Class Action

When you've got the blues, you need to blow the horn.

 My friend, David Kaa, who blogs at ManWife Chronicles about the trials and tribulations of long-term unemployment received a cease and desist order from an attorney representing his former employer. You can read the details here. 

It seems that David's employer was upset that he was making disparaging comments about them in his blog and on a video commentary that he put up on YouTube. The lawyer said he had to quit. Not only did the lawyer insist that he quit, but also that he remove the offending posts and dismantle his website. To give legal weight to this demand the lawyer cited a non-compete agreement that David had been required to sign when he was first employed. Also cited was the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.

This last seemed a bit over-reaching to me. At issue was the fact that David's video included shots of the employer's office building with its logo displayed prominently on the side. Wait...what?! Displaying a picture taken on a public thoroughfare of a sign on a building is copyright infringement?

David called bullshit on this one, but it turns out that the lawyer is right. You can't do that, at least not for commercial purposes or private financial gain. Neither can Google it would seem, but nobody is making an issue of it with them. David's former company's logo is displayed for all to see on the street view of Google maps. Google presumably has more lawyers than God.

David did take the video down though. Who wants to waste the precious hours of blissful unemployment (no longer working for assholes) fighting with a lawyer? As my hometown pharmacist and soda fountain operator used to say, 'You can wrestle with a turd all day long, but no matter how bad you whup it you're still bound to get a little on you.'

Copyright issues aside, I think the proscription against making disparaging comments is an actionable offense on the part of David's employer, and many others as well. My former employer did it too—not in a non-compete agreement but in the termination letter I was forced to sign in order to get any severance pay. I'm not only prohibited from making disparaging comments in any public forum, I'm also prohibited from acknowledging that any severance agreement even exists. Good luck enforcing that one.

Here's my point. The ability to make disparaging comments is a necessary adjunct to the continuing mental health and well-being of an unemployed individual. This fact is, I think, well established in modern society on another front. For instance people who have just gotten out of bad relationships are allowed, expected, even encouraged, to say all manner of perjorative things about their former significant others. It's part of the healing process. It's an expression of the anger that is one of the five necessary steps in the grieving process.

Nothing more closely parallels a divorce or break-up than losing one's job. The longer you've had the job, the more effort you've invested in the relationship, the harder it is to adjust to being terminated and escorted out of the building like a trespassing derelict. This is a hurtful experience. Anyone who's been through it knows that you need all the healing tools available to weather the turmoil and get your life back on track. One of those tools is the ability to work through the natural feelings of anger and betrayal.

Taking this a little bit further, the continuing mental health and well-being of the unemployed is a necessary adjunct to their ability to get another job.

This is and has been an extremely difficult job market. Three years after the CDO- and derivative-fueled real estate bubble burst and brought our economy to the brink of collapse, unemployment is still running above 9%. There are an estimated 25 million unemployed, underemployed, and displaced workers who need jobs. Conservatively there are 6 people actively looking for work for every one available job.

A job seeker in this market needs to be on top of his or her game. There's no room for self doubt or depression. The slightest sign of weakness is going to get you culled from the herd of available applicants for any job. A job seeker needs to be positive, confident, assertive, self-possessed and optimistic. None of these is very likely while you still have unresolved issues regarding your former employer. In other words you've got to work through your anger to be sane, and you've got to be sane to have a chance of getting a job, especially in an employer's market.

Seen in this context, any effort on an employer's part to circumvent the natural process of healing can be viewed as unfair and injurious. Proscriptions against disparaging remarks, public or private, are deliberate attempts by employers to protect themselves from the consequences of their decisions at the expense of the very people they harm the most. It is adding insult to injury. It is kicking a man when he is already down. It is therefore objectionable. It needs to stop.

I propose a class action lawsuit on behalf of every unemployed person who has been forced to agree to place their mental health and future financial security in this kind of jeopardy in order to make it easier for their employer to fire them. It's only fair.

10 Surprising Things that Really Suck about Losing a Job

Enjoying the view from your new office.

Everyone understands, I hope, that losing one's job is a huge setback. It's not for nothing that losing a job is referred to variously as being 'fired' or 'getting the axe' or, my personal favorite although you have to think about it a little to understand all the ramifications, being 'discharged'.

No matter what you call it, it sucks. It sucks on many levels, but most people understand the impact of losing a job only in economic terms. Certainly the economics of unemployment are deleterious enough, but financial difficulties are not the only problems facing the terminated. Joblessness will gnaw at your innards in insidious ways that would surprise those who have not experienced it first hand. Here are ten of my favorites:

1. No matter the reason you lost your job, you can't help but feel that you have somehow failed yourself, your family, and your potential. This may not be fair, but it's natural, and it may be unavoidable. The trick is to use your feeling of inadequacy against itself. I mean, if you are the big loser you think yourself to be, then what you think is naturally suspect and you shouldn't take it seriously. Seriously, this will work, but it's not easy...and it helps of you've already turned to strong drink for solace.
2. Feelings of inadequacy and depression make it that much harder to get another job. Say you score an interview, and it is scheduled for a day when you are feeling particularly down on yourself. (In a relatively short period of time, this will be every day.) The interviewer asks you some stupid question, the purpose of which is to see how good a liar you are—something like 'where do you see yourself in five years?' The answer that leaps immediately into your confidence-starved brain is something like 'still sucking up to a snot-nosed diesel douche like you,' and the despair engendered by this thought will take root and flourish so that it will be impossible to come up with the kind of lie that will get you the job you suddenly realize you are not worthy of anyway.
3. Your creditors will not be sympathetic. They will immediately begin to take advantage of your inability to pay them by charging you enormous fees and raising your interest rates into the stratosphere. (How convenient for the banks that the financial lobby managed to get most usury laws repealed before they crashed the system and drove so many of us to the brink of ruin.) When you try to cut your expenses by canceling their services, you will be forced to pay burdensome cancellation charges. If you protest, they will talk to you like you are a deadbeat. After a while you will begin to accept this as your due.
4. If you elect to take advantage of the COBRA provisions to keep your health insurance in force, you will find that it costs you double what you were paying when you had a job. Unemployment compensation is not enough to cover this. You can't pay your mortgage and your health insurance too. There is no kind of math that makes this work—not even the math that Wall Street used to tell them that securitized sub-prime mortgages were a safe investment. If you get sick, you are screwed. All the depression, anxiety, and self-loathing that have come to roost in the cobwebbed recesses of your psyche make it that much more likely that you will, in fact, get sick.
5. Unemployment compensation is not enough to keep your boat afloat, especially since all the providers you are used to doing business with are taking advantage of your unfortunate situation to enrich themselves before you go belly up. Your expenses will go up instead of down. The only expenses you will have any control over are food and cable TV. Ironically these are only the two things that are keeping your depression from lurching across the border into Suicideland. How are you supposed to stay upbeat and positive when you are forced to give up your daily ration of chocolate covered pretzels while you watch the Real Housewives of Swankville bicker about who said what to whom while they are drinking wine and getting a group Brazilian bikini wax at some high-dollar spa?
6. You will suddenly become aware of a gaggle of bozos who think that drawing unemployment is the same as being paid not to work. They resent your lazy, shiftless, scheming, system-scamming ass because they think that while they are at work, you are using their hard earned tax dollars to put fuel in your yacht. They are everywhere, posting comments, writing letters to editors, phoning into radio talk shows to shout out kudos and dittos. You will rightly wonder why people that ignorant have jobs while you do not. While you are wondering this, they are making campaign contributions to candidates who are promising to put an end to extended unemployment benefits and anything that looks like a real economic stimulus. They want to run you out of options. They don't really care if you get another job. They certainly aren't going to spend any money to help make another job available. Only by dying will you cease to be a drain on their resources. After a while it will seem as if this is their true aim...to kill you. They are too cheap though to buy bullets and make quick work of it. They want you to go quietly on your own nickel.
7. The elected officials that you hope will fix the problems of the larger economy, the problems that are keeping jobs in short supply, are instead busy chasing skirts, tapping their feet under the stall dividers in public restrooms, texting inappropriate messages to their constituents, engaging prostitutes to help them maintain their legislative focus, and e-mailing pictures of their genitalia to further clog the bandwidth of cyberspace. As with the self-proclaimed voices of reason in number 6 above, you will rightly wonder why people this ignorant have jobs while you do not. You will think briefly about running for Congress, but you quickly realize that nobody wants to run a candidate who doesn't have a job. They think something must be wrong with you. Perverts, apparently, are harder to vet.
8. Criminal activity begins to look more and more like a viable career path. Not only are there few barriers to entry, no inane job interviews, no credit checks, no hoops to jump through, but the downside to failure is better than the lifestyle you are currently enjoying. If you get caught, convicted, and sentenced to prison, you have free room and board, free medical care, and free cable TV. This beats hell out of the cardboard box under a bridge that seems to be in your future otherwise. In addition, if the powers that be ever get around to prosecuting the Wall Street bankers for their complicity in stripping the wealth and livelihood of the middle class, you may even get a cellmate who can regale you with tales of unimaginable decadence. When the Geezer Bandit begins to look like a sage old life coach, you are well on the way to making sense of your life again. Best keep it to yourself though.
9. If you are a husband and your wife is still working, you are going to have to man up and become the woman of the house. This is only fair. In time you will realize that suffering the abuse of a churlish boss or the mind-numbing drudgery of yet another meeting is exactly as mentally depleting as cleaning the bathroom or folding underwear. The problem is not that these tasks are difficult. It's rather that they never end. You are never finished with them, and neither was your wife except that she had to do them after she got home from work. When that little tidbit sinks in, you suddenly realize that you owe your wife a huge debt of gratitude and probably an apology for taking her for granted—the kind of apology that demands to be accompanied by jewelry. The irony is that, to do right by her, you will now have to use the money your wife earns to bring the bling. Better perhaps to just put another load in the washer and try to come up with something tasty for dinner.
10. When holidays and birthdays come around, you have to look the people you love most in the world directly in the eye and explain to them how sorry you are that they are pinned to your worthless coattails. Gifts are a luxury you can no longer afford. When they pat you on the back and tell you not to worry, they understand, this will only make it worse for you. This is the moment when, finally, you understand the value of life insurance. It's unfortunate that there's only one way to realize that value. Luckily, your don't have to take matters into your own hands. You can just wait for the angry clowns in number 6 to come hunting for you.

