Curating a Bucket List on the Fly

Today you need to head over to Studio 30 Plus where I am featured writer in the members blog with a post about my ever changing bucket list.

http://studio30plus.com/profiles/blogs/curating-a-bucket-list-on-the-fly

Poke around while you're there. They have a lot of excellent writers and an active community.

Day 124 - Slouching toward Decrepitude

          I miss Bud a lot. I’m not really sure why this is. I haven’t really known him a very long time, and most of the time I have known him I’ve also known that he was sick and not likely to survive his illness. I had plenty of time, in other words, to prepare for his death. So here in the realization I ought to find resignation, acceptance, closure, and peace in the finality of it, but I don’t.

I want Bud back. Bud and I had an affinity that I can’t explain…or maybe can, but don’t want to admit. I find the things that I miss most about him are his least redeeming qualities. I miss his stinking breath. I miss his messy eating habits. I miss the tortuous way he got up off the floor to go do his business. I miss his general slovenliness and his abiding uselessness. When I think of all the things I miss about Bud I realize that, except for (hopefully) the bad breath, these are all attributes that I possess in equal measure.

I haven’t eaten a meal in recent memory that I didn’t get part of on my shirt. I’ve taken to telling people that at my age and with my history of colon cancer it’s important to keep an accurate record of what I eat. I keep mine on my shirt.

It takes me forever to get up out of a chair. It takes me an average of 28 seconds to get out of our car. I know this because my grandson times me. He got tired of waiting for me. He’s usually out of the car and inside our destination before I even get my seatbelt off. Putting a stopwatch on my torpor seems to him like a good way to occupy otherwise wasted time just waiting. He takes a lot of pleasure in announcing my times to the general amusement of the rest of the family. If I had anything to leave I would consider writing him out of my will.  

Now that I’m unemployed I just putter around getting in other people’s way. My wife often has to park me in a corner when we go shopping together so that I don’t impede the flow of traffic up and down the aisles of the stores. Bud and I were images of one another. We were old men sliding inexorably into decrepitude, and both grown useless as the tits on a boar hog. This is why I mourn Bud so much. It’s as if a big part of me has gone missing.

*****

There was a point in the midst of all the turmoil at Albatross where it seemed as though my star was in its ascendency. It was short lived. This happened when the new CFO, let’s call him Quentin Parks, asked me to assume the duties of the Operations Controller in addition to my own. This was to be a short term assignment that would be made permanent if I acquitted myself well. I planned to acquit myself well. There was, of course, a monkey wrench waiting in the wings for the opportunity to hurl itself into the mechanics of my forward progress. Let’s call him Rod Chandler.

Rod was a nemesis of monumental proportions, although I didn’t realize that at first. Rod was the new controller of the North Alabama plant. Rod had a career track in mind, and that track intersected mine. My problem was that where my career track was a passive thing that went where I thought the company needed it to go, Rod was actively engaged in mapping his track to take him where he wanted to be.

Where he wanted to be was where I thought I was going to end up if I acquitted myself well. So while we were both headed for the same destination, I remained blissfully unaware that I was in a competition. I had a huge amount of work and responsibility to take care of in order to acquit myself well. Rod on the other hand, less blissful and infinitely more aware, arranged to have nothing to do but lay track.

I know this because the old controller of the North Alabama plant complained to me about it. The old controller was trying to retire. He had announced his retirement, and the company had hired Rod to replace him. The old controller agreed to stay on and train Rod in the particulars of the job.

Even in the worst circumstances, this shouldn’t have taken more than a couple of months. Rod was, after all, a degreed accountant with years of experience in manufacturing as an assistant controller and controller. He didn’t need to be trained. He only needed to be shown where things were.

It took way more than just a couple of months though. This is what the old controller complained to me about. It was taking forever because Rod never got to the point where he was actually taking over the work. The old controller continued to do all the things he had been doing all along while Rod engaged full time in managing his career.

Now I don’t mean to suggest that Rod wasn’t doing any useful work. He probably was. At least he was doing work that seemed useful to the plant manager at North Alabama and to the CFO at the corporate offices because the work he did was deliberately tailored by Rod to appeal to their particular management sensibilities.

It was not, however, the work he had been hired to do. It would have been nice if the rest of us finance and accounting stiffs had the same luxury—to have some poor slob who was trying to retire do our jobs while we cherry picked tasks and projects calculated to make us look like geniuses to senior management.

