John Bechtel- Entrepreneur, Investor, Author & Speaker Welcomes You

Chapter 16. What I Could Teach Tiger Woods

What follows is a continuation of a series of articles comprising a book entitled “Passion, Power, and Panties–Confessions of a Businessman” wherein the author describes being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, spending almost ten years at their Bethel headquarters in Brooklyn, NY and then entering the ”outside”  world at the age of 27.  For purposes of continuity, I encourage you to subscribe in the column to the right so as not to miss a post.  It is free and without obligation

Warning:  Chapters 14 through 19 contain sexually explicit narratives, told in the language of the street as I learned to speak it.  I discuss these adventures, not in a spirit of narcissism or exhibitionism, but in the wider context of a former Jehovah’s Witness  who was seeking new meaning and purpose after leaving a cult-like church that had defined every aspect of my existence virtually from birth.  I was determined to experience life for the first time on MY terms, and I was going to draw my conclusions from first-hand experience, not hear-say or the value judgments of others.  If you have been following from previous chapters, we pick up the thread here as I enter the dating scene in earnest at the age of 36.  I share my observations and conclusions more or less in the order in which I formed them, and they evolve over time, as you will see.

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Eventually of course, I moved beyond sheer anatomical curiosity.  I was still nervous about sexual activities and unsure of myself, but I was also developing a sense of annoyance and sometimes downright anger and frustration with the dating game.  It was obvious we were all, men and women, constantly negotiating, and the Grand Prize was either sex or the resources it could be traded for.  It was equally obvious that the women made the decision as to whether or not it happened.   Feminists who loudly bemoan what they perceive as male dominance and women’s victimhood overlook this one single indisputable fact:  women control the pussy in the world, and that is power.  Real power.  And like youth itself, this kind of power is wasted on the young.  Most young girls seem to be trying to find out what it feels like to be in love and they are trying out their emotions on their boyfriends, which really confuses the boyfriends, who are trying to find out what it feels like to get laid.  The boys end up thinking the girls are nuts.  And the girls think the boys are obsessed with sex.  Neither gender has enough information, or they wouldn’t be so surprised at the behavior of the other.

A woman’s beauty is a major source of her power.  This is not about vanity or a male-dominated culture.  Quite the opposite:  in cultures where women are truly powerless, such as in certain Islamic countries, women are veiled and covered from head to toe to deprive them of the power of their looks.  In a free society, women spending a lot of time on their appearance is a survival tactic, and this one, believe me, is not vestigial!  Pretty women  receive advantages throughout life:  babies like them better, and so do men, who are often just bigger babies.  We will pay their way, change their flat tires, and open their doors.  Women  will spend endless hours on their hair and cosmetics, not to mention plastic surgery in order to attract men, tempt men.  Male lust for women is a  source of great female power.  It is nature’s way.  Should it surprise men then that women don’t give away the goodies for free?

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15. God and Women

What follows is a continuation of a series of articles comprising a book entitled “Passion, Power, and Panties–Confessions of a Businessman” wherein the author describes being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, spending almost ten years at their headquarters in Brooklyn, NY and then entering the ”outside”  world at the age of 27.  For purposes of continuity, I encourage you to subscribe in the column to the right so as not to miss a post.  It is free and without obligation

Warning:  Chapters 14 through 19 contain sexually explicit narratives, told in the language of the street as I learned to speak it.  I have made no effort to be politically correct in the telling of this story; and I seek neither approval of my choices nor the expiation of guilt.  I would remind my readers that upon leaving Jehovah’s Witnesses I had made a committment to myself to never let the judgments of other humans, traditions, and cultures get between me and my quest to understand existence, to discover reality, to know what IS, and to find or achieve meaning in my own existence.  I was not interested in adopting other people’s meanings; I was done with all that.  I was continually in shock at the pervasive human need to BELIEVE.  Belief came first, reality was always a distant second.  For a short while I was convinced that this was a phenomenon unique to Jehovah’s Witnesses, or maybe cults in general.  As time progressed I came to the same conclusions as scientists who coined the term CONFIRMATION BIAS.  Belief trumps reality–at all levels of all societies. At this point in my story, women and sex were very high on my list of unresolved internal conflicts.  I wanted to know who they were, how they thought, what they believed, how they viewed men, and why they had  sex (or not).  I also wanted to become better acqauinted with myself as a sexual being and how this  related to my larger quest for meaning.  I attacked this challenge with my usual gusto and determination, and relate events herein without regard to saving face or winning approval.  In doing so I understand that I am foregoing any chance of ever running for political office for the rest of my life.  The things I did , you do AFTER getting in office, and standard operating procedure when suspected of such activity is to deny, deny, deny.

