Class Action

When you've got the blues, you need to blow the horn.

 My friend, David Kaa, who blogs at ManWife Chronicles about the trials and tribulations of long-term unemployment received a cease and desist order from an attorney representing his former employer. You can read the details here. 

It seems that David's employer was upset that he was making disparaging comments about them in his blog and on a video commentary that he put up on YouTube. The lawyer said he had to quit. Not only did the lawyer insist that he quit, but also that he remove the offending posts and dismantle his website. To give legal weight to this demand the lawyer cited a non-compete agreement that David had been required to sign when he was first employed. Also cited was the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.

This last seemed a bit over-reaching to me. At issue was the fact that David's video included shots of the employer's office building with its logo displayed prominently on the side. Wait...what?! Displaying a picture taken on a public thoroughfare of a sign on a building is copyright infringement?

David called bullshit on this one, but it turns out that the lawyer is right. You can't do that, at least not for commercial purposes or private financial gain. Neither can Google it would seem, but nobody is making an issue of it with them. David's former company's logo is displayed for all to see on the street view of Google maps. Google presumably has more lawyers than God.

David did take the video down though. Who wants to waste the precious hours of blissful unemployment (no longer working for assholes) fighting with a lawyer? As my hometown pharmacist and soda fountain operator used to say, 'You can wrestle with a turd all day long, but no matter how bad you whup it you're still bound to get a little on you.'

Copyright issues aside, I think the proscription against making disparaging comments is an actionable offense on the part of David's employer, and many others as well. My former employer did it too—not in a non-compete agreement but in the termination letter I was forced to sign in order to get any severance pay. I'm not only prohibited from making disparaging comments in any public forum, I'm also prohibited from acknowledging that any severance agreement even exists. Good luck enforcing that one.

Here's my point. The ability to make disparaging comments is a necessary adjunct to the continuing mental health and well-being of an unemployed individual. This fact is, I think, well established in modern society on another front. For instance people who have just gotten out of bad relationships are allowed, expected, even encouraged, to say all manner of perjorative things about their former significant others. It's part of the healing process. It's an expression of the anger that is one of the five necessary steps in the grieving process.

Nothing more closely parallels a divorce or break-up than losing one's job. The longer you've had the job, the more effort you've invested in the relationship, the harder it is to adjust to being terminated and escorted out of the building like a trespassing derelict. This is a hurtful experience. Anyone who's been through it knows that you need all the healing tools available to weather the turmoil and get your life back on track. One of those tools is the ability to work through the natural feelings of anger and betrayal.

Taking this a little bit further, the continuing mental health and well-being of the unemployed is a necessary adjunct to their ability to get another job.

This is and has been an extremely difficult job market. Three years after the CDO- and derivative-fueled real estate bubble burst and brought our economy to the brink of collapse, unemployment is still running above 9%. There are an estimated 25 million unemployed, underemployed, and displaced workers who need jobs. Conservatively there are 6 people actively looking for work for every one available job.

A job seeker in this market needs to be on top of his or her game. There's no room for self doubt or depression. The slightest sign of weakness is going to get you culled from the herd of available applicants for any job. A job seeker needs to be positive, confident, assertive, self-possessed and optimistic. None of these is very likely while you still have unresolved issues regarding your former employer. In other words you've got to work through your anger to be sane, and you've got to be sane to have a chance of getting a job, especially in an employer's market.

Seen in this context, any effort on an employer's part to circumvent the natural process of healing can be viewed as unfair and injurious. Proscriptions against disparaging remarks, public or private, are deliberate attempts by employers to protect themselves from the consequences of their decisions at the expense of the very people they harm the most. It is adding insult to injury. It is kicking a man when he is already down. It is therefore objectionable. It needs to stop.

I propose a class action lawsuit on behalf of every unemployed person who has been forced to agree to place their mental health and future financial security in this kind of jeopardy in order to make it easier for their employer to fire them. It's only fair.

Day 134 - Day of Infamy

          One week to the garage sale. Two weeks to moving day. I’ve scheduled two crews to help us load and unload the truck. We’ll take one load to the storage facility near our son’s house and a second with us to my father-in-law’s place on the East Coast. We’ve also arranged to distribute, temporarily at least, some of our extra bedroom furniture and appliances to the kids and grandkids. This will include a newish 42 inch LCD TV, which I’m not too happy about but what else can I do. There’s only so much space available, and it’s obvious that I’m not going to be able to keep everything I want.

