Smashwords Author Interview

Link to my author interview on Smashwords. Fun facts for fans. sorry, couldn't resist the alliteration.

https://www.smashwords.com/interview/JonahGibson

Day 262 – Big Chance (conclusion)

Juvenile Snook cruises the tank at Florida Oceanographic Coastal Center - Hutchinson Island

          I’m still trying to figure out what kind of lesson, if any, to take away from this discomfiting series of contacts with Volkswagen. I know I’m not alone in this. We all like takeaways. Usually, though, the lessons we want are what we could do differently to get a better outcome. In this case I don’t know. I did my best in the circumstances and that wasn’t good enough. Perhaps I already got the best outcome possible—that is to escape having to work for Volkswagen in general and in Chatanooga in particular. The more I think about it, the more I have to conclude that this is the case.

I was prepared to like VW as an employer. It certainly would have been the biggest company I ever worked for, and, if there is anything to economies of scale in terms of job satisfaction and career potential, would certainly be capable of providing excellent opportunities over time.

I have always admired VW. It is an innovative and progressive company. It makes good products that are well thought out in terms of the way they work and that suit the market. I have owned 4 of their cars in my lifetime—two new and two used. I could easily own more.

Volkswagen has an immodest vision for itself. Its goal is to become the biggest car manufacturer in the world. I think they have a legitimate shot at it. They are dogged in the pursuit of their aims. They have both the corporate chops and the historical DNA to make it happen. They were conceived in the midst of a quest for global domination and emerged from the ashes of its failure. To make matters easier, Toyota and GM are currently squirming in sticky pits of their own devising. The time is right for VW. It would seem, however, that whatever they do they are going to do it without me.

I never should have been brought to Chatanooga. It was a waste of time and money, mine as well as theirs. The board members I interviewed didn’t know why I was there. I didn’t know why I was there. I don’t know who did. The accounting manager seemed to have an agenda, but he did a lousy job of communicating what that was—at least to me, and apparently to the board guys as well.

Maybe he didn’t have time. Maybe he was stretched too thin. I don’t know. All I do know for certain is that, at the end of a long and arduous day of travel and discomfort, I didn’t feel any better about having interviewed the Germans than I would have about interviewing Ivan or Henry or any one of a handful of bozos from Albatross. I came away from the experience with the uneasy feeling that I had had a narrow escape, but from what I cannot say with any certainty.

          Here is what I think I learned: Even though VW is at the top of its game, it is not much better when it comes to managing its affairs than anyone else I have ever worked for. Poor communication and the bone-headed decisions to which it leads are not the exclusive franchise of small companies and small-time managers. The differences between top-flight companies and also-rans are measured in inches and hundredths of seconds, not yards and minutes. The best of companies suffer from the same dysfunctions, faulty precepts, hidden agendas, second guessing, and grandstanding power-plays that cripple their less successful competitors. That their results are better is often a matter of pure dumb luck and the fact that they are so big that their course is not easily diverted by petty deficiencies. This may be the true advantage of economies of scale.

          Volkswagen would have been a departure for me from my usual employment environment. I’ve always thrived in a smaller company. I’ve always been a big fish in a little pond. At VW I would have been a little fish in a big pond. I was going to try to be okay with that, but that may have been a big mistake on my part. I don’t want to do in desperation what I would never do in more serene circumstances.

I’m 62. I don’t need to thrive. I just need to survive until retirement. A big fish has to perform, and in a small pond the ways to do so are limited by the size of the pond itself. A small fish may need to perform too, but it also needs to devote a certain amount of its focus on not being eaten. Survival occupies a relatively larger amount of his energy. A big fish doesn’t compete with the other fish in its own pond. A big fish competes with other ponds. A small fish has to compete with all the fish in his own body of water. This means a small fish spends a lot of time looking back over its gills. In addition to knowing its job a small fish has to be adept at pond politics.

I’m not an aggressive predator. I like to work in concert with people. I don’t think it should be necessary for the rails of my career to be laid over the carcasses of my fellow workers. In fact I think that kind of success runs counter to the best interests of the organization I work for. Ultimately it is teams that succeed best, and teams are not generally made up of cut-throats and back-stabbers. Fierce competition within an organization weakens the organization.

Last week I was thinking of myself as a grasshopper. This week I’m a fish. I’m not a barracuda or a shark, though. I’m more like a snook. I like to hold behind structure where the current is slowest, conserving energy, waiting for opportunity to come floating by. This is probably not the best way to get ahead, but it is a style that suits me.

Snook do okay by it. They are prized game fish. Some of them grow quite large. The Florida record, near as I can tell, is 48 inches long and just short of 44 pounds—no great white, but a respectable fish and, perhaps more important to me, a fish that does not inspire fear and loathing as the big sharks do. Snook are admired, prized even, for their fighting ability, their speed, and their native cleverness. They are hard to catch. Snook occupy the middle ranges of the food chain. They manage this while still being essentially ‘lazy’ predators. I think that’s a worthy enough aspiration for an old guy like me. I’m content with it. Of course I’d never say that I was lazy in a job interview. Oh, wait…I kind’a did.

Day 262 – Big Chance (continued)

          The turnaround on the travel arrangements to Chatanooga was quick. The day after the video interview I had reservations for flights and a rental car and had directions from the airport to the leased VW headquarters downtown. The travel was scheduled for the next day—up in the morning and returning in the late afternoon. There was a connection in Atlanta. There is always a connection in Atlanta.