When you are growing up, you are taught that there are certain things that are never discussed in polite society; politics, religion, money, and sex.  I have discussed all of them in considerable detail in this and my blog www.financialliteracysource.com, so let’s finish what we’ve started.  I do not wish to offend, so if you find the subject of sex, as learned by a middle-aged neophyte and related in an honest but not intentionally salacious manner, to be offensive, you may want to resume with this narrative with Chapter 20.  I offer my observations in the light of what I understood at the time the events took place.  Some of those conclusions evolved over time, as you will see.

The Three Great Questions

 At this point all the confusion in my life distilled down to three great questions:  (1)  Was there a God?  (2)  If there was a God, and the Bible was his Word, why was He such a lousy communicator?  (3)  If there was a God, was woman his practical joke on men?  It just seemed to me that male and female natures were custom designed to nurture disharmony and aggravation.   Bear in mind that at this point in time I did not have “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” to guide me. 

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Chapter 14. The Door of Dionysus

What follows is a continuation of a series of articles comprising a book entitled “Passion, Power, and Panties–Confessions of a Businessman” wherein the author describes being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, spending almost ten years at their headquarters in Brooklyn, NY and then entering the ”outside”  world at the age of 27.  For purposes of continuity, I encourage you to subscribe in the column to the right so as not to miss a post.  It is free and without obligation

Warning:  The following six chapters contain sexually explicit narratives, told in the language of the street as I learned to speak it.  I have made no effort to be politically correct in the telling of this story; and I seek neither approval of my choices nor the expiation of guilt.  This is a little hard to explain, but I felt like the church deacon who preached fire and brimstone sermons about sin, but was secretly curious what it would feel like to experience it.  I was determined to find out for myself, and I did, often with my heart pounding from both fear and excitement.  With the exception of divorce, my experiences were always consensual.  The results varied.  Sometimes I experienced a sense of compulsiveness, and sometimes a sense of the bizarre.  Sometimes I wondered why I was in certain places doing certain things, and sometimes I was surprised at the conclusions I drew.  Sometimes I laughed–usually at myself.   I cared not what judgments I might receive from others; I cared a great deal about my own judgments. No longer would anyone, any culture, any institution, group, or person, stand between me and reality.  I wanted to experience what was out there on my own:  I wanted TO KNOW.  I cared about other people’s feelings, but I no longer considered their wants, wishes, traditions, and expectations a blank check on my life.  I was now responsible for my life and happiness; they were responsible for theirs, and our lives interfaced where our interests overlapped.  For those who may wonder:  in toto, I have very few regrets.  I learned a lot that I could have learned in no other way that I know of.  That does not mean, however, that with the benefit of the rear view mirror, I would not skip some parts a second time around.  Like Dionysus of Greek legend, I was grateful to have gotten this far, eager to be freed from my former self, and in search of both ecstasy and meaning.

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By the time I had opened my first branch office in another city, I had over a hundred employees and had also been married 13 years.  Not only were both of us virgins when we married, my wife, Barbara,  was the only woman I had ever kissed.  I had never been around girls in a social context, and I was both mystified and intrigued by their differences.  When my wife and I went on our honeymoon, it took us all night the first night to figure out what to do and to get the job done.  For the next week we hardly ever left the cabin we had rented for our honeymoon.  Our sex life was routine and healthy for as long as we stayed at Bethel, Jehovah’s Witnesses headquarters in New York City.  Our paradigm was that marriage was forever.  I don’t think any thoughts of adultery or promiscuity ever crossed our minds once during that time.  I was a ‘golden haired boy’ at Bethel, and my wife had selected well in the minds of her family and friends.

I can remember only once, at Bethel, when I worked in the Service Department and was assigned a temporary secretary named Eva who was drop-dead gorgeous, that I felt distracted and uncomfortable.  I was both disappointed and relieved when after two weeks her assignment was changed.  I didn’t know what to do with the unfamiliar  emotions I felt with her around.

