Day 132 - Betty Boop and the Witch Queen

          Getting ready to abandon much of what I’ve worked for seems like despair. It’s only common sense, but it seems like despair. Reconcile that with your standard issue positive thinking clap-trap, and tell me what you come up with. I know. I’m not believing enough in myself and my potential. I’m not seeing the opportunities all around me. I’m fearful of bad results. I dwell on the negative, so I attract the negative. I read The Secret. I know the drill. The secret to The Secret is that you can get rich selling The Secret, or something like it, to pathetic losers like me—at least so long as they haven’t reached the point where despair seems like common sense. After that it’s too late.

* * * * *

          When Quentin moved me from the boat plant to the main plant and promised to consider me for a promotion, I hired a temp to take over the daily bookkeeping duties for the boat division. I called the temp agency we usually used, and they sent me a young woman who had a degree in accounting, but had been working as a waitress. She was anxious to get something that would utilize her education and training. She was a tall, gangly thing with wild hair and scary eyes. Her clothes were loud and vaguely inappropriate, but she talked a good game so I gave her a shot. Hiring her turned out to be one of those decisions that kept reaffirming my good judgment long after its initial utility had faded.

          We’ll call her Betty because Betty Boop was the nick-name she gave herself, and one that suited her well. She looked like Betty Boop would look if Betty Boop, the cartoon, had been tall with really big hair, or if Betty, not the cartoon, had been short with really short hair. Either way they could’ve passed for one another, and done it happily.

Betty was more than just a good accountant. She excelled at every task I gave her. She exceeded my expectations every day. When she finished her assignments, she came looking for more things to do. If I didn’t have anything else for her to work on, she would roam the halls looking for things to do for other people. She was fantastic.

          When I had first seen her, I was afraid that she wouldn’t really fit in our cliquish little enclave of South Alabama clerks. She wasn’t from the South herself. Her dress and mannerisms were foreign and exotic compared to the rest of the women in the office. The women I worked with wore slacks or quiet dresses and sensible heels. They came into the office on Monday mornings carrying pies and baked goods to share. They talked about their families. They got excited about fishing, camping, ‘Bama football, and the week-end’s events on the NASCAR circuit. They were unlike any other group of women I had ever worked with, but they were as like one another as peas in a pod. Betty—single, flashy, flirty, stiletto-heeled, and hip—stuck out like, well, Betty Boop in a crowd of matrons.

          Amazingly, everyone took to Betty right away. They all loved her like she had been born among them and raised up with them. She couldn’t have got on better with that group if she had been a barefoot, backwoods, gator-snatchin’ swamp cracker. They all came to me at one time or another to tell me how much they liked Betty and how much they enjoyed working with her. Betty somehow came into a great working environment where nearly everyone got along really well, and made it even better. I couldn’t have been happier.

          I determined to make Betty a permanent employee. The temp agency was getting a goodly percentage of the hourly amount we were paying for her services. She was still working the waitress job nights to make ends meet. She wasn’t getting any benefits to speak of. I was going to need someone in the slot where I had her if I got promoted, and I knew I could find something useful for her to do even if I didn’t. If I didn’t make her permanent, she would take the first opportunity that came along. I didn’t want to risk losing her.

I went to Quentin to clear my preference with him. He was agreeable. We even discussed what salary to offer her, and he agreed to that too. I went to Betty and made her an offer. She was ecstatic. I went to HR and initiated the paperwork. Among other things I needed Quentin to sign a personnel requisition, a slam dunk as he had already agreed to everything I’d asked.

That’s what I remembered anyway. It had only been two days. Quentin’s memory suddenly wasn’t so good. He couldn’t remember what he’d agreed to just two days before. He looked at me like I was out of my mind when I put the requisition on his desk for him to sign.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“I’m making Betty permanent,” I said. “We talked about it two days ago. You said it was okay.”

“Why are we doing this?”

