Day 124 - Slouching toward Decrepitude

          I miss Bud a lot. I’m not really sure why this is. I haven’t really known him a very long time, and most of the time I have known him I’ve also known that he was sick and not likely to survive his illness. I had plenty of time, in other words, to prepare for his death. So here in the realization I ought to find resignation, acceptance, closure, and peace in the finality of it, but I don’t.

I want Bud back. Bud and I had an affinity that I can’t explain…or maybe can, but don’t want to admit. I find the things that I miss most about him are his least redeeming qualities. I miss his stinking breath. I miss his messy eating habits. I miss the tortuous way he got up off the floor to go do his business. I miss his general slovenliness and his abiding uselessness. When I think of all the things I miss about Bud I realize that, except for (hopefully) the bad breath, these are all attributes that I possess in equal measure.

I haven’t eaten a meal in recent memory that I didn’t get part of on my shirt. I’ve taken to telling people that at my age and with my history of colon cancer it’s important to keep an accurate record of what I eat. I keep mine on my shirt.

It takes me forever to get up out of a chair. It takes me an average of 28 seconds to get out of our car. I know this because my grandson times me. He got tired of waiting for me. He’s usually out of the car and inside our destination before I even get my seatbelt off. Putting a stopwatch on my torpor seems to him like a good way to occupy otherwise wasted time just waiting. He takes a lot of pleasure in announcing my times to the general amusement of the rest of the family. If I had anything to leave I would consider writing him out of my will.  

Now that I’m unemployed I just putter around getting in other people’s way. My wife often has to park me in a corner when we go shopping together so that I don’t impede the flow of traffic up and down the aisles of the stores. Bud and I were images of one another. We were old men sliding inexorably into decrepitude, and both grown useless as the tits on a boar hog. This is why I mourn Bud so much. It’s as if a big part of me has gone missing.

*****

There was a point in the midst of all the turmoil at Albatross where it seemed as though my star was in its ascendency. It was short lived. This happened when the new CFO, let’s call him Quentin Parks, asked me to assume the duties of the Operations Controller in addition to my own. This was to be a short term assignment that would be made permanent if I acquitted myself well. I planned to acquit myself well. There was, of course, a monkey wrench waiting in the wings for the opportunity to hurl itself into the mechanics of my forward progress. Let’s call him Rod Chandler.

Rod was a nemesis of monumental proportions, although I didn’t realize that at first. Rod was the new controller of the North Alabama plant. Rod had a career track in mind, and that track intersected mine. My problem was that where my career track was a passive thing that went where I thought the company needed it to go, Rod was actively engaged in mapping his track to take him where he wanted to be.

Where he wanted to be was where I thought I was going to end up if I acquitted myself well. So while we were both headed for the same destination, I remained blissfully unaware that I was in a competition. I had a huge amount of work and responsibility to take care of in order to acquit myself well. Rod on the other hand, less blissful and infinitely more aware, arranged to have nothing to do but lay track.

I know this because the old controller of the North Alabama plant complained to me about it. The old controller was trying to retire. He had announced his retirement, and the company had hired Rod to replace him. The old controller agreed to stay on and train Rod in the particulars of the job.

Even in the worst circumstances, this shouldn’t have taken more than a couple of months. Rod was, after all, a degreed accountant with years of experience in manufacturing as an assistant controller and controller. He didn’t need to be trained. He only needed to be shown where things were.

It took way more than just a couple of months though. This is what the old controller complained to me about. It was taking forever because Rod never got to the point where he was actually taking over the work. The old controller continued to do all the things he had been doing all along while Rod engaged full time in managing his career.

Now I don’t mean to suggest that Rod wasn’t doing any useful work. He probably was. At least he was doing work that seemed useful to the plant manager at North Alabama and to the CFO at the corporate offices because the work he did was deliberately tailored by Rod to appeal to their particular management sensibilities.

It was not, however, the work he had been hired to do. It would have been nice if the rest of us finance and accounting stiffs had the same luxury—to have some poor slob who was trying to retire do our jobs while we cherry picked tasks and projects calculated to make us look like geniuses to senior management.