Day 147 - Bringing Grace and Serenity to the Oppressed

          I picked up the moving truck from U-Haul first thing this morning. The loading crew showed up at 10:00 a.m. to load the boxes and heavy furniture that we are putting in storage. Our two sons showed up with a trailer for the stuff they are taking—a bedroom suite, refrigerator, grill, table saw, pressure washer, and the big TV I have already complained about having to give up.

The plan was for me to cart all this stuff across the state in the afternoon where the boys and their friends would help unload it into the storage unit. We did this, but there was a problem that has upset the rest of the plan. The truck wouldn’t hold all the stuff we’re putting in storage. So much for a 26’ U-Haul moving a 4 bedroom house—not my 4 bedroom house—not even after I unburdened myself of a drive-way full of things at the garage sale and donated another truckload to AmVets and Goodwill.

          Tomorrow we were supposed to load the things we are taking to my father-in-law’s place and clean the house. We’ve scheduled a steamer crew to come in and do the carpets in the afternoon. Saturday we say goodbye to the neighbors, and head off to our new life. Now we’ve added about 6 hours to our Saturday itinerary because we need to make another trip across the state to the storage unit.

Hopefully we’ll be able to get all the rest of our things in one load. We’ll load the storage stuff last since it’s coming off the truck first. I think it will all fit, but if I’m wrong we’ll have to go to my father-in-law’s place, offload, and come back for the storage stuff. This will add another day—a relative disaster in my newly foreshortened perspective.

Even if it all goes in one load, averting a disaster, it’s still not going to be any fun. There’s another element to how hard all this is going to be, and that is that I am also towing my car behind the truck on a U-Haul car hauler. That means when we stop to offload at the storage unit I will have to unhitch and re-hitch the trailer—not a big issue really, but another in a long list of irritants in this whole sorry process. I need to stop dwelling on the negatives, and just assume for the sake of my sanity that everything will go on the truck tomorrow morning. Tomorrow night we’ll be sleeping on the floor. I don’t need an unresolved problem added into the mix of things keeping me sleepless.

* * * * *

          I kept in daily contact with Dennis and Eddie in the weeks after I was fired. We also met a couple of times a week for happy hour and dinner to update one another on our respective job searches. Conditions continued to deteriorate at Albatross in spite of the hopeful future that was supposed to result from the bankruptcy and reorganization.

          I had actually had a conversation with Rod about this eventuality before he let me go. He was sharing his expansive outlook on things immediately after the bankruptcy. He told me that we should be able to get the production lines back up to speed, at least on one shift, within a matter of days. As soon as the additional capital infusion that had been agreed to by the stockholder banks came through, he reasoned, the vendors would release their holds on our materials and we would be back in business.

          I told him that was folly. He didn’t like it much, but I couldn’t let him erect a set of unreasonable expectations for which, eventually, he was going to hold me accountable. First of all, the promised capital infusion had not been funded. It was already late, and there was mounting evidence that, even though they had agreed to the deal in court before a federal judge, the banks were having second thoughts about doing what surely looked to their directors like sending good money after bad.

          Secondly, even when the funds did arrive, the vendors weren’t going to start shipping us materials overnight. We had forced some of the vendors into circumstances not unlike our own. They had reduced their work forces, stretched their suppliers, cancelled orders, shut down production lines, and generally adjusted their business to accommodate our failures. Many of them—not all, but a number sufficient to impact our resurrection—were going to take weeks and months to ramp back up and get our orders back into their production queues. Even in the best case scenario it was going to take months for us to get back to the production levels we were at before our fall from grace.

          There was also going to be the problem of trust. Vendors that had us on COD weren’t going to go back to extending us credit just because we had reorganized. We’d reorganized before. They had heard our song and seen our dance already. They would not be impressed easily with a new routine that featured the same old soft-shoe.

This would be especially true when you considered that the promised but lagging capital infusion would only address 75 percent of our past due payables. We were not, in my estimation, going to get our lines up to speed until we had our vendor obligations current, and we were not likely to get our vendor obligations current until we had our lines up to speed along with sufficient customer orders to absorb that level of production. We were, in other words, between the proverbial rock and hard place, and our lives were not going to get any easier just because we had given tens of millions of dollars to our lawyers and consultants.

This was reality as I saw it, and I saw it clearly because I had been dealing with the toxic fallout of our meltdown and its effects on our vendors for months. I knew first hand what we had put them through and how they felt about it. Rod and the executive management team, because they had been too important or too pre-occupied to deal with those issues when we were spiraling into the dirt, now had no clue what kind of trouble we faced as we tried to dig ourselves out of the hole we had augered.

It was not going to be easy, it was not going to be pretty, and I’ll be damned if Rod didn’t look at me like I was an idiot for saying so. Oh well, now that he’d fired me, he’d just have to figure out how to deal with it himself. I often wonder if it ever occurred to him how much he’d screwed himself by screwing me. Probably not. I don’t think he was that familiar with the concepts of cause and effect.

The day after I was fired, I had my wife take my picture in my best suit. I had decided to insert this picture in my résumé. I thought it would help the résumé stand out from the rest of the pile on the desk of a potential employer. I also thought it would help overcome any initial reservations an employer might have about hiring an old codger like me.

