No...I'm not going to use that quote.

We have a receptionist system at my work, whereas everyone who wants to call me has to go through her before getting to me. Any call for me she announces to me before putting it through, giving me the opportunity to either accept the call or ask her to put it to my voice mail. This can be annoying at times, but for the most part it’s great as I never have to answer the phone if I don’t want to. A salesperson keeps calling me, just send it to my voice mail; a business vendor that I owe an answer to but I haven’t gotten to it yet, just send it to voice mail; I’m in the middle of my lunch, just send it to voice mail. It’s not a bad system.

So a couple of weeks ago, the receptionist buzzed in and said to me, “Doug? There’s a Paul Hogan on the line for you.” Now the only Paul Hogan I’m familiar with is Crocodile Dundee – but it can’t be him, of course. Must be a salesperson with the same name, but instead of sending to voice mail, I said, “Sure, send him through.” So the phone rings, I answer – and immediately I’m put off because the guy on the other end of the phone has an Australian accent! But I could also tell right away it wasn’t the Paul Hogan from Crocodile Dundee.

Anyway, this guy starts talking about how he loves the magazine, and he was recently “back in Australia” and thought that Cook’s Illustrated would be a huge hit in “food-mad Australia”, and he wanted to work with me to make it big Down Under. So I figure this guy must be some sort of subscription agent (the lowest form of life in the magazine publishing industry, I might add), or maybe some sort of newsstand distributor (second lowest), so I asked him what line of business he’s in, etc. He says, “Well, I’m a butler by trade, but I have done some television work as well.” A “butler by trade”? But also done television? And he wants to somehow sell my magazine? This was getting more and more bizarre.

We chatted a bit more, he told me he had taken classes at a culinary school here in Boston recently and is local now, and I told him that I’d look into our current Australian distribution, costs, etc, and get back to him. When I hung up I really didn’t think this would go anywhere, as there didn’t seem to be much upside in spending time and money in expanding Australian circulation. (It’s expensive to get product down there, you know. It's like the other side of the world.) Either way he intrigued me, but I wanted to see if I could find out some background on this guy. He had given me his email address that had a paulthebutler.com url, but when I went to that website I noticed it was just a placeholder from register.com. So then I googled “Paul Hogan The Butler”, and the first thing that came up was a Wikipedia entry. Assuming it was the “famous” Paul Hogan’s page, I clicked on it, but in fact it was this guy! Turns out this Paul Hogan played the butler on that so-crappy-it's-great reality show Joe Millionaire. Looking up his IMDB page and seeing a couple of photos, he did look to be vaguely familiar.

"Can I see your butler's pantry, Paul?"

So that is my completely random moment of the past month. I haven’t gotten back to him yet, but I might, just to see what sort of plans he has. And how knows – maybe I’ll need him to pay for me to go to Australia for three weeks on a “fact-finding publishing tour” to determine our business plan in taking over Australia. I’m sure he can afford that – I mean, the guy knows Joe Millionaire!