         The Biblical parable about it being easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven comes to mind. I’ve been told that the phrase ‘eye of the needle’ actually refers to a small gate in one of the walls of Jerusalem. The gate was small enough that camels laden with goods from trading caravans had to be unloaded in order the get through it. Knowing this takes some of the onus off becoming rich. It’s not as impossible as shoving a camel through the eye of a sewing needle for rich people to get into heaven, but they’re obviously not going to get through unless they unload their stuff first. It’s a you-can’t-take-it-with-you thing as opposed to a you-can’t-be-saved kind of thing. Good news for all the prosperity preachers out there. Of course, now that I think about it, the prosperity preachers just might be the source of this more relaxed and altogether kinder interpretation.

          Either way you cut it, I’m going to have to off-load a substantial amount of my possessions in order to enter the paradise of Southeast Florida. The irony is that I’m not even rich by any stretch of the imagination—in fact I’m soon to be quite poor—whereas, presumably, the rich traders in the Bible got to reload their camels on the other side of the gate.

* * * * *

          The consultants we had at Albatross were experts in bankruptcy reorganizations and dissolutions. They had earned huge fees from the then still fresh collapse of Enron. I won’t argue that these fees aren’t justified, although sometimes the amounts seem exorbitant. The fees, in any event, have to be approved by the judge presiding over the bankruptcy, so one should be able to assume that they are fair and reasonable in the circumstances. Still if you are an unsecured creditor getting pennies for every dollar owed you, or a loyal employee whose pension plan has turned to dust, it has to be painful to see millions of dollars flying out the door and into the coffers of the consultants whose very purpose is to feed at the trough of your troubles.

          Of course the consultants weren’t the only ones enriching themselves in the midst of our travails. Executive management had a hand in there too, as did, to my everlasting amazement, the new chairman of the board.

          The new chairman was a decorated Knight of the Realm—an honest to goodness ‘Sir’ who had achieved some notoriety in the UK for the successful conclusion to a sticky hostage negotiation back when radical fundamentalist Muslims first raised their turbaned heads. Since that time he had enjoyed some further success resuscitating both public and private enterprises that were failing in spectacular fashion. He had been appointed chairman by the board, which was comprised mainly of representatives from the consortium of banks and creditors that now owned us. He came to the U.S. to receive reports and issue orders for one day each month, and for this he received the princely sum of $25,000 per day plus expenses. Did I mention that he was a complete idiot?

          He was a small man with a high squeak of a voice. When he got excited, which was often, people in immediate ear-shot would cringe and wince as if someone were scraping their fingernails on a chalkboard. He made no sense whatsoever that I ever heard, but he certainly did not lack for confidence in himself or abject disdain for everyone around him.

          There was one company among the ownership group that was not a bank. It was a large and well known European manufacturing concern, very successful, with a substantial penetration into U.S. markets. They had fronted many millions of dollars to our former UK parent to conclude its initial purchase of Albatross. They now held about 30% of our stock. They had a significant presence on our board owing principally to their actual experience in manufacturing operations. They did not have enough seats however to prevent the banks from installing Lord McSqueak as chairman. That they were not thrilled by this choice was made abundantly clear by their near constant eye rolling and sideways glances at board meetings when His Lordship was holding forth with his customary high pitched exuberance.

          At one point management and the consultants tried to persuade this company to buy up the rest of Albatross from the banks. This probably would have been a pretty good deal for us. We would have had an ownership that actually understood what needed to be done, and they surely would have sent the chairman packing back to the UK with his last $25,000 check and a fare-thee-well. It didn’t happen though. They just bailed right before the end. They walked away from their considerable investment without a whimper or even looking back. They’d had enough.

          In the midst of our cash flow difficulties, in a surprise move that seemed calculated to make them seem as venal and self-serving as possible, executive management decided to take retention bonuses. They didn’t say anything about it. They just did it. Apparently they thought they could keep it quiet, but it is awfully hard to hide a handful of checks totaling nearly a million dollars from a payables section that is struggling daily to pay complaining vendors a few thousand bucks here and there. News of the bonuses spread like waters from a burst dam through the finance section. Everyone knew about it before the ink was dry on the checks.