Day 69 - Seeking a More Poetic Existence

          There seem to be a lot of jobs in health care—more than in any other single segment of the economy. I think that I might like to break out of the manufacturing niche and get into health care. The money would be comparable. The benefits would probably be better. The working conditions would almost certainly be an improvement. And of course we have already discussed my attraction for nurses. My one hope would be that I would be surrounded by smarter people. This is not to suggest that smart people do not work in the manufacturing sector, but only that they tend not to be in charge.

I actually started my accounting career with a health care provider—a kidney dialysis facility in Tampa. That was years ago, however, and things have changed a lot since. Now every accounting job I see listed in the health sector requires at least five years experience with a primary care provider. Unless a little good fortune comes my way I might just be stuck doing what I’ve been doing or doing nothing at all.

Periodically I have flights of entrepreneurial fancy. The last time I gave in to one of these I bought a small florist shop, moved it, merged it with a much larger plant and garden center, and promptly lost my shirt. Failing in a spectacular fashion builds character and also a considerable immunity against further flights of fancy. So far at least I have been able to resist the temptation to further entrepreneurial exploits. It doesn’t hurt that some eighteen years later I am still in hock to an assortment of credit card companies for more than $60 thousand—the price of refusing to file bankruptcy, and a nut that I do not seem to be able to crack in spite of earning a respectable salary.

Still there is allure in the prospect of not having to work for fools and charlatans. I’ve really had enough of that, and were it not for my astronomical credit card debt I would be looking for an opportunity to be my own fool and charlatan once again. Actually I am looking, but my search is constrained.

What I need is an opportunity that doesn’t require any initial capital outlay. This means my product has to be virtually free to produce. There can be no requirement for facilities, equipment, production workers, or materials inputs. Advertising will have to be direct and viral. Distribution will have to be on an as-ordered basis, orders pre-paid. As I’m sure you realize, we’re talking the Internet.

We’re also talking about writing. Writing is virtually free to produce. All you need is an idea to get started. Everyone already owns all the other necessaries to getting the idea into or onto something that someone else can read. All that’s required then is a mechanism for monetizing the process. If you look you will see that the Internet is rife with places where you can publish articles on practically any subject and get paid based on the number of people who either read the article or, more commonly, click through from the article to a place where they actually buy something. I signed up today for one of those. I even published an article. Not an article really but a funny poem about diet and exercise. Here it is in its entirety.

IMMORTALITY

If we could all decide our fate, and name our time of death and date,

Most all of us would check out late, and queue en-masse at Heaven’s gate—

Arriving at the same damn time, procrastinators in a line,

Who’d put off dying long’s we could, but just the same in coffin’s wood

Would all be lying stiff as boards awaiting judgment from our lords.

Though this is what we’d all prefer, yet most believe we must defer

To higher powers this life length choice. Sing halleluiah! Let’s rejoice!

But some there are that what they think’s our span of life’s not writ in ink,

But penciled on our page of fate—a mere suggestion to abate—

Just change the pattern’s warp and weft to raise the sum of days we’ve left.

The starting point is what to eat. The fare is spare and short on meat.

Less sweet desserts, less this and that, a pan-caloric tit for tat

Less fat or carbs—just take your pick. What works for some makes others sick.

More fibrous greens, organic fruit, whole-kernel grains, and tofu suit

The longer, leaner lifetime mess (though much of it be flavorless.)

Then what’s required is discipline and going placidly within—

A regimen of proper diet, avoiding all excess and riot,

Restraint in all save exercise (in working out we’ll agonize.)

For fitness is the way to stay about a longer time than they

That shirks their time inside the gym, and journey fat through thick and thin.

Hard work and sweat must now align to gobble up great gobs of time—

Running, rowing, dance aerobic, pumping iron, and skipping ropic,

Swimming climbing, step and stretching, jogging to the point of retching—

Till weary rapture of corpuscle coursing through sore, aching muscle

Signals that this hard persistence barely lengthened our existence.

Then free from guilt but full of pain we pause to calculate our gain,

And find when appetite’s denied that all life’s fruits are froze and dried,

And though we may have added years, they’ll have to be reviewed through tears.