I was 57 at the time. Owing to a fortuitous dip in the gene pool I looked a good bit younger. This is principally because I inherited a lush head of hair from my mother, one that has resisted the thinning and graying that so often accompany a man’s survival into his fifties.

I thought a good picture might at least prevent someone reviewing my many years of experience and seeing the dates of my credentials from doing the math and conjuring up the vision of an ashen and stooped old man in absorbent underwear hobbling around on a walker. I needed a picture of a vigorous, dynamic, and accomplished man ready to climb over a stack of vanquished competitors and claim the prize of the job being offered. Somehow my wife delivered this picture in spite of the more obvious shortcomings of her subject. It became and remains the best picture ever taken of me, and its destiny was to drive Rod out of his mind.

Once she had a good shot, my wife loaded the digital image into her computer and made some improvements. Principal among these was to eliminate the optical aberration around my eyes caused by the thick lenses of my glasses. This was always a problem for me that vanity would not let me get past. I no longer have this problem, not since I had cataract surgery that gave me 20/20 vision, but before that my usual solution to the problem was to avoid having my picture taken. As this picture was my idea, that wasn’t a workable solution. Fortunately my wife by this time had developed a facility for photo-manipulation, and she made short work of the parallax distortion.

Satisfied, and maybe even a little smug about the improvement to my visage, she decided to add a golden halo above my head. “Just to leave no doubt about what a good man you are,” she told me. Have I mentioned how much I love this woman?

Naturally I thought this was great fun and well worth sharing so I told Dennis and Eddie about it at the first opportunity. They wanted to see it. My wife sent Dennis a copy via e-mail. He shared it with Eddie. Eddie was so inspired by the picture that he blew it up to an 11 by 17 inch print, which he then taped, surreptitiously of course, to the window of my old office with the caption “The Legend Lives On.”

Evidently it created quite a stir in the office for the hour or so it remained until Rod arrived on the scene and ripped it down in a rage. Honestly I don’t know what upset him so about it. I like to think that, had I been him, I would have thought it was pretty funny to see a picture of me with a halo taped to the door of my office like I had passed on. I would have thought it was something to lighten the tension occasioned by letting me go, and help those who were upset about my leaving to get past it. Rod’s not wired like me though, so he pitched a fit.

He called another meeting to get to the bottom of the blatant affront to office propriety. I guess he thought the guilty party would come forward and take whatever punishment he thought appropriate. No one did, of course, and I still chuckle when I imagine Dennis and Eddie sitting in that room biting their lips to keep from laughing out loud at Rod’s ineffectual little tirade.

Rod’s next step was to launch an investigation into the event. He enlisted the IT department to scan the incoming e-mails looking for any direction or files that might have come from me. There were some of course, but the offending missive, the one Rod was most interested in, had got to Dennis by a circuitous route.

I suspect that IT was fully aware of this and whatever other communication may have passed between Dennis, Eddie, and me, but they never gave it up to Rod so the investigation fizzled out like a damp fuse. This is when I got the bright idea that Rod needed some more exposure to my still considerable influence over his department. I became like the saint my wife had pictured—larger, more powerful, and better loved after my passing than I had been in life.

I printed scores of pictures onto 4 by 6 inch sheets of magnetic photo stock and delivered them to selected friends and admirers at Albatross for further distribution. I explained what had happened to those who did not already know. Not one soul was reluctant to oblige. In a matter of days my picture was plastered on filing cabinets in offices and cubicles all over the company.

Since these were items of personal décor allowed to Albatross employees under guidelines established in the employee manual, there was nothing Rod could do about it. I took immense pleasure imagining his blood pressure soar and anger throbbing in his temple every time he went into someone’s office to assert his authority only to be confronted by my picture beaming beatifically across the room, conferring grace and serenity on everyone but him.

Some of those pictures still hang I’m told, although Rod is long gone. Sometimes when I’m depressed or frustrated by my circumstances and need a lift in spirits, I think how wonderful it would be to find out where Rod is now and send some magnetic placards with my picture on them for his ill-used and hard oppressed subjects to display. Hell, unless Rod’s management style has mellowed by a considerable degree, I could probably sell them based on the apoplexy they would be likely to inspire in Rod. I wouldn’t though. Grace and serenity are best bestowed free of charge.

Day 143 - The Courage for Hard Choices

          After a week of organizing, packing and pricing we had our garage sale yesterday. It was quite a success and actually a lot of fun, as such things go. All the neighbors took it as an occasion to stop by and commiserate about our leaving. They also bought up a lot of our stuff, although I suspect that at least some of their purchases were motivated by charity rather than bargain seeking.

          I sold some notable things that I have been carrying around with me for years, and the fact that they are irretrievably gone makes me nostalgic for them. One was a saber and scabbard that I'd had since my days as a cadet at a high school military academy. I always felt that it was something I had earned since it was part of my uniform paraphernalia as an officer in the corps of cadets. It was also an unusual thing to posses this day and age, and one that could usually be counted upon to initiate an interesting conversation whenever I got it out of the closet for company.

          I also sold a dark brown leather trench coat. I bought it in my late twenties, so I’d had it for over 30 years. It was too small for me for at least twenty of those years, but like a lot of people spreading inexorably through middle age I clung to the notion that one day I would get my disciplinarian on and lose weight. Yesterday I finally forced myself to give up that notion and embrace reality. I sold it to my neighbor, Rich. I made him put it on, and told him how good he looked in it. He did in fact look fabulous. It is a stunning garment. The women of the neighborhood helped me make this pitch by oohing and aahing appreciatively. It wasn’t a stretch for them. Rich looked that good in my trench coat. He gave me $35 for it. It cost me $425 all those years ago. I’ve worn it maybe 15 times in my life. I should take a $390 lesson from this. Like the old saw says, when life hands you lemons, you've got to make some lemonade.  

* * * * *

          The end came pretty fast for me at Albatross after the consultants finished up all their analysis and scheming and got down to business. They led us through a prepackaged bankruptcy. That means the bankruptcy plan was approved by our creditors before it was presented to the bankruptcy court. This cuts out the interminable back and forth that serves mainly to enrich the lawyers. The lawyers got plenty enriched anyway, but we were in and out of the federal bankruptcy court in 38 hours—a record at that time for a ‘pre-pac’, and one that for all I know still stands.

          A major part of the plan called for eliminating an additional $15 million of overhead. That imposing number included my position, although I didn’t know it at the time. I suspected it when Jed Boome stopped talking to me whenever we passed each other in the hallways. This sudden curtailment of pleasantries is an excellent indicator that your employment status is about to change for the worse. You can’t really call it a leading indicator because what it indicates has already happened. You just don’t know it yet. In my case it took about three weeks, but thanks to Jed I knew it was coming.

          It’s sad when you think about it. Executives of troubled companies like to think that they have the courage to make hard decisions about individuals and groups of employees for the greater good of the company as a whole. What they often don’t have the courage for is looking you in the eye or taking any kind of responsibility on a personal level for the hardships they create. Jed’s inability to even say hello to me in a hallway is an excellent example of this. Jed’s bone-headed decision regarding the option price optimization cost the company about $35 million in lost revenues. You could argue, and I will, that were it not for that costly error in judgment we would not have had to reorganize, we would not have had to carve out $15 million in overhead, and several dozen hardworking and productive employees, me included, would still be working there. This explains why Jed couldn’t look me in the eye, but it doesn’t do anything to explain his self-congratulatory posturing about the hard decisions.

          When Rod came into my office and asked me if I had time to go down to HR with him I knew the time had come. I said as much to Rod as he stood in my doorway looking uncomfortable.

          “So today’s the day, is it?” I said, mustering as much bravado as I could manage.

          Rod just nodded. I’m not sure in retrospect that he even knew what I was talking about. He was busy trying to make it seem like a routine meeting to discuss personnel issues. Maybe he did know I was onto him, but he didn’t have the acting chops to improvise from that point. He tried to continue with the charade.

