Day 147 - Bringing Grace and Serenity to the Oppressed

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day 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 131 - Rolling Papers

          I went to the Vet to pick up Bud’s ashes today. I suggested to my wife that we should spread them over the water at Lake Eola in downtown Orlando because Bud always enjoyed our outings there. Bud was a people person’s dog. He loved to engage strangers. He loved nothing so much as leaning against someone’s hip while they scratched him behind his ears. You would swear he was purring like a cat.

There was always plenty of opportunity to indulge him in this at Lake Eola on a Sunday afternoon. Hundreds of people came out to the park to walk or run the trail around the lake, to toss Frisbees and all manner of balls, to turn their kids loose in the playground, visit vendors set up along the walkways selling arts and crafts and food, and walk their dogs. Bud was in his element.

Having two greyhounds, Bud and Sandy, was a great conversation starter. I was always amazed how many people came up to us to ask about the dogs and to touch them. Everyone is curious about greyhounds. For one thing, you don’t see very many of them in the flesh. For another, the dogs’ calm demeanor and natural sociability is so contrary to the image people have of them as hyper and aggressive. In most pictures one sees of greyhounds, they are flying around race tracks in silks and muzzles. The reality is that they sleep 16 to 18 hours a day, and about half the time they are awake they are looking for another place to take a nap.

My wife wants to keep Bud’s ashes next to Ani’s. Alive they were similar looking dogs, both big fawn colored hounds with white feet. Now they reside in identical enameled tins. They even smell the same. I guess I thought there ought to be some residual evidence of Bud’s foul breath wafting from his cremains, but such is not the case. I’m considering sticking a clove of garlic down amongst his ashes, and letting it bloom into the full flower of Bud’s fetid essence. It would be a fitting tribute, if a trifle disturbing.

* * * * *

When I realized that I was going to have to live with Rod as my boss, I started looking for ways to mitigate the more troubling aspects of his supervision. I decided I needed to manage him in much the same way I had tried to manage Henry. In many ways Henry was much smarter than Rod, but he was also less subtle and entirely more predictable. Rod was not exactly an enigma, but he was not easily distracted and he had few of Henry’s obvious vices. Rod played his cards close to the chest, and he did not reveal his tells. I decided I needed to amp up my own deviousness.

For this I turned to something I found on the Internet called Neuro-Linguistic Programming, or NLP. Neuro-linguistic programming was developed back in the early seventies by a couple of guys who thought they could exploit the links between language and habitual thought patterns to help people modify their behavior and lead more satisfying, productive lives. They promoted NLP as a kind of breakthrough in psychotherapy. The process has an appealing logic to it, but it is not based on much credible science nor did its developers have real credentials beyond linguistics. For these reasons NLP has had only limited acceptance In legitimate psychological circles, and is viewed by some with outright disdain.

In the fields of self-help, life-coaching, hypnotherapy, and business management however, NLP has been embraced with considerable enthusiasm. This is especially true in the fringe domains of get-rich-quick schemes and other largely predatory programmed paths to purported success and happiness. I found it, for instance, by Googling the phrase “mind control techniques.”

After an afternoon following links and scanning a hodgepodge of claims, I had seen everything from ways to rid one’s mind of psychological blocks to the accumulation of wealth to techniques for turning otherwise resistant women into willing sex slaves. Many of these claims are made for neuro-linguistic programming. It is seen by many as a way to overcome ingrained counter-productive attitudes and behaviors within one’s own psychological make-up, and in fact it may have some legitimacy in this regard. It is seen by others as the key to changing attitudes and behaviors in others in order to get them to do things they would not do on their own—things generally calculated to enrich the practitioner in various ways, most of them less than altruistic, many of them self-serving, some of them nefarious. In other words NLP seems to me to be a tool for psychological manipulation that is touted by con-men, bullshit artists, and perverts.

My goal was the opposite of this. My goal was to prevent getting screwed by yet another over-reaching, self-serving rat bastard bent on furthering his own aspirations at the expense of mine. In this light, purchasing an NLP training regimen from one of the many enlightened purveyors on the internet seemed counterintuitive. I would be trying to gain an advantage over Rod by giving up the advantage, along with some hard-earned cash, to a WWW dot self-serving rat bastard. I decided to learn as much as I could for free, and begin a series of experiments on Rod to see if I could at least get him to relent in some of his more troublesome demands.

I settled on a fairly simple technique called mirroring. Mirroring consists of parroting back phrases and mimicking gestures of a person you are conversing with. It is supposed to build rapport, to convince the person you are mirroring that you are in sync with them, that you are of a like mind and disposition, and that they should trust you and believe what you say.

