GETTING BACK TO CIVILITY: 10 Easy Steps

There's no question that the world is a less civil place than it used to be. Rudeness and name calling are the new black. In the genteel South people used to preface compliments with 'Bless their hearts' to let the listener know that the niceties to follow were less than sincere. Those days are gone. Now it's okay to cut a bitch and leave the bloody entrails at the scene. When supposed society luminaries pepper their speech with profanity like drunken sailors, what are drunken sailors to do when they need to add some passion to their conversations?

9 mm punctuation. getting your point across without the need for any bothersome fact checking

I was discussing the idea for this blog entry with my wife this morning while she was trying to watch the Real Housewives of New York. One of the housewives was wearing a hideous low-cut knit top throughout the scene, and my wife remarked that when she saw the episode aired, the housewife was bound to regret her fashion choice. “She really needs a push-up bra to make that work,” my wife said. My reply: “Push up bra? She needs a floor jack.”

This is when I realized that my own civility could use a little tune-up, although I lay a lot of the blame for my failings in this regard squarely on the Real Housewives shows. They have so desensitized us to verbal sniping, insults, sarcasm, name-calling, character assassination, yelling, and even hair pulling that there is a danger that we will all begin to accept this stuff as normal behavior.

My neighbors are a case in point. They like to fight with one another in their driveway. They yell at the top of their lungs for interminable amounts of time, drawing fearful crowds. F-Bombs are just a stepping off point for them to truly horrific mutual vilification. My guess is that they somehow think this is normal behavior, and that they came by this notion from watching too much reality television.

I'm not about to dissuade them. Life is too short already. I've heard it said that you shouldn't bring a knife to a gun fight, but I have to think that taking an assault rifle to an argument with either of these two would leave you hopelessly outmatched.

Real Housewives' behaviors have infected politics, news analysis, scientific dialog, public policy discussions, religion, and sports. When I think of all the places where bad behavior seems to be the new norm, it occurs to me that all this may have actually started with sports. The rioting of soccer fans in assorted foreign venues is legend, but I'm actually thinking of something closer to home.

I'm think specifically of Vince McMahon's WWE professional wrestling franchise, where poor sportsmanship coupled with blatant vulgarity was pyramided into a viable ratings generator long before anyone thought of turning multiple cameras onto regular, albeit mostly immature, people in their native environs. I confess that I myself used to think of pro wrestling as just entertainment, but, in retrospect, I may have been seduced by the up-front and ubiquitous presence of pneumatic young blonds in skimpy costumes.

Fisticuffs: now a required skill for the debate team.
Can the chess club be far behind?

It's long past time to change course. These are my proposals for a return to civility:

1. Eliminate reality TV and talk radio. These seem to be the source of almost every wrong-headed opinion that infects our national consciousness and consicience.
   
   
2. Eliminate the internet...or unvetted commentary...or require all comments to include the real name, address, and phone number of the commenter. The anonymity afforded by the Internet has undone any requirement to be correct and replaced it with a requirement to be loud and repetitive. Eventually this will spell the end of civilization as we know it.
   
   
3. Eliminate caffeinated energy drinks. These just exacerbate an already dangerous situation. When people leap to conclusions without benefit of any forethought, the last thing we need to do is speed up the process.
   
   
4. Eliminate mobile communications devices. Where caffeine accelerates the germination of bad ideas, modern wireless communications speed their dissemination.
   
   
5. Move the national speed limit back to 55mph. Haste breeds anxiety, and anxiety breeds intolerance.
   
   
6. Limit in-car stereo systems to 10 watts per channel. It's not possible to listen thoughtfully to the opinions of others when your ears are bleeding.
   
   
7. Criminalize the habit TV news commentators have developed of talking over one another during panel discussions and talking over their guests when they disagree with them. Some of us actually want to hear both sides of an issue.
   
   
8. Eliminate super PACs and their political attack ads. Somewhere along the line campaign managers as a group got the idea that you can't win an election by being a nice guy. Now everybody running for office has to sponsor drivel meant to demonize the opposition rather than explain to us why their own solutions have merit. Seems to me all that campaign money would be better spent lifting us all out of the mire instead of trying to hold the opposition's collective head under it.
   