          Rod was furious that the news had leaked. He wanted to blame Eddie. I don’t know why he wanted to blame Eddie specifically. Maybe he overheard Eddie discussing it with someone. Eddie was in a position to know about the checks of course because he was helping Dennis and me monitor our expenditures. His knowledge of systems and report generation was extremely helpful to our efforts in this regard. At any rate Rod’s reaction to the leaking of the news was to pitch a fit and basically forbid anyone from discussing the matter at all. I don’t know what he hoped to accomplish. I mean, seriously, that ship had sailed.

          Rod came into my office and shut the door—always a bad sign. He wanted to know if I had heard anything about some bonuses. I had. He wanted to know where I had heard it. I told him the checks were on the list of disbursements for the day. They were in the system. It was my job to know what we were paying. He wanted to know if Eddie had brought them to my attention. He had not.

I should point out here that Rod was on the list of people getting a bonus. His take was $35,000. I had my own opinion about the bonuses in general and Rod’s in particular, but I wasn’t about to say anything. Rod was placated somewhat by my answers to his queries, but he still seemed hell-bent on being angry at someone. I suggested that if they wanted to keep the bonuses quiet they should have considered paying them out of another account, one that wasn’t being scrutinized by the whole accounting department on a minute-by-minute basis because of our crippling cash shortfalls. I did not point out that those shortfalls were now exacerbated by these unconscionable bonuses.

At that point Rod felt compelled to explain the logic of the bonuses to me. They had apparently been agreed to in the last reorganization. Their purpose had been to retain the executive talent, then newly hired and seen as essential to our future success, through that reorganization when there was a substantial likelihood that the company would collapse, and executive talent being what it is, that is whorishly self-interested, would be naturally motivated to seek another street on which to peddle their affections. They were R-E-T-E-N-T-I-O-N bonuses, Rod explained to me, slowly and with emphasis so that I would be sure to understand, and they were a contractual obligation that had to be paid within 18 months of their inception. The 18 months was up that particular week, so the bonus checks had to be written in spite of our pitiful cash position. There was no choice.

Personally I thought there was quite a bit of choice available. The executives on the list, all of whom were still there, could have elected to forego or delay those bonuses. If the obligation was to them, and they had negotiated it in the first place, they could certainly change the terms. That would have been the prudent and altruistic thing to do in the circumstances. That’s what most of the long term loyalists at Albatross would have done. That’s what I would have done, but then I wasn’t an executive on the list and that pesky altruism perhaps explains why.

Only a little while later, after the bankruptcy we eventually filed and the reorganization plan that provided for me losing my job, it occurred to me that the 18 month deadline for payment of those bonuses notwithstanding, the real reason for the unfortunate timing of those bonuses was to get them discharged well in advance of any statutory look-backs that were apt to be applied by the federal bankruptcy court. Management lined their pockets to the detriment of the continuing operations of the company in time to ensure that they wouldn’t be forced to give them back by some do-gooder judge. Naturally this is pure speculation on my part. No one in management would ever admit to such a scheme, but really...come on.

More than anything else that happened at Albatross this one event sums up for me the failure of management to faithfully discharge their responsibilities to the company they were supposed to be running. They took an unconscionable bonus at a time they could not have calculated better to injure their charge. They did it, either through ignorance or arrogance, in such a way as to rub everyone else’s face in the offal. And they got angry that anyone would construe their actions as less than honorable.

Day 132 - Betty Boop and the Witch Queen

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s this?” he asked.

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

“Why are we doing this?”

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

“That doesn’t sound right.”

“I already made her an offer.”

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

“I did,” I protested.

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

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

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

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

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

  

Day 126 - Dangerous Flora

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day 88 - Beer and Barbecue: Nightmares of the Deep South

         Today I couldn’t get hold of either of the recruiters who submitted or claim to have submitted me to the juice packing company. This has turned into a mess of sorts, and I have to say it’s a crying, bleeping shame because one, based on what they each told me about the job, I think I’m a good fit, and two, whatever negative impression they have managed to leave with the employer is just not my fault.

