Day 311 – Penmanship

          I almost always wanted to be a writer, but I never wanted to work at it. It’s a damn hard thing to do for one thing. It’s much harder than accounting or finance. I say this as an accountant who can discuss in-substance defeasance as it relates to advance refunding bond issues—not that anyone should care, but I think, from the way people’s eyes glass over when I utter that phrase, that it helps put things into perspective.

Just using English properly (or any language for that matter) is a thing that seems beyond most people’s ken. Going beyond mere correct usage, however, and forging language into a meaningful and compelling narrative is a superhuman undertaking that borders on the miraculous. This near miraculous facility with language is why guys like Salmon Rushdie can occasionally marry women like Padma Lakshmi. It’s easier to be good-looking of course, but, if you are not, it’s good to know that you can overcome a weak chin or pasty complexion with a resonant phrase.

Still I would rather be handsome than charming in the same way that I would rather be lucky than smart. I’m not just speculating. I know this—rather by accident, but I know it just the same. I had a neighbor once who was a spectacularly good-looking fellow. He was tall and lean and muscular. He had classic chiseled features, curly blonde hair, and stunning azure eyes. He was studying to become a golf pro. By studying, I mean he played golf every day with a teaching pro, and his aim was to get a PGA license and get onto the pro tour. He was also married to a very attractive young woman, whose function in life had been to support him in his quest to become a golf champion. Somehow she had either failed or grown weary in this role, and when I knew them they were in the process of divorcing.

One day this fellow asked me if I would accompany him to a pool party at an apartment complex across town. I doubt that he needed a wing man, but for whatever reason, he didn’t want to go alone. I agreed and happily. I was in my twenties, single, and almost adventurous…for an accountant. It may have occurred to me that being in tow to someone attractive could not fail but to get me some residual attention. Boy was I wrong. What followed was a revelation to me.

We came into the party on the back side of the complex. We grabbed a couple of beers and made our way around the pool to the club house at the front end. Along the way we passed maybe 100 young women, any one of whom I would have been glad to get to know. Not one of them seemed to know that I existed. Not one of them acknowledged my presence in any way whatsoever. They didn’t even glance at me to make sure their initial assessments had been correct, and that I was indeed beneath their notice or attention. They were all too busy swooning at the sight of my friend, Adonis.

I’m not making this up. I am not even embellishing. I had not realized up until that moment that girls could swoon over regular citizens. I knew they swooned. I had seen it on TV. Every time the Beatles got off a plane or out of a limo somewhere, there were plenty of hysterical chippies on hand to greet them, and they all had a particular look in their eyes like they had just seen their complete bliss and they had to get their fill of it before it was snatched away. I thought it was a little silly and laid it off to the music, the fame, and the glamour.

Now I was witness to the same kind of swooning, although without the screaming and hysteria, that I had seen on TV. This time, however, there was no music or fame or glamour. There was only handsomeness, but it was sufficient to make all these young women go weak in the knees.

It was a palpable thing, and, walking as close as I was to my good-looking friend, I could observe it as if it were happening to me, although clearly it was not. I watched the girls’ eyes get wide as early rising moons. They would blink once or twice, and stare unabashed. Their jaws would slacken and drop. They would forget how to walk. Most of them just stopped in their tracks, probably to avoid tripping over their own feet, which had been rendered useless by flooding hormones and misfiring synapses.

This happened time after time and without exception. I knew in a few minutes that it was possible to slay women with a glance, to induce in them a visceral longing without saying a word, without sweet nothings, without courting, without permission. I have never since coveted a power so much.    

It has never been mine to have, of course. It’s not the kind of thing you can develop. It is only a thing you can be born with, and, having been born with it, I don’t think it is a thing of which you are aware. At least you shouldn’t be. It just wouldn’t be fair. My friend certainly wasn’t—not on a purposeful level anyway. He couldn’t have cared less. In fact it was probably his indifference that allowed these women to swoon in the first place. Had he been aware of their reactions to his passing, had he been looking at them, they wouldn’t have been able to stare at him and swoon. Conversely, had they been less preoccupied with him, and thus able to look at me, I wouldn’t have been able to watch them swoon.

I might have been better off if it had worked otherwise. I mean I think it would be better for me not to know that this power is loose in the universe. It is a troublesome thing for me to have experienced. Having witnessed the power of gut attraction, my place in the cosmic pecking order of sexual magnetism will be ever precarious. Everyone else, however, is probably better off that it worked as it did. The women were happily unaware that I knew their weakness, and they were protected from their own folly in that my friend remained unaware of the power he had over them. This much is all as it should be, I think, but knowing it is a burden of which I am grown weary.