          I had time to reflect on the curious turn of events while I was in the air. I couldn’t believe that I was going to the next stage in the interview process. I felt there was something missing, but I couldn’t say what. Ted had been kind of non-committal in the video interview. Maybe he was embarrassed by my verbal gymnastics. Maybe he just didn’t want to seem too enthusiastic about me until he knew which way the wind was blowing with the accounting manager.

I never felt like I had established any kind of rapport with the accounting manager. For one thing he was hard for me to understand. He was a Mexican national. He had an accent, albeit a mild one, and he was soft spoken. These, coupled with my high frequency hearing loss and the vagaries of the audio connection at the video conference center had me struggling to understand what he said.

I have this problem a lot. My usual tactic is to nod my head and smile. I have no idea to what I might be agreeing. Since this was an interview and the results had some import for me, I really tried to focus on what he was saying. If I couldn’t piece it together to my satisfaction, I made him repeat himself. Mostly people hate to be made to repeat themselves. I know I do. I was afraid that my repeated requests for repetition were wearing thin with the accounting manager.

I thought he thought my answers to his questions were flippant and contrived. I thought he thought I was full of crap about being an Excel power user. I thought in the end he would be much happier with someone who had actual experience in the disciplines required by the particular job he was trying to fill.

I didn’t have any idea why they were flying me to Chatanooga on two days notice. I couldn’t work any of this out in the 2 ½ hours of flight time to Chatanooga. The best I could do for myself was resolve to chalk it up to practice if it all went south.

          All of these considerations had to do with the interview itself and the unusual way in which the circumstances had unfolded for me. I also had reservations about the job. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to live in Chatanooga. I’ve  been through it enough times to know it’s a lovely place. I’m equally sure that the people there are as nice as they can be.

In my experience, the further you get from the borders of the contiguous continental United States the more congenial and pleasant are the people to be around. I’m not making a judgment. I’m merely stating a fact. I love the people I know from New York, Virginia, Florida, Texas, California and Montana just as much as I love the people I know from Ohio, Oklahoma, Kansas and Colorado.

The fact is though, if I had to choose a place to live based purely on its citizenry, I would choose Oklahoma without any hesitation whatsoever. Why? Because I know that every twenty minutes or so in Oklahoma I am going to witness an act of uncommon civility. I know that in Oklahoma the driver behind me is not going to lay on his horn and flip me off if I am not already accelerating through an intersection as the light changes from red to green. I know that in Oklahoma when I do something stupid, as I know from long experience that I will, the Sooners who witness my failure will smile and shrug their shoulders as if to say, ‘Could’ve been me, Pard. Hope the rest of your day is better.’

There is a lot to be said for living in a place like that, and if you’ve ever done it you will forever after be calculating what you might be willing to give up to return.

          Now, having said all that, I have to say that I really don’t want to leave Florida. I have family here—family that needs me. It’s not just Nelson. My kids and grandkids are here too. They have medical issues of their own. It’s good for my wife and me to be handy to them. We can help.

Beyond that I like the climate. I like salt water. I like palm trees. I like seafood. I like that there is no snow or ice or sleet to stay the post people from their appointed rounds. I like the casualness of everything. I like sandals and bikinis, shorts and T-shirts, outdoor dining and Tiki themed bars. I don’t want to move to Chatanooga, to do work I don’t care for anymore, when I know I’ll be trying the whole time to figure out how to get back to Florida. I might have to do it, but I’m not going to like it. How much better would it be to get a job in Florida and not have to leave? Way, way better is what.

So I’m conflicted. I’m going to do an interview that I don’t understand why I got and that I don’t think I’m going to do very well at for a job I’m not sure I want in a place I’d rather not be. Still, under the circumstances, I’m committed to doing the best I possibly can…if only for the practice. I’ve remarked before that I was raised Roman Catholic. I can carry a boatload of baggage into almost any situation. Why should this be any different.

The actual interview took 18 minutes. It was over before it started, although it took a long time to start. I had to cool my heels for 45 minutes in the first floor lobby before someone came down from personnel to collect me. I say cool my heels, but there was nothing cool about it. It was hot as hell. The air conditioning either didn’t work or was just inadequate for the acres of glass that seemed to magnify the heat of the street outside. There were no chairs in the lobby either. It was torturous.

When I finally got upstairs I was put in a closet for a preliminary meeting with the accounting manager. He told me that I needed to tell the board members I was interviewing that I was being considered for one of two positions—the capital investment analyst and a general accounting position. That’s all he had to say. He was in and out in 30 seconds. I would like to have known why the board members didn’t already know this. It seemed odd to me that I needed to tell them what they were interviewing me for. That and this is the first I was hearing about the general accounting position. Something didn’t smell right…again.

The board guys were a little scary in a vaguely Eastern European kind of way. I’m sure they are wonderful men, good husbands, caring fathers, pillars of their community. Maybe it was the accents, or the accents in concert with the leather jackets and a level of dishevelment two days past needing a haircut. I don’t know. Germans can be imposing to the rest of us. I say this even though I am ¾ German myself. My German imperiousness is always getting the better of my Irish sensitivity.

Germans are almost always scary on TV and in the movies. I think the scariest character I ever saw, admittedly in a lifetime of avoiding scary movies, was the Gestapo officer in the black leather trench-coat in Raiders of the Lost Ark. That dude was evil.

Whenever Hollywood wants to make someone scary they make them look like Nazis. As evidence I submit Darth Vader’s WWII German helmet and the uniforms of the Imperial officers in Star Wars, Nazi imagery in Ralph Bakshi’s animated version of Lord of the Rings, and even the comic edginess of Cloris Leachman’s Nurse Diesel in High Anxiety. I know there are many others.

