Hair

          Most of my life I’ve hated my hair. The problem is that it’s really good hair; it just would never cooperate with the fashion of the day. My hair is thick and wavy. It is not the kind of hair that looks good long, and long is what hair was supposed to be when I cared about conforming to the styles of the day. Before that, when I was a youngster, my hair was at the mercy of a couple of local barbers who understood neither my hair in particular nor fashion in general. I spent 12 years with a bad haircut, and thought the whole time that I had bad hair.

          I didn’t really come to terms with my hair until I was 40. At 40 I began to realize how good my hair was, because most of the guys I knew who I’d always thought had good hair were beginning to lose theirs. Mine was holding its own. I no longer needed nor wanted it to be long. I’d found someone who knew how to cut it. Suddenly I had the best hair on my block. This only lasted for a few weeks. Now there is a new fashion it seems. Bald is the new great hair. Bald is the new sexy head, the new standard for virility, vitality, and appeal. My lush locks are passé once again, and once again my life is defined by bad timing.  

Day 62 - Beautiful Sheet Metal and Curves in the Road

          I went to visit another recruiter today. This one was way over on the west end of town. She indicated on the phone that she had a controller position open so I agreed to see her today. When I got there something seemed amiss right off the bat. First of all I had to fill out an application and some other paperwork before I sat down with the recruiter. They already had all the information they asked for on my résumé so I was a little confused about why they needed to capture it again in a different format. Still I’d already driven all the way across town so I filled out forms without complaint. The other thing that seemed off was that there was quite a parade of candidates going through the reception area, all filling out packets like me, all with appointments at the same time, and all very obviously applying for clerical rather than executive positions.

          When I finally got in to see the recruiter who had called me I found that she didn’t even have a cubicle. Her desk was in the midst of an army of recruiters in a large open space. I sat in a chair next to her desk. Every other place I have been I was at least taken to a conference room for the interview. This was a high volume operation with, as it turned out, low paying positions to offer. The recruiter was happy to tell me that I had excellent credentials and experience and she was sure that she could place me in one of a number of positions they were trying to fill. She then gave me the salary range of the position she was actively working. It was less that a third of what I made last year. I was flabbergasted. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. Another colossal waste of my time! What the hell was going on?

          One good thing about this particular appointment—the only good thing—was that the recruiter’s office was right next door to an Aston Martin dealership. I love Aston Martins. I think they are among the most beautiful cars built today. The DB9 model that I would most like to own comes in at around $170,000. Stopping to gaze at the graceful sheet metal and opulent colors was a bittersweet moment. I’m unemployed. If I don’t get something cooking in my job search within a couple of months I’m going to be homeless. Maybe then I’ll be able to run out into the street at stoplights and occasionally polish the windshield of an Aston Martin with a filthy rag while the owner yells obscenities at me from behind the leather clad steering wheel—something to look forward to, huh?

*****

          I got a strange e-mail from an anonymous source while Alicia was off in Florida with Fische. The gist of the e-mail was that Fische had been bragging around the water cooler that, in his opinion, Alicia could be had if a fellow played his cards right. The sender of the e-mail was concerned that Alicia was about to become the victim of blatant sexual harassment and that Fische was exposing the company to a lawsuit.

          There were a number of other employees from our Arkansas facility who also had gone to the open house, mostly sales people and technicians from our service department. These folks came back with stories that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. Chief among these was that Alicia had been seen leaving the open house in Fische’s car with her feet sticking out the passenger side window. There was a lot of speculation about how far that particular posture had caused her skirt to ride up and how much of her nether delights were thus exposed to Fische’s view. Another story was that Fische had been seen leaving her hotel room early in the morning wearing the clothes he had been wearing the previous day. Either Fische had been correct in his assessment of Alicia’s availability or Alicia had been an enthusiastic participant in the tryst—seen by her as an essential component of her new career path. This was all new territory for me, certainly not the kind of thing they teach you in business school. Oh how I wish that they had.

