The Corporate Asylum: Journal Entries

2 April 1999 - 3 July 1999

3 July 1999

They fired my boss on Thursday. I am not exactly sure who "they" are, but they did it. For those who regularly read The Corporate Asylum that would be Stan from my June 7th entry. Obviously Stan and I had our differences but I did not expect this. I knew him when he was a lowly courier like I am today and hope to be tomorrow. He was with the company for over 13 years. I heard some people from our Corporate Offices were down at our station some months ago asking questions about him and I knew there were other people who had had problems with Stan, but I did not think it was anything that constituted grounds for firing. Everyone has differences of opinion. Those differences should be allowed to coexist.
Regardless of whether or not Stan should have been fired(I don't know either way and probably never will) the way this news was presented to the rest of us was typical of corporate "communication." Our interim manager who I will call, Linda, gathered about ten of us together and said, "There have been some changes that we would like to make you aware of. Susie and Lester will now be working with the a.m crew. Susie will be informing you of your start times. If you have any questions make sure you talk to her. Thanks." That was it. It would have ended there had not one of my of colleagues quickly asked, "What's the deal with Stan?" In a melodramatic tone Linda said, "Stan is no longer with us." No longer with us? What? Is he dead? Was he kidnapped? Then she said, "If you have any questions I'll talk to you on an individual basis." I have noticed a managerial technique in the last few years: whenever management presents something that they know is going to be controversial or something that they know us peons are not going to like they often say something like, "I'm not going to take any questions now. If you have any, please come see me in my office." There must be seminars and books connected to this(If you are a discerning manager I'd love to hear the inside information of this technique.). This is probably thought necessary so that there is no cohesion amongst the workers, which, if present, might give them enough power to start a revolution and take over. Right away I said, "I have a question." Linda quickly retreated to her office to talk to me. The conversation went something like this.

"So what's up?" I asked.
"I can't discuss anything."
"That's too bad. This is how rumors get started. Everyone is going to talk about it. People want to know what happened."
"We are not going to tolerate people talking about this."
"Look," I said, "you know people are going to talk about this."
"Yes, I know that," she said with some resignation.
"It's just unfortunate that more cannot be said. Many of us have known Stan for a long time."
"I can't say anything."

Linda made an extremely foolish statement, a statement that ignores reality(of course we are interested in why he was "let go" and we are going to talk about it). Was she attempting to assert some kind of authority(Has she read The Constitution of the United States of America?)? Was she proving her status with privileged information? Her secretiveness(is that a word?) in her announcement to us about the situation was both condescending and ludicrous. I heard when she addressed the afternoon crew Stan's name never came up. Why couldn't she have just said, "Stan was fired yesterday. There were a lot of things leading up to this that I cannot discuss for both legal reasons and per Stan's request. Susie will now be the a.m. supervisor." If there were not legal reasons that forbade her from discussing the details she could have even done that. If she thought Stan should not have been fired, she could have said so. Okay, okay, it's a little too optimistic on my part. Corporations for all their lip-service about communication, communicate very poorly. It is an extremely selective communication which is why most corporate newsletters are boring, trivial and banal publications and why so many corporate types exhibit speech patterns so similar one wonders if corporate cloning hasn't been going on for the last 4 or 5 decades.

Our mechanic was fired about three or four months ago and there was never any official statement to us. The news traveled fast--as it always does--but it is almost as if they hope we are not going to find out. I know they don't think that, but why is it such a big deal to feign a kind of concealment and/or ignorance about the situation when everyone knows that everyone knows(Again, any of you who are privy to this knowledge, please, please let me know.)?

Linda's little soap opera display treated us like children and, ironically, was childish itself("I know something you don't know" or "I know something that you do not need to know."). I don't know if Linda was under orders not to say anything, if she could not say anything for legal reasons or if she just made the decision herself. My hunch is that was a combination of all three. At the very least she could have and should have been forthright with us regardless of how much information she disclosed. Surely she could have said, "Stan has been fired," or "Stan has resigned for personal reasons that he prefer not be disclosed." But to attempt to act as if nothing had happened was absurd--one more example, of the numerous ones available, of the appropriateness of the title of this web site.