   
9. Campaign finance reform...NOW! Too much money in politics has made it possible for a handful of really wealthy charlatans to subvert the democratic process. They have turned our electoral system into gladiatorial combat that has us all trooping down to the Colosseum for bread and circus while they help themselves to the spoils of the realm.
   
   
10. Resolve all major divisive issues with single unarmed combat. A little pugilistic blood-letting couldn't be any worse than what we have now. Two champions get in a ring, and the matter is settled in 12 rounds. The loser's supporters have to sit down and shut the hell up. Right or wrong, fact or fabrication, none of the intellectual arguments would carry any weight whatsoever. If you think about it, this is not significantly different from the situation we have right now. It would just be over a lot sooner, and we could all go back to blessing each other's hearts.

Deficit Tales: Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

Let's talk about the federal deficit. Everybody seems to agree that it is a bugaboo, but no one is willing to give up anything to make it go away. Barack Obama said we need to do something about it back in 2006 while George W. Bush was spending us into oblivion. Now that Obama is president the deficit has soared to unprecedented heights...at least if you believe this graphic that has been circulating the Net:

My niece, who ought to know better, shard this on Facebook. The innocent are being led astray by blatant disregard for the truth.

The anti-Obama forces love this because it paints a picture of our president as not only a profligate spender but one who is unnaturally and, as the picture seems to evidence, smugly happy about it. Those more amenable to the President are not that happy with it because, among other things, it's not very accurate. The math doesn't work, and it leaves a lot of useful information on the editing room floor.

The amount of federal public debt handed over to the new administration at the end of George W. Bush's term was $10.7 Trillion. Of that, $6.3 Trillion was owed to the public and $4.4 Trillion was owed to other U.S. government agencies. The total public debt increased under the Bush administration from $5.7 Trillion in 2001 to $10.7 Trillion in December of 2008. As of February of this year (2012) the total public debt stood at $15.5 Trillion, an increase, so far, of $4.8 Trillion.

The Office of Management and the Budget (OMB) estimates that by the end of fiscal 2012 the gross federal debt will stand at $16.3 Trillion. This represents an increase of $5.6 Trillion, not the $6.5 Trillion depicted in the graphic.

The other problem, of course, is that if you're going to hold Obama responsible for running up the deficit with extravagant spending, then he better have bought something truly ridiculous. Here's a nice graph of where all that new deficit came from since Obama took office:

Makes you wonder where all Obama's 'Robin Hood Socialism' shows up. Listen carefully to the Republicans and you would have to believe that the Democrats gave the whole increased spending nut to lazy welfare cheats and old people who ought to stop draining the nation's resources and just die already.

So except for Tarp, the bailouts, and the stimulus spending, which together total about $1.5 Trillion, none of the deficit spending was initiated by Barack Obama. It all came from programs, policies, and two wars in place before he took office.

Here's another telling chart, this one from the July 23, 2011 edition of the New York Times Sunday Review, and based on data from the Congressional Budget Office and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. It is 'intellectual' as opposed to 'partisan.' That is, it does not spin blame, but rather pins spending to the origin of the policies that drive it.

Wow...looks like Obama has actually SLOWED non-defense discretionary spending and entitlement increases. No mean feat in an economy that the Republicans seem determined to hammer until the election is over. After that they'll make it even worse.

To me this shows the utter dishonesty of Republicans who cry about the deficits while refusing to acknowledge that the single most influential driver of deficit spending that has occurred during Obama's presidency is the Bush tax cuts. Not only do they refuse to acknowledge this indisputable fact, they want to add to the problem with even deeper tax cuts.

It doesn't make any sense to me that Mitt Romney and the Republicans hope to make their narrative stick, but stick it does in spite of the fact that it is a BALD-FACED-LIE. They are no longer accountable to the facts. Apparently they don't have to be.