So I found these two guys from Germany to be intimidating. I may have been unfairly pre-disposed to this feeling, but that doesn’t make it any less real and I guarantee you they didn’t do anything to dispel it.

The first thing they wanted me to tell them was how much actual experience I had analyzing capital investments. I told them I had none. They asked me if I therefore wanted to terminate the interview. I told them I was being considered for two different positions. They told me that I was not. I decided it best not to argue with them.

I didn’t think they were packing Lugers, but I didn’t want to test that supposition either. I told them that I felt I could do the job they had in mind because I had a wealth of experience, but I was sorry to have to tell them that I had no direct experience with capital investments analysis. They asked a few perfunctory questions about the experience I had and told me they would be in touch. I walked out, stunned. It had gone even worse than I imagined.

The HR lady met me outside the door. She wanted to know how I felt it went.

“Not very well,” I said.

“Oh,” she asked, “why not?”

“Because it lasted less than twenty minutes,” I said.

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” she said. “They have a lot of people to see today. Every candidate has been allotted 22 minutes, and they are determined to stay on schedule.”

It didn’t feel right to me…no matter what she said.

Day 262 – Big Chance

          I scored another interview last week. This one had me excited for several days. It started with an e-mail from a fellow I used to work with at Albatross. He was something of a wit, but he was also knowledgeable, engaging, and extremely competent. We were both division controllers when we worked together. When he left to take another job at a home appliance manufacturer, all his work got assigned to me. This was in addition to my own work. I didn’t get any more money. By that time I was already used to that kind of treatment.

This fellow—we’ll call him Ted—once showed me a graphical report that he used when he had worked previously at BMW. It tracked production starts and deliveries against incoming orders and against budget. It was part of a group of indicators referred to as a dashboard, and its purpose was to alert management to trends that were likely to result in too much or too little inventory. The report was divided into bright red and green areas separated by a bright yellow warning track. When the trend lines were in the green, things were good. When the lines went into the yellow warning track, it was time for management to wake up and do something. When the lines went into the red area, someone was going to lose their job. Things were never ever supposed to get in the red.

Ted felt we should adapt this report to our own needs an Albatross. I agreed. I duplicated his formulas and entered some trial data from my own division. Where Ted had used bright primary colors, I elected to use pastels. For one thing I thought the pastels would use less ink, thereby saving the company a few cents a page. I also hated the glaring colors. I preferred the more restful shades of rose, canary, and sage. I showed a sample to Ted. He was not impressed.

He said, “The formulas are fine, but I prefer the heterosexual palette.”

At the time I thought this was the single funniest thing I had ever heard at work. It probably wasn’t, but I was under a lot of stress already and my emotional responses tended to be a little exaggerated. Still it was a pretty clever thing to say, and my estimation of Ted’s value as a human being surged upwards by a considerable amount as a result. When he left I was sorry to see him go…and not just because I had to do his job for free.

According to his e-mail Ted had just taken a job with Volkswagen of America at a new assembly plant they are building in Chattanooga. He thought they might have a place for me as well. I sent my résumé.

          A few days later I got a call from HR with some preliminary questions about my experience and credentials. They told me a little about the job they thought I might fit. It was a capital assets analyst position—something I have never done, but also something I thought I could easily assimilate. I told them I was interested even though it would mean taking a lower annual salary and having to relocate. It’s a buyer’s market for labor. I judged that the potential for improving my situation at VW far outweighed the initial negatives.

          HR called back next day to schedule a video conference interview. I had to drive up to Vero Beach to a video center and talk to three people from management over a video connection. The three managers turned out to be the young woman I had already talked to from HR, Ted, and the accounting manager. I figured I had a pretty good chance of coming off well.

          I like video conferencing. As a rule you get two screens to look at. One displays the people at the other end of the line. The other displays your own image. It’s like you get to constantly check yourself in the mirror while you talk without it being immediately obvious to the people you are talking to what you are doing. This is great interview feedback. If you lose your poker face or nervously play with your earlobe or dart your eyes around the room like you are being probed by alien life forms, you will know right away that you need to adjust your on camera mannerisms before it is too late. I wish all my interviews were on video conference.

          I suppose that for some people there is a danger that they will be so distracted by their own image that they will be unable to focus on the job at hand. These are the people who are too attractive—or think they are—for their own good. If they also happen to be enthralled with the sound of their own voice, they will be doubly handicapped. Fortunately I am not one of these. I know such people exist though. I have met some, and you probably have too. You can read about some others here, and here.

There is a FaceBook group called Sexy Accountants. I used to belong. I joined because I thought I could get the sexy accountants to read this blog. I was especially interested in getting them to read the entry titled Budget Burlesque. It didn’t work. Apparently accountants who think they are sexy are too self-absorbed to read about other would-be sexy accountants. If you go to this group’s page and review the list of members you will immediately notice that the sexy accountants mostly are not. There is maybe one notable exception. I’ll leave it to you to decide who that is.

          Now as it turned out, the video interview with Volkswagen that I thought would be a cake walk was instead fairly arduous. They asked hard questions that forced me to get creative in responding about my abilities and shortcomings. The accounting manager was especially pointed in some of his questions. I guess he was making up for what he assumed would be ‘softball’ questions from my friend, Ted. He wanted to know a lot about my management style, which I found odd as the job was not a management position.

He also asked a lot of typical questions from the HR interview handbook—questions like what are your three best and your three worst qualities in terms of performing this job, and give specific examples of each from your work experience. I know how to answer that question, but that doesn’t make it easy. It’s one of those questions where you are expected to seem like you are considering it on the fly and thinking on your feet, but where you have actually rehearsed the answer so that it conveys a precise message while sounding spontaneous. It is bullshit. There is nothing that answering this question skillfully can convey to the interviewer except that you are a good liar. Of course a good liar may be precisely what they are looking for.