7 June 1999

It has been an amusing and, at times, frustrating past few weeks.
It began with a meeting--oh, how I adore them. Our "service center"(We no longer call ourselves a "station.") manager announced that there was going to be a "forum" for employees to make suggestions, ask questions or voice concerns. I decided to ask an important question before the day of the forum about the forum. "Is this a paid activity?" "Yes," came the reply--and if it had ended there I would not have had anything to write about--but it rarely ends in time for that. Our manager then proceeded to explain to us that he would not tolerate people talking in the back, focusing on the free food that would be provided or not participating, though, he continued, that did not mean you had to ask questions. So I asked another simple question: "How are you going to determine whether someone is participating or not if they do not have to say anything?" "If people are talking or getting up to get food during the meeting," came the reply. I left it a that. Mainly, I asked the question because it irritated me that he felt he had to tell us we had better not come to goof off--as if we are all a bunch of third graders hoping to extend recess into the history lesson. It showed an extreme lack of respect for us as workers and it was condescending. I understand that there may individuals who would take advantage of a situation like this--but it is not the majority. So don't address the majority about a problem that is not theirs. It is really a form of fear or anxiety about having to confront an individual--but guess what?--that's what managers get paid for. I, along with my co-workers, have been, at least it feels that way to some degree, berated over the years for all kinds of things that we have never done or even thought of doing. I did go to the forum and I did participate and I am fairly sure that nothing substantial will come from the process--call it an educated guess.

A week or so later I had a "checkride" with my supervisor. I like having someone ride with me--it's nice to have a conversation and an enjoyable change from the radio. The next day, however, my supervisor, I'll call him Stan, decided to go over my checkride with me. I should inform readers that I am a 13 year employee and have received, except for the last two years(this will be discussed momentarily), the highest ratings possible on my yearly evaluations. I don't say this to impress you only to give some context in which to place the coming events. Though I derive little intrinsic satisfaction from this job as a delivery driver I am serious about being a good, honest, responsible worker. My parents taught me to have integrity. Socrates taught me that virtue is its own reward. Anyway, Stan began my "coaching session" by informing me that he had decided to focus on my driving skills, partly because I had, what is known in the professional driving business as, a "preventable accident." For those of you who have never had the chance to enhance your resume by driving for a living accidents go on your company record if they are determined to be "preventable" which has nothing to do with who is legally at fault. In my case the other driver was legally at fault, but the accident was still evaluated as a "preventable" by my peers. And that was fine. Attempting to be objective about it, if I had been on the committee I would have had a tough time trying to decide. I knew it could go either way. So, Stan began telling me everything I had done wrong--at least in his eyes--during my checkride. Some of it was picky, some of it legitimate and some I disagreed with. I was asking myself after my meeting with him why it angered me. I think part of it was the unstated idea that since I had had an "accident"(that is what they call them) suddenly I became a bad driver even though I had gone many years previously without an accident, a ticket or complaints from other drivers. So now I'm being grilled on how to determine a safe following distance, when to turn on my blinker, when I should tap my horn, etc., etc. All things that I am completely aware of--after 13 years who wouldn't be? But Stan kept after me. I argued with him a little, then I simply decided to listen, nod my head, sign the paper and get out of there. Sometimes it's just not worth it. I know it is difficult being a manager--I truly do have sympathy for the pressures, many of which are unnecessary and created for no real purpose--but if I had a fellow employee(workers are not manager's employees--even though some managers like referring to them that way) who was doing a great job, who had proven himself or herself over many years my motto would be to leave them the hell alone. But it seems that's not possible. They start spouting all those cliches: "There is always room for progress," "You can always find something to improve," "This is the only thing holding you back." What they often do not understand, and I love being blunt here, is that I do not care. I have no great desire to improve my courier skills. I already do a fine job. My satisfaction with life is not dependent on making 17 stops per hour. My goal is to come to work, do a good job and go home. I am a courier, but I am also a father, a husband, a person attempting to understand life and a writer. These are the things that consume me--these are my passions. This particular job is simply a means to pay my bills and pursue my interests. Often meetings and evaluations treat workers as if they have nothing better to do than to go home and think about how to build a better mouse-trap. My mouse-trap is really good and it hasn't changed since my youth.

Following this "coaching session" I realized that I needed a day off to go with my wife out of town to see a doctor. He's a good doctor and it has taken us years to find him so a three hour drive is well worth it. I thought this might be a problem since it is during summer and tons of people are on vacation. Thankfully, it was not. Stan and I decided on the day and everything was going fine until he said I could just take a sick day. As a life-long part-timer my sick time does not accrue at a significant rate and having had a major bout with the flu this year I was all out. So I asked if I could take a vacation day something I assumed would not be problem since I was going to be gone anyway and I needed the money. Well, nothing, it seems, can ever be simple. That was not Stan's policy. We had a lengthy discussion in which, for the first time in thirteen years, I invoked the name of God(see Re: The Proper Use of Profanity) to a manager's face. I attempted to appeal to Stan's reason: I was going to be gone anyway--who cares if it is called a vacation day instead of sick day? Stan did. The fact was, and Stan admitted this, that it would be better economically for the company if I took a vacation day, but Stan could not make an exception to policy. I told him I was going to go over his head to someone who could make the exception. It turned out he did have the power to make the exception if he wanted--but he did not want to because then, as he put it, others would all want exceptions made for them.