They know hardly anyone will bother to check on the truthfulness of their assertions. There are too many facts to check, and it's too hard to separate the truth from the fiction. All a politician need do is keep repeating the story he wants to tell. When he's said it often enough it becomes true enough for the faithful who, after all, only believe what they want to believe.

Does anybody besides me long for the days when you could call a guy a liar, lay out the facts, and he'd be embarrassed by the dishonesty? Now the facts are just words streaming in the ether without effect or import.

...and 10 Surprisingly Good Things about Being Unemployed

Better than a knife in the back   

One of my sisters-in-law thought my last post was depressing. She felt bad for me, immersed as I am in self-perpetuating misery. I thought the post was hilarious, although I did point out to a commiserating commenter that, while misery makes excellent blog fodder, it's still freaking misery. Once again, apparently, I have missed the humor mark.

In the interest of balance, I thought it would be a good idea to address the positive aspects of losing one's job. The fact is not everything about losing your job sucks. It won't be rosy by any stretch of the imagination, but there are a few pleasant surprises along the way.

1. You can now finish a library book before it comes due.
2. You won't overflow the hard drive on your DVR with recorded shows and movies that you don't have time to watch.
3. No paycheck you sold your soul for is ever quite as satisfying as a severance check when you know you were offered up to appease the capricious gods of commerce.
4. Your daily exposure to fools, charlatans, pirates, and thieves is at an all-time low.
5. You have an automatic and very effective response for solicitors and telemarketers. “I lost my job” shuts them up almost every time. I say almost because you are still going to have to deal with the religious whack jobs who want to pray with you.
6. If you were thinking about a career change while you were still working, you now have time to realize your ambition. Just because it didn't happen the way you envisioned it doesn't mean it's not an opportunity. A word of caution though—there are already a bazillion people out here trying to monetize social interaction by blogging, tweeting, and booking their faces. There may not be any barriers to entry, but it's a bitch to get noticed.
7. You can bond with your pets in ways you never dreamed possible. All your dogs and cats and whatever elses are firmly in your camp when you're home all the time. They will be connected to your hip or ankle. This may seem an annoyance at first, but you will soon realize that your pets are an improvement over the jerk-wads at work. A cold nose up the butt is way better than being stabbed in the back by an ambitious co-worker with a self-serving agenda.
8. All the self-improvement plans you neglected when you were working are now within reach. You used to be too tired to go to the gym when you came home from your ball-busting job. Now you can go in the morning when the poor schmucks who are still working for your old employer are just stumbling into their first mind-numbing meeting of the day. You can read the books on your list instead of hundreds of e-mails from management wanting you to explain why the company is not meeting sales targets without telling them that their targets were set to satisfy unrealistic directors rather than being based in any objective, quantifiable data. The smartest manager you ever met could not have written a mediocre novel, and even vampire romance is better than the last business memo you had to read.
9. No more buzzwords. No more jargon. No more obfuscated business-speak. If you are a big fan of jargon, doubletalk, and ambiguity, you can get your fill by reading the congressional testimony of Goldman Sachs executives regarding their actions during the recent financial turmoil and alleged Great Recession.
10. So long as you can keep your blood pressure under control, there is a lot of entertainment value to be had in following the rants of ignoramuses who still believe, variously, that: the sub-prime mortgage crisis was caused by dead-beat borrowers who failed to honor their obligations because they are bereft of any moral backbone, that anyone drawing unemployment compensation benefits ought to suck it up and just get a job, that Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner are heroic civil servants who saved us from financial ruin at the eleventh hour, that George W. Busch tanked the economy by military adventuring in Iraq and Afghanistan, that Barack Obama is spending our future to further his own political aspirations, that Lady Gaga is stylish and talented, that the Real Housewives are either real or interesting, that Charlie Sheen is winning, or that Anthony Weiner is less reprehensible than, say, Mark Sanford or Arnold Schwarzenegger because he didn't actually reach out and touch anybody. Really, the number of things with the capacity to amuse us grows exponentially every day. I don't know how I ever found time to work.

