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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Chapter 6. Early Socialist Yearnings

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 first six months at headquarters we were enrolled in Primary School, later more aptly named Bethel Entrants School.  During this period we were required to read the entire Bible verse by verse, and annotate it, i.e. make notes on the meaning of each text in longhand.  We were also enrolled in the Bethel Theocratic Ministry School, which was exactly like the one I had grown up with, except that at Bethel, we had two counselors, the regular one and the Silent Counselor.  The Silent Counselor met with you after the program was over, and he was the guy you had to impress, for a very important reason.  If you obtained three consecutive good ratings from your Silent Counselor, you were appointed to the Bethel Speakers List.  Once on this list of approved speakers, you would be assigned once a month to visit a congregation within two hundred miles of Bethel, all expenses paid.  You represented headquarters, and you were considered one of their best speakers.  You were held in very high esteem, if not awe, by the locals in the congregation you visited, and it was not uncommon for many of them to show their appreciation by putting cash in your pocket.  So this privilege brought prestige, fun, travel and time away, and money.  The money issue was never discussed but it was always appreciated.  Generally speaking I’m talking about a few hundred dollars total from a visit to one congregation.  Ironically it was my experience that the poorest congregations usually contributed the most.  Later, in the real world, I was to make a similar observation that the wealthiest patrons in a restaurant were often the stingiest tippers.

The best part of being on the Speakers List is that on each visit to a congregation, you gave two one-hour speeches, one on Saturday night and one the following Sunday.  The one on Sunday was standard issue, written by headquarters writers.  The Saturday night speech, called a Service Talk, was a topic and content of your own choosing.  My first such presentation was “Are You Happy?”, and the second one was “Are You A Thinking Christian?”  It turned out that both subjects have been core elements of a lifelong spiritual quest–for rationality, purpose, achievement, and meaning.  With both subjects I found my audiences universally hungry for answers to the same questions:  It was easily apparent I was hitting a mother lode of interest.

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Chapter 5. Sex in the City

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. 

So at the age of eighteen, I left home to do missionary work in Oil City, PA, where I learned it was possible to be poorer still and hungry.  We learned to buy food at school supply warehouses in No. 10 cans and this would save a lot of money. The only problem was we were broke after buying three cases of food, one each of corn, peas, and beef stew.  We ate corn, peas, and beef stew for weeks for every meal.  To this day it is hard for me to eat beef stew.  Sometimes the only food in the house was jello, and we would eat that until it was gone.  

None of us were doing very well at finding jobs.  Oil City was a very old, depressed town.  I went to the local Holiday Inn to apply for a job as a janitor.  The Inn Manager said he had a janitor but needed a Night Auditor, and asked me if I had any experience.  I said no, but I was a fast learner.  He hired me for $1.65 per hour and I went to work that Saturday night.  It was an awful night.  I had no comprehension of auditing, and I knew that everything in the front desk posting machine had to balance by 8 a.m.  To make matters worse I had to operate the switchboard, one of those old fashioned ones with the cords that plugged in.  The Harlem Globe Trotters were staying in the Inn that night and the switchboard was going crazy.  In no time at all, I had the switchboard all tangled up and a lot of frustrated house guests.  In desperation, at midnight I woke up the Inn Manager and he came down and cleaned up the mess.  A few weeks later I and my two roommates all got a job bandagging truck tires.  This is like recapping, only when you do it to truck tires it is called bandagging.  I got that job by faking a British accent during the interview with Bruce Taylor, the owner of Penn Aire Tire.   A few days later when Bruce visited me in the plant he inquired what had happened to my accent.

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Chapter 4. Poverty, Up Close and Personal

he column to the right so as not to miss a post.  It is free and without obligation.

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 t

 

Sometimes being a Witness kid was painful, sometimes not.  What I personally hated the most was being required to sit during the national anthem at school.  I felt so conspicuous and I felt it was one of the harder beliefs to defend.  Sometimes I would be derided, even kicked in the back by other kids.  I also got beat up a lot on the school bus.  My father had taught me that if I ever got in trouble at school I would get a whipping at home.  This was my introduction to justice, but I accepted it because it made about as much sense to me as Original Sin (you’re condemned from birth for something you didn’t do).  My solution eventually was to walk the two miles to and from school.  I told my parents I wanted the exercise.

Our school life had three basic groups of kids:  Academic (college preps), Commercial (secretaries and beauticians), and Vocational (the dumb kids).  At least that’s how things were perceived.  Kids can often by cruel, and since I didn’t fit into any of the three groups, I really had no group or clique to attach to at school lunches.  So school lunches became hell for me.  I obviously belonged to the preps, except I wasn’t going to college, so I was ostracized by them.  As a minority of one, without any support group, I became an open target to the VoAg boys, who delighted in throwing food at me or whatever other mischief they could think of.  The school faculty was not particularly sympathetic since they felt I brought this on myself, and my request for permission to spend the lunch period in the library was denied.  There was this one particular kid who took  delight in making my life miserable.  He had flunked two or three years and I found him very intimidating.  I had heard a story about how he had beat up a kid with a lead pipe.  One Sunday afternoon while participating in door-to-door activity, I was up in rotation in the car to take the next house and there was this same guy out in the front yard.  I expressed considerable concern, but agreed to take my turn.  I gave this kid my entire spiel and he stood there and said nothing.  When I concluded with an offer of some publications, he politely refused.  The following Monday he sent one of his cronies over to me in the lunchroom to tell me never to come to his house again.  The harassment in the lunchroom stopped from that day forward, however.  There was, however, the sense of total alienation from the outside world; we knew we did not belong.  And we knew that same sense of alienation was our badge of honor, proof positive of our righteousness.

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