Day 94 - Crash and Burn

          There are ten days until Christmas, and I am not in the holiday spirit. One of my good friends at Albatross was the IT director. He was (and still is) a smart, sensible, and unassuming fellow full of good humor and grace. He used to wear a different Christmas themed tie to work every day from the Monday after Thanksgiving until the Christmas break. I thought this was a wonderful tradition and worthy of emulation so I started doing it too. I continued to do it at my new job. I won’t be doing it this year, but I do stare wistfully at those ties every morning when I’m in my closet picking out a t-shirt to wear with the shorts that I have worn every day for the past two months.

*****

          The boat division at Albatross was not the only division for which Richard Hardin had grand designs. He also intended to create a commercial seating division. The idea was to leverage our capacity and expertise in school based applications to create both individual and stadium seating solutions for non-school applications. These would be more up-scale, comfortable, and expensive than the school products and would both broaden our markets and improve our profit margins.

          Development projects had been launched and project managers put in place. A new head engineer was brought on board so that the old head engineer could take over the commercial division. A new controller was hired for the commercial division. Things were popping. There was a lot of excitement in the air. We were spending money like water on new product launches including new office furniture suites, new stadium seating packages, a new classroom suite aimed at private schools and universities, and two new boats. It wasn’t very long before every project was over budget and in trouble.

          At the outset I wouldn’t have thought it possible for a company like Albatross to burn through $600 million in such a short period of time. The failures were legion and the timing even worse. Every project went over budget and every new product went over its target unit cost. This was a huge problem because they all had to compete on price in the marketplace. The markets had all gone to hell for a variety of reasons—not the least of which were the tragic events of September 11, 2001.

          It seemed we couldn’t get traction with anything we were trying to do, and what products we did manage to sell were sold on such skinny margins they made hardly a dent in their astronomical development costs. To make matters worse almost everything we sold came back with serious warranty issues.

          Bad as things were for the commercial fixture and boat divisions, almost everyone at Albatross remained calm and composed, secure in the knowledge that we could always depend on the school product sales to keep us afloat while we sorted out our problems. This or course was precisely the time that the bottom fell out of the school fixtures division.

          The problems at the North Alabama plant had continued unabated and largely unnoticed. Everything imploded in one catastrophic day when our largest school system customer rejected a huge shipment of furnishings destined for a dozen or so new schools being built in a high growth population center. This was the inventory that had been stacked in the warehouse in North Alabama—the stuff that wasn’t shipped because it wasn’t finished. When DeLeon couldn’t delay shipment any longer he sent the stuff out late and incomplete. It was so far below standard that the school system refused the whole lot out of hand, and cancelled all their pending orders.

This presented a number of immediate compounding problems. First and foremost was the immediate loss of about $60 million in revenues, revenues that were not going to be recovered easily. The second problem was that the returned items were going to have to be fixed.

They couldn’t be fixed in North Alabama because they obviously didn’t know how. North Alabama had its own problems to address. That would be the third problem, but the second was more immediate and more critical because we needed to turn that inventory into cash as soon as possible. The solution ended up being to load it all into trucks and haul it to the Mid Alabama plant to be reworked. When we started doing this we found that the number of hours required to fix the items was nearly the same as the hours it took to build them in the first place. Thus ended the fatal Albatross complacency—the belief that the school business would keep the rest of the company afloat.

As you can probably imagine, this debacle caused quite a shake up in executive management. Richard Hardin was forced to step down in the UK. Not surprisingly he had made some other costly missteps in the European operations. The Albatross problem was the final straw. Personally I think it was his arrogant management style that was his undoing, but no one is listening to me.

Robert Lester, the U.S. president of Albatross had to step down as well, although he didn’t really go anywhere. The directors brought in a new president, one who had recently presided over the dismantling of a crane company, and Robert moved over to the boat division to become the sales manager. He moved at the same salary he had been making as president, which probably rankled a few souls. I know it rankled me.

While Robert’s duties and responsibilities had shrunk considerably, he was making north of $350 thousand a year. Meanwhile my duties and responsibilities had more than doubled in scope, but adjusted for inflation, I was making less than when I started. To make matters worse Robert came to my office every day to get my advice and opinion on every decision he had to make in his new reduced capacity.

Now I have to say that I actually liked Robert. He was an engaging and personable fellow, and he certainly tried hard. It’s just that when it came to actually moving the company forward, Robert was just taking up space. He once said to me in the course of a rambling philosophical soliloquy, “You know, as long as I live I don’t think I’ll ever understand what went wrong at North Alabama.” That’s too bad really because almost everyone else did know, and almost every one of them blamed Robert for being asleep at the switch.

I guess it should go without saying that DeLeon was forced out. The only surprising thing about it was that he was allowed to leave under his own steam—that is to say, still walking. He stopped me in the hallway to say goodbye. He told me he’d given it a good run, but it was time for him to move on and try something different.