Day 178 - Jobs, Lies, and Videotape

          I scored an interview last week, the first one in this area. It wasn’t a recruiter either. It was a real job. There have been no listings for controllers or CFOs in this area. I decided to lower my sights some. Now that we have offloaded so much of our stuff and cut our living expenses to the bone I can actually get by on a lot less money than I’m used to making. The job I interviewed for was an assistant controller position for an outfit that publishes contract bid lettings for construction contractors. The salary range is less than half what I used to make, but realistically that’s still four times what I get in unemployment benefits. It’s amazing to me how many different ways I’ve had to adjust my thinking.

          The HR manager called to set up the appointment. She e-mailed me directions to the office. Included in her e-mail, which I didn’t actually read until it was too late to respond, was a request to reply to her explaining why I was willing to work for so much less money. I figure this has to be as problematic for potential employers as it is for me—maybe more so. Anyway I went to the interview without responding. The interview was with the controller, a pleasant enough young man probably 20-25 years younger than me. His concern was whether I would be able to adjust to working for him when I had obviously been used to having a lot more authority and autonomy in my previous positions. This is a good question, one I wasn’t really prepared for as I hadn’t really thought about it. I was more hung up on the money issue.

I think I answered it pretty well. I told him that I was all about the work and that as long as I was engaged and making a contribution it didn’t matter to me who I was taking direction from. Besides with 30 years experience I wasn’t going to need very much direction, a happy circumstance that was going to free up some of his time that would otherwise be applied to managing me. This seemed to satisfy him. We got along very well. He told me the office was full of women—the whole office, not just the accounting department. He said that in terms of men it would just be him and me.

I told him about the question the HR manager had asked in her e-mail, and that I hadn’t been able to respond. He said they were worried that once the economy had recovered I would bolt for a better paying position. I knew this. It’s certainly a legitimate concern. The truth is that of course I would. Who wouldn’t leave a junior position for more than twice the money?

I knew I had to lie. The controller knew I had to lie, else he would have asked the question right away. It was the only thing either of us really cared about.

I did have a pretty good story though. I told him about Nelson. I told him that I knew I was going to be settling for less money when I decided to move down here to take care of Nelson, that money wasn’t the issue anymore. I was here because my family needed me to be here, and I had altered my lifestyle and my expectations to make it work to everyone’s benefit. I wasn’t about to change all that for more money.

It was a good lie because it was almost true. He acted like he believed me, but I didn’t get the job. The HR manager e-mailed again on Friday to tell me they were going with another candidate.

Here’s another problem with the economy. How many people besides me are regularly put into positions where their only logical recourse is to lie? I’m guessing millions. And why is that? We’ve got this whole shell game built up around the process of finding a job to the point where everybody is spinning everything on both sides of the desk.

Employers are spinning stories about the health of their company and the nature of the workplace environment. Candidates are spinning stories about their experience and its relevance, about their willingness to do stuff they’d really rather not. The interviewers are asking questions calculated to determine the best liar from among the candidates that were chosen based on how compelling the fictions were in their résumés.

If they videotaped the process and hooked everybody up to polygraphs, no one would ever get or take a job. Is it any wonder, given the nature of the selection process, that we have the occasional crisis of ethics in the business community? This is how it is in the best of circumstances. A recession just exacerbates the whole mess.

Day 41 - Sport Negotiating

          Gary called today with a question about the inventory—a simple matter that we disposed of quickly. He asked after my health and I told him about the pain, the fever, and the Cipro. He said that in his experience Cipro takes a minimum of a week and as much as two to begin to work. Once it begins, apparently, it works pretty fast, but I’d have a long wait for any relief. I don’t know if this is true or not. It seems irresponsible on the part of the doctor to prescribe a slow-acting antibiotic for a kidney infection that had the potential at least to become virulent and even life threatening, but what do I know? I’ve got a lot of nerve second guessing a board certified urologist when I can’t even hold a simple job in accounting.

          If you were paying attention during those last two sentences you will realize that self doubt has begun to take root right next to the bacteria ravaging my plumbing. I expect that in this circumstance the hydrocodone is both my best friend and my worst enemy. I’m taking them two at a time now even though the pain has abated to the point of mild discomfort when I urinate. I convince myself that they help with the fever and they help me sleep, although that last is not really true. They don’t help me sleep at all, but they do help me not to care that I am awake.