Day 61 - Tears and Implants

          I had another downtown interview with yet another recruiter today. I think I am going to stop making appointments with recruiters unless they have a real job order that they are trying to fill. This one was a plump little Asian woman. At least she was dressed smartly. She may have been as smart as she looked, but alas she was another youngster conditioned to become a non-reader by a relentlessly digital world.

Personally, I have trouble operating my cell phone. I think texting is a ridiculous waste of time. I do not Tweet. I don’t post daily updates on my activities on FaceBook or MySpace. These young recruiters, however, adept as they may be at brief, digital communications, can’t be bothered to read the very résumé that made them want to talk to me in the first place. Yet they seem to be thriving while I am unemployed. I guess that ought to tell me something about how useful my focused, linear, and structured mindset is in today’s workplace. The world is a very different place than it used to be when it made sense to me.

*****

          When Fische first met Alicia I didn’t even own a cell phone. Even so, looking back, this is about the time that the world started coming off the tracks for me. I’d like to blame the digitization of social interaction for this, but that’s just because I am digitally disadvantaged. Digital media may be linked in there somewhere, but the reality is much more complicated and sinister.

          To say that Fische was fascinated by Alicia is to make short shrift of what in Fische’s mind at least was about to become one of the great love stories of all time. Fische was smitten, mesmerized, dumbstruck—good for him perhaps at the time because he was thus prevented from declaring himself early and derailing the whole enterprise. Instead of falling to his knees and making a fool of himself, Fische plotted a conquest.

A good marine in all things, even Amor, Fische developed an overall strategy. He did reconnaissance. He requisitioned the necessary supplies and resources. He enlisted troops and reinforcements. He planned a series of small engagements. Then he threw himself into the fray with courage and abandonment.

That Fische eventually succeeded appeared at first to be a testament to his marine training. Nothing else made any sense. Where Alicia was young, pretty, engaging, smart, and sexy, Fische was anything but. He was an aging, paunch ridden, intolerant, bellicose mass of overcompensated insecurities. His grey hair was receding faster than an estuary tide, and his nose, viewed from straight ahead, was the approximate shape of the state of California.

Fische started his campaign by ratcheting up the attentiveness. He became Mr. Sensitivity. He made it a point to stop by Alicia’s desk several times a day whenever he was in town. He inquired after her health, her family, her work, and her aspirations. He traded bits of philosophy and what passed for business acumen. He carefully mixed the personal into the work-related. He maintained an air of propriety in these exchanges while continually testing where the border between that propriety and impropriety might lay, and whether the border might shift as he continued to pitch his subtle woo. He encouraged her to think of him as her mentor, ever willing to guide her through the intricacies of corporate life at Quilnutz.

Alicia ate it up. She wanted a champion. She wanted a lot of guidance and feedback. She had told me as much in our interview. Trouble was I didn’t have near as much time to devote to it as Fische. His title was Director of Executive Administration. You figure out what that’s supposed to mean. To me it meant that Fische’s job was bullshit while I had actual work to do. Alicia had actual work to do too, but Fische was eating up an increasingly unreasonable amount of her time. He was in her office constantly, leaning over her desk, chuckling over some insight or some shared intimacy while he helped himself to a view down her blouse. He came to town more and more often. They started taking their lunches together. What I saw as time spent feeding Fische’s libidinous ego, Alicia saw as career development. She was not being naïve. She was not even innocent, not by a long shot.

Things really came to a head when Alicia had breast augmentation surgery. She actually came to me about this. I guess she felt she had to since, technically at least, she still reported to me. She needed a couple of days off for a medical procedure. I said okay. She told me it was a female problem. I didn’t want to know the details. I said okay again. Then she told me it wasn’t a female problem in the way I’d probably thought, but was in fact breast implants. I was quiet for a long time trying not to let my face twitch, and then I said okay a third time. Then she told me a whole bunch of the details I had been hoping to avoid. Her husband wanted her to get the surgery. She couldn’t understand why, but she was willing to be the trooper, the dutiful wife, and do what she could to keep him happy. By the time she had laid it all out for me I actually felt a little sorry for her.

