A Little Rhyming Philosophy

with apologies to Jonathan Swift and Augustus De Morgan

Leap Blog Day

Today is Leap Blog Day. A bunch of bloggers have undertaken to do guest posts on other participating blog sites. My wildly entertaining and informative entry today is at The HusBlog. You should click on the link, read my post, and spend a little time getting to know HusBlog - a fine young fellow from Texas who enjoys guns and philosophy.

There is no guest post on my blog because I waited too long to ask anybody, and when I did finally ask someone I asked an actual celebrity. Probably a mistake. She was not persuaded that she should squander any of her fame on my meager few readers. She may also think I am a stalker. In any event she chose not to respond to my request, which put me in mind almost immediately of my dating life back in the Seventies...right after the invention of the answering machine.

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.

Aimless Philosophy 101

Sometimes aimlessness will take one to a path that frustrates further aimlessness—a path that shunts one in a straight line to an unknown and possibly unsettling destination. The true follower of aimlessness will not resist. A tracked path is no different from any other to the aimless drifter in a cosmos of wonder. The trick is to notice the small and often stunning surprises along the way. The tragedy of an aimless existence would be not to see the little things.

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.

Day 69 - Seeking a More Poetic Existence

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

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

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

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

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

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

IMMORTALITY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Till weary rapture of corpuscle coursing through sore, aching muscle

Signals that this hard persistence barely lengthened our existence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day 64 - More Philandering, More Fallout

          The landlady came back today offering to reduce our rent until I get another job. This was a very nice gesture, and it’s just like her to do something like that. Unfortunately she can’t lower it enough to make any difference to me once my severance runs out. This is kind of a bummer because I would really like to keep living here. It has been great.

          My wife actually found this place shortly after I started work at my last job. She found the listing online and called the landlady to get the particulars on the house and directions to it from my office. I went to see it over my lunch hour. It was exactly what we were looking for—a nice big split plan with an open kitchen and family room, high ceilings, and a pool. It was situated on a cul-de-sac so traffic was minimal. It was also in a golf course community, but not adjacent to any of the holes. To me that meant things would stay green and manicured, but also that I wasn’t going to be getting a lot of errant golf balls crashing through my windows. The landlady lives right across the street.

          The longer we live here the more we like it. The neighbors are great. They are an interesting mix of ages, professions, and acculturation, and they all get along with one another. Almost every holiday we have a block party in the cul-de-sac. Everyone brings a dish. We drag a fire pit into the street, ring it with lawn chairs, wire up some music, and talk and drink wine into the night. There is nothing not to like.

*****

          There was plenty not to like at the new Quilnutz—the one defined now by Alicia and her boyfriend, Fische. Fische was in love. Alicia was not. Fische was calling Alicia dozens of times a day. He called during the day, and he called into the night, leaving voice mails…lots of them. He wasn’t leaving mentoring messages either. They didn’t deal with the intricacies of costs or allocation of overhead or the problems associated with pricing custom contracted products. No, these messages were intensely personal. Fische was in love. Fische had been transformed from the consummate swordsman bragging around the water cooler to the lovesick puppy. Gone was the self-assured, foul-mouthed ex-marine on the make. That guy had been replaced by a whiney, insecure, self-flagellating, and epic putz.

          I can only speculate what might have happened to effect this transformation. It was obvious from some of the things that Fische said that he and Alicia had slept together at least once, although not so obvious whether or not they had actually consummated their relationship. It became obvious over time that the relationship was not progressing according to Fische’s expectations. He wanted more from Alicia than he was getting, and he wasn’t talking about sex either. He was talking about affection.

          The sheer volume of the messages was troubling. Three, four, five times a night, sometimes even more. He called after work. He called before dinner. He called after dinner. He called between planes. He called before bed. He called in the middle of the night when he got up to piss. How many times can you call someone and leave a message without seeming desperate, no matter what you’re saying. What Fische was saying only raised the level of desperation into the realm of the pathetic.     

