I first saw a Paul Reed Smith at my favorite guitar shop in 1997. The company had been around for a while and was producing really, really nice instruments. I plugged it into an amp, played it for half an hour, and was smitten. But it was too expensive. My favorite guitar salesman told me a shipment of seconds (guitars with minor blemishes) was on its way to the shop in a few weeks. They would be about a third off.

I was having dinner at home with my wife and her friend when his call came: “Roy, the seconds have arrived.” I told him I would come down after dinner. “No,” he said, “come immediately.”

When I got to the shop I saw this guitar 100 feet away, on a big rack of seconds with a mob of potential buyers crawling over everything. I walked right up to it, plugged it in to check it out for maybe 4 minutes, and wrote my check. Dinner was still being served when I got home.

I never found the blemish.