I like to turn questions like this upside down and then talk my way out of the shambles I create. For instance, I like to say that my best quality is that I am lazy. Saying that never fails to get the interviewer’s attention. They can’t believe anyone would say that in an interview. They always need to hear more, and they never fail to pay close attention to the explanation.

I tell them that I don’t necessarily mind hard work, but I hate having to do anything twice. I hate wasting my time, so it is important for me to do everything correctly the first time. When you get it right the first time, you don’t have to do it again. It’s a simple and rewarding concept. To execute it you go just a little slower than everyone seems to think that you ought. You spend a little time thinking about what you have to do and how you are going to do it before you start. This kind of thing seems to satisfy an interviewer because, I suspect, they don’t know how to think the process through to its logical conclusion.

In practice, if someone sees you sitting at your desk thinking, they are apt to surmise that you are thinking about what you are going to have for lunch or about the colors and textures of the receptionist’s lingerie. They are apt to think that you ought to be working as hard as the grunts across the hall frantically spinning their wheels off in the wrong direction.

The result is that your work outcomes will shine but your performance reviews will be bad. I try to forestall bad performance reviews by keeping my door closed. That way I get excellent performance reviews right up until the moment that I get fired. My managers like my results, but they can’t stand that they don’t have any idea what’s on my mind. It makes them nervous.

The Volkswagen accounting manager wanted to talk about my familiarity with Microsoft Excel. I told him I was an early adopter—that I had been using Excel since the early eighties. I told him that I had taught Excel as an adjunct instructor in a state university in Arkansas. I told him I was a power user. He commented that I must then know about the several glitches in the Excel code that produce erroneous results. I did not. He insisted that I must, else I wouldn’t in fact be a power user. I apologized for not knowing what he was talking about. I told him that I had used Excel extensively on a daily basis for decades and had never run into a problem. I couldn’t say there were no problems, only that I had never experienced them. He nodded in a dismissive way, and that was pretty much the end of the interview. He said they would contact me within a week or so.

I thought I had really blown the interview at that point. I figured the guy had taken my different experience with Excel as evidence that I was full of crap, and that my chances were blown out of the water. I left the video center and drove home, dejected. I was even a little pissed at Bill Gates, and not for the first time in my life.

Before I got all the way home—the trip is about an hour—the HR lady called to invite me to Chatanooga for a face-to-face meeting with some board members that were coming in from Germany. She said they would make all the arrangements and e-mail me the details. I honestly didn’t know what to think about that past that I must have fallen down a rabbit hole or slipped into a rip in the fabric of space and time. It was not a comfortable feeling. 

Day 227 – Spilling the Beans, Paying the Price

          I was very excited one evening several weeks ago to get a call from a CFO who had seen my résumé online, and wanted to talk to me about a controllership at his company. I was excited for two reasons. First he was not a hyper-caffeinated recruiter trying to make a name for himself by pulling the trigger hundreds of times in rapid succession without discerning a clear target (an actual job) or checking his ammo (reading my résumé.) I’m beginning to think of this as the video game approach to modern recruitment. No, the guy who called was a real executive with a real company who wanted to discuss a real position and thought I might be a real possibility because he had really read my résumé.

          The second reason I was excited is that we seemed to get on famously. We had similar attitudes, similar aptitudes, and our business sensibilities seemed to me to be as in tune as they could be. The more we talked the better it got.

          The company was a second generation décor jobber that had carved out a nice little niche for itself in the international hospitality industry. They weren’t looking to grow exponentially. They didn’t have unreasonable expectations. They weren’t acquisitive. They weren’t interested in selling out. They were interested in growing in profitability by improving their purchasing, service, and delivery efficiencies. They wanted to take a methodical and systematic approach to these improvements. I thought they were perfect for me.

          To add to the intrigue, the CFO wanted me to send him a one page letter on any topic whatsoever. If I was passionate about cars, for instance, I should write about what cars appealed to me and why. If I was interested in the cultivation of exotic orchids, I should write about that. He didn’t really care what it was about. It didn’t have to be about an interest. It could be, quite literally, anything under the sun.

          Some people would be intimidated by an open ended assignment like this. I was not. I am not afraid of a blank page. I love creative writing exercises. Not only that, I excel at them. I’ve participated in enough of them to know. If performing well in creative writing exercises were all that was required of men in order to attract women, I would have a harem of beauties that would be the envy of every randy mogul and every over-indulged sultan in history. Fortunately, both for me and for womankind, more is required. If people were generally compensated for excelling at timed, impromptu writing exercises in a competitive environment, I could quit looking for a job and just attend writer’s conferences for the rest of my days, thus assuring myself of a comfortable living. I’m not throwing down a gauntlet. I’m just saying that this little exercise assigned by the CFO, who I was sure was about to become my new boss, was well within my comfort zone.

          The CFO and I ended our conversation on that note. I would provide the required letter via e-mail the following day. He would call me back as soon as he had read and digested my brilliance. We would proceed from there.

          I set to work immediately on the letter. I decided that what he really wanted was a window into the soul of me. He had proposed writing about a passionate interest because he thought an avocation that burned with some intensity would better illuminate the dark recesses of my inner self. I have two such passions. One is for writing. The other is my faith. I decided to write about both of them and, in what I thought was a stroke of self-promoting genius, to discuss how they informed and guided my working life.