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Chapter 13. Sex for Resources

What follows is a continuation of a series of articles comprising a book entitled “Passion, Power, and Panties–Confessions of a Businessman” wherein the author describes being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, spending almost ten years at their headquarters in Brooklyn, NY and then entering the ”outside”  world at the age of 27.  For purposes of continuity, I encourage you to subscribe in the column to the right so as not to miss a post.  It is free and without obligation

In time we exhausted, and dominated the market in our part of the state, and I decided to enter the market of a major metropolitan area about 170 miles away.  

I spent about six months doing market research on the cheap, which meant asking what local fast food restaurants were paying their help in order to get a frame of reference what the current wage rates were in this new city.  At the time most fast food restaurants were paying $3.45 per hour, so I based my quotations on that wage rate.  What I did not know, was that at the time, there were over ten million square feet of new office space under construction in this city.  When all that office space was completed and was occupied, there was going to be a major surge in the demand for new housekeepers.  With the supply of labor more or less fixed, and the demand for cleaners surging, the result was quite predictable:  a surge in the price of labor.  Which meant that all those new contracts I had just sold in this city were going to lose money, because we were going to be unable to staff the buildings at the wage rates we had quoted, and if we raised the wages, we could not raise the prices, and so were going to take a serious financial hit.

 We tried to hold the line on our wages at the level we had quoted the new business at:  remember we were in the cleaning business, and labor is by far the largest cost of doing business.  As we tried to hold our wages at the levels we had quoted the business at, the competition for labor was intensifying in the city, and our competitors were slowly offering more money.  And so were the fast food restaurants, and every other enterprise that operates with entry-level labor.  I would often pass the same Wendy’s unit on my way to work, and they constantly had Help Wanted signs in the window, and I noticed that the offered rate of pay went up about $.25 per hour every two months or so.  The significance of this had not quite seeped into my consciousness, but I woke up at a trade show in St. Louis later that same year.  I was talking over cocktails with one of my Jewish competitors from back in my home state, and he said about one 22-story office building we cleaned:  “My cousins run that building.  Don’t you think I’d have that contract if I wanted it?  Why do you think I don’t have it?  Because I don’t want it, because I can’t make any money at it.” 

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Chapter 12. When Your Best Just Isn’t Good Enough

What follows is a continuation of a series of articles comprising a book entitled “Passion, Power, and Panties–Confessions of a Businessman” wherein the author describes being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, spending almost ten years at their headquarters in Brooklyn, NY and then entering the ”outside”  world at the age of 27.  For purposes of continuity, I encourage you to subscribe in the column to the right so as not to miss a post.  It is free and without obligation

One of the hardest things to accept about business, and maybe human behavior in general, is that most behavior doesn’t seem to be rational, but whimsical, irrational, and emotionally driven.  Decisions are based on emotion, and then the intellect is summoned to justify them.  Business could be gained and lost for some very arbitrary reasons.  My response to this was mostly terror.  On any given day I knew the wrath of the gods could descend on my head for reasons far beyond my control.  Since all of my contracts were on a month-to-month basis, I understood that on any given day I was only 30 days from bankruptcy court, if enough of my clients were to cancel my contracts at the same time.  No business was guaranteed, even if you were doing an excellent job, and the specter of economic death hung over your head all the time.  It was imperative to build relationships inside the client’s organization on at least three different levels.  Whenever possible I would build a relationship with the CEO of the corporation, my manager would build a rapport with his peer in the client’s organization, and we would try to match up our cleaners with the personalities of key people on each floor.  Generally speaking, it took all of us as a team to keep a tight grip on business.  Everyone was important, and I always told our people to avoid stepping on hands when climbing up the ladder, because those same hands could expedite the way down (or out the door!)  A disgruntled secretary in a client’s building could make our work life miserable.

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Chapter 11. “How Much Justice Can You Afford Today?”

What follows is a continuation of a series of articles comprising a book entitled “Passion, Power, and Panties–Confessions of a Businessman” wherein the author describes being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, spending almost ten years at their headquarters in Brooklyn, NY and then entering the ”outside”  world at the age of 27.  For purposes of continuity, I encourage you to subscribe in the column to the right so as not to miss a post.  It is free and without obligation.