My feeling was that Rod somehow saw me as a threat because we had in effect competed for the position he ended up getting. As long as he felt threatened by me, however misplaced his feelings in that regard might be, I was never going to make any headway in my own career. Mirroring seemed a fairly innocuous way to accomplish a level of trust that would at least make it possible for me to do my job with a minimum of hassle from Rod.

I wish I could say that this worked for me, but it did not. It may have worked in time, but I lost my nerve somewhere in the middle of the attempt. It was going swimmingly at first. Rod had called me to his office to discuss some reports he wanted done to help Quentin make a reasonable case to a bunch of consultants who were supposed to be shepherding us through the latest reorganization. This involved rolling up separate revised forecasts from each division. Rod wanted to make sure that everything came through him so he could review it all and validate the assumptions. That’s what he said at any rate, but I understood this would also give him the opportunity to imprint everything with his own particular style so he could garner more credit than he deserved. I was sure that the final version presented to Quentin would be painted with the rose, mauve, and lavender hues that Rod favored so much in his own reports.

While Rod was going on at great length about how he wanted me to proceed, I began to cautiously mimic his gestures and mannerisms. I assumed his posture in my chair. I positioned my hands on my lap just as Rod had done his on his desk. From that point on, every move he made I duplicated a fraction of a second later. Rod had a peculiar way of blinking his eyes when he was trying to make a point. He would squeeze his eyelids together as if he were trying to press the moisture out from between them. It was an unnatural expression that he repeated so often that I had begun to think of it as a facial tick. I mimicked that too, to the point where I began to feel foolish. The whole experience felt forced and unnatural to me, as if I were trying to become someone else. I guess our own mannerisms and expressions are so natural to us that when we try to adopt someone else’s we feel that we are shedding our own skin to put on one that doesn’t fit or suit us very well.

When Rod began to smile, literally beaming at me, I decided that he was onto me. It could easily have been that the mirroring process was working, and that Rod was developing a genuine liking for me because I was finally exhibiting the good sense to become just like him. Instead, I decided that he knew all about neuro-linguistic programming and mirroring and that he had just then realized that I was trying to manipulate him. I abandoned the experiment in a panic, and never tried it again.

Unnerved by my fears, I picked up a report that I had brought with me to the meeting and began rolling it into a tube. This is my own nervous habit, and one which someone trying to mirror me would surely adopt. Rod did not. He wasn’t trying to mirror me back at least.

“Please don’t do that,” he said.

“What?” At first I didn’t know what he was talking about.

“Don’t roll up those papers like that,” he said. “I hate that.”

“Why?”

“They’ll never lay flat again. I just don’t like it. Please don’t do it again.”

“But they’re mine,” I said. “I brought them. I’m taking them back to my office when we’re finished. What difference could it possibly make to you if they don’t lay exactly flat?”

Rod leaned forward, squeezed his eyes closed and opened them again to reveal a prodigious double skunk-eye. “It makes a difference to me,” he said, “and I don’t want you to do it anymore.”


claim token: NXTAHUJPZWTE

Day 127 - The Big House

          Sorting, packing, labeling, taping—this will be the drudgery of our days till the end of the month. Today was punctuated by a trip across town, way across town, to pick up a van-load of boxes in the parking lot of an apartment complex. My wife found them on Craig’s List. The lady selling them was an emaciated little Asian of undetermined age. She could have been 20. She could have been 50. I couldn’t tell. She had the boxes piled into the back of one of those dual wheeled, king-cab pick-up trucks. It was as incongruous a sight as I have seen in a long time—that teeninesy woman next to that gargantuan truck. The boxes appeared to have come from an import store of some sort. There are hundreds of them over in that area of town, selling bric-a-brac and souvenirs to the tourists flocking to Disney.

          I had some time on the drive over and back to reflect on just how far down I’ve been brought in the space of a few short months. I’ve been striving all my life it seems for more, bigger, and better circumstances. I didn’t think I’d got very far, but where I got is a considerable luxury compared to where I’ll be at the end of the month. Even after I get there, even after I’m settled in to the confines of the small bedroom in Nelson’s house, I’ll have to continue shedding the accumulated accoutrements of my former life. The big house, the locus of my dreams, the focus of my strivings, the place where I hoped one day to hold court and entertain my admirers, is a fading memory of vain expectations.

* * * * *

          Rod continued to circumvent my aspirations. I took a run at Quentin to get out from under Rod’s supervision at one point. It didn’t work. It was early on, just after Quentin rewarded me for all my hard work by giving the job I wanted to Rod. Rod then came to me and promoted me, officially, to the operations controller position that reported directly to him.