          I reasoned that ultimately this CFO was going to have to make a choice about my qualifications, skills, and values and how those would frame my suitability for the job he needed to fill. Making those connections for him seemed to me to be the surest way to convince him that I was his man. My letter was a masterful mix of subtlety and candor, deftly connecting the lessons of my pursuits to my professional development and to the ethical foundations of my life at work. Beyond this it was calculated to make me seem as interesting, intelligent, humorous, temperate, equable, and humble as I, on my best days, believe myself to be. Apparently it was not enough.

          Two days went by with no word. I sent another e-mail—return receipt requested—inquiring as to whether or not he had received my submission. Another two days went by with no response. I called. The new custodian of my future was in a meeting and not to be disturbed. I hadn’t asked that he be disturbed, so I thought this information, relayed to me by a brusquely efficient personal assistant, was, if not suspect, at least a little heavy-handed. I left a message. A week went by. I sent another e-mail stating that, at the risk of becoming a pest, I was anxious to get some feedback on my assignment. I have yet to hear anything in return.

          This turn of events is a mystery to me. The guy indicated he was going to move quickly on his decision. We had rapport. We were simpatico. I felt that I had acquitted myself in exemplary fashion on the letter writing assignment. I can’t imagine that I was so far afield in my assessment of the situation that I don’t even merit a courtesy response to my inquiries. Even a perfunctory e-mail telling me they had decided on another candidate would be better treatment than I got.

          I have gone as far as I am willing to go. Not only that, I have gone as far as the guy I described in my letter is willing to go. I am interesting, intelligent, humorous, temperate, equable, and humble. I am not annoying, and I am not interested in becoming so.

I am annoyed, however. I have officially had it up to ‘here’ with folks who lead me down a path only to abandon me deep in the woods without apology or explanation. This is something I would never dream of doing to someone else, yet it seems that it keeps being done to me. What’s up with that? 

Day 178 - Jobs, Lies, and Videotape

          I scored an interview last week, the first one in this area. It wasn’t a recruiter either. It was a real job. There have been no listings for controllers or CFOs in this area. I decided to lower my sights some. Now that we have offloaded so much of our stuff and cut our living expenses to the bone I can actually get by on a lot less money than I’m used to making. The job I interviewed for was an assistant controller position for an outfit that publishes contract bid lettings for construction contractors. The salary range is less than half what I used to make, but realistically that’s still four times what I get in unemployment benefits. It’s amazing to me how many different ways I’ve had to adjust my thinking.

          The HR manager called to set up the appointment. She e-mailed me directions to the office. Included in her e-mail, which I didn’t actually read until it was too late to respond, was a request to reply to her explaining why I was willing to work for so much less money. I figure this has to be as problematic for potential employers as it is for me—maybe more so. Anyway I went to the interview without responding. The interview was with the controller, a pleasant enough young man probably 20-25 years younger than me. His concern was whether I would be able to adjust to working for him when I had obviously been used to having a lot more authority and autonomy in my previous positions. This is a good question, one I wasn’t really prepared for as I hadn’t really thought about it. I was more hung up on the money issue.

I think I answered it pretty well. I told him that I was all about the work and that as long as I was engaged and making a contribution it didn’t matter to me who I was taking direction from. Besides with 30 years experience I wasn’t going to need very much direction, a happy circumstance that was going to free up some of his time that would otherwise be applied to managing me. This seemed to satisfy him. We got along very well. He told me the office was full of women—the whole office, not just the accounting department. He said that in terms of men it would just be him and me.

I told him about the question the HR manager had asked in her e-mail, and that I hadn’t been able to respond. He said they were worried that once the economy had recovered I would bolt for a better paying position. I knew this. It’s certainly a legitimate concern. The truth is that of course I would. Who wouldn’t leave a junior position for more than twice the money?

I knew I had to lie. The controller knew I had to lie, else he would have asked the question right away. It was the only thing either of us really cared about.

I did have a pretty good story though. I told him about Nelson. I told him that I knew I was going to be settling for less money when I decided to move down here to take care of Nelson, that money wasn’t the issue anymore. I was here because my family needed me to be here, and I had altered my lifestyle and my expectations to make it work to everyone’s benefit. I wasn’t about to change all that for more money.

It was a good lie because it was almost true. He acted like he believed me, but I didn’t get the job. The HR manager e-mailed again on Friday to tell me they were going with another candidate.

Here’s another problem with the economy. How many people besides me are regularly put into positions where their only logical recourse is to lie? I’m guessing millions. And why is that? We’ve got this whole shell game built up around the process of finding a job to the point where everybody is spinning everything on both sides of the desk.

Employers are spinning stories about the health of their company and the nature of the workplace environment. Candidates are spinning stories about their experience and its relevance, about their willingness to do stuff they’d really rather not. The interviewers are asking questions calculated to determine the best liar from among the candidates that were chosen based on how compelling the fictions were in their résumés.

If they videotaped the process and hooked everybody up to polygraphs, no one would ever get or take a job. Is it any wonder, given the nature of the selection process, that we have the occasional crisis of ethics in the business community? This is how it is in the best of circumstances. A recession just exacerbates the whole mess.

Day 91 - The Forest and the Trees

          This was another day without anything of interest in the job search, although I did get a call from Gina, the HR manager who had to witness my termination. She got canned too, several weeks after my last day. She called to make sure that I had applied for unemployment benefits. I have not. I never have. I never thought I would, and it wouldn’t have occurred to me in any event that I could apply for unemployment while I was still getting severance. Not so, according to Gina. Severance, apparently, is not earned wages for unemployment purposes. Severance is not owed compensation for work performed. Severance is largesse. It is a gift, although I never would have characterized it as such. I might call it hush money, a bribe not to try to do the right thing, but never a gift.

