"Good morning," Gloria said, stopping a polite distance from the reception counter. "I'm looking at passenger vans for my transportation business. I was hoping somebody could show me a few models and explain the service options." She set her folder lightly against her hip, waiting for an answer. Derek looked past her toward the bus, then back at the work shirt and the scuffed shoes. His eyes made the calculation before his mind bothered to examine the question.
"You came here in that?" he asked, pointing toward the windows. Gloria followed his gesture and saw the yellow bus sitting neatly in its space. "I did.
It still runs beautifully, although it needs a little patience on cold mornings." Derek gave a short laugh that was not intended to be shared. "Well, these vehicles don't run on nostalgia, ma'am. They cost serious money."
Gloria had been in enough purchasing meetings to recognize the difference between a price warning and an attempt to make a customer feel small. She had also been in enough rooms full of men who assumed she knew nothing about engines to understand that correcting a stranger's attitude rarely changed the attitude itself. She adjusted her folder, glanced toward the silver van nearest the showroom's center aisle, and kept her voice level. "I'm aware of what commercial vehicles cost. Could we start by looking inside that one?" Derek glanced at the brochure stand as though it were the answer to a tiresome question.
"Prices are in there," he said, lifting a thick catalog from the counter. He let it fall onto the tile near her shoes rather than handing it to her, its glossy pages spreading open with a slap that turned two customers near the coffee station toward the sound. "Go ahead and pick it up if you're serious." Gloria looked down at the catalog, then up at him. She had worked hard enough in her life to know that picking something up from the floor did not diminish her, but she also understood what Derek had intended.
"I didn't come here to argue," she said. "I'd like to speak with someone who can explain the vehicles." Derek walked around the counter with the false patience of a man indulging a child. "Listen, you're welcome to look around, but these are brand-new units, and we don't just open them up for people who are curious."
Gloria shifted closer to the silver van, stopping before the driver's door. "I'm not curious about the paint," she answered. "I'm interested in the turning radius, service intervals, passenger access, and how quickly I can get replacement units if a route vehicle breaks down."
The specificity of the questions should have changed his assessment. Instead, it irritated him. He had spent years learning how to sell vehicles by recognizing status signals, and Gloria had arrived without the signals he trusted. Her familiarity with operations left him with an uncomfortable choice: acknowledge that his first judgment might have been wrong, or treat her knowledge as another reason to dismiss her. Derek chose the second.