*****

          Henry was never troubled by self doubt. No feeling of inadequacy, sense of guilt, or pang of conscience ever clouded his mind that I know of. Henry kept his own counsel. By Henry’s reckoning he was the smartest sumbitch in the valley, and while he might pay for good advice that did not mean that he had to take it when it went contrary to his own wisdom. Everyone else’s intelligence was measured by the yardstick of Henry’s own notions, so that the more you agreed with him the more brilliant you became.

          Much of what Henry did seemed to me not just counterintuitive, but downright stupid. And yet he was not, despite his behavior, a stupid person. I began to believe over several years that he made stupid business decisions intentionally just to prove that he could. Just like hitting on bizarre and unattainable women—to prove that he could. He had to constantly reinforce the notion he had of himself that he was above having to listen to anyone else or do anything that anyone else would do in the same or similar circumstances. He would cheat and fudge and screw up wherever and whenever he chose, and because by doing so he gave the impression that he was crazy no one ever called him on it. There were almost never permanent consequences for him. Sure he might have to buy a truck or pay a settlement, but his life, his homestead, his business, his circle of influence remained virtually intact. I wondered sometimes if he’d made a pact with the devil.

          The lowest I’ve ever seen him was shortly after I’d gone to work for him, about a year after he’d run afoul of the IRS, and while we were in the process of moving our whole operation to Arkansas. We got caught out of trust by our floor plan lender. A floor plan is a wholesale line of credit secured by our inventory. As soon as we sold a boat we had to pay it off. Being out of trust meant we hadn’t paid off sold inventory on a timely basis. We weren’t out of trust just a little bit. We were out of trust about $6 million.

          I had walked into this situation without knowing what I was getting myself into. Henry had been pulling the wool over my eyes as the CPA in charge of his tax work and annual review in the same way he was fooling the lender. When I left the CPA firm to go to work for him, I was suddenly in the thick of the very accounting subterfuge he had been using against me. I knew that sooner or later we were going to get caught. I also knew that as soon as the lender found out we were out of trust they would shut us down and padlock the doors.

Henry had been able to hide his out of trust condition because the lender was at best lackadaisical about checking our inventory. They let us know in advance when they were coming. Henry would get on the phone to his customers, and have them bring their boats back to the dealership on some pretext, usually service work. If that didn’t work he would just tell the lender’s agents that the boats they were looking for were out on a demonstration cruise or at a show. Sooner or later the unit would make its way back to the lot, he’d call the lender, they’d come out to look at it, and everybody would be happy until the next inspection. Then the whole process would start all over again. To keep things interesting Henry kept paying units off and ordering new ones from the manufacturers to keep his float alive.

          The internal financial statements he was providing to the lender every month were a joke. The $6 million he was out of trust was being carried as customer deposits. That is he had sold the boats and collected the money, including taking a unit in trade usually, but he hadn’t recorded the sale. The money was be credited to customer deposits rather than recorded as sales revenue. I knew I had to get things honest and I had to do it in a hurry, but I also knew that if I did it all at once the whole sorry mess would come tumbling down on our heads. We were actually making significant progress toward clean books until Henry decided he needed to buy a factory and move his operations to Arkansas.

          I ran the numbers on that too. It wasn’t such a bad deal. We bought a bankrupt manufacturing operation for 10 cents on the dollar. The trouble was coming up with the cash to fuel operations until we started getting production off the line. I told Henry it would take $3.2 million to do properly. Henry raised $1.5 million and pulled the trigger on the deal. We were a million seven short, and Henry made up the difference with out of trust floor plan proceeds. Instead of us getting back into trust and being able to breathe a collective sigh of relief, he plunged us deeper into the hole.

          It all came crashing down when I published the next set of quarterly financials. I made them honest. I knew I had to. It was one thing to fudge on the monthly internal financials, but I just wasn’t about to lie on the published quarterlies. It would go against everything I stood for. I dug in my heels. Disaster was the result.