The attraction of having a policy that is immovable is that you do not have to think in order to make a decision. All you do is go to the policy, read what it says and do it. We rarely ask managers to make judgments, to use their common sense--but we should. Workers are rarely asked either--but they should be too. A manager should always have the option to make an exception. In Stan's case, he simply did not want to have to make a judgment so he created a self-imposed policy in the name of consistency and fairness. Once I determined that he had the power to make the exception I said, as near as I can remember, this to him:

"Just so we understand each other. I need the money. It will be a financial burden for me not to get paid that day. You have the power to make an exception and since you are not going to allow me to take a vacation day you are the one who bears the responsibility for hurting me. You are the one who bears the responsibility for the rightness or wrongness of this decision. The reason I will not get paid is because of you, because of your inability to make an exception in a case that is warranted. You have made a rule to supposedly be consistent and fair with everyone but by adhering to it dogmatically you are being unfair to me."

"I can live with that," he said.

Apparently, however, he could not, because a few minutes later he changed his mind(If you have to read that sentence again to verify it says what it does I will not be offended). I thanked him a couple of times for doing so and left. The thing that amused me about the whole episode is that going in I thought getting the day off was going to be the problem--because giving people a day off does literally cause a scheduling problem in our business. But that was the easy part. The difficult part was, essentially, what to call my day off.

As fate would have it a few days after this I met Stan for my yearly evaluation. I had decided going in to listen calmly, offer some reasoned rebuttals to anything I did not agree with and if I was happy with the raise not to worry about anything else. This is the first year in the last four or five that I had the potential for a significant raise(at least in my economic world) since I have been at the top of the scale for a long time and this year they changed our station's rating raising the top hourly wage by well over a dollar. Surprisingly, the evaluation went well. There is much too heavy a reliance on statistics in my business--a policy determined by our corporate offices--but I received the raise I was hoping for coming 10 cents shy of the highest possible. Stan even attempted to get me that 10 cents since last year I received nothing. The woman he talked to could not, of course, break policy and give it to me. One of the things she said to him was: "It will give him something to look forward to next year." Statements like these make me believe corporate types have very little respect for those of us who work on the lower rungs of the corporate ladder. Does she really think I am actually going to look forward to that for the next year? Does she really believe that anticipating 10 cents an hour will give me the incentive to work harder than I already do? Or was it just something to say, a cliche she spouted off not really even thinking about what it actually meant? And they wonder why I'm cynical.

7 May 1999

A few days ago I was making delivery to a receptionist and overheard one end of a phone conversation in an adjoining office that went something like this:

There's just not much here for him to do. I told him just come in one or two days a week and I'll pay him for five. But he says he's got nothing to do at home so he would rather just come in here.

I remarked to the receptionist, "I'll take that work 2 days get paid for 5 job." She laughed, then said, "Well, when you're 81 maybe you'll get it." In much of our culture today that kind of work ethic is often praised, but it saddens me more than anything else. At eighty-one I would like to think that people could enjoy the good life, enjoy their retirement, but the philosophy, or maybe I should say religion, of work-above-all-else often makes this impossible. Why is that? I have often thought that it is because people do not practice for retirement. In Tom Morris's book, If Aristotle Ran General Motors, he recounts a story of four friends who all retired together. Within two years three of the four were dead. Why does that happen? It has a lot to do with work consuming men's and women's lives during their working years to such a degree that they really have little time to engage consistently in activities(not exactly the right word) particularly suited for retirement: thinking, meditating, gardening, reading, philosophizing, writing, sitting on the porch rocking chair on a summer evening, napping in the garden hammock on a summer afternoon, wandering slowly through the park, watching children play, etc. You cannot simply jump into these activities for hours and hours because you have suddenly got the time if you are not familiar with them. It will be difficult to enjoy Plato or Emily Dickinson or Steinbeck after forty years of only reading business memos, company newsletters and The Wall Street Journal. Overwork(I am not referring to long hours that sometimes must be maintained out of necessity, but rather to work or career as a choice above all else)is often symptomatic of something else. Pascal said that "The sole problem with mankind is that he does not know how to sit alone in a room." He also wrote about people's obsession with "Diversion," something he defined as what they do to avoid the important questions of life. So we work ourselves to death so we don't have to think about death. Death is in some sense like the seasons that come and go every year, but it is also like an earthquake: unpredictable, powerful and unforgettable. Daily practice for retirement is essential for the good life. None of us know whether or not we will make it to retirement age, so we should enjoy some retirement now.