          My personal favorite message was a long, whimpering soliloquy on unrequited love. Fische could be quite philosophical when he put his mind to it. I guess he meant to be instructive. It was as if he thought if he explained it just so, if he made it perfectly logical and easy to follow, that Alicia would finally see the light and love him back the same way he loved her. It’s hard to say. Anyway he went on at length on how love could not exist for long unless it was returned. Eventually a one-sided love would wither and die, but if that love were returned it would flourish and grow stronger and reflect back the returned love and the two loves together would become some magical, noble force that would sustain them forever. “Love must return,” he kept saying over and over and over. “Love must return.” It would have made a great country and western song if it rhymed, but it didn’t so it wouldn’t. It’s been ten years now since I heard it and it still makes me chuckle. It was so perfectly, magnificently maudlin. Whatever else I may think of Fische, I’ll always be thankful for that wonderful little bit of entertainment.

          Of course it wasn’t all love and flowers with Fische and Alicia. Occasionally Fische would get down to business. I can only speculate in this regard as well, but I think the business that Fische got down to was the real reason that Alicia was even party to this relationship. The reason I think this is that, in large measure, the business had to do with me. It seems that Alicia had designs on my job. I don’t know if she came up with that notion on her own or if Fische came up with it and presented it to her fully formed as a kind of inducement to her continuing and intensifying their affair. Whichever way it played out, the two of them were trying to orchestrate an accounting coup of sorts to bring me low and get me fired. With me out of the way they thought Alicia could just step up and take over.

          The only problem they had, although I’m not sure either one of them realized this at the time, was that there were only two people in the company who thought Alicia was even capable of doing the job she already had. Those two people were Alicia and me. I don’t count Fische as knowing because I don’t think he had any idea. It didn’t really matter to him. For him it wasn’t about Alicia getting my job. It was about Alicia thinking she could get my job if she kept feeding his need to be loved.

Fische had no clue what accounting entailed. He probably thought it was akin to his job, executive administration. You put in your hours. You sling some hash. When things go wrong you jump up and down and yell real loud about how nobody in this goddam company has any sense of urgency.

          If Fische and Alicia managed somehow to get rid of me they would then have to convince the grunts at corporate finance that Alicia had the chops to do my job. That wasn’t very likely because I was continually having to sell those same grunts on the idea that eventually she would make a cost accountant. I thought she was already doing a fine job in spite of the fact that most of her time was taken up either salving Fische’s precious ego or plotting against me. The corporate finance grunts thought she was too pretty to be any good. They were all Midwest farm boys at heart. They’d never seen a pretty woman who could add two and two and consistently come up with an answer of four without using ears of corn to hold her place while she thought it through.

          When I’d first hired Alicia, I sent her résumé up to corporate as a courtesy. I figured it was my department, my call. I’d already made the offer. The CFO called right away and started second guessing me. He wasn’t sure she had the experience we needed. He wasn’t comfortable with the fact that she’d been selling real estate for two years. He was going to send one of his analysts down for the next month end closing to make sure she knew what she was doing. I was a little miffed, but I wasn’t really concerned. I knew she’d do all right.

          I already knew the guy they were going to send. He was a kid—a nice fellow and smart as a whip, but a kid. He was either going to be tongue tied and clumsy around Alicia or she was going to have no effect on him whatsoever. I was actually betting on no effect whatsoever. There seemed to be a lot of sexual disinterest going around amongst the boys from corporate. Too much corn and pork in their diet perhaps. Fische made up for the lot of them, but then Fische wasn’t actually from the Midwest. He was from California—apparently a whole different thing.

          I got the strangest reaction when I told Alicia that the guy was coming though. She asked me if I wanted her to wear a short skirt while he was there to keep him distracted. I couldn’t believe she’d asked that. I couldn’t believe she thought that was an appropriate thing to do. I couldn’t believe she was willing to do it. I couldn’t believe she thought I’d say yes. “Good Lord, no,” is what I said. It might have been a pleasant diversion to see her in a short skirt, but I knew I was not prepared for the chaos that would ensue. Some things are just not worth the trade off.

Day 55 - Henchmen

          I guess I gave satisfactory answers to the recruiters yesterday about my experience. One of them is going to submit my résumé to a client, and the other wants me to come to their office for a face-to-face interview. I’m glad I’ve got the new suit, but now I’m wishing that I had gone with the blue rather than the brown. I’m every bit as adept at calling my own opinions and decisions into question as Ivan was. I just use less profanity when I’m doing it.