          He dropped me at the door of the HR director’s office and waited outside. Inside it was quick and perfunctory. I got 3 months severance, but that was the extent of any largesse from the company I’d been giving 14 hours a day to for as long as I could remember. Back outside Rod was waiting to escort me back up to my office to get my coat and car keys. They didn’t want me taking my personal effects home just then. They wanted me to come back over the week-end to get them, when no one else would be there to mark my passing. I guess they thought it would be disruptive otherwise. Turns out they were right.

          Ringcomme was waiting outside Rod’s office to talk to him when we got back upstairs. Rod couldn’t abandon me to talk to Ringcomme, but he really couldn’t tell Ringcomme what was going on either. Ringcomme, proud owner of an overdeveloped sense of entitlement, did not understand Rod’s refusal to see him right then. He got a little insistent. Rod’s discomfort grew exponentially. I have an underdeveloped sense of entitlement so I decided to help him out.

          “He can’t talk to you, Jimmy,” I said. “He’s in the middle of firing me. Right now he has to walk me out the door to make sure I don’t cause a scene or steal something.”

          Ringcomme was crestfallen, not because I was leaving, but because he couldn’t get his problem resolved right away. He didn’t know what to do or say. He just stood there looking stupid.

          I got my coat and keys from my office. I noticed that my laptop was gone. It had been open and running on the top of my desk. The power cord was still there, still plugged in. I knew that someone from IT had been dispatched to get the laptop while I was downstairs getting the axe. Later I found out it had been the department manager, my friend with the Christmas ties. It’s usually one of the tech support guys when they do something like this. I guess they were afraid that a tech guy would have spilled the beans. I thought they seemed inordinately determined to keep my firing quiet. As it turns out Rod wanted to personally control the likely fallout. He thought there would be an impact on morale, and he was right.

          My wife was shocked and dismayed to see me home early. She knew what it meant. I’d been laying the groundwork for weeks.

          The phone started to light up almost as soon as I got home. Word had spread once Rod got me out of the building. Some folks had seen it happening. Ringcomme probably felt no need to keep it a secret. Some had been in earshot when I told Rincomme why Rod couldn’t give him the time he was so desperate to get. Everyone wanted to know how I was taking it. There were a lot of crying women involved. I found I was giving more comfort that I was getting. The calls continued the rest of the day, except for one brief period that probably coincided with Rod's big meeting.

          He called the whole department together to announce that he had let me go. I don’t know what all he had planned to say, but apparently he didn’t get very far. Eddie Sharpe asked him in front of everybody if he had lost his mind. Rod tried to make the case that everyone needed to make a sacrifice to accommodate the new reorganization plan, it was a difficult choice to make, everyone was going to have to pull together and get past their personal feelings—stuff of that ilk. I don’t think anybody was buying it. I know I wouldn’t have. For one thing, I don’t think it took him three seconds to decide who to give up to the cost cutting consultants. I think he knew all along he was going to get rid of me at the first opportunity. All the rest of it was just about getting people to go back to work. What they did, most of them, when they got back to their desks, was call me.

          I met Eddie and Dennis for drinks that evening. They were livid. Eddie had already called a recruiter and put his résumé in play. Dennis had been getting calls from an old colleague who had a position he wanted Dennis to take. Dennis had been putting the guy off because he actually liked the setup at Albatross. What he liked was me. He called the guy after Rod’s meeting and told him he was ready to reconsider.

Day 32 - Closing a Chapter

          Gary and I finished up the closing early today. I showed Gary where all the reports reside on the computer and how to access and update them. We even reconciled the borrowing base and submitted that to corporate three days early. I left at lunch time, happy to be shed of the place at last.

I’m anxious to get on with my life now. The last few weeks, winding down an already closed chapter, have been like wasted time to me. If I hadn’t been sick and drugged most of the time it would have been even more frustrating than it was. I shook Bill’s hand on my way out. It seemed like a mature thing to do at the time, but I didn’t feel any more mature for having done it. I wonder how Bill felt about it. We’ve actually been through quite a bit together in the relatively short time we’ve been associated. I thought we had a pretty good rapport right up until the end, when Bill decided to reveal his truer nature. I wonder if he really will miss me, or, in his alternative universe, if he’s told Threasher that he’d like to snatch me out of my car at a stop light and beat the crap out of me.

          My physical condition has improved modestly throughout the week. My fever is all but gone, and the pain is bearable without medication. I’ve got another lithotripsy next week—hopefully the last one. By the end of the month I should be feeling great and ready to tackle the job hunt with the energy it requires. At that point I’ll only have three months of severance left. It seems like plenty, but the economy is tanking all around me. Every day the news is full of economic woes of mind-boggling proportion. That can’t bode well for my prospects.

Day 27 - Conference Call: a meeting with eye rolling

          Technically, yesterday was my last day at work. My benefits have terminated, although the severance payments will now begin and continue through the end of January. I haven’t done a closing with Gary yet, and I missed some days because of the lithotripsy, so I am going to continue to work through the end of the closing process. Gary seemed happy to hear this. Now that I am dealing with him I don’t talk to Bill very much anymore. That suits me fine.

          We began today pulling dated reports from the subsidiary records to support the closing balances. Once this is done, there is not much else to do closing wise until Helen and the accounts receivable girl finish up the sales reports. This sometimes takes a week because they have to drag sales information out of the field reps to properly record the vehicles delivered. There are things to do but they’re not burdensome. I’ll let Gary do them and help him out if he gets lost. That’s the way I like to learn. It seems to suit Gary as well.

The difference between a meeting and a conference call. 

Of course video-conferencing just ruins all the fun! 

          There was one interesting development today. When I say interesting I mean the kind of thing that had me muttering profanities under my breath, and yelling them at the top of my lungs after I got into my car and started driving home.

          Bill invited me to a meeting to discuss the status of the perpetual inventory project, specifically the progress or lack thereof that has been made in implementing a sound, viable cycle count program. Some history is in order.

          One of New Ron’s projects was supposed to be orchestrating a company wide implementation of a perpetual inventory system. Fritz wanted to make it a priority because first, the auditors had suggested it would be a good idea, and second, it was a good idea. Fritz wanted to start with my division because ostensibly we had the least robust inventory system as evidenced by repeated significant write downs following our periodic physical inventories. New Ron contracted with a consulting group to come in, review our systems, and give us a conversion plan. The consulting firm left us with a report that contained a list of steps we needed to take in the approximate order that we needed to take them.

          New Ron sat on the report for weeks. Fritz kept calling him asking for a timeline for completion. New Ron kept telling me Fritz wanted a timeline, but there was no way to give him one. I suggested that all he needed to do was take the consultants’ report, assign the listed steps to appropriate individuals, and put dates next to the items. Still he didn’t do it.

          “Fritz is going to fire me if I don’t give him a timeline,” he said to me one day.

          “Give him a timeline,” I said.

          “I can’t give him a timeline.”

          “Sure you can. Just do like I told you. Take the consultants’ list. Assign names and dates.”

          “I don’t know,” he said. “I already told Fritz that this ought to come from Bill.”

          I thought that New Ron was right—not that the timeline ought to come from Bill, but that he was going to get fired. This was especially true if he was going to try to hand the whole thing off to Bill. Fritz had made it obvious that he wanted New Ron to do it. Next thing I knew Fritz had got onto Bill about it. Bill didn’t let any grass grow under his feet. About five minutes after Fritz talked to him he had called a meeting. He invited all the department heads to discuss the project. At the meeting Bill said that we had to get this perpetual inventory system going as soon as possible, but he didn’t know how to do it. Neither did he think that anyone else knew how to do it. He said that everybody needed to come back the next day with some ideas.

