There were only a few when Patricio became CEO in the summer of 2019. What else? Ketchup sweetened with honey…” A staffer later supplies the answer: There are more than 20 kinds of Heinz ketchup. There’s ketchup with less sugar, ketchup with less salt. “There’s ketchup organic, ketchup non-sugar. I cherish every summer I spend behind the wheel, anxiously awaiting the day that I take it out of hibernation for the first drive of the season.“I don’t know,” says Kraft Heinz CEO Miguel Patricio. Perhaps if fortune permits, I will add another performance car to the stable, but the Miata – this particular Miata – will always have a home with me. I still get inquiries from friends about buying a newer or “better” car. For the first time in years, I felt the anxiety and mental paralysis melt away, partly as a result of feeling like I had given my all to an improbable professional moonshot and partly because I felt like I had been received with open arms by an old friend, one who had been loyal and unerring, even when I hadn’t. ![]() I spent the summer reliving those earlier years, driving around with the music up and the roof down running through the gears and taking turns far faster than I had any right to on public roads. But the engine revved so freely and the steering felt alive in my palms. ![]() It darted around on the highway and required a more deliberate touch. Coming from a modern car, it was a cacophony of mechanical sounds, not all of them pleasant. There was a muscle memory ingrained as I shifted gears and adjusted to the brakes and throttle, which were both weaker and far more tactile than I remembered. I knew my colleagues would be as merciless about my newest Miata as my classmates had been about my first one – this time on social and economic grounds rather than perceived masculinity. It was so perfect that the new car smell still lingered. At the owner’s home, I examined it with an unsteady hand, prepared to encounter the structural weak spots, the signs of a slipping clutch or a soft top that was about to tear. ![]() I knew exactly how I’d spend it, and returned to the classified ads.Īgain, another Miata, but this one had just 38,000 km on it and it had never been driven in the winter. Flush with the proceeds of one final bonus. I left the job feeling utterly defeated, like I had been given a shot at the big leagues and failed to make the roster for next season. and left past midnight every single day, decompressing on the drive home in a powerful European performance car that I’d presumptuously purchased to show that I’d “arrived.”įirms like these are “up or out” and despite my best efforts I was unequivocally in the latter category. I had undergone an incredible stroke of good fortune that led to an exponential increase in income after landing a job at a Bay Street private equity firm. There’s a reason they say what they say about third times. Why I became a flight attendant in my 40s, and never looked back Two years later I handed it over to another optimistic buyer, a small profit being a consolation for letting it go. The vinyl soft top provided scant protection from the cold, and though I was used to wearing a parka, hat and gloves with the heater huffing and puffing at full blast, I knew that every drive in the salty streets of Toronto advanced the Miata’s eventual demise. Unfortunately, I was still underemployed, so I ended up driving it through the winter, too. Three months later, I bought another one, imported from Florida and kept pristine by the elderly owner. I never knew what happened to that car, and under no circumstances do I want to find out. ![]() I rationalized it as a way to simultaneously free myself of attachments to material objects and pad my bank balance. A colleague with a taste for gaudy modifications offered me double what I’d paid for it. My Miata needed real help, preferably on someone else’s dime. Seventeen years of harsh winters and deferred maintenance were not kind to the thin sheet metal and featherweight chassis that made it such a nimble, deft-handling sports car when it rolled off the showroom floor. Over three years, I gave it as much TLC as my meagre postrecession earnings would allow, but as the odometer rolled over to 200,000 kilometres, I knew we were on borrowed time.
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