          What unemployment benefits I receive will, of course, be charged against my former employer’s experience rate. Knowing this I have decided to apply. I qualify to receive $275 per week, a paltry sum compared to my former earnings and my severance, but decidedly better than the zero I will be getting after January. It won’t prevent me from having to move, and it won’t even cover my expenses after I move, but it will keep me in groceries and gas money while I continue to look for work. It is surely best to get it in place now before I really need it.

When and if we have to move, there is another place to live besides Brian’s house in Lakeland. That is with Madeline’s dad, Nelson. Nelson lives on Florida’s east coast near one of Madeline’s sisters. He has some fairly serious health issues and he is nearly 90 years old. He doesn’t want to go into a home or an assisted living facility because he doesn’t want to be surrounded by ‘old’ people. If Madeline and I were to move in with him, we could help with his care, run his errands, and otherwise ensure that he is able to stay in the home where he is comfortable and where he can still exert a certain amount of independence and control over his life.

*****

          The practice of mislabeling inventories set Albatross on the path to its first of several reorganizations while I was there. DeLeon acted in concert with his lieutenants, one of whom was the production manager at my division. He was the guy being made to look bad by Ben’s premature completion of parts. What was actually happening was that the cabinetry and other parts for the boats were made in the main plant on one side of the street, then brought to our side of the street to be installed in the hulls. These parts were being shipped incomplete. The boat division was absorbing all the rework hours to complete parts that had been shipped to us in an unfinished state by the furniture division.

          The furniture division looked good. The boat division looked bad. DeLeon had shifted his problem to a place where, if he couldn’t make it go away, at least he could make it someone else’s fault. The boat production manager was complicit in all this. As a reward for fading the heat he was put in charge of a larger plant in the north end of the state, and the boat division got a new general manager. Let’s call him Jim Poole.

          I was actually consulted on this change, although for what reason I have not a clue. The HR director called me one day to ask if I knew anyone who had the experience to head our division. It turned out that I did know a fellow who had impressed me with his background and abilities in production management at Quilnutz. I gave his name to the HR director and then promptly called him myself to alert him to the opportunity. He was interested.

          After a week or so of dithering on DeLeon’s part we hired someone with no boat experience. I had to wonder why. The HR guy indicated to me that DeLeon had never seriously considered the fellow I had suggested. In fact he had already decided on Poole before anyone bothered to ask me if I knew a qualified candidate. I can only assume that DeLeon wanted another name in the hopper to make it look like he had chosen Poole from among a number of qualified candidates.

          As it turned out Poole’s principal qualification was that he was even more ignorant than DeLeon, a happenstance that I’m sure gave DeLeon a comfortable assurance that he wouldn’t have any difficulty getting Poole to buy into his harebrained schemes.

          Poole turned out to be a change agent. It’s hard to believe, looking back on it, that someone so gloriously inept could exercise enough influence to change the course of an entire company, but he did, and not for the better either. That’s another story, though.

          The most momentous thing that happened next had to do with the production manager that Poole replaced—the one who was sent to the North Alabama plant to preside over a doubling of capacity there—the one who along with Ben DeLeon managed to tank the company for the first time.

          The school fixtures business was Albatross’s bread and butter. School desks, lockers, and bleacher sets were the core products and the reason for Albatross’s success and longevity. While Richard Hardin had everybody from the board of directors to the janitorial staff committed to expanding into the commercial fixtures business and doubling the boat business, school fixtures would remain Albatross’s most important segment.

Everyone knew this. Everyone believed in the school business as the bedrock on which Albatross was built. Everyone expected the school business to remain stable, viable and strong. This faith was so deep and abiding that in effect everyone believed that we could royally screw up the commercial fixtures and boat segments, and no matter how bad things got there, the school segment would always be there generating the cash and profits to keep us not just afloat, but healthy. Everyone underestimated Ben DeLeon’s capacity to bring the 75 year old company to its knees.

          The plan was to move production of the largest, most complicated, and highest volume stadium bleachers to the north Alabama plant in order to make room at the main plant for the new commercial fixtures lines. This was to reassert Albatross’ competitiveness in its usual markets, which had been eroded somewhat by the recent entry of two new companies into the school fixtures business.

Moving production to North Alabama presented a raft of problems that it would seem, in retrospect, were not adequately considered beforehand. The North Alabama facility was a sleepy little backwater by comparison to the main plant. It had never produced a bleacher set, let alone anything as complicated as the one we were moving there. It had only ever made our simplest and lowest volume school desks. It had never produced anything in the volume it would now be expected to produce.

If anyone had thought about it at all, they would have realized that they were going to exhaust the available local labor supply to get to the production volume we wanted, and would then have to go in search of production employees at the local rehab facilities, half-way houses, and homes for the mentally challenged. To compound the staffing problem, there were no clearly documented work instructions detailing the processes required to assemble the bleachers.

          To sum up, we were going to double production of a product at a facility that had never built that product before, a facility with inadequate access to staffing resources, with little or no training resources, and with inadequate documentation of assembly processes. This effort was going to be overseen by a manager who had already demonstrated that he was unable to recover from manufacturing bungles and snarls foisted on him by his boss, Ben DeLeon.

          It seems obvious, when you state the problems that succinctly, that this was a disaster in the making. You might be tempted to excuse those in charge for failing to recognize this before the fact because hindsight is always so much clearer and easier than foresight, but the fact is that many people knew this was going to be a serious problem and tried to sound the alarm before the whole thing went off the rails.