I already had an idea so I ran with it. I took the consultants’ list from their report, entered it into a spreadsheet, put a name and a date next to each item, and printed it out. It took about half an hour. I showed up at Bill’s meeting with stapled and collated timelines to distribute. Bill was ecstatic. He called Fritz from the meeting. He told Fritz that we had this timeline complete with task assignments and dates and that we would have the perpetual system implemented in 6 months. Fritz was ecstatic as well.

After the meeting Bill told me he had originally thought that the inventory implementation was going to be a bust because no one knew what to do, but now that I had come up with the fabulous timeline he was suddenly feeling really good about this project. He was feeling especially good because now Fritz was feeling good. Everything was good. Well maybe New Ron was not so good, but I had given him plenty of opportunity to be a hero. He wouldn’t listen to good advice.

We started having meetings once a week to track our progress against the timeline. We hired the consultants to come back and help with the software changes and data conversions we needed in order to make the system work. Bill ran the first couple of meetings, but gradually I took over. New Ron came to the meetings, but he didn’t have a lot to contribute. In a couple of months Fritz let him go—told him they had decided to go in another direction. My star seemed to be ascending. Ascending that is until we got to the cycle count process.

Cycle counts are critical to a perpetual inventory system. In a periodic inventory system (the opposite of a perpetual system) you take a complete physical inventory—wall-to-wall—at least once a year, and adjust the inventory balance in the financial records to the amount that you counted. In a perpetual inventory system you count everything at least once a year, but you do it piecemeal. You count the high value and critical items more than once a year. You do a few items every day. Every day you compare the counts of those items to the balance in your inventory records. If the amounts are different you investigate to find out why. Usually it is that you are using more or less of that item than your bills of material say you are supposed to use. If this is the case you then need to determine whether the operators are using the wrong amounts or the bills are specifying the wrong amounts. Either could be the case. You either fix the bills or retrain the operators depending. If you don’t do this, and do it effectively, you might as well not have a perpetual system because it’s not giving you any more accurate results than you would get with a periodic system.

The problem is that doing cycle counts requires dedicated resources. That is you have to have people permanently assigned to do cycle counts, and they have to be smart enough to do the investigative work and fix the problems on an ongoing basis. The trade off in terms of costs is that while you are paying a few people throughout the year to do cycle counts, you don’t have to shut the whole plant down for the day or two that it takes to do a complete physical count and pay everyone to count rather than to build the product that makes you money. That and you have better control over your inventory spending throughout the year. A perpetual inventory system is a good thing—a better thing than a periodic inventory system—but it does cost money to implement. It does add to cost at the outset, and some of the eventual savings are not immediately quantifiable.

This became my problem. Management was all for a perpetual inventory system until they found out we were going to have to hire some cycle counters. That little tidbit threw a monkey wrench into the works. My star stopped ascending. My star had the brakes put on. I wasn’t anybody’s fair haired boy anymore. Suddenly I was that dumb ‘sumbitch’ that wanted to hire more indirect overhead. This just reinforced something I already knew, but had neither the time nor the energy to put into practice in the circumstances at hand. It’s not enough to do your job and manage an extra project. Your also have to manage management’s expectations along the way. You cannot depend on them to know what needs to be done, or why, on their own. If you don’t do this you will be tossed overboard at the first sign of trouble. Think of it as the first rule of seamanship—keep one hand for the ship, and one hand for yourself. If you don’t make an effort to protect yourself, you’re not going to be of any use to the ship.

I had to fight for every cycle counter I got, and that turned out to be too few and some of them not bright enough to do the job. We launched the new system without a viable cycle count process in place, and as a direct result the system effectively crashed and burned. Guess who had to fade the heat? That is correct. New Don got fired for not doing the inventory project. I got blamed for doing it badly. It wasn’t the proximal cause of my dismissal, but it had to figure heavily.

That brings me back to the present day and the meeting that Bill asked me to attend. I had already been fired. I had washed my hands of the inventory fiasco. I had enough stuff to worry about without agonizing over the inventory. That was someone else’s problem now. Still Bill wanted me to contribute as I saw fit. He must have thought I might know something useful.

All the current cycle counters at the meeting as well as the remnant of the implementation team. The IT guys were on the line via conference call as was Fritz who as it turned out was running the meeting. Apparently Fritz didn’t know that I was there because about the first thing he said was we wouldn’t be in this terrible fix if only we’d had a strong individual in charge of the project. Then he chuckled at his own insight. The sound he made was an embarrassed choke. It was the kind of sound a pimply sophomore might make just after he has called someone ‘gay’ only to realize that they are not insulted by the term.

I looked across the table at the head of the engineering department. He rolled his eyes because he knew what an affront to good sense and sensibility Fritz’s observation had been. He could see how offended I was. I thought of all the clever things I could have said to Fritz just then, but the thing I really wanted to do defied the laws of physics. What I most wanted to do was stick my hand through the phone all the way to Kentucky, grab Fritz by the throat, and drag him back out at my end. I wanted to see the look on his face. I wanted to rearrange the look on his face…a lot. I did not see fit to make any contributions to the discussion. When the meeting was over I got in my car and drove home. 

Day 25 - Dreams of Kelly Ripa

          My replacement started today. I started out for work, but turned around and came home before I made it all the way there. I was having a lot of pain then, and I’m having a lot of pain still in spite of the excellent drugs. It started on Sunday afternoon, and has been intense and unrelenting ever since. The oxycodone is not managing the pain. At best it makes it so that I don’t care about the pain, but to get to this level of indifference requires doubling up on the dosage. I called work and told them that I wasn’t coming in. I called again and talked to Helen to let her know what’s up with me. I asked her to convey this information to my replacement. Hopefully he won’t worry about what he’s gotten himself into. It will be bad enough for him without having to worry about me.

          At home I popped pills, pushed fluids and watched daytime TV. My wife works at home. She does online transcription. She’s one of those people who stays busy all the time. She’s a card-carrying Type A personality. She doesn’t watch daytime TV. She thinks daytime TV is silly. She might be right, but in my current state I am not capable of undertaking anything more challenging. I try to be embarrassed about what I am watching, but embarrassment also seems to be beyond my capabilities.

          I have always liked the cheap and tawdry in entertainment. I like bad movies, professional wrestling, The Real Housewives of Orange County. The shallow and the vapid have a great deal of appeal for me. I like to be beat over the head with the obvious. I like a lot of scantily clad window dressing. I like raw emotion rooted in base instinct and ignorance. I like shallow water. I knew within a few short hours that I would be hooked on soap operas in a matter of days. I took two more pills and went to bed. I dreamed of Kelly Ripa.

          Sometime later the Oklahoma recruiter called and woke me up. My wife made excuses while I splashed cold water on my face in a vain attempt to get my pharmacologically compromised brain to focus. The Aerospace firm has decided on another candidate. They found someone locally—someone they wouldn’t have to relocate. My addled mind translated the unspoken and unvarnished truth. They found someone younger, cheaper, healthier, prettier, better educated, and more competent. I’m never going to get another job. I took another pill and went back to bed. Kelly Ripa did not reappear. Damn!

Day 22 - Breaking More Rocks

          The second lithotripsy was a breeze. It’s only been a week since the first one. Everything looks good. I can keep using the stint that’s already in there. I’ve had a little discomfort from the stint, but it’s easily managed with the fabulous batch of oxycodone that the urologist prescribed for the pain. I’m still getting some blood in my urine, but it’s diminished. The doctor got all the rest of the stones in the right kidney.

          Life is good. If I only had a job it’d be damn near perfect. I called the Oklahoma recruiter to see what’s up with the Aerospace firm. She promised to call me as soon as she hears something. I’m beginning to think that if they were interested I’d have heard something by now. It’s easy when you’ve been fired to get eaten up by self doubt. It doesn’t matter how arbitrary the decision or how unfairly you think you were treated. At some point you’re going to begin to think that you had it coming to you.