Day 123 - Mourning Bud, Changing Plans

          We had Bud put down on Saturday. He was game to the end. It’s a hard thing to do—having a pet euthanized—even when it’s been an inevitable outcome for a long time. Bud is the second dog we lost to cancer this year. The first one, Ani, was also a fawn greyhound. Both dogs were fosters that we ended up adopting because they were so personable and engaging.

Well-meaning friends keep pointing out to us what a difference we made in the lives of these two hounds. Maybe so, but what they don’t fully realize I think is how much difference the dogs made in ours. Difficult as it is to have to palliate gentle and needful creatures like Bud and Ani through a terminal illness, I would not trade away one minute of time with them for anything I can imagine. I miss Bud’s crooked grin and his rank breath.

          My wife’s dad, Nelson, had a cardiac event over the holidays. It had to do with his congestive heart failure. He spent a week in the hospital, and now he’s in the middle of several weeks in a rehab facility where they are teaching him to walk again. The Parkinson’s got ahead of him while he was laid up. His muscles lost their memory. He’s no longer able to care for himself. This is making him crazy.

He’s a proud man. He’s always been the one to take care of everyone else. Having to be done for is an affront to the essence of the man. He hates the rehab facility. When he gets out he’s going to have to live with someone. He won’t be able to go back to his house by himself.

          We’ve decided, my wife and I, over the past couple of weeks that we will go live with her dad rather than with our son. That way at least Nelson will be able to go back to the house he is familiar with and in which he would be comfortable. He will have a caregiver during the day and a series of therapists and nurses throughout each week. My wife and I will run his errands, cook and serve his meals, and see to his needs the rest of the time.

*****

          The last, and the most disastrous, of the new regime’s initiatives at Albatross was a project to rationalize our pricing. What management hoped to accomplish was a simplification of pricing models by bundling options together into packages, much like the automakers do, and making a lot of commonly ordered options standard equipment. The result would be higher average unit prices as customers were forced by the bundling to purchase options they didn’t care about in order to get options that they did care about. The higher volumes of heretofore lackluster options would result in lower unit costs and increased assembly efficiencies. This is the way it works in the auto industry. Why shouldn’t it work the same way in ours?

          Here’s a possible reason why that might not work. The customers are different. Most automobiles are purchased by individual retail consumers. Most school fixtures are bought by school boards. School boards are elected. They answer to constituencies, and they also have legislative mandates and imposed budgets to deal with. School boards are vastly different from retail consumers.

Mark Twain once wrote, “In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made School Boards.” Twain had equally disparaging things to say about legislators. School boards occupy a kind of middle ground. They answer to the voters on one side—a collection of individuals many of whom are the very idiots that God made for practice. On the other side school boards answer to legislators—fools, charlatans, and liars if Twain is to be believed. There is certainly plenty of evidence to support that view. So we have idiots answering to and at the mercy of idiots and nefarious idiots on all sides. What possible chance do they have of behaving in a logical and predictable manner?

          This was management’s problem. They had a model in mind for pricing options that depended on not only the logical and predictable behavior of our customers, but a logical and predictable behavior that mirrored that of individual consumers. Right out of the gate this model didn’t have a prayer.

Many of the Albatross natives knew this, but Boome and his imported lackeys had already instilled a healthy fear of reprisal in those same natives to the point that they were understandably reluctant to share this bit of knowledge. Once again arrogance and a management style that depended largely on threats and abuse would trump the tribal sensibilities of an old and well established organization.

          The results were spectacular, but they took a long time to play out. Because management’s attention was by then focused elsewhere, corrective action was slow in coming. The symptoms were disguised as cost overruns—something we were already experiencing and thought we knew how to address. What appeared to be high costs however were actually discounted sales prices, because what actually happened is that the idiots on the school boards didn’t think that they should have to pay higher prices to get optional features on their orders that they hadn’t specified and that they didn’t want.

Because we had made this stuff standard equipment we couldn’t easily take it off the things we were building. The sales people were put in the position where they either had to give the extra equipment away by discounting the base price of the buses or walk away from the sale. Discounts and concessions were the order of the day, but because they were written into negotiated contracts, they didn’t get reported as discounts and concessions. They were just lower than normal contract prices.