Honestly, I don’t know how anyone gets a job in this current environment. The recruiters I used to work with just don’t seem to have anything. At least that’s what they claim when I call them. I don’t have any reason to doubt them. I know them, and I’ve had success with them, and they with me. When they don’t call me back I assume it’s because the market is skinny.

These other recruiters though, the ones who say they have listings, the ones who talk and act as if they are hustling on my behalf, are just so incompetent it’s become laughable. I honestly think that they are doing me more harm than good. If I weren’t growing desperate I would just quit responding to them at all. Almost every time I interview one of these birds or even let them submit me, it turns out to be a monumental waste of my time.

*****

          In my first several weeks at Albatross I got invited to a party of sorts. It was to be all or at least most of the men in the finance department. The women were not invited. It sounded pretty innocuous except for the no women thing, but given my past experience with philandering associates I was somewhat relieved to know I wasn’t going to witness any sexual improprieties at this particular event.

The controller I was replacing told me about it. He took me out to the site of the party during our lunch break on the day of the party so that I would be able to find it in the evening. It was in the woods. I mean deep in the woods.

We drove out of town a couple of miles, turned off the main highway for another mile, and then turned off that road onto a dirt track that skirted a pasture. Behind the pasture was the front edge of a substantial pine forest, and we bounced along next to it for another half mile or so. The track consisted of two ruts separated by a ridge of tall grass. It ran in a straight line except for several places where it made a sharp jut to the right in order to go around rusted hulks of ancient farm machinery. I know I saw a harrow and a hay rake. It was hard to tell in the tall grass but they looked to me as if they had been horse-drawn.

At some point the track made a sharp left turn between two pines and continued into the woods. Light filtered between the leaves and the pine needles, streaming down in shafts of green tinged light that reminded me of the inside of a cathedral. It was eerie quiet and stifling hot in the middle of the day.

A little way into the woods we came upon a clearing with a tall metal shelter and a fire pit. There were a few picnic tables. The shelter consisted of a corrugated tin roof suspended high up on four round steel posts. I grew up in a farming community. My dad was a country veterinarian. I have been on hundreds of farms. I had never seen anything like this deep woods compound.

I knew farmers to be a practical lot. They do not build stuff for which there is no immediate and logical purpose. They do not build anything very far removed from the center of the farm. I had no idea what this thing was for.

I was a lonesome Yankee boy in the middle of rural Alabama. My nearest friend was over 300 miles away. My nearest relative was over 700 miles away. I was being lured into the woods by a bunch of Alabama crackers with the promise of beer and barbecue.

I have seen the movie Deliverance…twice. I was pretty sure that at some point that evening I was going to be bent over a tree stump and ordered to squeal like a pig. I actually missed Alicia and Fische a little bit just then.

Day 68 - Betrayal

          I fired off another eight résumés today complete with tailored cover letters. I think it’s cool how the job boards make the process easy once you’re properly set up. On the flip side, they make it easy for everyone so it’s harder and harder to stand out, especially in the midst of the huge crowd of folks now looking for work.

*****

          Things weren’t nearly so easy for a job seeker when I began to feel that I’d reached the end of my rope at Quilnutz. Back then everything was still intensely manual and cumbersome, and I was working so hard and under such duress that I just didn’t have the energy to look for a better situation. I was pretty much on my own. Ivan had fired Henry over an alleged breach of fiscal rectitude that was both smaller and less obvious than Ivan’s own trespasses. With Henry gone, Ivan shipped Mike off to Florida, and I suddenly found myself fighting battles on multiple fronts without allies. It was a bleak time.

          Henry’s undoing was interesting in a way. He was sucker punched by the one person who should have had his back. That was his supposed mistress, let’s call her Penny. I don’t know if Henry and Penny were engaged in an affair or not. Most everyone thought they were, including Henry’s daughter and probably, eventually at least, his wife. Penny certainly acted as if they were because she took every opportunity to throw her weight around as if it were Henry’s own—so much so that everyone came to take her excesses at face value. I confronted Henry about it once. I told him it didn’t matter to me one way or the other, but it sure was creating problems among the troops and he ought to consider cooling his jets. “When would I ever find time to screw that broad?” is what he said to me. I never brought it up again.