Oh, we can choose long life to live, knowing we’ve but one to give,

But racking life out to its limit sadly leaves scant living in it.

A silly thing surely with, hopefully, some entertainment value. We’ll see what happens.

Day 47 - Mini Me (or Stinky Me) and Me

          I’m feeling better and better, but I continue to medicate myself into a relative stupor at every opportunity. Get a twinge in the back, take a pill. Feel a stinging sensation when I pee, take a pill. It’s no consolation, but I’m now medicating Bad Breath Bud even more than I am myself. The vet has him on a regimen of pills that would choke a horse. That poor goofball gets an anti-inflammatory 4 times a day, an antibiotic for infection, mega vitamins with each meal, zantac to keep him from throwing up, and methadone for pain as often as needed not to exceed every four hours. Some of this stuff is bad for his liver, but we’re not worrying so much about his liver as he is not likely to live more than a couple of months. We’re just going to keep him as comfortable as possible.

          Bud’s problems with his hips—the general weakness in his hindquarters—seemed to be improving with the regular walks, but he suddenly began to favor his left shoulder. He never complained, but it was obvious that he was having a lot of pain there. Bud is not a complainer. Our other hound, Sandy, is a complainer. She will cry and whine at the least provocation. Once she got a twig caught up between the pads of one of her front paws. She screamed like she was being murdered with a dull knife. She is a big baby. Bud…not so much. He winces from the pain in his shoulder, but the discomfort doesn’t seem to diminish his enthusiasm for a walk.

          When it was obvious after a few days that Bud’s pain wasn’t getting any better, we took him to the vet. X-rays showed a lesion involving his left forearm with significant bone loss on the forward side of the humerus. The vet felt that surgery was not a good option for Bud because of the weakness in his hindquarters. If we amputated his left foreleg, he’d only have one good leg left. For Bud at least, the cure, which doesn’t offer a lot of hope anyway, would be worse than the disease. Our best option is to make him as comfortable as possible until even that becomes a cruelty.

I feel pretty badly about all this. I’ve only known Bud a short time, but I feel a real affinity with him. I think of him as the canine me. We’re both old coots, coming to the end of our usefulness. Our spheres of influence are shrinking, and our bodies are in revolt. Maybe the drugs I’m taking are making me too vulnerable and sensitive for my own good, but any way you look at, it Bud is a good old dog. I hate to see him fade away.    

          My wife called Kelly to tell her that Bud was sick. Kelly felt compelled to speculate that the cancer was the direct result of my walking Bud too much for the last several months. If Bud doesn’t offer to bite her next time we see her, I intend to do it myself. 

Day 29 - Ninja Accounting: assassination by the numbers

          Still sick. My temperature hit 103. I sipped ice water and popped hydrocodone, which has acetaminophen so it helped with the fever. Gary was not too happy with me, but I didn’t care very much at this point. I was still having flashbacks to former jobs. I don’t know why they all seem unpleasant looking back. I seem to remember enjoying work.

*****

          I almost killed a boss once. Let’s call him Henry. Henry had just gotten out of the hospital from a quadruple bypass. Before his heart attack he was a three pack a day smoker and a 12 cup a day coffee drinker. He used to hit the Dewar’s White Label pretty hard too, but he had mostly given that up to keep the peace with his wife. He was notorious for knocking down cash from his business—that is he would pocket a chunk of money from each transaction and keep it for himself. He used to do this on his own, but the IRS caught up with him, and he had to plead out to a felony tax evasion charge. That was before I met him. When he hired me he told me that my job was to keep him out of jail. I understood this to mean keeping him honest. It was the hardest thing I ever had to do.

          Henry still knocked down cash, but I recorded it as a loan to him from the company. If he didn’t pay it back it would become income to him or it would reduce his basis in his company. Either way it would end up having adverse tax consequences for him. None of these niceties disturbed Henry as long as he thought he was getting away with something. I was keeping him honest without him knowing it.

          Henry was a natural born salesman. He could sell anything. He had customers lined up to deal with him. There was something magical about it that I never understood. He was not gracious or charming or smooth. In fact he was usually the exact opposite of those, but somehow he exuded a brand of charisma that made people want to make him happy. The best way to do that was to buy something from him, especially if you managed to let Henry at least think he had the upper hand in the deal.

