KNIFE FIGHT!

Last night I dreamed that I killed a guy in a knife fight. I didn't just dream that I had done this in some nebulous past. I dreamed the actual fight in all its gory detail. What I didn't dream is why we were fighting in the first place. That is, I don't know why the guy I killed was fighting me. I was fighting him for my life.

You need to know that I never dream stuff like this. I don't as a rule have scary dreams, or violent ones, and if ever I dream something that seems like it's going to tip the scale in that direction, I wake up before anything serious happens. Not last night.

My opponent was relentless. He cut me several times. I cut him back. Neither of us was doing a lot of damage, but the intent was obvious. At some point my mind-set changed from merely trying to stay alive to a joyful determination to end the guy's life. I quit looking for opportunities to escape and started looking for openings in his defenses.

We were both dancing around. Our moves were punctuated by stabbing thrusts and whirling slashes. Blood was evident, but not quite flowing. I had cuts on my arms and shoulders, and one on my right side. I tried to slice his neck open, but missed. He tried the same move on me.

By this time in the fight, I knew how he moved. I took a chance. I was not afraid...either to fail or succeed. I grabbed his right wrist with my left hand as his blade flashed forward and stepped inside his swing. I got right up in his face where I could smell his spittle and his determination. I shoved my knife up under his rib cage and into his heart. He went down like a sack of potatoes.

That was the end of the dream. Short on philosophy and long on action...pretty much the exact opposite of me.

The most disturbing thing about it was that it wasn't very disturbing. I wasn't shocked or unnerved by my capacity for violence, nor did I have any remorse over the dead guy. I really had no feelings whatsoever beyond the understandable relief that it had been him rather than me and that things had turned out much better than I could have imagined beforehand.

I think it may have been the first dramatic dream I ever had from which I couldn't draw a lesson. If you know me, you know I like a good lesson. With no known motive for the dead guy's attack and no obvious reason for my response other that self preservation, there's not much about anything to be gleaned from this dream. A guy wanted to kill me. I don't know why. I killed him instead, drawing on resources I didn't know I had. End of story.

The only thing that makes this dream make sense to me is if the dead guy, the guy who was trying to kill me for no apparent reason, was cancer. Now that sumbitch I could stab without compunction.  

...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 97 - Cutting Edge Negotiation

          If my wife and I are going to move in with our son, we’re going to have to downsize—a lot. We’ve got a 4 bedroom house filled to the rafters with stuff. This includes the attic and the garage where we haven’t been able to park a car for as long as I can remember. There is stuff in the garage, still packed in boxes that haven’t been unpacked since we moved from Arkansas to Alabama 9 years ago. The task is daunting. The garage sale will be the stuff of which legends are made. It’s already too late to start planning it. We are going to have to pray for and get a miracle. A job would be good too.

*****

I had an interesting exchange during the strategic sourcing negotiations with one particular vendor. It was a hose and fitting company owned by two brothers. They made all kinds of hoses for a variety of applications—hydraulic lines, fuel lines, water lines, vacuum lines, and all the associated fittings.

They had bought a building close to our plant specifically to service the Albatross account. They went beyond normal bounds to provide us what I considered to be stellar service. If we needed something in a hurry, they would fabricate it on the spot and drive it over to us in a matter of a few minutes. They made Albatross proprietary parts to our specifications as well as providing aftermarket and replacement assemblies made by other hose and fitting manufacturers. Their price structure was very competitive. They were committed to doing whatever they had to do to keep our business.

Negotiating with this company was a trip. The two brothers came along with the fellow who managed their local facility and dealt with Albatross on a daily basis. The manager wore a suit and kept a business-like and professional demeanor. The brothers wore jeans and knit shirts and cowboy boots. They were personable and relatively well focused, but they were anything but professional.

They were a couple of hard-scrabble country boys who were having a good time with their modest success. They weren’t trying to grow their company or groom it for a public offering or a sale or merger. They wanted to keep our business, but their primary concern it that regard was that they wanted to be able to buy bigger fishing boats and spend more time on the water.

What I’m suggesting is that their goals were modest and very concrete. They didn’t translate what they wanted into percentage increases in annual volume or improvements in margins or better overhead absorption. They wanted fishing boats and pick-up trucks.

They knew what they wanted and they knew what they needed to get from us and what they could afford to give up in order to get there. To my thinking this made them a lot easier to deal with than some of our other vendors who had grander schemes and better calibrated yardsticks, but no clear picture of what they hoped to gain.

The brothers were neither ignorant nor naive, although that is precisely what most of my colleagues thought. The younger brother actually pulled a knife on our materials manager during a break in the negotiations. It was meant to be a joke, although it wasn’t received very well, and no one thought it particularly funny. Other than a deranged low-life (or Bill, the last division president to fire me, or a fat chef), who brings a knife to a business negotiation? That was the consensus in our group anyway. It didn’t bother me that much, but then he hadn’t pulled the knife on me, and, in any event, I had already been desensitized to knife lore and cutlery flashing in my past working life.

In a couple of days the event, stripped of its context and amplified in its implied threat, had become company legend. Ringcomme and Boome in particular liked to hold the knife pulling incident up as a prime example of why we had to reshuffle our vendors and start doing business with professional business people rather than crackers and rodeo clowns. 

As it turned out though, in spite of their lamentable social graces, the brothers were excellent vendors. When we started talking numbers, they showed themselves to be astute and to have a large amount of quantitative data committed to memory. They were emphatic without being hardnosed. They were more than willing to horse trade, but they knew exactly how far they could go and when we got them there they dug in with all four heels.

I thought we did very well by them, and they were so far ahead of their competition across the board that they became our vendor of choice for all our hose and fitting needs in spite of the ‘knife pulling’ incident. They were so far ahead in the rankings that not even Ringcomme could undo our recommendation. And boy, he really wanted to.