He offered me a token raise, one that, adjusted for inflation, was actually less money than I had originally taken to come to work at Albatross. I told him I was disappointed, that I thought it should be more. He offered nothing in return, not even consolation. “It is what it is,” he said. I’ve heard that phrase thousands of times in my career. Whatever 'it is' turns out to be, I've never known it to be anything good.

All the new guys who’d been brought in to run the various divisions I was now responsible for had made more money than the company was now offering me. They were all gone, all except Rod. I was now doing their jobs, and Rod was now doing something else for another quantum increase over my pittance. Almost everyone left reported to me. I reported to Rod. I was Rod’s only direct report. Once again Rod had found a situation where someone else did all the work, and Rod got all the credit. He had plenty of time left over every day, after sending me off on meaningless missions, to manage his career to his best advantage. It did not escape me that, under the circumstances, one or the other of us was superfluous. If anyone ever had to decide between us, I knew who would be leaving.

          I went to Quentin. I thought if I complained just right, making my case plain and making it clear that I didn’t want to work for Rod, that I might at least get him to make me one of his direct reports. He didn’t go for it. He didn’t even want to give me any of his time. I went as cautiously as possible.

          “I guess Rod told you I’m not that happy,” I said. I was standing in front of his gigantic new desk. Marjorie had ordered it for him. No one else was allowed to spend any money on office furniture.

          “He might have said something about it.” Quentin’s manner was evasive. I knew he didn’t want to get into any crap with me.

          “I thought you ought to know why,” I said. “I’ll not take up a lot of your time. I’ll just say it once, and when I’ve had my say, you’ll never hear from me again on the subject.”

          He looked resigned. He gave me what looked like polite attention. I plunged in. My plan was to cover the money angle first. It would be easier for him to deal with. He would understand it better. I told him how my responsibilities had increased nearly four-fold since I’d started at Albatross. I told him how through all the comings and goings I had always been there to do what was required without complaint and to the best of my ability. I told him how all the guys that they’d brought in at big salaries to do the work I was now doing were gone, some of them found to be inadequate to the task, some of them unwilling to commit their careers to a failing enterprise. I was left, the best of the lot, and still working for the same money I’d made 5 years before.

          A kind of beatific smile came to rest on Quentin’s lips. I thought that I’d made my point, and he was going to agree to make things right for me. Quentin did no such thing. He remained frozen in his big, over-stuffed executive chair, nestled in its buttery, brown leather, grinning. I realized that he had tuned me out. He wasn’t listening to anything I said. I was spinning my wheels, and he was daydreaming—probably about Marjorie’s latest purchase from Victoria’s Secret. I beat it the hell out of there. If I disturbed his reverie by insisting that he focus on my piddling discontent, I would just piss him off. He wasn’t going to do anything for me. I damn sure wasn’t about to bring up the fact that I didn’t want to report to Rod. I’d just have to figure out how to live with that.

Day 96 - One for All, and All for Naught

          I told our landlady today that we would be moving out by the end of January. This should give her plenty of time to find a new tenant for the house. I hated to do it, but time is growing short. It sure looks to me like nothing good is going to happen anytime soon on the job front or in the economy.

Last year I put on a seafood boil for the neighborhood for New Year’s Eve. It was a great party. Everyone brought their own beverages and desserts and appetizers. I did a huge pot of Low Country Boil that included shrimp, crab, scallops, clams, mussels, lobster, kielbasa, potatoes, corn-on-the-cob, and onions. I put out bowls of drawn butter, cocktail sauce, tartar sauce, and a chipotle rémoulade. We dumped the cooked seafood onto a central table covered with newspapers, and everyone just dug in. It was fabulous.

Everyone had a great time. I want to do it again this year—kind of a last hurrah before I have to pack up my stuff and run to safety. The neighbors have agreed to ante up on a ratable basis so I don’t have to pay for the whole thing like I did last year. I love this place.  

*****

The next big project we launched at Albatross was the strategic sourcing initiative. This was a very big deal. It came under Ringcomme’s supply chain umbrella, but it was actually initiated by the new CFO, another of Jed Boome’s cronies from the crane company days. The CFO, let’s call him Wylie Lovett, was a smooth talking, silver haired, sharp dressed man who exuded class and competence. He made everyone, including me, feel as though we were on the right track. He had grand ideas rooted in good sense that we vetted thoroughly before implementing. Everything seemed so rosy for a time.

We hired a consulting firm to shepherd us through the process. They sent a squad of high energy kids down from Chicago—all bright, focused, and confident. Management picked Albatross employees to be involved in the project. Before we finished more than a hundred of us were involved in one aspect of the project or another.

