The taxman cometh....

Contributed by SC

This was from my days in IT sales rather than IT PR, but hopefully it’s still interesting.

Working for Compaq (before its HP days), I was hosting a trip for clients to Comdex in the very early 1990s. Among the group were senior IT buyers from the Inland Revenue.

Having been on the West Coast for a couple of days, we flew from San Francisco to Vegas for the conference. Every plane seat had a pair of headphones on it. TheInland Revenue guy sat on his, breaking them in the process. Replacement headphones were charged at $5, which the tax man obviously didn’t feel like paying.

Wanting to listen to the film being shown, a little way into the flight he stole the headphones belonging to another person in our party (who worked for a division of Mitsubishi). Within a few seconds these two grown men were fighting over a $5 pair of headphones. Proper fighting. The IR guy lost, a fact he was very unhappy about.

The same IR guy, and his IR cronies, proved somewhat less thrifty during Comdex (back in its more functional days). They chartered a plane to the Chicken Ranch (aka "the best little whore house in Texas"). Lord alone knows what the British tax payer had to part with to reimburse their expenses from the extensive menu.

Don’t already think the IR chap was evil? Might have been coincidence but, a couple of weeks later, the very same division of Mitsubishi was subject to a full financial investigation from….the Inland Revenue.