          While Henry was in the hospital the company was deprived of his charisma and sales fell off. Cash flow began to be a problem. I realized two things. We had deliveries coming up on which the customers had made substantial deposits. Henry had taken the deposits and banked them for himself. When we made the deliveries we were going to have to credit the customers for their deposits even though the company didn’t have the money. Henry had it. The bookkeeping would be honest, but we wouldn’t be getting sufficient cash from the transactions to fuel operations. And since we weren’t booking new sales we weren’t taking in any deposits on future deliveries. We were facing a cash crunch of disastrous proportions.

          To help weather the storm, I developed a comprehensive schedule of our cash position—our expected inflows and outflows. With this schedule we knew what we could pay and when, and when we were going to run out of money. I took this schedule to Henry at his home when he got out of the hospital. I pointed out to him the position we were in. I told him that in order to keep the company afloat he was going to have to pony up some of the cash from the deposits he had pocketed.

          Several hours later the Vice President and General Manager, a good friend of mine—let’s call him Mike—told me that he had talked to Henry on the phone and that Henry had said my cash flow schedule wasn’t “fit to wipe his ass with.” I was used to abuse from Henry at this point. He was forever abrasive and insensitive when things didn’t go his way. The magnitude of this particular calumny however was more than I could stand, especially under the circumstances where I had been trying to hold things together in his absence—an exercise that wouldn’t have been nearly so difficult if Henry didn’t have a larcenous heart. I don’t think that I have ever been angrier at work. I quit on the spot.

          We were having an open house at the time. It was an annual event where somewhere around 250 customers would show up for three days of seminars, entertainment, and meals, get tours of the plant and put their hands on our new product offerings. I was supposed to tend bar that evening at a catered steak dinner. I told Mike that I’d be back to pour drinks, but that was it. I packed up the personal stuff in my office and went home.

          When I returned at 6:00 to set up the open bar, Henry was roaming the hallways looking for me. I knew he would be.

          “There’s that boy I been looking for,” I heard him booming down the hall.

          He was in the Mike’s office. He came out into the hall and swept me in. He was expansive, full to bursting with good will and affection. He bowed his massive head and spread his hands like a penitent. He would have looked at home in sack cloth and ashes although I doubt he could have pried himself out of his Gucci loafers.

          “There’s my boy,” he said, a little quieter, trying to suffuse his tone with humility.

          “What’s the matter,” I asked, “did you run out of toilet paper.”

          He clutched his hands to his chest like I had wounded him grievously. He always liked a lot of histrionics. You couldn’t call him a drama queen. He was a great shaggy hulk of a man, craggy and gruff. He was a drama bear.

          “You know I never said such a thing,” he said.

          “I’m sure that you did,” I said. “It sounds just like you. Don’t stand there and expect me to believe that Mike made the whole thing up.”

          “Well I never meant it. We’ve been friends for a long time now. I love you like a brother. You love me too. I know you do.”

          “You are not my friend. You never have been. You’re too full up with self interest and greed to love anyone. All you’ve got to offer is a lot of abuse and broken promises. The only reason you ever got close to anyone was to take advantage or them or cheat them out of something.”

          “That’s not fair,” Henry was really laying on the aggrieved act now. “Name one time.”

          “For starters how about that $30,000 real estate commission you stiffed my wife for?” I said. I knew I had him there.
          “You can’t still be mad about that! That was 6 months ago. It’s high time you let that go. It didn’t mean nothing personal. I still love you, and Mazie too. It was just bidness.”

          That was his favorite excuse for some particularly sleazy bit of chicanery. He’d used it several times with me when I was trying to get him to be more honest than his nature generally allowed. “It’s just bidness” meant there’s money involved so any lack of propriety is completely excusable. When he said it this time, I decided he needed a real dressing down. I took a couple of strides and got right up in his face. He’s a lot bigger than me. I mean a lot. He’s a good 8 inches taller and 125 pounds heavier than I am. I was shouting right up his nose.

I started recounting every slight, every petty cheat, conniving trick, scam, broken promise, bald faced lie, and betrayal he ever committed. Not really every one, just the ones I knew about, but even those were legion. I never stopped for air. I never gave him a space to jump in and defend himself. I doubt if I have ever been as formidable. He had nowhere to go, and he needed to go somewhere desperately. He needed at least to sit down. The onslaught was too much for his heart in its weakened condition. Just standing there listening to me recount his failings as a human being was undoing him in a major way. His stitched up aorta was failing under the pressure. He went grey and pallid. He began to weave on his feet. His eyes were glassy. Beads of sweat popped out on his forehead and alongside his bulbous and vein tracked nose. He was about to go down.