“It’s on the req. We already talked about it. You agreed.”

“That doesn’t sound right.”

“I already made her an offer.”

“That’s not my problem. You should have gotten an authorization first.”

“I did,” I protested.

“Then how come this isn’t signed? This is your authorization. Clearly you don’t have it signed.”

I was stunned. There was nothing I could do at that point, short of calling him a liar, that was going to give me any satisfaction. I don’t know what happened in Quentin’s brain between the time he said okay and the time he decided I was trying to put one over on him. He never actually acknowledged our previous conversation on the matter, so I’ll never know if some synapse misfired and wiped the exchange out of his memory or if he was just denying me an honest process because something he didn’t want to own up to had changed his mind. I did speculate on this some.

It occurred to me that perhaps Marjorie wasn’t as happy with Betty as the rest of the women in the office. Marjorie might have felt a little threatened. She was prettier than Betty, and dressed a lot better, but Betty had enough presence and personality for three Marjories. Betty was a force, and it would have been natural for Marjorie to feel diminished by her proximity. Marjorie could easily have persuaded Quentin that his best interests lie in maintaining her status as queen of the realm and fairest of them all.

Another possibility was that Rod had objected when Quentin told him what I had proposed. Rod would have objected to anything that wasn’t his idea, no matter how good an idea it may have been. He would have been okay, of course, if it had been Quentin’s idea, but it wasn’t. It was mine. I wasn’t authorized good ideas in Rod’s world. Having a good idea for me would have been overstepping my bounds. Rod would have found a way to put the kibosh on any ideas that I got past Quentin. This wouldn’t have been as easy for him as squashing them before Quentin heard them, but still within Rod’s range. His insistence that everything headed to Quentin’s office be funneled through him was just Rod’s way of making his life easier. He wouldn’t have to talk Quentin out of a good idea if he killed it before it ever got into Quentin’s head. Either that or Rod could make it his own and bank the credit. I know I’m only speculating here, but, honest to God, I love office politics.

I gave Betty the bad news right away. I didn’t want her doing something celebratory like buying a new outfit or something only to find out too late that her fortunes had improved not at all. I hated telling her. I hated dashing her dreams. She had been so excited when I made her the offer, as had all the other women in the office when they heard about it. I knew I was going to have to be the goat. If I made it Quentin’s fault, there would eventually be hell to pay. Betty was disappointed, but she took it like a trooper…until the next day that is, when she gave me four days notice.

  

Day 126 - Dangerous Flora

          My wife is sorting out what to sell, store, or take with us, and organizing the impending garage sale. It's a huge undertaking. We are moving out of a four bedroom house with a pool into one tiny bedroom in her dad's tiny house. The logistics are daunting. Fortunately my wife is good at stuff like that. I’m not. My natural inclination is to pile it all up in the back yard and set fire to it. Unfortunately you don’t get any money for bonfires.

          We’ve schedule the sale for the third week-end of the month. We’ll be moving on the last week-end. The 31^st is a Saturday. The new tenants will be moving in on the 1^st of February. Arranging for the trucks and the moving help is my job. I’m probably not any better at that than I am at organizing a garage sale, but at least there’s nothing that I can reasonably set on fire.

          In order to complicate matters as much as humanly possible, we will be renting a storage unit near our son’s place on the other side of the state. Rentals over there are about half what they run here on the East Coast. Hopefully the dollar savings will more than offset the added inconvenience of having our stuff three hours away from where we live. I guess it all depends on how well we choose what to store and what to keep with us. I’m already beginning to dread the hours I will be spending bouncing back and forth across Florida in a rented truck. My back is killing me.

* * * * *

Marjorie Tinn’s attachment to Quentin Parks became problematic for me in dramatic ways in fairly short order. She was like a bromeliad in the swamp, nestled in saw grass and scrub palmetto, surrounded by mangrove, bald cypress, slash pine, gators and snakes . She was pretty to look at but more trouble than she was worth. You just couldn’t get close enough to reason with her, and if by chance you ever did, you'd find her as bristly and dangerous as the stuff that seemed to protect her.

