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 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 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 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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Chapter 3. The Sex Police

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.

It was easier for those of us who were born into a Witness family than for converts.  We never missed the holidays because we had never celebrated them.  We saw everyone around us celebrating them, but that is not the same as having had to give them up.  Which brings me to the subject of making converts.  Many churches build on pre-existing ethnic, tribal, or racial ties.  For example, if you are Irish, you are probably also Catholic; if you are British, you are probably a member of the Anglican church; if you are an American  Southern black, you are probably Baptist.  Jehovah’s Witnesses have no such ties working for them.  The basis for their fellowship is therefore totally contrived.  Intellectual belief then is supremely important.  Jehovah’s Witnesses use an intellectual hook to catch their converts.

They want to show you the contradictions and misrepresentations common to all other belief systems.  They want you to question why you should stick with a belief system that didn’t bring you the truth.  And if they can demonstrate that part of what you believe is patently untrue, how can you have confidence in the rest of it?  It is for this reason that Jehovah’s Witnesses frequently know more about what your religion teaches than you do.  They have to study your beliefs to discover their flaws, so they can point them out to you. In most cases if they know as little as five Bible verses they can hit a home run against an adversary. 

As conscious beings, we humans have a spiritual need for meaning to our short lives.  For most of us, we accept what our familial culture has handed to us without subjecting our beliefs to much scrutiny.  This provides fertile soil for Jehovah’s Witnesses to cultivate by planting seeds of doubt.

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Chapter 2. The Politics and Business of Belief and Service

I remember once the organization was trying to unload some old publications.  Instead of throwing these pamphlets out, which is where they belonged, we ran a “sale” and gave bunches of them away for next to nothing.  But at least they weren’t going to waste.  My mother had the temerity to read one of them, something no one was expected to do.  It was entitled Judge Rutherford Uncovers Fifth Column.  As I recall, it was published in the early years of World War II and made some absurd predictions as to the outcome of the war.  We were distributing these pamphlets in the mid-fifties, long after the war was over, and the predictions made in this publication were embarrassing.  My mother wanted my father to explain how we were in good faith expected to distribute this material to the public.  My father told her that no one was expected to read it.

Later when I was at Bethel I found it most interesting how an organization based on faith endeavored to teach the flock not to act on faith in their business dealings, and to adjudicate their differences when they failed to act rationally with each other. It was only much later that I understood that to live at all “by faith” means to suspend rational judgment and accept what rational judgment will not support (or faith, by definition would not be needed), and that in order to live by faith, one has to compartmentalize one’s life.  The exigencies of daily survival often require a higher level of intellectual integrity than does one’s philosophy, and so usually these two parts of your life have to be divorced from one another.  It never occurred to me at that point in time that if living a successful temporal life required you to practice your beliefs hypocritically, this was a condemnation of your philosophy:  your philosophy was not life-supporting or life-enhancing, but quite the opposite.  And if your beliefs condemned you for seeking your own life and happiness as your logical highest achievement, your beliefs in effect put you at war with yourself, with unearned guilt as the result; self-esteem, if not outright impossible, becomes possible only by further compartmentalizing your life.  Our family practiced our beliefs with considerable integrity and consistency; we had little guilt and were very unhappy.

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Chapter 1. Becoming a Foot Soldier for God

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 parents converted from the Lutheran religion to Jehovah’s Witnesses the year before I was born.  My father was a Pennsylvania Dutchman, and my mother was a war bride from England during the Second World War.  I was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania.  I was involved in Jehovah’s Witnesses proslytizing activities from earliest childhood.  Later I was often told about the time when I was two years old and standing with my parents outside the local movie theatre waiting for the moviegoers to exit the building and then “place” (Jehovah’s Witnesses’ euphemism for selling) the Awake! and Watchtower magazines.  When my offer was rejected by one man, I inquired “Don’t you want to live in the New World?”  My indoctrination was well in progress.

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Passion, Power, and Panties . . . Confessions of a Businessman Preface, part 2

What follows is the second half of the Preface, 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.

Psychology is the discipline that studies the fears that prevent us from perceiving reality correctly or of acting appropriately upon the knowledge and awareness of reality available to us.  One of the greatest appeals of religion is that it seduces us into believing we can short-circuit this entire process and rely on another to shoulder the burdens of dealing with reality.  This relieves us of the onerous burden of choosing our Purpose, and obviates the need for self-directed action, risk-taking, and courage to take those risks.  It welcomes us to the world of victim-hood, for having borrowed the purposes, principles, and ethics of others, we surely cannot be held responsible for the consequences of our actions, and having chosen to avoid thinking in order to avoid choices, we find ourselves unable to face life and its greatest issues with a direct gaze and our heads held high.  We are hostages of vague fears.  We can never become a champion of our own happiness, and must live our life at the most mundane, concrete level.  We have condemned ourselves to living the life of what Ayn Rand called a second-hander.   We never experience the joys of ownership–of ourselves.  Where there can be no failure, there can be no success.  Failing to empower ourselves at the deepest level, we may even attempt to substitute power over others.

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