          I thought to myself at that point that if I kept at him he was going to die, that if I didn’t let up and he had to stand there until he fell over that I would be responsible for his death. I knew in that instant that I could kill him just by yelling. I liked the feeling that gave me. It was very empowering. I’d never felt quite like that in my entire life. I’d been taking abuse, swallowing injustice, putting up with crap my whole career, and now I could make up for a lot of it—not all of it, but a lot—in a few minutes of lethal venting. I really wanted to.

In the end I couldn’t keep after him. I’m an accountant, not an assassin. I couldn’t have blood on my hands, no matter how much the bastard might deserve to die. I’ve never been in sales where absolutes are only momentary and ethical considerations are only considered in relativistic ways. Accountants are supposed to live at the moral center of the business world. We are the conscience, the soul, a force for truth and justice in the world of business. That’s why I got into accounting in the first place. God knows I hated math and numbers my whole life. I became an accountant because accountants tell the truth. It’s their job—except of course for the ones who lie, but that’s a whole other story.
           So I let Henry live. His health improved over time, and he returned to a semblance of his former self. That he went on to screw people, me included, in myriads of creative ways, that his return to 'bidness as usual' was more complete than his return to physical health...well that was just my own damn fault. 

Day 28 - Roll Me Over...

          This morning I felt like hell. The pain was back. I had a fever. I stayed in bed and popped pills all day. I didn’t even get up to watch Kelly Ripa. I just didn’t have the energy to tolerate a lot of morning venue nonsense for a dose of Kelly's high spirits. It seems life is always giving you trade offs. Sometimes they’re just not worth it.

          In my fitful, drug induced sleep I had one bad dream after another. I never have bad dreams. I have weird dreams sometimes, but never bad ones. I don’t pretend to know the purpose of dreams. Maybe they’re just another one of life’s little trade offs—stuff you deal with in your sleep to balance out stuff you didn’t deal with when you were awake. Like I say, I don’t know. All I know is that, now that I don’t have to go to work any more, I dreamt about being at work. I dreamt about the job I just left, the job before that, and the job before that, all the way back to when I used to work for my dad. All the disagreeable crap that ever happened to me at work came flooding back in serial form like bad daytime TV—only there was no scantily clad window dressing and no Kelly Ripa.

This truck is the approximate age and size of the truck that I wrecked. You'll have to imagine it with an open top covered by a red tarp, oxidized paint, bald tires, cracked windshield, wired down hood, and a lot of rust and dirt. Put that all together in your mind, and you'll get the idea.

          One such dream was a graphic replay of a real event. It had to do with driving a 1952 Ford straight body bulk feed truck, something that I did for my dad in 1965 when I was 17 years old. I drove it because nobody else who worked for Dad would get in it. It wasn’t safe. The windshield was cracked. The hood was held down by a piece of baling wire wrapped around the radiator grill. The two front tires were worn down to the cord. The whole rig was so poorly balanced that with a full load the driver had to exercise extraordinary caution when easing out the clutch in first gear to avoid lifting the front wheels off the ground. Dad paid me $4.00 an hour to drive this truck around three counties delivering feed to ten flocks of ranged turkeys. Why Mom let him do this is a mystery to me to this day. I can only guess that she had no idea how dangerous it was.

          Dad was a country veterinarian with an entrepreneurial heart. He longed to build a thriving business, to become a captain of industry, and eventually to pass on a financial empire to his sons. He started with a fertilizer business—a pole shed with a mixing tank and some applicator equipment to side dress corn. Then he added another facility down the road and next to a railroad siding to mix and bag dry fertilizer. He hired managers to run the plant while he continued his veterinary practice.

While he was still trying to get traction in the fertilizer business he decided to branch out into poultry. I guess he figured if anyone understood animal husbandry it should be a vet. He bought a grain elevator in another town to store and mix feed grains for turkeys. He bought about 100,000 hatchlings and paid to have them raised to pullets in brooder houses and then transferred to contract ranges to mature to packing age and weight. My brother and I ranged 10,000 birds in two flocks on 40 rented acres, and I drove the truck to feed all the birds. By any stretch in our little town it was a big operation. He certainly had a lot of money tied up in it, and he lost it all in pretty short order. I helped. I wrecked the truck.