I have to say that the results were spectacular. I had seen women with boob jobs before, and not been overly impressed. I didn’t really understand what all the commotion was about. I think that my problem was that I had never known a woman in the before-and-after context of breast enhancement. Up until Alicia’s procedure, I had only known after. With Alicia the change was instantaneous and remarkable. She went overnight from merely curvy to full-on voluptuous. I have been a big fan of implants ever since.

The first time Fische saw Alicia after the surgery he left a trail of drool down the hallway. If I thought he spent too much time in her office before the implants, I figured he’d need to pitch a tent in there after. I was wrong. Instead he decided to take her out of town.

He told her he thought it would be a good idea for her to travel to the Florida facility for an open house that they were having. It would give her an opportunity to meet the Florida staff, meet some customers, and get a better idea of how things were done there with an eye to what might be worth incorporating into our processes in Arkansas. Alicia was anxious to go. She thought it would be a big boost to her career. It didn’t seem to register on either her or Fische that she would be leaving right in the middle of month-end closing when I needed her to be accumulating and reconciling the costs in our work-in-process and finished goods inventories—the job I had hired her to do.

I told her she couldn’t go. She went to Fische, and he called me and told me I needed to let her go. I told him I wasn’t against her going, I was only against the timing. He said they couldn’t move the open house to accommodate my closing schedule. I told him it wasn’t my closing schedule, it was the company’s closing schedule and it was the same every month. He told me to get over it. I went to my new boss, the vice president and manager of the division that had been Henry’s company. He was an import from another division of Quilnutz, but one who was at least willing to listen to reason. He called Alicia in to his office to discuss the situation. She came in tears and pitched a serious and unnerving fit about my apparent determination to keep her from developing into a fully realized cost accountant. I could hardly believe my ears. All I wanted her to do was stay in town and do her job.

My boss called Fische to impress upon him the importance of Alicia’s presence for the closing. Fische stood his ground. My boss gave up.

“You need to pick your battles,” he told me. “Fische is a director. You are a division controller. You can’t win.”

I was really beginning to hate working for Quilnutz. I had hoped that they would be more orderly, more logical, more businesslike in their decision-making than Henry had been. I had hoped that the combination of their good business practices and our products would create a synergy that allowed us to meet our potential. I had hoped that my one twelfth share of Henry’s company would grow under Quilnutz’s management into a real stake in my future. Instead I got counterintuitive decisions based on the prurient aspirations of venal and stupid men.

Day 56 - Interviewing in Disheviledekistan

          I donned my new suit this morning, and drove downtown for my interview with the recruiter. It was a truly odd experience. I was resplendent (if too brown) in superbly coordinated colors set off by a crisp white shirt. The recruiter, on the other hand, in addition to being late to work and therefore late to the interview, looked like a refugee from a failed Eastern European state.

His shirt was dingy, frayed, and wrinkled. It had a broad stripe in a depressing shade of purple that matched nothing else in his ensemble. He wore no jacket. His tie looked as if it had been tied by his palsied, arthritic grandmother and kept in his closet in its knotted state since her death some years ago. It featured a stain that I imagined to be beet—the first and only vegetable suggested by his impoverished appearance. His trousers were even more wrinkled than his shirt and pooled, two inches too long, around derelict wingtips. He was a mess, and had I met him on the street I would have been moved to offer him a few bucks to buy himself a meal. As it was I was visiting him in a posh office as a supplicant, hoping to persuade him to submit me to one of his clients for a job. I was not encouraged.

          To make matters worse the recruiter asked such basic and obvious questions that I suspected after a short time that he had not actually read my résumé. This was more than a little unnerving to me. The guy had called me to come for an interview based on the contents of my résumé, but he had no clear idea of what was in my résumé. Extrapolating from what I’d read about how résumés are searched online I came to realize that he’d found me by way of a keyword search of various job boards. Having matched the key words his search program was looking for, he apparently didn't feel the need to actually read the résumé. He was in his mid twenties—presumably with an abbreviated attention span honed on a variety of video games and cell phone texts. Reading two pages of the job history and accomplishments of a dried-up old geezer such as me was not likely to trip his trigger.