Central to the project were a handful of commodities teams. There was one for wood and fiberglass, one for hardware and fittings, one for metals and extrusions, one for rubber and plastics, and one for MRO or maintenance and supply items. Each team had eight to twelve members from all different areas within the company.

The teams were to stage a supplier conference, post a list of items they proposed to buy, solicit bids from selected suppliers for the items on their list, visit the suppliers to determine their suitability and capacity to meet our requirements, negotiate with suppliers to achieve the best overall performance in terms of quality, service, and price, and select the best overall vendors. The idea was to save in total costs, to partner with suppliers to provide the best possible products in the most agreeable time-frame to our customers at the lowest possible cost to us.

To achieve these laudable goals we put in a tremendous number of hours beyond what it took to do our usual jobs. We developed lists. We made phone calls. We studied cost structures. We mapped product movement. We developed and published specifications and drawings. We attended classes in communication and negotiating. We wrote, developed, and rehearsed presentations. We did role playing exercises. We went to endless meetings. We beat ourselves half to death for the company because the promise was—the promise that we believed with all our hearts—that we stood to save tens of millions of dollars over the next five years if we did a good job. That was tens of millions of dollars that we absolutely needed to save in order to remain competitive and profitable.

I got tapped to join the MRO team. I didn’t want to do it because, for one thing I didn’t even know what MRO meant at the time. Besides I felt I’d already been assigned more than I could hope to accomplish is a lifetime. Since starting at Albatross as controller of the boat division, I’d also assumed responsibility for all the commercial fixtures products, and then, when the shared services controller was canned and the school business controller left for greener pastures, I got their jobs added to mine as well.

I calculated that if the company paid me the salaries of all the controllers whose duties I had assumed they would have to give me an annual wage of $540 thousand. If they also gave me just a quarter of the salary they were paying Robert Lester, who was still eating up a tremendous amount of my time trying to get an understanding of the boat business, I would have been the highest paid individual in the company—knocking down nearly $630 thousand.

I’m not complaining about the money, but I did have plenty to do without getting immersed in the strategic sourcing project. I tried to get out of it. I went to the CFO and made a pretty good case I thought. Rongcomme made a better one against me. He wanted me on a team, and he had way more clout than I. I started going to the MRO meetings.     

It was a huge commitment of time and effort, but I ended up enjoying it a lot, especially when we got to the negotiation phase. There was something about sitting across the table from teams of supplier executives and hammering out deals that really tripped my trigger. The hours were incredibly long and arduous, but the satisfaction quotient for me was as high as it’s ever been in my working life.

If I could do that all day every day I’d be a happy fellow. I think I’d be pretty successful too. I mean I think I’m good at negotiating, good at overcoming objections, finding common ground, making persuasive arguments, getting to ‘yes’. I’m not a natural. It didn’t come easy to me because I’m naturally shy and reticent. I don’t like meeting and interacting with strangers, and I don’t like having to put on a performance. But with practice I can get really good at something I enjoy, and I enjoyed this…a lot. It would have been even better if, after the project was done and we had new agreements with a new slate of suppliers, it had meant anything at all to any of us.

Like so many other things I’ve been involved in at work over the years, executive management sabotaged the whole deal. In the end no matter what vendor we thought offered the best hope of helping us reach our goals, Ringcomme picked vendors based on prior relationships he had with them. The whole sourcing initiative was just a shell game. We paid the consultants $5 million and change, paid another bucket full of money on travel and staging dog and pony shows, put in an astronomical number of hours doing homework and taking meetings, negotiated our hearts out, and we could have saved all that time, money and effort by just asking Ringcomme who he wanted to do business with.

So we didn’t save any real money. We just spent it. Even the vendors who gave us price concessions did so based on volumes we never achieved. Favorable payment terms that I personally had beaten out of a goodly number of suppliers never materialized because we couldn’t even meet the extended payment schedules. We didn’t have the cash. We’d spent it on consultants and projects.

Day 95 - Variance Schmariance

          We took Bud back to the vet today for another round of x-rays. We were clinging to the hope that what looked like osteosarcoma on his shoulder would actually turn out to be an infection. To this end we had him on some really strong anti-biotics and anti-inflammatory drugs. If our hope turned out to be true the shadow on Bud’s x-rays should have been markedly diminished. It was not. This is as close as we can get to absolute certainty without getting a biopsy. We don’t see the need to put him through the additional pain just to be certain of what is by now obvious to us. Bud has bone cancer, and he is rapidly failing. Still he offers no complaint. He continues to eat well and seems to enjoy his walks as much as ever, although he is noticeably slower.