Everyone knows that companies use economic downturns, reorganizations and the like that result in lay-offs to get rid of the bottom ten percent—the least productive and most incompetent of employees. That’s what they’re supposed to do anyway. Because people with all their prejudices, imperfections and frailties ultimately make the decision as to who will get fired, companies often get rid of very good employees along with the legitimate culls. I know this is so because I’ve seen it happen time after time—not just to me. Still when you’re on the receiving end of a reduction in force, you have to think that someone in management must have felt that you were not pulling your weight. Somehow you have to rise above these feelings of inadequacy every day in order to function, in order to get another job, in order to get past the set-back. The longer you go without work, the harder it gets to stay upbeat about your value to the rest of the world. Trust me...I know.

Day 21 - Sandbagging

Bill called this morning to ask if I had finished with the budget revisions. I told him I had just finished up even though the revisions had been sitting on my desk since yesterday afternoon. I told him I’d bring it down to his office. He looked it over. He went right to the bottom line to see what the total impact of the new vehicles was. The impact was substantial even though we’d only added 100 vehicles. This is because we already covered all the overhead with the existing product lines, so all the gross margin on the new product goes straight to earnings.

          “This looks pretty good,” Bill said.

          “Yes it does,” I said, “but ‘looks’ is the operative word there.”

          “What do you mean?”

          “Well you don’t have any idea what the actual costs are going to be so you don’t have any idea of whether or not you can hit those margins on a per unit basis. In addition to that you don’t have any idea how many of these things you can sell.”

          “So we could actually do better than this?” Bill said.

          “Or much, much worse.”

          Bill thought about that. He was thinking about the possibility of not making this budget next year and what impact that will have on his bonus. If he misses the budget by more that 10 percent there won’t be any bonus at all. Down at the division level the thing to do is budget as low as corporate will allow—to sandbag the budget in other words. That makes it a lot easier to outperform the budget. Then the bonuses will be substantial. Of course you have to strike a balance. If you do too well against budget, management won’t let you sandbag the next year. It’s not that they necessarily know that you did. It’s that a year of stellar performance makes them greedy. They will expect that kind of performance every year. They will pump up your subsequent budgets to make it harder for you to earn your bonus. If they get stellar performance without having to pay bonuses, they win twice. It’s an annual game—budget chicken—where everybody is trying to get to an outcome that maximizes their personal gain. Whoever blinks first loses.

          “Maybe we ought to trim this back a little,” he said.

          I remembered that I won’t be getting a bonus in any event. I’ve been fired. I don’t actually care if they make budget or not. In fact I’m rather hoping they don’t. I’m a vengeful, rat-bastard at heart.

          “On the other hand,” I said, “these margins are pretty conservative based on what we’ve done historically with our other product lines. How do you feel about the unit sales projections? Can we sell a hundred units?”

          “I don’t know,” Bill said. “If we get any traction with it at all it should be fairly easy to move that many.”

          “Then go for it. This budget ought to make corporate very happy.”

          “Yeah, I think you’re right,” he said.

          “You’re going to miss me when I’m gone,” I said.

          “I already do.”

Day 19 - Back to Work

          I went back to work today. I’m feeling good. There have been no ill effects from the lithotripsy Friday.

Bill told me that my replacement starts next Monday. That will be the 1^st of the month so we’ll be jumping right into the month-end closing routines—baptism by fire for the new guy. I hope he’s a fast learner.

I went to the urologist this afternoon for a follow up. They did another x-ray. It sure seems like I’m getting a lot of those. Anyway, everything looked good, so the doctor decided that he will do the second lithotripsy this Friday. That’s quick turnaround, but he’s so pleased with the amount of sand I’ve passed already that he thinks I’ll tolerate the accelerated schedule. That’s okay by me. I’ll be happy to have all the doctoring over with so I can concentrate on getting another job.


Job prospects in general remain dim, but hope exists for those willing to risk a creative career change.

Day 16 - Breaking Rocks

          The lithotripsy frightened me not at all. In fact I was kind of looking forward to it. It’s an interesting thing, and the place where they do it, the Kidney Stone Center at Memorial Hospital, is a fun place to be. I know this because I’ve already been there twice for lab work and x-rays. Everyone is good-humored and upbeat. They go out of their way to make you feel good. In my experience this kind of thing usually starts with the doctors. If the doctors are good natured, then so is the staff, and by extension the facility.

I like my urologist. He is Indian, but he was born and raised in Texas so he does not have one of those sign-song accents that you think of if you’ve seen too many movies or met some Indian transplants. He is very smart, very young, and very personable. He is too young to be doing what he is doing, but he capitalizes on his youth by being irreverent and taking a conspiratorial tone with his patients. He does not take himself too seriously although he does frequently lecture board certified urologists all over the state and has written some well received papers. He must be serious somewhere, but he is not serious with me and I appreciate it.

The nurses and technicians started flirting with me before I had a chance to flirt with them. I don’t know what’s up with that. I feel like I have a certain responsibility to my nursing staff public in the recovery room, and if these women are going to jump start the process before I even get any drugs into me then I am really going to have to kick out the jambs later. I don’t know if I’m up to the pressure.

They put me in a little dressing room where I have to strip naked and put on one of those ridiculous hospital gowns that tie up the back. I don’t know how they expect you to get one of those things on properly, but somehow I do. The x-ray tech stuck her hand through the curtain to get my attention, and asked if I need any help getting the thing on. I told her thanks, but the deed was already done.

“Darn,” she said. “I was hoping to get a look at your butt.”

I could scarcely believe what I just heard. I couldn’t wait to tell my wife about this.

“Sorry to disappoint,” I said to the tech, “but you didn’t miss much.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” she said.

Anyway she took some pictures so the doctor would know where the stones were before he started the procedure. Then she took me to a staging area. I climbed into a rolling bed. They covered me up with a blanket they just got out of a warmer. They started an IV. They took my vitals. They asked me what I wanted to watch on TV while I was waiting. They brought me my wife. We were having a high old time. The nurses were in a party frame of mind. People kept stopping by to visit and ask me questions. I got visits from the surgical nurse, the staging nurse, the recovery room nurse, the nurse anesthetist, the anesthetist, and my urologist.

They all wanted to know pretty much the same stuff: what was I there for, which side kidney were we doing (left or right), had I have anything to eat or drink since midnight, had I had a bowel movement, did I need to go to the bathroom, where do I see myself in 5 years, what are me three best and worst traits and why? I was better at answering some of these questions than others.

Eventually they gave me something in my IV to help me relax. Relax from what I don’t know. This was about the most laid back, non-threatening, friendliest setting I’d ever been in, and the notion that I might require some pharmaceuticals to help me relax is near nonsense. Of course I wasn’t about to protest. I mean really. What harm could it do? Besides I didn’t want to upset the delightful ambiance by protesting.

I woke up in the recovery room. This is the great thing about surgical procedures. You sleep through the traumatic parts and wake up stoned and surrounded by women. I was feeling pretty good. Since there’s no cutting with a lithotripsy there’s no residual pain. The meds are less intense, so you wake up faster.

The procedure had broken up about half the stones in my right kidney. The 14 original stones were evenly distributed throughout both kidneys. The stones at the top of my right kidney have been pulverized into sand, but that sand is still in there and I’m going to have to pass it. To ease this process the doctor has inserted a plastic stint in my ureter—the tube that runs from my kidney down to my bladder. The stint is supposed to keep the sand from getting trapped in the ureter, clogging the works, and causing damage. The stint will stay in for a couple of weeks depending on how fast the sand passes. It may cause some discomfort. I’m to let them know if I have any serious pain. Other than that the doctor was pleased with how many stones he got and my prospects for a quick recovery and transition into the next procedure.

