Day 67 - Different Lyrics, Same Tune

          It was another slow Monday on the job boards. It occurs to me that things are going to continue to slow down anyway as we get closer to the holidays. It’s likely to be January before I see any significant pick-up in listings—not even then if the economy stays in this death spiral. Maybe I ought to be stocking up on canned goods and camping supplies.

          We took Bud to the vet today. The tumor on his shoulder is noticeably larger. It’s only been a few weeks so there’s no question that the cancer is progressing rapidly. Bud seems to like hanging out with me more and more. He will stand next to me while I watch television and rest his head in my lap. Somehow this seems to give him comfort. I hope so anyway. It is sad to see him failing when he has so much heart left for living.

*****

          I was losing heart at an accelerating pace at Quilnutz. Every success, every overcoming of an obstacle was answered by a new challenge. Nothing came easy, and every difficult thing was made even more so by the chicanery, bullying, and bone-headed decisions of corporate management.

          When I thought I had the Fische/Alicia conspiracy contained, Ivan started giving me fits. He decided at one point that we had overvalued our used trade-in inventory in the sale. He assigned new values to the remaining stock, and told me to adjust the units on the books accordingly. I knew they had been fairly appraised at the time of the sale, but I also realized that they had declined in value somewhat since the sale. I knew that Ivan wasn’t going to have any of that. Logic was not a path to appeasement for Ivan. I took the adjustment—another significant loss to be charged against the earn-out and against the possibility of my ever cashing out. It was like being mugged in slow motion. There was nothing I could do about it but watch. Ivan was holding the gun, and anything I said would just get me shot.

          The boat that I took the biggest adjustment on, some $40,000 write down in value, Ivan moved to Florida. He sold it there several weeks later and made an $80,000 gross profit on it. I guess our original appraisal values weren’t so far off the mark after all. The rat bastard never agreed to let me reverse the adjustment against the earn-out. He knew what he was doing from the start, and he was not ashamed to flash his avarice in my face and line his pockets at my expense. I guess it was ‘just bidness’. Different lyrics. Same tune.