          One fellow in particular, the Alabama controller who had hired me and had, prior to assuming that job, been the controller of the North Alabama plant, circulated a memo stating clearly what was likely to happen and why. He was not just ignored; he was roundly spanked by the powers that were.

          No one wanted to hear about failure. Mention of failure was politically incorrect. Probably everyone in a position to do anything about it was afraid to bring the subject up to Richard Hardin because they already understood that the result would be another of his blistering counseling sessions. Eventually the Alabama controller was fired for not being a team player. Talk about irony.

          Like anything huge, this disaster took a long time and a lot of money to build. All the while it was tended lovingly by DeLeon and his new plant manager. There were some sign posts along the way, but they were largely ignored. There were some rumors and rumblings heard occasionally from long term employees in North Alabama who could see what was going on, but who had also seen what happened to the Alabama controller for daring to mention his reservations.

          The biggest, the most glaring, of these sign posts was the huge build up of undelivered inventory at the North Alabama plant. It couldn’t be delivered because it wasn’t finished. It was classified as finished on the balance sheet of course, but it wasn’t—DeLeon’s favorite trick come to roost in a new place.

No one in the corporate finance management group saw this alarming build-up because they were too busy chasing accounting minutia for the UK management group. The UK boys liked a robust analysis. They liked a lot of detail. They liked their charts and graphs and trend lines and a whole raft of other analytical esoterica. It was a classic case of not being able to see the forest for the freaking trees.

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day 82 - The Unbearable Lightness of Almost Not Being

          The drive from Orlando to Clearwater isn’t so pleasant as one might hope. There’s always a lot of traffic in I-4, and everyone is in a hurry. The landscape is flat and overbuilt with strip malls and tourist attractions on the Orlando end, transitions to endless stretches of scrub palmetto in the middle, and finally becomes industrial corridor as you come into Tampa. The only pretty stretch is the bridge over Tampa Bay between Tampa and Clearwater. I had plenty of time to reflect on what my interview with Henry’s son might portend.

          On the one hand it was kind of exciting. I knew it wasn’t up to me to convince them I could do the job. They already knew that I could. The job would be mine if I wanted it. The burden of proof was going to be on them. They were going to have to convince me that the job was worth having. Given my history with them they were going to have to go some distance to make a case.

          I already had a pretty good idea that they had fallen on hard times. The boat industry is particularly sensitive to consumer mood swings in a troubled economy. Boats are expensive and unnecessary. Even for the well heeled, the purchase of a boat almost always requires financing, especially in the market price ranges where Henry operates. While the higher end market is somewhat insulated from downturns in normal circumstances, the current recession is broad and deep and scary, and the financing sources have all but disappeared. The boat industry is comatose. The manufacturers who were setting the world on fire when I first went to Albatross are now reorganized, sold, or padlocked. Henry is still standing, but I don’t think he can be long for this world. If he’s been sensible about managing his cash he may be able to hang on trading used boats and taking orders for new ones from the few customers who are not affected by the economy. If he’s overextended and/or trying to build inventory on spec, he’s screwed.

          I saw encouraging signs and signs of disaster when I pulled onto the lot. There was a lot less inventory on the lot and in the water than the last time I was there, and that is a good sign indeed. Henry always saw inventory as a store of value in spite of my many and repeated attempts to convince him that his inventories were killing him. With low inventory levels he just may be positioned to weather the storm. On the other hand I also noticed several motorcycles, two Hummers, and a sports car out front under the sign. This means Henry and his family are selling their toys. That is a bad sign. Henry is always happy to trade his toys, but he would never put them out front like distressed merchandise unless things were truly…distressed.

          I met with Henry’s son, let’s call him Stew. Stew acted as if he was happy to see me. We’ve never gotten along very well, Stew and I. I always thought he was spoiled and greedy and eaten up with unenlightened self-interest. We had a conversation on the phone once that devolved into name calling and threats of physical violence. When Stew offered to come by my office and whip my ass I told him to come ahead on and try because I would yank his artificial leg off his stump and beat him around the head with it. Yes, that was me, threatening bodily harm to a handicapped individual. When I think back on it, I am embarrassed by what must seem cowardice at worst and a complete lack of sensitivity at best. The fact is that Stew could easily clean my clock any day of the week, artificial leg or not.

          I used to refer to Stew as the poster boy for nepotism. I thought it was hugely clever, and I got a lot of laughs using it around people who knew him. This was before I met the poster boy for ADHD, the poster boy for heartlessness, the poster boy for the listening impaired, the poster boy for misogyny, and others too numerous to mention. Nepotism lost its luster amongst a whole litany of maladies that cause things to go seriously wrong in business. There are way too many poster boys, and it seems that I have met them all.

          Stew got right down to business. Things were as bad as I imagined. Henry’s floor plan lender was pulling his credit line. The bank had given Henry 90 days to find another source of financing before they shut him off. This would put Henry out of business overnight. Henry’s daughter was leaving because she didn’t want to be there to record the end. The ugly truth was that Henry was not in default. In fact the company was actually in pretty decent shape given Henry’s history. I guess Stew had been keeping him honest. The problem was entirely the bank’s, but the bank was going to make it Henry’s by pulling the plug. Meanwhile Henry and Stew want me to help them get out of this trick box. Unfortunately they don’t want to make a serious commitment to me to get me to help them. They don’t want to pay to relocate me. They don’t want to give me any benefits. They don’t want to pay me what I’m worth. They don’t want to give me any staff. They don’t want to make it a permanent arrangement. What they want is to pay me less than half of what I made last year—an amount that adjusted for inflation is less than Henry offered me to go to work for him 18 years ago. And they don’t want to take advantage of my ability to actually help them either. Rather they want me submerse myself again in the daily grind of bookkeeping and meaningless report generation while they finish driving the nails into the coffin. You may have gathered by now that I’ve decided to pass.