I asked him what he had lined up, and he said nothing definite. He was just beginning to explore his options. I personally thought that one of his options ought to have been scrubbing the restrooms at Albatross while the production employees took turns kicking and insulting him, but apparently you get better treatment than that when you cost a company millions of dollars. The bigger the screw-up the more likely it is that you will be allowed to walk around with your dignity intact.

A few weeks later I read in the paper that DeLeon was teaching a course in industrial management at one of the local community colleges. Knowing that he was passing his special brand of production know-how on to the next generation of plant managers gave me a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.

Day 89 - Shooting the Messenger and other English Traditions

Essential tools of English management.

          The Colorado recruiter finally called back today. He said the juice packer client was looking for someone with an active CPA. I would have taken this at face value, but the other recruiter who claimed to have a solid and lengthy relationship with the employer had told me that they were not looking for a current CPA but only someone with public accounting experience. Who am I to believe? The local recruiter hasn’t returned my calls yet. Maybe she found out she was mistaken. Maybe the employer changed their mind. All I know is, I seem to be suddenly short on credentials.

          I was a CPA once. I let my license lapse by accident. I thought I could take it inactive indefinitely, and bring it back active by getting some continuing professional education in the form of seminars and online programmed training. I was mistaken. There is a time limit. I suppose at one time I knew that, but somewhere along the line I forgot it and the deadline passed unnoticed.

Now my license can’t be resurrected. To be a CPA again I would have to go back to school. The college coursework I took 30 years ago would count to an extent, but it would be insufficient. When I first got licensed I only needed a 4 year degree. Now I would need a total of 5 years of course work. Effectively that means to get another license I’d have to get a master’s degree and sit for the CPA exam again. I’m 61 and unemployed. I don’t have the time or money or the energy for that. I’m going to have to stay short on credentials.

          The unfortunate thing is that it’s an employers’ market for labor. With hundreds of candidates chasing every available controller and CFO position, the employers can require almost anything they can imagine in the way of qualifications. Now I’m seeing them requiring, in increasing numbers, active CPAs, advanced degrees, and significant and specific experience with a number of program disciplines such as Six Sigma and Lean Manufacturing as well as experience with the major ERP platforms like SAP. I’m beginning to wonder if this all means that I’m going to have to wait for the recession to end and full employment to return before I can hope to get a job with my now obsolete skills set. Am I bummed? You bet!

*****

          For a time Albatross was the best place I had ever worked. It seemed to be a real company where Henry and Ivan’s companies had seemed more like playground sandboxes ruled by bullies. There is a line of dialogue that has always stuck with me from the TV series, Thirty Something, “Life is just a pale imitation of high school.” I never really followed Thirty Something, and today I don’t remember what the episode was about that had that line in it or even if I watched the episode or just happened to catch the line as I was switching channels. Whatever the circumstances the line, “Life is just a pale imitation of high school,” had for me an unforgettable and compelling resonance.

          The line contains a truth that may have been trickling into my consciousness at the time, but which did not fully register until I heard it spoken on television. That truth is this: I keep waiting for life to get real, to gain importance, to become consequential, but it never does. I saw high school and college as preparation for something that was supposed to be more serious, more meaningful. So all my time since college I have been looking for evidence that the important stuff has started at last—that life and death are, well, life and death. Everywhere instead I have found evidence that very little can actually be taken seriously. It’s the same old emotional effluvia we suffered in our adolescence. Once we recognize it for what it is, once we’re ready to dispense with the turmoil and the hormonal mudslides of our coming of age we find instead that all the crap continues unabated. It’s just no longer magnified by the crucible that is high school.

It seems that there is no ideal, no lofty concept, no momentous moment that cannot be diluted, denigrated, debased, or denatured by the actions of the supporting cast of my life. I learned in high school and college of grand themes and essential philosophies meant to underpin all that happens with meaning and import. When I began to live my life in earnest however, that is when I deemed that I was finished with the preparatory phases and undertook to leverage what I had learned into some significance of purpose, I found that I was thwarted on all sides. Nothing in real life has been as lustrous, as shining, as important as it seemed it would be in high school. Nearly everything has been tarnished by comparison, and tarnished not on its own lack of merit or capacity for greatness but rather by the poverty of capacity in so many of the players on my stage to recognize import and give it its due. Nowhere is this truer it seems to me than at work, and the final dawning came to me, over a time, at Albatross.

           Albatross had everything going for it when I got there. It had a long history. It had a loyal customer base. It had a mountain of cash. It had a talented, committed, and loyal workforce. It had new owners with a vision for the future. I thought I had arrived at last at real and momentous work. I thought I had found a home where my abilities would be nurtured and encouraged, where I would flourish, where I would at last find the fulfillment that I thought ought to be the natural and inevitable consequence of honest labor. I thought I had seen the last of arrogant, self-destructive blowhards like Henry and Ivan and of errant, tail-chasing buffoons like Fische. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong.