Probably my most telling run-in with Marjorie had to do with rearranging the offices. This was a task mandated by my new nemesis, Rod Chandler. Rod decided that we needed to move cubicles and people around and shuffle some offices in order to optimize work flow in the department. I suppose this was a laudable goal, but given our by now dire cash position, we weren’t allowed to spend any money to reach it.

My feeling was that we had plenty of other, more pressing things we ought to be doing. We were out of cash. Our vendors were on the phone sunup to sunset every day screaming for the money we owed them. Our production lines were constantly running out of parts that our vendors wouldn’t ship because we hadn’t paid them. Optimizing workflow in accounting was precisely like the proverbial rearranging of deck chairs on a sinking ship. Still, I had my orders, and Rod was not the type of manager who would brook a challenge to his authority. I had tried logic on him before. The interjection of logic looked like insubordination to Rod.

Eddie Sharpe and I set to redrawing the cubicle farm in the center of two large rooms that were ringed with private offices. There was no easy way to do it. It took several days of back and forth until we had what we thought was a workable plan. Any improvement we might achieve over the current state of affairs would be marginal at best.

The real difficulty would be not to piss anybody off. Since we would be asking several people to move all their years of accumulated stuff anywhere from 5 to 15 feet into a smaller cubicle to achieve an “optimum work flow” that would represent hardly any improvement, we were at a pretty considerable risk in that regard. Naturally that’s just how it worked out. Everyone who had to move was pissed, and not just a little bit either.

I knew this would happen. I took some pains to prevent it. We had several meetings with all concerned parties where I explained at length what we were trying to do and why. I asked for input. We shared the drawings. We got a crew from maintenance to do the heavy lifting. We gave everyone plenty of time to adjust. I apologized to everyone in advance. Maybe that was my problem. Apologizing made it look like I wasn't really committed to the project, made me look weak and susceptible to whining and chafing.

When the day to move came, Quentin, who may not even have known what Rod was having us do, was at a meeting of the board of directors. The maintenance guys were dismantling cubicles and re-running electrical service. Eddie was coming to my office with constant progress updates. Rod was holed up in his office seemingly oblivious to the project he had ordered. We made it to almost 10:00 a.m. when Marjorie came to my office to tell me that Quentin had finally put an end to our foolishness.

“What foolishness is that?” I wanted to know.

“Moving all these girls around for no good reason,” she said. “You’ve got the whole department upset. I finally had to call Quentin to get him to put a stop to it.”

“Quentin is the one who wanted us to do this!” I protested. I had Rod’s word on this. I would have been skeptical, but I had actually discussed some aspects of the changes with Quentin. He certainly knew what we were up to.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Marjorie said. “Quentin would never authorize this kind of chaos. This is you and Eddie trying to make everyone miserable.”

Apparently Quentin could not stand up to Marjorie’s disapproval. When she called him to dip me in the grease, he pretended not to know anything about it. He was either afraid of her, trapped in the web of her defter enchantments, or both. It wasn’t the first time the bastard let me go down a path with his explicit blessing only to pull the rug out from under me at the worst possible time and place, but it was the first time where my undoing at his hands had been orchestrated by Marjorie. The realization of how thoroughly I had been skewered left my stomach churning for weeks.

           Rod took the afternoon off, and escaped any connection to the events of the day. He may have been as deft as Marjorie at feigning innocence while screwing the hapless. What he had ordered me to do and pestered me to do sooner rather than later, was suddenly my mistake to answer for…and mine alone. That happenstance would have set a lot better with me if I had ever thought what we were doing was a good idea. I don't like fading the heat for my own mistakes, but at least it's fair. Being made the scapegoat for someone else's folly sucks...a lot. 

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.