My wife drove me home. We stopped for lunch at a high-priced flatbread pizza place with snooty waitresses and some truly oddball, California inspired, fusion cuisine. It was all health food inspired, heavy on the whole grains and sprouts and such. I guess the idea is that the society matrons and trophy wives who inhabit that particular area of town need food that will help maintain their stick figures to go along with their Botox immobilized faces. My wife hated her food. Mine tasted like cardboard, but I was still a little high and trying not to interject any negativity into the proceedings. 

Day 15 - First Interview

          The phone interview was interesting. It’s been several years since I looked for a job, so I’m rusty at the processes. Still I think it went fairly well. The man I talked to in Tulsa was engaging, had a lot of good things to say about the company, and didn’t ask too many hard questions. I hate it when they ask you stuff like ‘where do you see yourself in 5 years’ and ‘what are your 3 best and 3 worst traits and why?” To my thinking there’s no useful information conveyed in the answers to questions like that. If you manage to answer well it’s because you have heard the question before, anticipated it, and formulated an answer in advance. Then you have to act as if the answer you give is spontaneous rather than rehearsed. The interviewers know this—or should. Certainly all the candidates know this. So the best that an interviewer can hope to gain is some sense of how well the candidate prepared. In other words they’ll know that they’ve got someone who is good at interviews, but not necessarily if they’ve got someone who is good at the job.

          Thankfully this guy did not ask any questions like that. Perhaps he wasn’t prepared for the interview. I was because I have good answers to those particular questions. They are bald-faced lies, but they are good answers. They are calculated to make me seem smart, thoughtful, industrious, team centered, ambitious (but not overly so), and sensitive (but capable of being a jerk when required). That’s a lot of information to pack into a couple of sentences. I try also to be a little funny. I don’t want anyone to think that I take myself too seriously. I tend to draw the line there. I’ll pretend to be anything they want me to be to land the job except someone who takes himself too seriously. If that’s what they are looking for they will have to keep looking because that’s not me and never will be.

          Oh I suppose I could pretend to take myself seriously if I was of a mind, but you have to consider the consequences when you undertake a deception like that. If the company is looking for candidates who take themselves seriously, then chances are pretty good that they are already loaded up with such individuals, and that just sucks all the joy right out of a workplace. Those are the kinds of places where you could die, find yourself in hell, and never know that you weren’t still at work. I just escaped two such places in a row. I’m not going to volunteer for a third by making stuff up.

Day 14 - Exit Strategies

          I told Bill that I am going to take Thursday and Friday off this week—Thursday because I have an interview, and Friday because I am having some of my kidney stones blown up. He did a little double take over the interview news. Suddenly it’s feasible that I will get a job before they get my replacement hired. Then I will be unavailable for the all-important transition, and the new guy will have a terrible time settling himself into our recalcitrant and user-antagonizing systems.

The interview is going to be over the phone, so things with the aerospace firm haven not actually progressed to the point where I’m excited yet. I wasn’t about to tell Bill that though. Better to let him stew a little.

          Bill stopped by my office in the afternoon with a new draft of the severance agreement. I guess the prospect of my taking another job this soon got them rattled enough to speed up the severance deal anyway. Bill tried to get me to sign it while he was waiting. I told him I’d like to read it first. I asked him if I still had seven days from the new date in which to sign. I knew that I did, but I also knew he wasn’t going to relish hearing the question while he was busy trying to get me to sign it blind. I wondered secretly if, because I was deliberately trying to make him uncomfortable with his choices, I might also be a jerk. I decided that I was not. Bill said that they have made an offer to another candidate for my job, and they expect an answer today or tomorrow. I asked when the guy was likely to start. Bill didn’t know.

          “Soon, I hope,” he said, shaking his head. “Soon.

Day 13 - The Joy of Surgery

You might feel a little pinch.

          I have 14 kidney stones. Some of them are quite large. The biggest one is about 5/8 of an inch in length and a quarter inch across. That is a huge piece of gravel when you consider where it has to come out. I’ve passed kidney stones before, and I can attest that doing so will make a dancer out of the stodgiest and least rhythmic of old men. My urologist has scheduled a lithotripsy to start breaking them up. He thinks it will take at least two procedures and maybe as many as four to get them all. Modern lithotripsy is a wonderful thing. They use focused sound waves to crack the stones. The doctor doing the procedure can watch the whole thing on a video screen and see how he’s doing in real time. They put you to sleep to keep you from jumping every time they zap you, but there’s no cutting. That’s the best part. I don’t like cutting.

          Cutting was featured last year when I had cancer…and then I didn’t. This is a good story for two reasons. First, at the end I’m still alive…so far anyway. Second, it illustrates why I think that Fritz is very likely a jerk.

I went for a routine colonoscopy at the end of July in 2007. I tell people that I like a colonoscopy. No one wants to believe it, but it’s true. While bits of a colonoscopy are certainly unpleasant, especially the prep the day before, I really don’t mind them. I’ve had several. They give you good drugs, they knock you out for the actual procedure, and when it’s over you get the rest of the day off even though you don’t feel bad at all. What’s not to like? I especially like them now that one has probably saved my life.

I woke up in the recovery room after this particular colonoscopy. My wife was there making sure that I remembered to breathe because for some reason I don’t find breathing all that compulsory when I wake up from general anesthesia. Also it seems I like to profess a profound and abiding affection for the nursing staff while the anesthetic is wearing off, and my wife likes to stay close to keep me from either succeeding too well at fascinating the nurses or making a fool of myself. Anyway we were thus engaged, me waking up, my wife encouraging me to breathe and stifling my other natural inclinations when the doctor came in to the room.

“Well, you have cancer,” he said, just like that, no ‘good news—bad news’ preamble, no greasing the skids, no easing the shock.

Of course I was still stoned, so the gravity of what the doctor had said really didn’t register on me. My mind was busy processing other information such as: did that gasp I just heard from my wife suck all the oxygen out of the room? And couldn’t you have sent a nurse to tell me that—say the curvy little one with the dark hair and the big eyes I just saw pushing the IV pole down the hall?

In case we were still conscious after hearing this momentous news, the doctor also brought pictures he had taken of the inside of my colon. One of them featured a protuberance with an angry looking mass on a stalk. It was quite impressive. Not the kind of thing you’d like to meet in dark alley or a Quentin Tarantino movie.

“I took a sample,” the doctor said. “We’ll send it out to the lab to confirm, but I’ve seen a lot of these. It’s cancer.”

As it turned out, he was right. The lab confirmed cancer. I got hooked up with a colorectal surgeon, and we scheduled a bowel section to remove 14 inches of southbound pipe. I suppose there’s no scarier thing you can hear from your doctor than ‘you’ve got cancer.’ I only suppose this because it seems reasonable, but the fact is that I never got scared. I got mad. I got mad as hell, but I was never really scared. I think the reason for this is that my job already sucked so much that the prospect of a terminal illness represented something like a reprieve from having to go to work. At the very least I was going to get some time off, or so I thought.

I suppose the degree to which I got angry merits some comment because who I got mad at was God, and when you have a serious disease that might kill you like cancer the usual course is to start sucking up to God in order to cut a deal. ‘Oh Lord if only you take this cancer away I promise I will go to church faithfully every Sunday, be generous when they pass the collection basket, and never ever hit on another nurse as long as I live.’ That kind of thing. My problem, the thing that made me mad, had to do with the Scripture reading and the sermon that went along with it from the Sunday before I got the troubling news about my colon.

You may know the scripture. I know I’ve heard it many times before. It is from the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 11, verses 11-13: ‘Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!’