Some of my most painful business lessons came from the legal system.  I was unaware that a large group of under-employed attorneys had invented a brand new field of litigation that came to be known as contract employment versus employment-at-will.  The theory apparently went something like this:  if an employer said something to an employee that could even vaguely be construed as an assurance of continued employment, it could be considered a binding verbal contract.  Let’s say, one day during a discussion with an employee that you, as the employer say something intended to show appreciation and encouragement for recent good work on their part such as “Keep up the good work.  You have a real future here”, and then let’s say that a few months later their attitude changes and their work goes south and you end up terminating their employment; they could now sue you for termination without just cause, because implied in your encouraging verbal statement months before was a guarantee of some sort of continued employement.  From that point on, in the eyes of the law, you could only discharge an employee for “just cause”.  Well , how hard can that be?  Who would want to terminate someone for an unjust cause?  The problem is, “for just cause” in the eyes of whom?  Of course it was appropriate in your mind to discharge them; you were probably fed up with their behavior, or taking a lot of grief from them and spending 80% of your time trying to correct them and taking heat from both your boss and the customer to get the situation fixed.  But the problem is, their discharge is never  for “just cause” in their own eyes.  When was the last time you heard someone say, ‘I got fired today, and by God, I deserved it.’  So now, under this concept of implied employment contract, this discharged employee can challenge his discharge in court, and you are obliged to defend your decision to let him go.  To a jury.  What if you get a jury that buys into the Hollywood stereotype that businessmen are greedy and corrupt and out to get the little guy?  You may successfully defend yourself, but it’s going to cost you money, probably a lot of it, and the plaintiff’s attorney knows that.  So he launches a paper battle that runs up the bill for the defense.  At some point the insurance company will capitulate and pay off, just to contain their spiraling legal costs.

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Chapter 10. Save the World, or Save Myself?

What follows is a continuation of a series of articles comprising a book entitled “Passion, Power, and Panties–Confessions of a Businessman” wherein the author describes being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, spending almost ten years at their headquarters in Brooklyn, NY and then entering the ”outside”  world at the age of 27.  For purposes of continuity, I encourage you to subscribe in the column to the right so as not to miss a post.  It is free and without obligation.

 

I apologize to my readers, for I have gotten ahead of myself in this story.  Picking up where I was at the beginning of Chapter 9, I had twelve part-time people working for me, and I was taking $800 per month out of the business to live on.  I had this dinky little office in the basement of a building near the apartment where Barbara, I, and our first daughter Meghan lived.  The office was about the size of a closet, one room, and there was this deep ditch outside the basement door to the building, with a wooden plank thrown across it as an entrance.  I paid $90 per month for this.  There was a large standpipe from the floors above that went right past my desk, and whenever anyone upstairs flushed a toilet, you could hear it whistling right past my desk on the way down into the sewer.  I had an old metal battleship desk I had bought from a customer for $25.  I was drowning in problems and had no idea where to turn to for help.  And I couldn’t think of whatever else I could do if this failed.  It was not uncommon at all for me to work 24 or even 36 hours straight before collapsing in bed.  I did not consider myself a businessman at all; I felt totally incompetent and foolish.  What kept me going was desperation and fear of failure.  Barbara and my combined, adjusted gross income that first year was $5600.  We were below Appalachian poverty level.  I’m sure we qualified for all kinds of government Welfare, but we didn’t even know it existed and it never occurred to us to ask.  It never occurred to us that we were anyone’s responsibility but ourselves.

I went to the town library and looked up trade journals and sent in a card to one of them.  I started getting junk mail, and eventually I saw an advertisement for a trade association convention to be held in Orlando, Florida.  I figured out what it was going to cost for Barbara and I to go down there, and it was about $600.  I don’t remember where we got the money from, but we went.  I was shocked.  I expected to meet a whole bunch of miserable sods like myself trying to stay alive, and there were some.  But I also met many very successful operators, some of them multi-national,  with literally tens of thousands of employees each. 

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Chapter 9. Starting Over: From Rags to Regulators.

What follows is a continuation of a series of articles comprising a book entitled “Passion, Power, and Panties–Confessions of a Businessman” wherein the author describes being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, spending almost ten years at their headquarters in Brooklyn, NY and then entering the ”outside”  world at the age of 27.  For purposes of continuity, I encourage you to subscribe in the column to the right so as not to miss a post.  It is free and without obligation. 