          Penny had been a payroll clerk in the company that Henry bought out of bankruptcy. When they shut their doors, she found herself relegated back to housewife status in rural Arkansas—not a happy circumstance for a woman with Penny’s aspirations. When Henry sent me out to Arkansas to get the plant ready to open again she was one of the first in line to get her job back. I made her an offer that I thought was fair based on the prevailing rates for clerical help, and Henry promptly cut it in half. She was happy to get that. I thought she must be just that desperate to get out of the house. I didn’t know that she was an expert practitioner of the dark arts, and that just getting her foot in the door was the moral equivalent to her of securing a fingernail paring or a lock of hair.

          We weren’t even open before Penny was promoted out of the payroll clerk position to become Henry’s personal assistant. The rest of her days with us, and subsequently with Quilnutz, were spent solidifying and fortifying her position. With Henry’s company that meant hanging onto Henry’s coattails, whatever that took. All her considerable power was derived from Henry and wielded in his name. At first Henry’s wife was a champion of Penny’s ascendancy. They were great chums. They went everywhere and did everything together—when Penny wasn’t busy ministering to Henry’s needs that is. As Penny’s hold on Henry increased, his wife began to fade into the background. Some of the newer customers even thought that Penny was the wife.

          Henry’s wife, let’s call her Pam, took most of this in stride. She’d been with Henry a long time and weathered all his storms and put up with all his shenanigans. She was content it seemed to let Penny play on center stage because she knew that whatever else may happen Henry owed her for her past loyalty and even a witch like Penny wasn’t going to upset that dynamic. She did have a breaking point though, and I was there to witness when she reached it.

          A crowd of us were out to dinner one night—Henry holding court in his usual flamboyant style. His wife was there, Penny, me, my wife, several other couples, most of them customers. When desert was served Penny began loading bites of chocolate cake from her plate onto her fork and feeding them into Henry’s mouth. It was a shockingly personal and intimate display—completely inappropriate in that or any other context. Jaws dropped all around the table. Glances were exchanged.

Henry’s wife’s usually placid and softly smiling face turned to granite. Her eyes glowed like mica fire-screens. You could see the flames licking up the inside of her skull. She was never the same after. Two years later she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She’s had a mastectomy and been through three courses of radiation and chemotherapy already with another to come. I’m sure that she is dying, although no one will say that. I think it was that chocolate cake that killed her.

After Quilnutz bought us out and Henry’s star began to fade, Penny suddenly needed to hitch her wagon someplace else. With Ivan showing no interest in women at all and Fische rooting around in Alicia’s garden, Penny had to get creative. The first thing she had to do was disassociate herself from Henry. At least she’d have a chance on her own. Still attached to his hip she would be consumed in the flameout. At some point it must have occurred to her that if she could be the author of Henry’s undoing she would not only disassociate from Henry but demonstrate her loyalty to Quilnutz and to Ivan in the bargain. Once she’d figured that out she dipped Henry directly into the grease and danced around the sizzle.

It was as thorough and awesome a betrayal as I have ever seen. It eclipses anything that’s ever been done to me and I’ve been the victim of some doozies. What was alleged was that Henry was getting some money directly from customers on deals he was booking for Quilnutz at shows—knocking down cash, always one of his favorite tricks. Trouble was he’d already been warned about it and he knew Ivan was watching him like a hawk. I would have thought that he’d be more careful, but then Henry was always happiest when he was cheating someone. The more Ivan pressed him the more likely Henry was to cave in to his instincts. Cheating Ivan under Ivan’s nose would have been an altogether irresistible proposition to Henry. The mere suggestion that he try it would have been entrapment to his greedy soul.

I don’t know what part Penny had to play in all this. I know that she bore witness against him, and that was enough to undo Henry and cement her position at Quilnutz. Whether she urged Henry to do it, whether she made the whole thing up and Henry was actually innocent, I couldn’t say. Either is possible, but in all probability neither would have been necessary. In the grand scheme of things what happened to Henry was just Karma. For the rest of us life went on. The difference for me was that I was out of players who shared my interests and my fortunes. I was alone in a dark and scary place.