          My first inkling that my new paradise was just a veneer of civility and good sense pasted over the same old craziness came at a board meeting. Local management had presided over the sale of the company to a British holding company. The local organization was left largely intact, and the new British ownership group came to the U.S. once a month to update and redirect the business as they saw fit. The chairman was a man we will call Richard Hardin. Richard Hardin had almost single handedly put together a consortium of investors and lenders to buy Albatross and two Canadian companies in an effort to stake out a meaningful presence in North America.

          Now Richard, in addition to his plans for the core business, which was office and school furniture, had an equally ambitious vision for the boat segment. The boat business had been almost an afterthought for Albatross. They’d been building desks forever, and had carved out an early niche in school fixtures, locker systems, and bleachers. They started in boats in the sixties because their owners liked to camp and fish. They had developed a solid reputation over the years, but they had never made any real money in the boat business. By the time I came on the scene they were selling 80 to 100 small motor yachts in a typical year.

The business was break-even at best. If you take into account the lost opportunity cost, the money they could have made if they had reemployed the boat assets into the building of school school fixtures, the boat business was a loser. Loser though it may be, however, it was a high-profile business.

The boat products were stand-outs wherever they showed, and probably brought more than their fair share of attention and recognition to Albatross as a company. In other words the boat business had some value in terms of marketing, and it had a lot of glamour—glamour in which Albatross would not otherwise have been able to glory.

          Richard Hardin wanted to change all that. He liked the glamour and the high profile customers, but he wanted more. He wanted to grow the boat business into a profitable segment. He wanted to double its market share. He wanted to cut costs. He wanted to expand the product line. He wanted to do this within a year. He wanted to do all this at a time when the total motor yacht market, not counting the custom mega-yachts, had suffered two consecutive years of decline.

This is the scenario we walked into at my first board meeting with Richard Hardin. The sales guys took statistics prepared by the boating industry. They also took copies of the last 3 quarters of Nautical Surveys, an independently published compilation of boat registrations captured from the licensing and titling departments of all 50 states. This publication breaks down boat registrations by make, model, state and month and compares statistics to previous quarters and years. It is the bible when it comes to tracking the boat markets because it can’t be fudged. Most boat manufacturers and dealers will lie about their sales numbers to make things look better than they are. The registration numbers in Nautical Surveys are as real as they can get.

          What the sales guys hoped to accomplish was to convince Richard that doubling production to meet his optimistic sales projections was probably a mistake. The industry stats didn’t support his rosy outlook, and building a huge inventory of unsold boats was a path to financial ruin. Richard wasn’t having any. He had been listening to a fellow named Kaiser Dickson, then president of the largest and most profitable fiberglass boat manufacturer in the country, who had told him in no uncertain terms that he needed to develop a lower priced model and aggressively pursue increased sales volume in the middle price ranges.

The industry stats showed the middle and lower range sales flattening or declining. Dickson was giving Richard bogus information. He may have been doing it on purpose—a predatory trick to induce Richard to over-commit resources and send Albatross’s boat business into a tailspin. It may just as easily have been sincere error. Dickson’s company was at the top of its game at the time, and that is precisely the moment at which CEOs who have benefited largely from fortunate timing and other generous serendipities begin to believe in the efficacy of their own bullshit.

Richard’s reaction to the sales department presentation at the board meeting was to shoot the messengers. At one point he held up the copy of Nautical Surveys he had been given, waved it around like a bloodied battle flag, and announced that it wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on. I was reminded of Henry’s characterization of my cash flow analysis as unfit for toilet paper.

Richard’s performance devolved from there to resemble one of Ivan’s profanity fests, except done with a British accent. The accent did little to refine the carnage, and I guess that one only need look at a survey of English history to know that, however civilized the accent sounds in the movies or theater stages, the English have always been a bloodthirsty bunch. They have a long and well established tradition from their Norman royalty right through the Plantagenets, the Tudors, the Stuarts, and the Hanoverians of summarily dispatching anyone who disagrees with them—often including drawing and quartering the victim to make a lasting impression. Richard Hardin was not ignorant of his heritage.

          The sales force left the meeting pale, shaken, and of one resolve. They agreed with one another never to disagree with Richard again, no matter how ridiculous his ideas and no matter how predisposed those ideas might be to ruin. Eventually ruin is what we got. I knew it was on its way from the moment of that first meeting. You can’t scare your troops and expect to achieve any lasting victories. It doesn’t work. It might motivate them to do something they wouldn’t otherwise do, but sooner or later your lack of sound intelligence and analysis will undermine your efforts and you will fail spectacularly.