*****

The new president at Albatross, let’s call him Jed Boome, went about the business of stacking the local executive management posts with his buds and cronies from past companies. Notably, we got a new CFO and a new supply chain manager. Then it was back to business as usual with the new guys in charge. Just because they were new didn’t mean they were any smarter or any more qualified to run the company as they soon proved.

Several new initiatives were started that accomplished, in the final analysis, not much more than stirring the pot. That may have been their sole purpose all along because nothing makes a cook look more like he or she is doing something useful than stirring the pot, but as any cook will tell you the main thing it does is keep things in motion so they don’t stick to the bottom and burn up.

To keep anything from sticking to the bottom and burning we started a huge strategic sourcing project, an outsourcing project, and an option optimization project. These were all touted to streamline operations, save buckets of money, and return us to profitability. Instead they paved the way to our next major reorganization.

The first of these initiatives to get off the ground was the outsourcing project. The new vice president in charge of supply chain management, let’s call him James Ringcomme, decided, probably because he’d read somewhere that this was a good idea, to start having all the parts that we had been fabricating in-house manufactured and delivered to us by outside vendors instead.

No studies were done, no detailed cost analysis undertaken to determine whether or not this made any sense in our particular situation. It was just done. Not only was it done, it was done as quickly as humanly possible, and accompanied by a great deal of yelling and threats when it still didn’t happen fast enough to suit Ringcomme.

Yes, Ringcomme was yet another of those over-energized, take-no-prisoners managers who substitute hysteria and abuse for good sense and reasonable attempts at communicating ideas. Ringcomme burned through a rapid succession of competent lieutenants by such antics as calling them at two o’clock in the morning to give them unreasonable assignments and then taking them to task in front of the rest of the staff the following day for not having accomplished the job he gave them to his satisfaction.

The purpose of outsourcing is to save total costs. You expect to get some uptick in productivity, in this case reduced labor cost by the amount of labor normally input into the fabrication of the parts now being outsourced. This savings would be offset by the increased cost of materials now purchased from the outsource vendors. The labor that would have been applied to the parts fabrication process may then be applied to assembly instead, hopefully earning a better return.

The better return is essential because there is not a direct trade off between the labor saved and the additional materials costs. The additional materials costs, all other things being equal between Albatross and its parts vendor, will now include the profits of the vendor. In other words if Albatross doesn’t earn more efficiently on its re-directed labor, there is no savings and no reason to outsource. This is not rocket science, but it is complicated and difficult to measure. It requires some sophisticated analysis and intelligence to do properly.

Unfortunately, at Albatross and many other places I have been associated with, managers do not do the kind of sophisticated analysis that is required to make these kinds of decisions. What they do instead is skim through popular business literature to get an idea what the current buzzwords are, and then attempt to manage to those buzzwords.

We even had one manager who made it his business to learn what the president was reading at the time so he could pepper his conversation with appropriate buzzwords from the same book. He never actually read the books himself just skimmed the chapter headings to pick out the buzzwords and get some inkling as to what they meant.

In our case the buzzword Ringcomme was most enamored of at the time was outsourcing. Outsourcing had been touted by several large auto makers, and Ringcomme figured what was good for them would be good for us, so outsource we did. Because we did it without sufficient forethought and analysis and because we did it quickly, it failed miserably.

Our total costs did not go down. They went up. We did not post gains in the efficiency of our assembly operations. Instead we had operators standing around waiting for parts that our vendors couldn’t deliver because, among other things, we had done nothing to ensure that our outsource vendors had the capacity to meet our demands. The materials cost of a 45’ boat increased by nearly $20,000 within several months. The labor cost on the assembly side remained virtually the same.

When it became obvious that something was seriously wrong with our new cost structure, Ringcomme began trying to manipulate the accounting numbers to deflect the blame. He had taken a savings number to the board to get them to approve his outsourcing scheme. He came up with this number by getting the vendors to commit to advantageous pricing at a given (aggressively estimated) volume. We never reached those volumes so the vendors were under no obligation to meet the advantageous pricing that Ringcomme had in effect taken to the bank.

When the smoke cleared the new and advantageous prices were established in the system as the standard cost for the associated outsourced items. Whenever we were invoiced for an amount greater than the standard, the situation that usually attained because our volumes were too low to get the standard prices, the system would spin off an unfavorable purchase price variance for the difference.