          I spent some time with the daughter to get her spin on things. Her biggest problem is that although they’ve cut everyone’s overtime and not given out any bonuses or raises, Stew refuses to cut his enormous salary. I don’t know how much it is, but she seemed to think that it was obscene under the circumstances. Last I heard Stew was knocking down about $250 thousand so I’m guessing that ‘obscene’ must be somewhere north of $300K.

          I went to lunch with Stew and Henry. Henry looks terrible. He is a broken man—a shadow of his former formidable self. He’s had some health issues, and the business has to be weighing heavily on him. He still talks a good game though, and seems not to be overly concerned about the bank's latest play. He may be right. If they’re in too deep, and they may well be, they won’t be able to liquidate Henry’s inventory if they just shut him down. Henry will have to help them, and that means they’ll have to make some concessions along the way. Henry may make out okay in spite of his precarious situation. He’ll just have to do it without me. I could actually help him. I know exactly what to do and exactly how to present it to mollify the bank. It might not work—especially if the bank is motivated by its own troubles, which seems likely at this point, rather than Henry’s financial condition—but it’s the best shot he’s got. He’s too cheap to take it, and I’m too used up to do it for nothing.

          Henry’s wife came by to see me before I headed back to Orlando. Her last round of chemo hasn’t helped her much. She looks good all things considered, but she’s down to about 80 pounds. She was her usual gracious and effervescent self, although she couldn’t hide the strain it is on her to just get around. It’s too sad really to see her like this. I’ll be surprised if she lives more than a few months. One good thing—she’s learned to hug really well. I imagine it has to do with the unbearable lightness of still being when you know you won’t be for long. She should become the patron saint of long suffering wives of difficult men.

Day 81 - Golden Boy

          I got a call from Henry’s son this morning. He and Henry are currently operating another yacht business in Clearwater, Florida. Henry’s daughter has been doing their accounting, but she is leaving to take another job in North Carolina. Henry wants me to come over and take her place. This is almost attractive at the moment, although I’ve had enough experience with Henry to know I’ll have to be very careful how I proceed from here in order not to get on the short end of the ‘bidness’ yet again. Still, they know me and I know them, and if they can make the money right this could be just what I’m looking for. I’m driving over there tomorrow to see exactly what they’ve got in mind.

*****

          When I left Quilnutz, I gave 6 weeks notice. I was teaching a class of high school students at my church in preparation for their receiving the sacrament of confirmation. I didn’t want to leave them until we were through, and confirmation wasn’t scheduled until the end of April. Albatross was okay with this, and Quilnutz was happy to have sufficient time to find a suitable replacement although they wasted several weeks of that time trying to convince me to stay.

A Fine End to Arkansas

          After two years of almost constant grief at Quilnutz, I was suddenly a lustrous resource they couldn’t afford to lose. They promised to match the salary that Albatross had offered. They offered to move me to Florida. They treated me with an enormous amount of respect and deference. Finally they put me on the company jet and flew me to Florida to pick my brains in a week long conference about systems and accounting issues facing the whole company. They even let me interview some of the candidates who’d applied to replace me.

I talked to three applicants and recommended the one I thought would be the best fit. They picked another candidate, one I hadn’t even talked to. They felt they wanted someone younger with higher class credentials. They were looking for a guy on a faster career track. I had recommended a more desperate guy, one who was more likely to put up with their crap. Their last act of second guessing my considered opinion worked out way better for me than it did for them.

Their new guy couldn’t start until my absolute last day. That meant I only had one day to train him. I did the best I could. He was a bright and personable young man, and he had good experience although not in our business. Things were going pretty well until we got into the financial statements early in the afternoon. He was surprised—no shocked—to find that we had been losing money. It seems that no one he’d talked to thus far had bothered to tell him that things weren’t going so swimmingly for us. He seemed pretty distracted by this new and unsettling bit of information for the rest of the day, but still managed to make some sense of what he was going to have to do. Corporate finance was going to send my favorite analyst down to help him with closing so I didn’t worry about it too much.

I had a big party that week-end. All my friends came from work, from church, from my writers’ group. It was a big deal. I had a grand time. I drank too many martinis, swapped funny stories, got slapped on the back by a lot of well-wishers. It couldn’t have been any better. Monday I packed up two weeks worth of clothes and set out for Alabama. My wife was going to join me when we sold our house. I stopped by Quilnutz on my way out of town to say my final good byes. Two things of note happened.

First, and perhaps most surprising under the circumstances, Alicia gave me a hug and a card. I opened the card. She had signed it with ‘love.’ I don’t know if she meant it or not, or to what extent. If she had any affection for me at all, she had a strange way of showing it—not unlike Henry who regularly professed his love for me, often at the very moment he was trying to fleece me. I would love to have been able to give Alicia the benefit of the doubt, but the fact is that she had enlisted with Fische to make the previous two years of my life, years that should have been exciting and fruitful, become instead rife with frustration and disappointment.

The second surprise of the day was that my replacement had not shown up. Apparently he spent the week-end stewing over the accumulated losses and decided that it was not quite the opportunity that he’d been led to believe. It was too late for me to do anything other than gloat. I tried to do it in a nice, mature, and unassuming way. There was no one there from corporate to see it anyway.