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[Danno]

Last friday, Aug. 28th, was the 19th anniversary of the F5 tornado that ripped through Plainfield Illinois killing 33 people and causing wide spread carnage.

It reminds me of my story of that fateful day.
It was an extremely hot and humid August day here in the southwest suburbs of Chicago, with temps in the mid 90's and humidity of what seemed like 120%, just miserable.
At the time, I was a wide eyed rookie salesman, riding with my boss that day. I had a great day set-up and had first meetings with several clients that eventually turned into long time customers and friends.
Anyways, towards the end of the day, about 2:30 or so, we made a call on a Civil Engineer in Joliet Illinois, just off Rt. 52. As we were getting out of the car, a strong cool wind dropped the temperature about 20 degrees in seconds and we noticed that a typical afternoon storm was approaching, but that is quite common this time of year so we paid no mind.
As we talked in his conference room which had floor to ceiling glass windows, he proved to be a tough cookie, so we turned it up a notch. My boss and I were facing the windows with the customer seated across the table from us. To that point, we had had a great sales day, our confidence was brimming and we felt like we could sell Ketchup Popsicles to a bride in a white wedding gown, so we were really giving him a run for his money.
About 10 minutes into the meeting, the weather was getting pretty bad, the lights went out, but we continued chatting. A few minutes later my boss and I saw roofing materials and insulation dropping from the sky. Taking a queue from our better senses, we left the glass room we were in to safer haven, which turned out to be a large hallway on the lower floor.
As the true salesmen we were, we simply continued the sales call in our makeshift shelter. As the storm was blowing over, a couple people in the hallway said they could see a tornado, but it was going the other way, so we were good.
We wrapped up the call downstairs and as we were driving away, there was trash all over everywhere, it looked like a war zone, it was pretty obvious what had transpired. Finally getting back to I55 to head back to the office, we passed where the tornado had crossed I55 near US30. A 3/4 mile wide swath of cornfield was gone and a couple high tension electric towers were nothing but twisted wreckage barely resembling their previous form.
The next day, as we figured out the path of this destructive monster, we realized were directly in the path of it, less than 1/2 a mile from an apartment building that had been completely leveled killing a dozen people. This behemoth of a twister, literally jumped over our location, sparing ours and many others lives.

I kept this guy on my call list for many years, stopping by every 4 or 5 months, reliving our shared "near-death" experience, however, each conversation for all that time always ended the same way, "Thanks but No thanks!"

To this day, the son-of-a-bitch never gave me one dime of business.