The purchase price variance account is meant to allow a company to track the performance of its purchasing department. If they can negotiate better prices than the standard they get a favorable variance, and that reflects well on their performance. If they secure prices that are greater than the standard they get an unfavorable variance that reflects poorly on their performance. Since the purchasing department belonged to the supply chain manager, Ringcomme, these unfavorable variances reflected badly on him. His solution to his problem was to direct the purchasing agents to go into the system and increase the standard costs in order to make the unfavorable variances disappear.

Standard prices are usually only changed once a year and under the direction and control of the accounting department. Standards that are fixed over time allow you to get meaningful data out of your variance accounts. Changing the standards changes the total standard product costs and therefore the standard margins. What Ringcomme was doing was shifting the margin erosion caused by the ill-concieved outsourcing project into the standard cost structure at the same time he was claiming that he had saved the company a ton of money.

When we caught him at it, and called him on it he put on an innocent act that was worthy of an academy award. He promised not to do it any more. Not only did he continue to do it, when one of the purchasing managers refused to bump up a standard cost for some critical hull fittings, Ringcomme had him fired for not being a team player. Naturally he had to give him a big severance package to keep us out of a wrongful termination suit, but we did after all have all those substantial outsourcing savings so we could well afford the severance.

Of course it didn’t matter to the company whether the extra costs were in the variance accounts or the standard cost accounts. Either way we had the same additional costs to deal with. You’d think if Ringcomme was serious about doing a good job, serious about making the company more competitive, he would have been attacking those costs with dogged energy. Such was not Ringcomme’s bent however. He was all about smoke and mirrors. All his energy went to making himself look as good as possible. There was none left over for actually doing the right thing.

Day 94 - Crash and Burn

          There are ten days until Christmas, and I am not in the holiday spirit. One of my good friends at Albatross was the IT director. He was (and still is) a smart, sensible, and unassuming fellow full of good humor and grace. He used to wear a different Christmas themed tie to work every day from the Monday after Thanksgiving until the Christmas break. I thought this was a wonderful tradition and worthy of emulation so I started doing it too. I continued to do it at my new job. I won’t be doing it this year, but I do stare wistfully at those ties every morning when I’m in my closet picking out a t-shirt to wear with the shorts that I have worn every day for the past two months.

*****

          The boat division at Albatross was not the only division for which Richard Hardin had grand designs. He also intended to create a commercial seating division. The idea was to leverage our capacity and expertise in school based applications to create both individual and stadium seating solutions for non-school applications. These would be more up-scale, comfortable, and expensive than the school products and would both broaden our markets and improve our profit margins.

          Development projects had been launched and project managers put in place. A new head engineer was brought on board so that the old head engineer could take over the commercial division. A new controller was hired for the commercial division. Things were popping. There was a lot of excitement in the air. We were spending money like water on new product launches including new office furniture suites, new stadium seating packages, a new classroom suite aimed at private schools and universities, and two new boats. It wasn’t very long before every project was over budget and in trouble.

          At the outset I wouldn’t have thought it possible for a company like Albatross to burn through $600 million in such a short period of time. The failures were legion and the timing even worse. Every project went over budget and every new product went over its target unit cost. This was a huge problem because they all had to compete on price in the marketplace. The markets had all gone to hell for a variety of reasons—not the least of which were the tragic events of September 11, 2001.

          It seemed we couldn’t get traction with anything we were trying to do, and what products we did manage to sell were sold on such skinny margins they made hardly a dent in their astronomical development costs. To make matters worse almost everything we sold came back with serious warranty issues.

          Bad as things were for the commercial fixture and boat divisions, almost everyone at Albatross remained calm and composed, secure in the knowledge that we could always depend on the school product sales to keep us afloat while we sorted out our problems. This or course was precisely the time that the bottom fell out of the school fixtures division.

          The problems at the North Alabama plant had continued unabated and largely unnoticed. Everything imploded in one catastrophic day when our largest school system customer rejected a huge shipment of furnishings destined for a dozen or so new schools being built in a high growth population center. This was the inventory that had been stacked in the warehouse in North Alabama—the stuff that wasn’t shipped because it wasn’t finished. When DeLeon couldn’t delay shipment any longer he sent the stuff out late and incomplete. It was so far below standard that the school system refused the whole lot out of hand, and cancelled all their pending orders.

This presented a number of immediate compounding problems. First and foremost was the immediate loss of about $60 million in revenues, revenues that were not going to be recovered easily. The second problem was that the returned items were going to have to be fixed.

They couldn’t be fixed in North Alabama because they obviously didn’t know how. North Alabama had its own problems to address. That would be the third problem, but the second was more immediate and more critical because we needed to turn that inventory into cash as soon as possible. The solution ended up being to load it all into trucks and haul it to the Mid Alabama plant to be reworked. When we started doing this we found that the number of hours required to fix the items was nearly the same as the hours it took to build them in the first place. Thus ended the fatal Albatross complacency—the belief that the school business would keep the rest of the company afloat.