During the last few weeks at Watchtower, I began preparations for entering the outside working world.  Since I loved to write, I sought a job as a writer.  It took no time at all to discover that writers with  phD’s were falling out of trees.  My first obstacle was how to explain how I had spent the last nine years of my life.  Life in a monastery?  A waiter, bookbinder, letter writer for Jehovah’s Witnesses??  How to explain why I left?  To have children?  On the outside, people didn’t have to quit their jobs and relocate in order to start a family.  What was I qualified to do?  How much did I have to earn to survive, to support a wife and possible child?  I had no idea about any of the above.  I had never bought a car, established credit, learned a trade, or gone to college.  I was twenty-seven years old.  During the few disastrous  job interviews before we left Brooklyn, I did learn the short answer to why I left my last “position”:  “Career redirection.”   My first lesson in spin control.  Substance and unnecessary detail were not nearly as important as a few words that created a brief image.  I also learned a quick lesson right out of law school:  Never answer a question that hasn’t been asked.  Also,  never ask a question to which you don’t already know the answer.

Suffused with early rejection and a sense of impending disaster, Barbara and I decided to move to Youngstown, Ohio where she grew up.  Her parents encouraged us to stay with them until we got on our feet.  Our timing was impeccable.  Unknown to us, Youngstown Sheet and Tube, a steel company that was a pillar of the economic community was about to announce its closing, the first in a string of dominoes due to fall in quick succession and ultimately to devastate the local economy.  Unbeknownst to us, the biggest business in the Youngstown area appeared to be organized crime, and the economy was so bad even they were leaving town.  With tens of thousands thrown out of work, we came to Youngstown like two immigrants just off the boat and looking for work.  And like first-generation immigrants, because of being sequestered for over nine years in near-monastic existence, we couldn’t speak the language of the new world in which we found ourselves.  I couldn’t even begin to comprehend their thought processes.  It was massive culture shock, and we were too ignorant and innocent to even feel sorry for ourselves.

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Chapter 8. It All Falls Apart

What follows is a continuation of a series of articles comprising a book entitled “Passion, Power, and Panties–Confessions of a Businessman” wherein the author describes being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, spending almost ten years at their headquarters in Brooklyn, NY and then entering the ”outside”  world at the age of 27.  For purposes of continuity, I encourage you to subscribe in the column to the right so as not to miss a post.  It is free and without obligation. 

My star continued to rise, and soon I was requested to rewrite some of the lectures composed by some of the lesser talents in the Writing Department.  By this time I felt quite free about inserting much of my own philosophy in my writing.  After all it was all going to be reviewed and censored by others anyway.  So I lent my voice to the cacophony of dissent.  I wrote an article published in the Awake! magazine about the etymologies of words, and offered to write an article for the Watchtower   entitled “Are You a Thinking Christian?”  It bothered me that so much of the membership seemed to follow the route of least resistance and looked for a higher authority to tell them what to do when faced with the slightest conflict in their life.  They seemed incapable of abstracting principles from concrete situations and forming independent conclusions.  When I submitted my Abstract for the article, I received a letter in return from the Writing Department strongly admonishing me to build my article around prayer, meeting attendance, and regular door-to-door field service.  Only then did I realize the organization had a vested interest in the membership conforming to policy, and the last thing they needed was for them to become independent minded.  Later still I came to realize that the intended title of my article was in itself something of an oxymoron.  Not entirely however:   there were quite a few of us in the tradition of Thomas Aquinas who were attempting mightily to reconcile faith and intellectual integrity.  I never wrote the article.

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Chapter 7. From Manufacturing to Amanuensis

What follows is a continuation of a series of articles comprising a book entitled “Passion, Power, and Panties–Confessions of a Businessman” wherein the author describes being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, spending almost ten years at their headquarters in Brooklyn, NY and then entering the ”outside”  world at the age of 27.  For purposes of continuity, I encourage you to subscribe in the column to the right so as not to miss a post.  It is free and without obligation. 

During this period of time, there were several other interesting developments.  My boss, Ralph Lindem, who was a very kind man who struggled mightily with his management responsibilities,  was bumped upstairs to Purchasing, and was replaced by John Adams, who was in his early thirties and very bright.  John quickly shuffled the deck of bindery leadership, put some young, bright men who were very loyal to him in charge of various departments, and in no time at all had the bindery humming.  Production improved quickly, and in contrast to his predecessor who had put in such long days, John was often to be found in the Bindery Office reading the New York Times, with his feet propped up on the desk, an impertinence Ralph Lindem would never have dreamed of.  When the Factory Overseer, a soft-spoken Swede named  Max Larsen  would wander by, John showed respect by putting his feet down, but he did so unapologetically.  This took chutzpah because, to me at least,  Max Larsen always conveyed the impression of an iron fist in a velvet glove.  Maybe John just knew how good he was at his job.  One of many business lessons I learned from John Adams was never to confuse activity with results.

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