          Ivan wasn’t alone in his predilection for strong language. He had a sort of travelling second in command. His real second in command was his son, but his son stayed close to home. In addition to his duties at work the son had a farm. When I met him the whole crew of them had flown down from their headquarters in the Midwest in their corporate jet to start their negotiations with us. Everyone had taken some pains to dress for the occasion except for the son. He wore jeans and a pair of scuffed cowboy boots that were caked with manure. Fortunately for the rest of us he raised cows rather than pigs.

          The travelling second in command, let’s call him Fische, was more urbane in his dress but no less earthy in his demeanor. One of the first things our new management did after they had taken over was to look for assets that they could sell off. We had a little Kubota tractor with a mower deck that we used to cut the grass in front of the plant. Fische came one day to me to ask where it was. I told him I thought it was in the back of the upholstery shop where there was a rollup door to the parking lot. He said he’d looked there and not found it. I told him I’d look into it. I asked around and found out that it was at Henry’s son-in-law’s house. The son-in-law usually cut the grass so this was not unusual or even alarming to me.

          I found Fische on the plant floor and told him where the tractor was. He launched on me in much the same fashion that Ivan had—streams of profanity obfuscating any sense he might have otherwise made. It was an awesome display of invective aimed principally at me that left me literally shaking when he finally ran out of breath. The gist of it seemed to be that we, the old management from Henry's company, were an incredibly ignorant bunch of thieves who were engaged in an ongoing conspiracy to steal the assets that Ivan's company had bought and had a legitimate right to use as they saw fit. It didn’t matter to him that I had come to him to tell him where the tractor was, and had even made arrangements to get it delivered back to the plant. I had no idea what to say in reply, so I just walked away.

          The final irony to this little exchange was that Fische had the tractor loaded onto a flatbed trailer and delivered 600 miles to Ivan’s son’s farm. We were credited for half it’s appraised value—the value on our books after the merger—and so had to take the first of many losses orchestrated by them and charged against our earn-out. It seems they were going to make it as difficult as possible for us to ‘earn’ any of the shares that had been escrowed for us.

          I witnessed a lot of profanity-laced yelling in the ensuing weeks and months of my association with Ivan’s company. It seemed to be one of the hallmarks of their management philosophy. I’ve seen similar management styles employed since, all with the same ultimately disastrous result. While the people engaged in the yelling and invective think they are instilling an appropriate level of urgency in the people they are yelling at, what they really do is ensure that the people they are yelling at will forever after go to great lengths to avoid being yelled at again. This does not translate into a workplace where everyone is efficiently engaged in moving the company toward its goals. It rather translates into a workplace where otherwise talented and creative employees stop taking any kind of risk in order to avoid censure. In other words they stop using their talent in creative ways, and focus instead on the immediate security offered by not drawing any attention to themselves. This becomes a kind of vicious circle in which management begins to believe that only they have good ideas, and that everyone who works for them is a slug requiring constant motivation by way of verbal lashings to accomplish anything at all. Eventually the company is crushed under the enormous weight of management’s artificially inflated opinion of its own worth.

Float Trip

Let's take a break from the aimlessness of joblessness, and explore the roots of aimlessness as the philosophy of peace. For your consideration: a poem I wrote for my wife on the occasion of our 11th wedding anniversary in 1994.

FLOAT TRIP

Me and my China Doll

bob and turn on the flood,

adrift on the float trip of our lives.

Sometimes

abused by storms,

shunted by currents,

scorched by the heat of our ambition

in strange places far from what we dreamed.

Still

we stop at marvels and beauty,

explore together where we may land,

and

rejoice in the kisses of angels,

which we share like candies,

gorging our grins.

Because

we are one

always

and we know

we cannot be sunk.

(c) 1994 Jonah Gibson

It would seem that I already knew then what I'm learning now, but didn't know what I knew. Aimlessness in its seminal form. 

Exciting new developments in aimlessness coming soon. Look for:

• aimless apparel
• aimless gift items
• the aimless martini