As you can probably imagine, this debacle caused quite a shake up in executive management. Richard Hardin was forced to step down in the UK. Not surprisingly he had made some other costly missteps in the European operations. The Albatross problem was the final straw. Personally I think it was his arrogant management style that was his undoing, but no one is listening to me.

Robert Lester, the U.S. president of Albatross had to step down as well, although he didn’t really go anywhere. The directors brought in a new president, one who had recently presided over the dismantling of a crane company, and Robert moved over to the boat division to become the sales manager. He moved at the same salary he had been making as president, which probably rankled a few souls. I know it rankled me.

While Robert’s duties and responsibilities had shrunk considerably, he was making north of $350 thousand a year. Meanwhile my duties and responsibilities had more than doubled in scope, but adjusted for inflation, I was making less than when I started. To make matters worse Robert came to my office every day to get my advice and opinion on every decision he had to make in his new reduced capacity.

Now I have to say that I actually liked Robert. He was an engaging and personable fellow, and he certainly tried hard. It’s just that when it came to actually moving the company forward, Robert was just taking up space. He once said to me in the course of a rambling philosophical soliloquy, “You know, as long as I live I don’t think I’ll ever understand what went wrong at North Alabama.” That’s too bad really because almost everyone else did know, and almost every one of them blamed Robert for being asleep at the switch.

I guess it should go without saying that DeLeon was forced out. The only surprising thing about it was that he was allowed to leave under his own steam—that is to say, still walking. He stopped me in the hallway to say goodbye. He told me he’d given it a good run, but it was time for him to move on and try something different.

I asked him what he had lined up, and he said nothing definite. He was just beginning to explore his options. I personally thought that one of his options ought to have been scrubbing the restrooms at Albatross while the production employees took turns kicking and insulting him, but apparently you get better treatment than that when you cost a company millions of dollars. The bigger the screw-up the more likely it is that you will be allowed to walk around with your dignity intact.

A few weeks later I read in the paper that DeLeon was teaching a course in industrial management at one of the local community colleges. Knowing that he was passing his special brand of production know-how on to the next generation of plant managers gave me a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.

Day 90 - It Ain't Finished Inventory Until the Fat Lady Sings

          It was another dry day on the job boards. After several days of elevated spirits because of the two idiot recruiters, I am once again resigned to a bleaker reality. My wife and I discussed where we might go to live when we move out of here. The most viable option right now seems to be for us to move in with our youngest son. He has a little house near Tampa, which is about an hour and a half from here.

He has a live-in girlfriend with two teenage daughters. The relationship is not working out for him. The girlfriend is mean, petty, and argumentative. She either can’t or won’t discipline her girls, so their behavior is becoming increasingly problematic. He has told her that they have no future together, and asked her to move out. So far she has not. Our son thinks that if his mother and I decide to move in with him, the girlfriend will be more motivated to finally leave. It is comforting to know that, after these several months of unemployment and purposelessness, I will once again be useful for something to someone.

*****

          Richard Hardin wasn’t the only author of bone-headed decision making at Albatross. He was the head boy to be sure, but he was supported by a cast of minions eager to take up the challenge when he went back to the U.K. to direct the wreck of our once proud company from afar. Chief among these minions at the time was the Director of Operations. Let’s call him Ben DeLeon.

When I got the plant tour during my interview, the Alabama controller told me that Albatross had been planning to build another plant in the area to add capacity, but that Ben had done such a fantastic job of reorganizing their production lines and freeing up space on the plant floor they no longer needed to build another facility.

It was a wonderful story that I tried to take to heart, but when I looked around at the endless stacks of parts queued up in front of and behind every machine in the place I had to wonder how bad things had been before Ben got there.

Then I met Ben and spent twenty minutes or so with him in a conference room while he asked me questions about my background and tried to explain his vision for the future at Albatross. I realized in the first five minutes that I was talking to a complete idiot.

I honestly don’t have any idea how guys that stupid manage to rise to positions of relative power and influence. I wish now that I could remember some of the things he said so that I could prove that I wasn’t letting my imagination run off the reservation, but the stuff he asked and the things he said were so gloriously incompetent that I put them immediately out of my mind. There’s only a finite amount of space in my brain, and I don’t like to allocate any of it to the remembrance of stupid things.

          Like many incompetents, Ben was a great one for fudging the numbers when he could get away with it. The numbers that mattered most to Ben as a production guy were units started and units completed. Ben liked to call inventory completed according to when it was scheduled to be completed, whether or not it was actually finished.