What showed up instead were lower margins that quickly translated into operating losses. The person who finally figured all this out was my genius cost accounting manager—by then so universally loathed that no one wanted to give him credit. Total cost of this fiasco--$35 million. Did Jed Boome get fired over this? Nope. A lot of people lost their jobs in the reorganization that followed, but Boome wasn’t one of them. I was, but not Jed.

Day 47 - Mini Me (or Stinky Me) and Me

          I’m feeling better and better, but I continue to medicate myself into a relative stupor at every opportunity. Get a twinge in the back, take a pill. Feel a stinging sensation when I pee, take a pill. It’s no consolation, but I’m now medicating Bad Breath Bud even more than I am myself. The vet has him on a regimen of pills that would choke a horse. That poor goofball gets an anti-inflammatory 4 times a day, an antibiotic for infection, mega vitamins with each meal, zantac to keep him from throwing up, and methadone for pain as often as needed not to exceed every four hours. Some of this stuff is bad for his liver, but we’re not worrying so much about his liver as he is not likely to live more than a couple of months. We’re just going to keep him as comfortable as possible.

          Bud’s problems with his hips—the general weakness in his hindquarters—seemed to be improving with the regular walks, but he suddenly began to favor his left shoulder. He never complained, but it was obvious that he was having a lot of pain there. Bud is not a complainer. Our other hound, Sandy, is a complainer. She will cry and whine at the least provocation. Once she got a twig caught up between the pads of one of her front paws. She screamed like she was being murdered with a dull knife. She is a big baby. Bud…not so much. He winces from the pain in his shoulder, but the discomfort doesn’t seem to diminish his enthusiasm for a walk.

          When it was obvious after a few days that Bud’s pain wasn’t getting any better, we took him to the vet. X-rays showed a lesion involving his left forearm with significant bone loss on the forward side of the humerus. The vet felt that surgery was not a good option for Bud because of the weakness in his hindquarters. If we amputated his left foreleg, he’d only have one good leg left. For Bud at least, the cure, which doesn’t offer a lot of hope anyway, would be worse than the disease. Our best option is to make him as comfortable as possible until even that becomes a cruelty.

I feel pretty badly about all this. I’ve only known Bud a short time, but I feel a real affinity with him. I think of him as the canine me. We’re both old coots, coming to the end of our usefulness. Our spheres of influence are shrinking, and our bodies are in revolt. Maybe the drugs I’m taking are making me too vulnerable and sensitive for my own good, but any way you look at, it Bud is a good old dog. I hate to see him fade away.    

          My wife called Kelly to tell her that Bud was sick. Kelly felt compelled to speculate that the cancer was the direct result of my walking Bud too much for the last several months. If Bud doesn’t offer to bite her next time we see her, I intend to do it myself. 

Day 44 - Bad Breath Bud

          My fever was finally down this morning, and I’m feeling a lot better today—probably because I hardly got out of bed the last two days. After a hot shower and a big breakfast I felt like a new man. Sadly, while I am feeling much better, we found out that our foster greyhound, Bud, has osteosarcoma. Prognosis is the worst.

          We’ve had a greyhound for 8 years. Her name is Sandy. She is a pretty little brindle with a sweet disposition. The foster dog, Bud, was bounced by the couple who had him for 9 years. I don’t know how they could do that, but they did. Bud is eleven. We’ve only had him a few months. The couple bought a big motor home last year, a 45 foot bus conversion with every conceivable bell and whistle. I know those things go for upwards of a million dollars. They want to sell their house and travel full time. According to them Bud didn’t like the bus. He spent all his time aboard cowering in a corner, whimpering. Maybe they were right to give him up under the circumstances. I just don’t think I could have done it, and I don’t consider myself to be a particularly sentimental kind of person.

