We flew into Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on a commercial flight, first class, to attend one of the NuSkin international conventions. The conventions were a rah-rah show, a way for the company’s executives to travel the world and get the sales force fired up about selling face cream and vitamins and Normally we’d fly on the corporate jet, but it wasn’t available for some reason or other, and we had to make do with wide leather seats, cute flight attendants, and champagne courtesy of Singapore Airlines. Life at the top was rough, sometimes.
The reception at the airport wasn’t quite what I expected. Sandie said we’d have a limousine waiting for us, and I expected a nice Mercedes S500 or something of the sort. Well, a Benz was on hand, an armored stretch job that could seat eight and luxuriously whisk the occupants along without any intrusion from the outside world. To make the ride to the hotel even more care free, the authorities had provided a police escort speed the way and to keep the peasants at a safe distance. It took a while to load the luggage into the car –Sandie never travelled light-- we got into the car for the ride to the hotel, with one police motorcycle leading the way and another following.
We were settled into back of the car, relaxing after the long flight, when the car slowed to a crawl. I lifted my head to look out the windshield to see what was slowing us down. As I did I saw the cop on the motorcycle ahead of us pull level to the car in front of us, and kick the window of the car with his boot. He kept kicking, and screaming at the driver, until the car pulled toward the shoulder of the road. The cop repeated the scene with each car in front of us, kicking at doors and windows and shouting at the drivers, until he’d cleared a path for the limousine. When the path was cleared, we rode along like Moses through the Red Sea.
The next day, the same two cops appeared to escort us to the convention center, with more kicking and screaming at cars. We had to tell them not to do that at the convention center, because the cars at the center were NuSkin’s distributors, and it wouldn’t be a good idea to treat them like riff-raff. At least so openly.