The effect of Ben’s fudging the completion numbers was that Ben looked like he had everything under control—that production was running smoothly and according to the master production schedule. The first thing I noticed when I started accumulating costs on production was that there were an awful lot of hours being booked to hulls in process to complete parts and fixtures that were built for us by the furniture division and that were supposed to have been brought to the boat facility in a completed state. These parts had already had their costs finalized in the system, and been transferred at completed cost to the boat division.

The boat production staff was charging hours to rework and finish the parts when all they should have had to do was install them. This made the furniture division look as if it was building inventory to the budget standard, but the boat division looked as if it were busting the budget on every unit. Lots of people at Albatross were aware of this little charade, but no on had had the temerity to complain about it—at least not until I arrived. If you have begun to see a pattern emerging from my recounting of my work history, you will now surmise, and correctly, that this didn’t go so well for me either. I may as well have been playing to the grass.

Day 77 - Sermons

It’s been another day with nothing to do but reminisce on past jobs. Future jobs are for the moment impossible to contemplate except for the notion, proved by a preponderance of anecdotal evidence, that they are likely to be more of the same and to require the forbearance of fools.

It’s not easy for someone who generally thinks that he is smarter than most to exist in an environment where the people who control his day-to-day involvement in the implementation of his own future think they are smarter than him. Yet this is the condition under which many of us toil. Some of us would be correct in thinking we are smarter than most, while most of us would, by definition, be wrong. Right or wrong however, your capacity to achieve either greatness or mayhem depends on the conviction with which you cling to the notion that you know better than everyone else. 

*****

Fische and Alicia continued to make my life difficult at Quilnutz. I had good intelligence on their activities, but I could not manage them. They were capable, when they got a really novel idea, of acting on it in swift, decisive, and surprising ways. I could usually get my guard up, but I could never get ahead of them. The one thing that worked best in my favor is that they also thought they were smarter than everyone else. If some of their machinations had not been so comical I might have been persuaded to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Once Fische came to town with a retinue of clingers-on from Florida that included the head designer. He brought her to get our design department to start turning out interiors that looked more like the Florida boats. (Some of our Arkansas workers naturally thought this was so that it would then be more credible for the Florida facility to re-badge our boats as theirs.) Anyway Fische decided to take the design department out for lunch with the Florida designer to help foster teamwork and cooperation. He wasn’t about to pass up an opportunity to spend some time with Alicia though so he included her in the lunch invitation. He wanted to cover up his ongoing association with her even though by this time it was pretty much common knowledge in the plant. To cement the subterfuge he got one of our designers to extend the invitation to Alicia for him.

“Go up to accounting and ask that cost accountant—what’s her name?—if she’d like to join us for lunch,” he said.

He said it with a straight face. The designer did not have a straight face when she came into my office to tell me what he’d said.

“Who does he think he’s fooling?” she asked.

“Everyone,” was the only reply I could think of.

I had occasion shortly after that to lecture Alicia on the harm she was doing the company by carrying on with Fische. Alicia was forever going on about how there was too much divisiveness in the Arkansas workforce, and that they needed to swallow their misplaced pride and do things the Quilnutz (meaning the Florida) way. This made it obvious to the local masses that she had taken sides in the issue—and the wrong side at that. I didn’t think I could persuade her to adjust her loyalties westward, but I knew she had left me an opening to appeal to her avowed interest in the ‘big picture’—the good of the company as a whole.

We were discussing the difficulties we were having in hiring qualified help for the plant floor. I told her that I thought that it was at least partially her fault. She wanted to know how I could possibly think that.

“We live in the middle of the Bible Belt,” I told her, and that much was true and obvious even to Alicia. There was a Baptist church on every corner of town and every other intersection in the county.

“So?”

“Your affair with Fische has given the company a reputation,” I said. “I hear about it in town. Employees have left here because of it. The folks who attend all these churches around here talk about it. They think we are a hotbed of loose morals and infidelity. Otherwise qualified employees do not even apply here even though we offer good benefits and competitive wages because they don’t want to be tainted in the community.”

“What affair are you talking about?” she asked.

“Do you really think I’m that stupid?”

She sat back in her chair, and I never heard another denial from her. I don’t know if that was the beginning of the end for Fische or not. I’d like to think that I got him cut off with a few well timed and supremely lucid sentences, but that’s just because I wanted to be the author of his unhappiness. Far more likely is that Alicia had already discovered herself mired in the sticky morass of Fische’s neediness, and was actively looking for ways to extricate herself.