I like to chalk failed interviews up to learning experience. Even if you don’t get a job or at least move forward in the process toward a job, you can learn something. You can get some practice fielding questions, gain a greater level of comfort talking about yourself, and get better at pretending to be upbeat and confident. I’m afraid this one was just a waste of time.

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.

Day 34 - Clothes Make the Man

          I’ve always been something of a dandy—not a fully realized one as that requires considerably more disposable income than I’ve ever been able to muster—but I do appreciate and wear nice clothes to the extent practical. I like to think that I’ve got a good eye for color and texture, and I’m not afraid to take a fashion risk. I was the first of all my friends to adopt and abandon bell bottom trousers, Nehru jackets, double breasted suits, pleated pants, suspenders, cowboy boots, black tee-shirts with a sports jacket, two-tone shirts, jewel-tone dress shirts, Hawaiian shirts, and a raft of others over the years. I came by this condition honestly. My dad liked to dress up as well, and had a collection of ties that I covet to this day. His dad, my grandfather, was a tailor by trade and was always immaculately turned out.

          It is with considerable excitement then that I set out to get myself a new suit. It is with considerable chagrin that I realize that I am going to have to spend more money than I am comfortable spending to dress myself in a fashion equal to my aspirations. Not having that kind of cash, I’m going to have to compromise. That means a trip to a discount clothier. Not so bad really, but under the circumstances I’d rather be able to deck myself out smartly—to look as successful as I think I need to feel to get the job I think I ought to have.

            There’s been a lot written and said about how to dress for an interview, a job, success. Most of it has been less than helpful in the situations in which I’ve found myself over the course of my career. What’s written and popularized in the press pertains to, as a rule, big firms in big cities. My experience has been with small firms in small cities, and in these places anything too fashionable is viewed with a certain amount of suspicion.

          A company in Alabama was a case in point. When I started there all the men in the finance department were required to wear ties. Jackets were optional, but a dress shirt and a necktie were the uniform of the day. The CFO at the time was an older gentleman, always impeccably dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, and silk tie. The dress rule was his, and though there was some grousing from the good old boys, there was no real dissention. When the old gentleman CFO retired and the company brought in a younger, hipper, more assertive, and less gentlemanly replacement, the first thing to go was the necktie rule. A collective sigh of relief went up as the ties came off and the dress shirts were replaced with a diverse collection of colorful knits and short sleeves. Comfort was the new order of things, and given the Alabama propensity for 100 degree days from July into September not a minute too soon.

          I myself relished the new freedom. I spent a lot of time on the plant floor, and I felt that my effectiveness there was improved once I no longer had to worry about the possibility of ruining my ‘good’ clothes. Nothing spoils your day like getting machine oil on a $40 silk tie. Things went along swimmingly for a while, but gradually my internal sartorial discipline began to flag. This is perhaps because my waistline was expanding at an alarming rate, and the expense of accommodating it with ever larger clothing was getting to be a burden on the household budget. Rather than limit my intake of calories I opted for the less restrained but wholly more satisfying approach of buying cheaper clothes.

          So one day I found myself on the way to a meeting with executive management in the company of my boss, the division vice president—he resplendent in pressed wool slacks and a stunning sports jacket and me in a fleece sweater, brogans, and extremely commodious jeans. My boss took the opportunity to comment on my deteriorating mode of dress.

          “You know,” he said, “whenever someone asks me who is the baggy-pants clown that I’m always hanging out with, I have to tell them ‘That’s no clown. That’s my controller.’”

          I didn’t say anything at that point because, let’s face it, there was nothing I could say that would reflect well on my character. I could have advanced the arguments my children used on me when they were teenagers trying to get out of the house dressed as street toughs—‘It’s not how you dress that’s important; it’s what kind of person you are inside.’ As adults and parents we all understand that not only is that statement irrefutably true, it is utter bullshit. Why? For the simple reason that the world does not work that way. The world works on appearances. The world cares little for substance and character, nor has it since Machiavelli published The Prince in 1513. It is important to cultivate the appearance of character and virtue in the world, but if you want to prosper you need to stop short of actually possessing character and virtue. If it were otherwise accountants would flourish while politicians and salesmen would toil in oblivion.