          Bud is a big goofy boy with a prodigious overbite—a condition called ‘parrot jaw’ in greyhounds that keeps him from being able to completely close his mouth. That’s not entirely accurate. He can close his mouth, but the front teeth and the roof of his upper jaw are not covered by his lower jaw when his mouth is closed. There is a gap of a little over an inch. The results are twofold. First when Bud chews his food, crumbs spray everywhere. He is the messiest eater I have ever seen. Couple this with the fact that he adores crisp dry treats and kibble, and we are going to have to enclose his food bowl in plywood and plastic sheeting like a construction site. The other and perhaps even less entertaining result is that Bud has breath that would stop an eight day clock. Honestly, if most UFO sightings can actually be attributed to swamp gas, Bud has the capacity to launch an entire alien invasion fleet complete with battle stars.

          When we picked him up at the couple’s house we sat amongst piles of clutter and detritus and discussed Bud’s needs and habits, or at least tried to. The woman, let’s call her Kelly, seemed more interested in talking about the motor home and their pending travels while the man seemed more interested in making sure that I was a good Republican. Presumably Bud would not tolerate any liberal leanings.

Kelly passed the  clutter and detritus off as preparation for the upcoming transition to full time motor homing. I didn’t see anything that I would take on a bus, but I kept my mouth shut. I know a little about boats and I know a little about motor homes, so I also know a little about traveling in cramped spaces. While a 45 foot bus makes a big motor home, when you load it up with two people and the stuff they need for an extended road trip it becomes a small, small space that will elicit homicidal tendencies among the passengers if very much stowage space is given over to useless stuff. This home was packed to the gills with useless stuff that I knew very well was not going to be loaded into their bus.

          Before we left with Bud we took him for a walk. I don’t know why dog people do this. I suppose it’s a good way to get to know a dog on neutral ground. Everyone does it though. When you go to a Greyhound Pets of America facility to arrange to adopt a dog they have you take the dog out for a walk. When you go to PetSmart and they’re having an adoptable pet ‘meet-n-greet’ and you express an interest in one of the available dogs, they have you take it for a walk. When Cesar Millan, the dog whisperer, goes to a house to fix a dog’s aberrant behaviors the first thing he does with the dog is take it for a walk. In this case though, I already knew that we were taking Bud to foster. I also knew that I liked Bud in spite of his breath. The only thing I was going to determine from walking him was whether or not he would pull on the leash.

          He did not pull on the leash. Bud’s hindquarters were so eaten up and atrophied from arthritis and lack of exercise that he would have struggled to pull one of those inchworm toys across the floor. Bud was going to need some attention to keep him from becoming a complete invalid. Near as we could tell he had never been walked on a regular basis. He was turned out into the back yard to do his business and let back into the house when he was finished.
     Greyhounds do not thrive on a lack of regimen. They love to run, but they need room to do it, and even when they have the room they don’t do it very much. Born sprinters, racing greyhounds run full out for about 45 seconds; then they rest up for their next race by sleeping 18 to 20 hours a day.

Confined to a small space and suffering from the discomfort of arthritis a greyhound will not exercise at all. Bud needed to be exercised. Gradually lengthening walks on the leash would build up his strength, stamina, and interest in life.

We started walking Bud the very next day. He was a willing participant. Weak as he was in his hips, I thought he would be reluctant to walk on the leash. Instead he loved it. He took to the neighborhood right away. We have a lot of small children, and they have always been fascinated by our dogs and our dogs by them. Bud loved the little girls especially. He would tolerate their pawing and fawning and hugs as long as they cared to go on. Of course this wasn’t usually very long. Little girls have short attention spans, and Bud is cursed with that egregious breath.

Within a couple of days Bud was showing new signs of exuberance. In the house he would bounce and bark and throw stuffed toys in the air to engage our other hound, Sandy, in play. Outside he was enthused about our walks, and always wanted to go further than we thought it prudent to take him.

After we’d had Bud a couple of weeks we loaded him in the van and took him to meet Kelly. She had a bed and some other of his things that she thought we could use. We met her in the parking lot of a strip mall between her house and ours. When we opened the doors of our van to load the stuff in, Bud didn’t even lift his head to acknowledge the woman who had housed, fed, and cared for him for 9 years. Kelly thought that was extremely unusual, but secretly I had to take Bud’s side in this. I didn’t like her either.