The present is our right place, and we can lay hands on whatever it offers us.
Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island

19 April 1999

The owner of a salon cut my hair today during my break. Her shop is open six days a week. She works Monday through Thursday and then has two people who work for her on Friday and Saturday. The shop is closed Sunday. She has had it for six years. One of the things she said to me after we started talking about work schedules was that she knew people who had a lot money and who had a lot of things but who did not have satisfying lives because they worked so much. She has worked out a great schedule for herself: 4 days on, 3 days off. Time to live. That's what is so important and what so many people miss. Work is a part of life and one has to live there too, but not to such a degree that it detracts from contentment or so that rest and relaxation become a scheduling problem. The point is regardless of your economic situation(there is nothing wrong with being rich) to take time to live--to savor the moment. We often miss the present by pursuing the future. No contract can guarantee tomorrow. It is a difficult thing, I told her, to keep your life unencumbered when many corporations print "Wanted Dead or Alive" posters with worker's pictures on them. There is a difference if your job is intrinsically valuable, but there are many jobs in our culture that are not, many jobs that never will be, but that are, nonetheless, extremely valuable on another level. The societal machine is oiled by such jobs and the people who perform them should be revered and respected. In that sense those jobs do have intrinsic value because they keep the nation running. Without those seemingly "unimportant" jobs most of us would die of starvation. Those who contribute to society in this extremely important manner should also make a decent wage without having to work hours and hours of overtime.
I was walking through our break room today and someone said of me, "He's been here a long time. How long?" "Almost 13 years," I replied. Was it respect on their faces? Or pity? No matter, I explained to them that part-time years are to full-time years like dog years to human years: my 13 years part-time is more like 5 or 6 in full-time years. Does that mean I'll live to be a 160?

9 April 1999

Regarding my last entry, I received a memo in my box today explaining the incentive program. It stays the same. Obviously, they really looked into it. When I commented in the meeting that it would be more incentive for everyone to get some cash if they got involved there was hearty agreement from my fellow employees, but, as usual, the desires of workers don't rate highly. "We'll look into it" is one of the more common clichés in the corporate world. It has little meaning. I was talking to my wife's uncle this past weekend. He's retired. Worked 36 years at the same company. Meetings where you are allowed to voice your opinions and give input he called "placebos." Management lets you "express yourself" and then they do what they want, what they knew they were going to do all along. My wife's uncle likened the worth of such meetings to that of suggestion boxes. We all know their net worth. I'm thinking of writing a letter about this to our station manager and area sales manager, but part of me says, "Why waste my time?" I have written lots of letters during my years at Cheetah Express and I think their main worth was that I practiced my writing and at least knew that someone up there was aware that someone down here did not agree with a decision that had been made. Expecting something to actually change because of a letter is like expecting to win the lottery. I don't even play the lottery.

2 April 1999

In the meeting this morning management "rolled out" another incentive program. Basically, the three drivers who get the most sale's leads receive credit on a credit card. It's something like $210, $120 and $60. The reality is that this is very little incentive. My colleague, The Artistic Inmate, said it best. "So if I bust my ass and come in fourth I don't get a damn a thing, which is why I never participate in these programs." It is ironic that for all the corporate posturing about us being a "team" the incentive programs tend to be about us competing, not against the competition, but against each other. My company, which I will call Cheetah Express throughout this journal, rolled out a nationwide program about two years ago, that awarded cars to thirty-two individuals during the year. We received "keys" which were actually certificates that gave us the "opportunity" to have a chance to win a car. Wow! A guaranteed opportunity. I did not like the program from the beginning. I wrote a letter(Here it is) to the President of Human Resources and sent copies to various other high-level managers and to my colleagues. Sure, the car is nice if you win, but Cheetah Express employs thousands of people and most of us received nothing. I thought workers would rather have a sure thing than a chance at something. I tested my theory by asking my fellow employees, "What would you rather have 50 bucks or a key?" Not a one said a key. A few months ago they disbanded the program for one that essentially awards cash to all who get involved. Great! It only took them a couple of years to figure out the obvious. I usually don't say much in meetings but I did this morning, suggesting that a program that awarded everyone who gets involved would be more incentive than the current one. They're looking into it. At the end of last year Cheetah Express awarded all drivers a 500 dollar bonus because the company reached certain economic goals. They should be applauded for doing that. I did not hear one complaint when they passed out the checks. It was a great day: morale was up, people laughed and joked as they slipped a 500 dollar check into their wallets or purses. History is a great teacher. We just need some good students.

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