I listened and took these verses to heart. I prayed earnestly for a boon from my Father in heaven. I prayed to be delivered from my job. Really I did. That was my fish, the thing I wanted, the gift I needed, the proof that I was loved. ‘Oh, Lord, please get me the hell out of here. Give me something else to do. I’ll take less money. I’ll take a smaller office, harder work, grittier conditions. Just please don’t make me do this any longer.’ Instead I got cancer—a snake, a scorpion, a crumby deal. I was pissed, and I stayed pissed for weeks.

Then an amazing thing happened. Maybe I was just tired of being angry all the time. It takes a lot out of you—staying mad. It wears you down. You lose your edge, your focus. You begin to be open to kinder, gentler thoughts just because it gives you a break from the bile in your stomach. What happened is that it began to sink in that I could actually die, and that if I did then technically my prayers would have been answered. God just might be getting me out of that job by calling me home. When I realized that, I actually began to feel a little thankful. God does answer prayers, but frequently not in the ways that we think he should. When the day of the surgery finally arrived several weeks later I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to make it, and I was pretty okay with that. The Lord works in mysterious ways, doesn’t He?

So I woke up in the recovery room, and I was thirsty as hell. The nurse was busy trying to make me comfortable. My wife wasn’t there because the surgeon forgot to go tell her that I’d lived. It was just the nurse and me and the sweet freedom to become the fool I ached to be. I asked her for some water. She said I couldn’t have any. I asked her for some ice chips to suck on. She said I couldn’t have any. I told her I just needed some relief. I wasn’t going to rat her out. I promised to love her forever if she would bring me some ice chips anyway. She brought me a whole cup of ice chips. She was overwhelmed by my post surgical charms, which it would seem are becoming legendary.

The surgeon finally remembered to stop by to tell us—my wife had found me by that time—that the surgery had been a success and that I was going to live. He had an amazing tale to tell. The surgery went well. He’d taken out the agreed upon 14 inches of colon. He’d checked the lymph nodes. He’d looked all over hell’s creation for some sign of cancer but couldn’t find any. He’d found the marks that other doctor had left during the colonoscopy to indicate where he ought to cut, but he couldn’t find any cancer. He couldn’t find any polyps. He couldn’t find anything to indicate he’d done me any good whatsoever. My wife found a miracle in this. Hundreds of people were praying for me. God had heard their prayers and taken the cancer away. I had to go through the surgery so that the doctor could confirm the miracle for us. It was plain as day.

I found something else in this. I’m not so easily duped by the Almighty. It may well have been miraculous, but the upshot was that I was eventually going to have to go back to work. My prayers had been answered not at all. I was reminded of my own personal favorite scripture—favorite because it is to me the most apropos: ‘Happy the man who delights in the chastisements of the Lord.’ Apparently I had not yet been sufficiently chastised, and, even worse, now I was going to have to answer for the nurse with the ice chips.

All of this brings me back to Fritz. Fritz had replaced Clive the sweetheart shortly after the company was sold to a private equity firm (not Cerberus) out of New York. The new owners were all about efficiency, urgency, and sweeping change. They didn’t approve of sweethearts. There was no room for sensitivity in their modus operandi. They wanted change agents, fiddlers, proactive thinkers outside the box, buzzword chandlers, and jerks. They wanted the kind of managers who occasionally throw out the baby with the bathwater. They fostered the kind of environment where it doesn’t really matter what gets destroyed or lost in the process as long as you are continually moving forward.

Fritz was perfect for them. Fritz is tightly wound. Fritz hums with barely contained energy that sometimes arcs out, sparks and fries things around him. He talks in clipped sentences. When he asks you a question, instead of listening to your answer he is already processing the thing he is going to say next. Fritz thinks that when he has everyone toiling needlessly at urgent tasks, spinning their wheels, arcing and sparking just like him, that he has done a good job of managing. You can imagine Fritz as a sea captain on a clipper ship. The entire crew is up in the rigging, hauling sheets, trimming sails, dodging lightning strikes, hanging on for dear life. Fritz is furiously spinning the wheel, port to starboard, starboard to port, only the wheel is not attached to a rudder. There is no rudder so all of what everyone is doing is for naught. There is a saying carved into the bowsprit. It represents the guiding philosophy of the ship and its master: ‘If it weren’t for our sense of urgency, we wouldn’t have any sense at all.’

At the time of my surgery we were working on the annual budget. Deadlines had been posted. The first pass of the budgets had already been done. That is broad assumptions had been made and translated into expected revenue and cost numbers for the upcoming fiscal year. The second pass—a more refined, more thoroughly vetted version of the first was due two weeks after my surgery. I had already done most of the work. I felt I had a week to recover from the surgery and a week to finish up the budget. That would give me plenty of time to do the few hours work that would be required to submit by the deadline, even if I took a few more days to recover than I thought. To me everything was copacetic.

This didn’t suit Fritz. He started worrying about it while the surgical team was probing my bowels on the operating table. I had the surgery on Friday, and was released from the hospital on Sunday afternoon. I went home with a couple of dozen staples in my abdomen and a bottle of oxycodone caplets to ease my considerable discomfort. Monday morning I got a frantic call from the other Ron, the new corporate accounting manager. Fritz wanted to schedule a conference call to discuss how we were going to get my budget done while I was recuperating.

“It’s not due for two weeks,” I pointed out. “I’ll be back in the office next Monday, and the budget will be submitted by the deadline. No problem.”

“Fritz doesn’t want to wait for the deadline.”

“Then why did he publish one? I mean, come on, Ron. We discussed this at the controllers’ conference. We’ve had conference calls since. We all agreed on the gateways and the deadlines based on what was feasible and what the board of directors expected. Why does he want to change it now?”

“I don’t know. He just wants to be able to massage it for a week or so before he sends it upstream.”

I could tell that Ron was very nervous. Fritz had given him a task. Get the budgets in early. Now he was having trouble getting me on board. I wasn’t being a team player, not being flexible enough, not demonstrating sufficient dedication to the team effort. Oh no, I was lollygagging at home with a belly full of staples and a head full of pain relievers.

“Is tomorrow good for you?” Ron asked.

“I have a doctor appointment in the morning.”

“So how’s the afternoon look?”

“I’m recovering from major surgery, Ron,” I say. “I’ll be right here, in pain, on drugs, forcing fluids, and hoping I don’t get sepsis and die.”

“Okay,” he says. “I’ll try to set it up for 2:00 p.m.”

The call itself was confusing. This may have had to do with the level of pain medication coursing through my system and short circuiting my synapses, or it may have just been the mind numbing drivel coming out of the phone. It was hard for me to gauge at the time. The conferees included Fritz, the two Rons and myself. I spent some time making my case that the budget would be done in plenty of time, that I had planned for being out, and that the budget was under control.

Fritz however, as New Ron had indicated, was anxious to get something early. To accomplish this he wanted me to get someone else working on massaging the budget while I was out. I didn’t want to do this. The budget is a complicated animal. It resides in a huge interactive spreadsheet. Someone who doesn’t understand where everything is and how everything interacts could easily damage it. It is so complicated that it ranks among those things—we all have them—that are harder to explain than they are to do. Fritz wanted me to tell the new Ron how to do it. I knew that this would be harder than just coming in and doing it myself—even on drugs. I also knew that explaining this to Fritz in such a way that he would believe it would be more difficult still.

I began to think that I would never get off the phone. Fritz was going to keep us talking until he got a resolution that suited him. I only had two outs. I either had to die—interesting don’t you think how many of my problems seem to have an untimely death as a viable solution—or I had to lie. I decided to lie. I told Fritz that I would go over the details of the budget with new Ron and get him accumulating and analyzing expense data. I told him there was no reason for all of us to discuss the detail on a conference call. New Ron and I could do it privately after we all hung up. I told him that this way we could have him the second pass at the beginning of the following week rather than the end. He seemed to be happy to have made things more difficult for all of us, which is after all his own personal gauge on his effectiveness as a manager. That he chose to do it three days after I underwent major surgery makes him, in my book, a monumental jerk.