When the lender realized that Henry was actually losing money they became unbelievably skittish about the whole arrangement. They descended on us unannounced with twice the usual number of grunts to check our inventory. Naturally they couldn’t find a lot of it. Instead of letting Henry waltz them around with a lot of B.S. like they used to do they started asking really hard questions. When Henry told them a unit was at a show they wanted to get on the phone and talk to someone at the show that could go look at the unit and capture its serial numbers. It got really ugly really fast. Henry was sweating bullets. Tension crackled across the property like downed power lines. After two days of trying to salvage the unsalvageable Henry came clean and threw himself on their mercy. That’s when things began to get really interesting.

          The lender didn’t shut us down as I had thought they would. The reason they didn’t shut us down is that they wanted to keep the whole matter as quiet as possible. They had already been caught unawares by another out of trust dealer to the extent of $104 million. That number made our paltry sum seem insignificant. It had also made a big splash in the financial press and caused the lender’s stock price to take a substantial dip. They couldn’t afford any more bad press, and they couldn’t afford any more losses. If they shut us down they would get both. The fiasco would make the papers, and they’d have to liquidate our inventory at a significant discount. They’d be lucky to get out with half what we owed them.

          The far better course for the lender was to throw us into a workout. They made Henry sign everything he owned over to them. He was three days just signing papers that gave them first security rights in virtually everything of value we had except the property itself, which was of course mortgaged. Then they parked two agents in our offices to approve every deal we made. All the cash we collected went directly to them every day. We would submit payment requests to them for all our expenses including payroll. Whatever we spent had to be documented and approved by them before they would release the funds. Everything else they kept. They came with us to Arkansas. It was burdensome and unnerving. It left us scant room to operate and no way to capitalize on any opportunities that might come our way. The lender ran the business, and they ran it with an iron hand. Still we were open for business, working our way out of the mess, and Henry wasn’t in jail.

          At first Henry seemed a broken man. He lost his color. He quit combing his hair or taking any care with his appearance. His attempts at philandering were listless and half-hearted. Gradually though he came out of it. It was another instance of Henry escaping his own stupidity unscathed by more or less blind luck. Were it not for the lender’s previous troubles they probably would have locked our doors and filed charges against Henry. As it was, to all outward appearances they left him doing what he’d always done with the one exception that everything was now totally above board and honest. That part probably made Henry crazy, but he made the best of it and within a few weeks seemed his old self. I guess he had to keep his larcenous spirits up by perfecting the use of his ‘foot wedge’ on the golf course. To his credit, and to my everlasting surprise, the one thing he did not do was hold me responsible for the mess. I knew that somewhere in the dark recesses of him mind he had to be thinking that if I hadn’t insisted on being honest he would have been enjoying ‘bidness’ as usual with impunity.

          One interesting thing happened to me in the course of all the turmoil. The lender sent an auditor from Detroit to look at our books. I’d already made significant strides getting them into shape, and I went out of my way to be as forthcoming and helpful as possible when he showed up. I guess he appreciated that because we developed a kind of cautious rapport that I would not have thought possible under the circumstances. Maybe the controllers he usually dealt with were still trying to cover up their bookkeeping misdeeds. I didn’t. There wouldn’t have been any point. We were already caught out. Keeping the books honest at that point just made everything work better. The more they knew about the reality of our situation the less likely they were to have unreasonable expectations. All I know is that eventually he came to trust me, and I made sure that his trust was not misplaced.

          Now Henry had earmarked a crummy little internal office in the Arkansas facility for my use. The furnishings were awful. The desk and credenza were pressed wood by-products covered in cracked and stained Formica. My chair listed about 5 degrees to port. There were no windows. It shared an air conditioning and heating zone with the windowed offices across the hall that also housed the thermostat. The result was that my office was a good ten degrees cooler than the rest of the building in the winter and that much warmer in the summer. I hated it and so did the lender’s auditor.