          My boss went on, “If you would dress professionally you might be surprised to find that you are taken more seriously. You might even find that there is a place for you over in the corporate finance office. You’ve certainly got the talent. You just need to look the part.”

          Well there it was in plain language—Machiavellian principles fully realized in the less princely world of corporate America. You’re not going anywhere on talent and intelligence, not until you look the part. Appearance trumps ability…almost every time. The famous baseball player, Ted Williams, once said “I’ve found that you don’t need to wear a necktie if you can hit.” I wouldn’t say that this is the exception that proves the rule. The statement sounds remarkably similar to the arguments of my children. The only thing it proves to me is that baseball is not nearly the consummate metaphor for life that we would like it to be. It is a game played by boys who have never liked to wear ties. The workplace may like to talk about baseball around the water cooler or in the break room over coffee, but it is not an environment in which boys thrive who will not put on a tie and pretend to be grown-ups.

          I know when to take a suggestion. That night I went shopping on the way home from work. I stocked up on dress shirts, tailored slacks, and conservative neckties. Next day I showed up at work decked out in my splendid new duds. The reaction of my peers was less than comforting. Most thought that I must have scheduled a job interview. It occurred to me that if that’s what the executive management team thought, I probably wouldn’t be getting the kind of attention to which my boss had alluded. More likely I would be viewed with suspicion so long as I continued to overdress for my station. I was suddenly trapped between second and third, and baseball had become a more appropriate metaphor than I imagined just a paragraph ago.

          There is another apt Ted Williams quote: “God gets you to the plate, but once you’re there you’re on your own.”

          On my own I decided to keep wearing my new professional attire. If new clothes weren’t going to get me promoted, at least they seemed to be getting me noticed. If I wasn’t going to be taken seriously, at least I could keep them guessing. In the end I got the axe and the knit shirt boys got to stay. Sometimes it’s just hard to draw pertinent conclusions.

          An interview suit ought to be dark blue, either solid or in a muted pattern or stripe. In a pinch you may substitute black or dark grey. The shirt should be white. The tie should be striped. Everything I’ve read on the various job boards is in pretty specific agreement on these points. I don’t own a blue suit because I don’t look that good in blue. I do own a black suit, but I haven’t been able to button the jacket or the trousers for at least two years. This is the beginning of the compromises I am going to have to make.

          I don’t want to buy a blue suit because I don’t like blue suits. I don’t want to buy a black suit because I already own a black suit, and, like most overweight people, I live with the fantasy that one day I will begin to exercise and eat sensibly and lose the few pounds required to get back into my old clothes again. What I want to buy is a brown suit. I like brown. I’ve read that it is the new black. I think I know what that means, but I’m not sure that it was meant to apply to me. Because I like brown I’m going to apply it to me anyway.

          Job hunt gurus like blue because it is a sincere color. Wear blue and you come across as solid, substantial, sober, thoughtful, and mature. I’m not sure what brown says. No one has anything to say about brown because they’re all on the blue bandwagon. I think brown is sincere as well. I think brown is at least as sincere as blue—maybe more so, and here’s why. Every politician I’ve ever seen was wearing a blue, black or grey suit. Every stockbroker, banker, and insurance executive I’ve ever seen was wearing a blue, black or grey suit. Every lawyer I’ve ever seen was wearing a blue, black or grey suit. Now it’s just possible that in some utopian state of existence some of those politicians, stockbrokers, bankers, insurance executives, and lawyers may in fact be sincere, but the odds are certainly against it. Yet, owing to the blue, black or dark grey suits, all these charlatans appear to be sincere. There has to be a better litmus test for sincerity than the color of one’s suit if every scheming sneak thief bastard in the world is using his suit to proclaim his ethical worthiness.

I like brown. I think it is sincere, but even if it is not, at least it doesn’t proclaim sneak thief trying to look sincere or scam artist trying to disarm you with the appearance of inner merit. When I read over these last sentences and allow the full implications of what I think and what I’ve said to register, I begin to think that I may never get another job.