I don’t think in all fairness you could call it my fault. Dad did, but then he had a lot at stake so I understand his frustration and his need to find someone to blame. The truck wandered all over the road. There was the balance problem I already mentioned, and the treadless tires didn’t help matters any. The tie rods were loose, the steering gear nearly shot, the suspension was overtaxed, under-designed, and older than dirt. If we had lived in a populous area I would have been involved in a serious accident the first day I drove off the lot in that death-trap. As it was it only took 6 weeks.

I was driving down a one lane country road with a full load on my way to feeding our remotest flock. It was early August and the air was laden with ragweed pollen and other caustic allergens that had my nose running and my eyes watering. I was popping over the counter allergy medication like candy oblivious to the warnings (if indeed there were any warnings in 1965) not to operate heavy machinery as ‘use of this product may cause drowsiness’. It didn’t have any effect on the allergies, so why should I think it might put me to sleep?

The truck drifted to the right and the right front wheel got onto the dirt berm that bordered the drainage ditch. The berm broke under the weight of the truck, and the wheel dug sideways into the ditch. I jerked the steering wheel to the left to keep the truck from plowing headlong across the ditch. The wheel popped up onto the roadway and bit into the pavement, finding just enough traction to fling the truck into a broadslide. I jerked the steering wheel back to the right, overcorrecting the skid into another broadslide in the opposite direction. The truck slewed back and forth like a big, lumbering boat and finally settled into an irretrievable slide into the left side ditch where the wheels dug in and flipped the truck over one complete revolution. The truck came to a rest right-side-up about ten yards into a wheat field.

I took an inventory. My glasses were missing. There were wires down across the roof and hood, but because I didn’t have my glasses I couldn’t tell if they were power lines or phone lines. I kicked the door open hoping to avoid being electrocuted, climbed out of the truck, and made my dazed way back to the road. I looked to my right and saw a farmhouse near enough to walk to and hopefully use a phone. I looked to the left and there was a car coming. In six weeks of driving this road I had never seen another vehicle on it. Even more amazing, the car was the county sheriff’s cruiser. More amazing still, the county sheriff drove right by me as if I weren’t standing there in front of a wrecked truck and downed power lines. I wondered if he couldn’t see me because I was dead. I waved my arms at his back window. He stopped and backed the cruiser up to where I was standing on the road. Okay then. I decided that I probably wasn’t dead.

He rolled his window down. “What’s the problem, son?” he asked.

“I think I just rolled that truck over,” I said.

We both looked over at the truck. Dust was still rolling across the field from the mishap. Six tons of turkey feed lay in a neat pile atop a red tarp in the middle of the ditch. The truck looked pretty much just as it had when I first climbed into it that morning. The only sign of something amiss was the downed lines.

“God A’mighty, son,” the sheriff said. “I seen the truck and a cloud a dust. I thought you was combinin’ wheat.”

The sheriff took a report. We determined that the downed lines belonged to the telephone company so I climbed back into the truck and retrieved my glasses. The sheriff radioed his office, and his office called Dad’s manager at the grain elevator. About 20 minutes later the manager showed up with a crew and a trailer and they started shoveling the feed off the tarp. I watched. No one had much to say. The sheriff left, and someone gave me a ride home.

I had a skinned knuckle and a stiff neck. I occurred to me for the second time in my life—the first being after I had got myself crossways with an electric arc welder—that I was lucky to be alive. I took a shower, changed clothes, and sank into an easy chair in our living room with a book. I didn’t read the book. I just stared into space. I don’t remember what I thought. I think maybe I thought that I should occupy my mind with weighty issues of life and death, good and evil, judgment and redemption. Nothing like that came to mind—at least not in such a way that I can remember it 42 years later. I was still in the chair when Dad came home.    

          “What happened?” he asked.

          “The berm broke,” I said. “I rolled the truck over in a wheat field.”

          “That’s going to cost me a thousand dollars,” he said, and walked off.

          That was my first indication that the lives of managers are different from the lives of workers, and that no matter what other connections may exist the two are rarely if ever truly in sync.

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.