          One day the auditor went to Henry and told him he needed to give me a bigger office. He told him that he wouldn’t even have a business were it not for me, and he had no business consigning me to a slum tenement of an office when there was so much prime space available right across the hall. He told him I needed more space, more comfort, and more respect, and that he wasn’t going to be happy until I was moved into quarters commensurate with my importance to the company. That little speech got me moved into Henry’s office. Henry moved down the hall and built himself another, but I inherited all his office real estate and all his furniture. I’ve never had as fine a place to work since.

          The thing was huge. It was the equivalent of three regular sized offices. The entire West wall was floor to ceiling window. The South wall was one huge custom built floor to ceiling cabinet that housed an entertainment center, a clothes closet, file drawers, and a wet bar. The custom made desk was just shy of two acres. There was a matching credenza, and respectable artwork on the walls. The carpet was plush with a hand inlaid design. There was a sofa, two barrel chairs, two end tables, a round conference table and 6 matching custom upholstered directors’ chairs. My new chair was a high backed leather executive chair with padded arms. It did not list to port or starboard. It was so comfortable that I had to eventually get rid of it and replace it with something more conducive to work. I had the Taj Mahal of Middle American office space, and I enjoyed it every day for 7 years before some dirt bag from the company we finally sold out to took it away from me. But that’s a whole other story.

          Eventually we slipped the lender’s shackles. They stayed with us for two years, collecting every dime and scrutinizing every payment. It got to be a huge pain in the ass, and it really stymied all our efforts to succeed and grow the company. The lender hardly cared what happened to us. They only wanted to get their money back, plus interest if possible. In fact they probably hoped that we would eventually fail. I’m sure they thought we had it coming to us. They just didn’t want it to happen until we had got them paid off. We were still a long way away from having done that when we found a private lender who was willing to buy out their position. Of course the new lender wanted a substantial discount, and we wanted to make sure that he got it.

This was my first indoctrination into the world of hard-nosed negotiation. I thought we could probably talk the lender into taking 75 cents on the dollar. I thought that was reasonable, and that they would be happy to get it if they could get out quickly and with cash. The longer they stayed in the workout the more likely it was that we were going to fail anyway. They kept such tight reins on us that we weren’t able to invest in improving our production efficiencies or upgrading our product offerings. We were languishing in mediocrity, and our lackluster sales were telling a story of significant risk for the lender. They would be happy to get any reasonable deal.

I figured we could offer them 66 cents and settle out at 75. Henry and his VP thought we could do way better than that. We offered them 40. I was sure they would balk, but they didn’t. They hollered. They made a lot of noise, but they kept talking. In the end we convinced them that we were going to walk away and let them have the keys. In fact Henry jumped up at one of our meetings with them and threw his keys on the table. It was his car keys, but the gesture wasn’t lost on the lender’s executives who suddenly saw their careers flash before their eyes. They couldn’t afford to take the kind of hit that our abandonment of the enterprise would give them. They were still in too deep, and the memories of their other losses too fresh. Besides, Henry’s demonstrably lunatic behavior over the two years they had been camped out in our back pockets convinced them he was just crazy enough to stick them with the whole mess. They settled for half what we owed them and ran for the exits.

We had a new lease on our future with a new and entirely more accommodating lender. The new lender was an individual. He’d built a huge agricultural operation in the East and sold out to a corporate food processor for a mountain of cash and stock. He was sitting on $150 million, and he was bored. He liked us. He owned one of our boats. He thought we deserved a chance at success. He was just as crazy as Henry but a lot nicer and there was not a larcenous bone in his body. At first he was reluctant to get involved. The risk was considerable. We’d gotten enough of a discount on the deal that his security interest in our inventory was going to be very attractive, but he was still fronting a lot of cash and anything could go wrong. The economy wasn’t that good. Sales were lagging. The VP and I went to his house, stayed with him two whole days talking into the night. We gave him our personal word that we would keep open channels of communication with him and watch his back at every turn. Finally he bought the deal, and we closed out the other lender. He was our savior, and I vowed that I would never let Henry take advantage of him. I never did either—no matter how hard the bastard tried.

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.