A Streetcar Named Acquire.

St Kilda Road is the longest boulevard in kind-of-central Melbourne. It used to be the headquarters of the advertising industry and some of the dinosaurs still remain there, like fossils stuck in a rock; McCann's and the like.

As well as being the longest boulevard, it also boasts the slowest trams. You know, those monstrous ancient metal green things like old railway carriages that clatter on tracks in the middle of the road with a power cord connected to overhead electric wires. Quite frankly, I've always wondered why tramloads of people don't get electrocuted every time it rains.

Anyway, they take about half an hour to get from the Cadbury-Schweppes building to Flinders Street station. You could walk faster. And if it rains, you won't get electrocuted. It's bound to happen one day.

One year when I was working for one of the dinosaurs, whose name I can't mention but whose initials are FCBDDBBBDOGPBYRHRME - or similar - they had an American agency boss visit - on the acquisition trail. Yeah: he wanted to buy the agency. If only he knew.

Anyway (and I must stop starting my paragraphs with anyway), he was due to visit three agencies in one morning. He must have had a good year of billings the previous year. He was at our place at nine. No-one was there. I guess a few suits were in their offices, beavering away at something or other, sending fawning letters to clients, etc. He looked around for a while and went into the boardroom with the MD, the CD and the CEO. Soon June the tea lady joined them, probably to chase them out because she wanted to clean up or something. The CEO must have been in a selling mood because they were in there quite a while.

I overheard them talking to each other as they emerged. The agency boss said to the MD he was running late and asked the MD to call him a cab. The MD replied, quite correctly, that the last thing you do in St Kilda Road when you are running late is call a cab. Because you will still be waiting an hour later. You just go out into the street, and if you are lucky, one will be going by, and you can flag it down. Or else you can jump on a tram. And that is what the MD told the Amercian agency boss, who replied, oh you mean those cool streetcars?

So that's what he did. Now it just so happened that I had an appointment at the doctor's (Dr. Headhunter) that morning and we took the same elevator down to the ground. The American guy racewalked off down St Kilda Road and I kept a respectable distance behind him. Unfortunately, no cab came and no cab came. So the American agency boss crossed to the centre just when a tram came trundling along, and he got on. And I got on. I sat down the back. He sat towards the front and leant forward and looked as though he wanted to move, and fast. The tram lurched away. Then it stopped again, having just missed the lights. I hate it when they do that. I'd rather they just sat there for the next round of lights. But they don't. They give a little lurch and get your hopes up and they they dash them again and you sit there for another three minutes and stew. The agency boss slumped back and checked his watch and stewed.

The tram did that stop start routine for the next three sets of lights and we were still nowhere near Domain Road. It had taken fifteen minutes to get from Leopold Street to the police building. The agency boss was getting antsy. He was sweating.

When the tram did the same thing again for the fourth time, the agency boss blew his stack. He jumped up and strode down to the driver. The tram was the old Z-class with open access to the driver through a mesh window.

'Can you drive this thing any faster, driver?' he asked, but it wasn't a question. It was a demand.

'Sure I can,' said the driver. 'I can drive it seventy-five kilometres an hour.'

Pause. 'But I'm not going to.'

'I'm about to buy half the businesses in St Kilda Road, driver,' yelled the agency boss through the mesh, 'and I'm late for an appointment to do exactly that. And you're telling me you're going to crawl this tram at two miles an hour for the next eight blocks. Well, I'm telling you you won't have a job when I own fifty perecent of the agencies on St KIlda Road because I'll tell my employees not to take any goddamned tram to work. What do you think of that?'

The tram crawled forward into an intersection while the driver thought about what he thought about that. Then it stopped because a BMW 7-series was late in turning right into Toorak Road and the light turned red. The driver clanged the bell and set the brake and we sat there.

'What do I think of that?' replied the driver. 'This.' He pointed to a button. He pushed the button and the front door opened. 'Get out.'

The agency boss's face was so red it was blue. 'You drive this tram NOW, driver. And fast!'

'No.'

He screamed. 'Drive it, driver.'

The driver sat, stone-faced. 'No.' He gazed out the window. The light turned green. The tram sat.

The agency boss said words he hadn't said in a boardroom since his old home-town agency lost an airline account back in the seventies.

'Get out,' the driver said, quietly. 'I think that's your stop.'

The agency boss got out. He checked a piece of paper in his pocket, checked the street number on a building. I think it was 320. He crossed the road, ran to the entrance of the building and disappeared inside sliding glass doors.

Later that day, the MD made an announcement. The acquisition had not gone ahead. 'The American agency has decided to buy Agency X and Partners instead,' he said. Agency X and Partners are at 320 St Kilda Road.

I was kind of disappointed. I wanted to see what happened when he tried to enforce the tram ban.