As Luck Would Have It (2 page)

The subjects came easily to me for the most part, except for math that is.  Luckily, Joseph was good in every subject, including math, and he would help me out and even let me copy his homework if I was in a bind, although sometimes
he would object
half
h
eartedly
on ethical grounds.
  How you ever going to learn that way, Clifford?  Just let me see what you wrote, would you?  He never said no to me, and the truth is I really didn't need much help; I just couldn't see the value of being able to calculate the area of some
odd
geometric
shape.  C
an you imagine any situation in life where you would be called upon to determine the area of a
trapezoid
? 

I didn't normally resort to having Joseph cheat for my benefit, but as I have said, math wasn't my favorite subject, and I detested our geometry instructor like a mite-infested scab.  He was a prick of a young second-year teacher who would never live to be tenured, but before he did the world a favor and quit teaching, he went out of his way to embarrass the kids he didn't like.  He was ill-mannered when it came to Joseph and referred to him once as girly in front of everyone when he raised his hand one time too many for the shithead's liking.  Joseph got quiet and withdrew his hand while I turned red with anger.  I had already been tossed from class on one prior occasion for some wise cracking comment about the quality of our education, so I thought better of spouting off again, though I was fuming the rest of the hour and was mad at myself for not defending my friend.  I apologized to him later for just sitting there and not saying anything.  It's no big deal really; it's OK. 
I’m sorry to tell you Joseph, but it
is not OK, you don't deserve that crap.  It's OK
, Clifford
.  I'm sorry about it anyway.

That's the way it went a lot with us; I was too young to fully comprehend what was really going on at the time, but I understood perfectly that middle school was a mean place where I could find myself in quite a bit of trouble and Joseph could find himself quite a bit bloody if we weren't both careful.

****

Joseph was born on December 7, so he had only a one day jump on me in getting a feel for what this thing called life was going to be all about.  He loved that we could celebrate our birthdays more or less together and that one of our parents would inevitably come up with some sort of joint party, at least for a couple of years. 

I pretended to resent having to share my birthday with him, but I actually enjoyed it.  Our families were friendly, but didn’t share social events all that often, but these were clearly good ones that everyone could partake in.  My parents had invited the Kleins to the house for Christmas dinner a couple of times, but there was a certain discomfort with their being Jewish I think.  It didn’t matter to us one bit, though I was definitely jealous of all the great stuff Joseph landed over eight long days of Hanukah.  His parents I think wanted to make a show to their kids and maybe everyone else that they were not going to be outdone by their gentile friends in the gift giving department. 

But the Andrews were not about to be so easily outclassed if they could avoid it.  Although money
might have been a little bit
tight, they went way out there and bought me
a
beautiful stereo for my 14
th
birthday.  I never saw it coming and I was thrilled because we were really starting to appreciate music by then and all I had to that point was a cheap record player that skipped a lot and sounded like I imagined one of Edison’s might have.  No offense Thomas, but I was sure the new one would be a whole lot nicer.  As it turned out, their gift was to stay in its box for weeks after my birthday for reasons we will learn in a little while.  You may notice that I tend to get ahead of myself and lose focus, so please be patient with me and I endeavor to stay on track and tell my story with a minimum of confusion or disruption. 

I was invited to the Klein’s house frequently for dinner.  They kept kosher, which was a source of great perplexity to me.  It’s not that I minded what they served; Joseph’s mother was a wonderful cook.  She prepared
so many
unusual and delicious foods
,
a mix of traditional ethnic
meals
and her
own
version of American cuisine, all to my liking.  My own mother wasn’t exactly a bad cook, and I especially enjoyed when she made her roast beef or spaghetti and meatballs, but still it was unfair to compare Mom's cooking with the meals Joseph's mother turned out.  She loved to cook for us and impress everyone with her perfectly hone
d
culinary skills.  But what was this kosher thing about?  Was a cheeseburger seriously off limits?  I kept screwing up by requesting a glass of milk when beef was on the table or asking if Mrs. Klein had ever tried sausage with her otherwise delicious pasta.  That got a good laugh out of the whole family, but how was I supposed to know that sausage was what they referred to as
treif
?  Joseph tried to explain the laws of
Kashrus
,
but I didn’t get it.  How come you can’t eat oysters?  They don’t have fins and scales.  And what’s up with the milk and meat thing?  It says not to mix them in the Torah.  The more I tried to make sense of it, the more puzzling it became.  But my lack of understanding of the law did nothing to diminish my appetite for enjoying the wonderful meals with the Kleins, kosher or not. 

I look back on those days with such happiness now and think of the good fortune I had when the Kleins moved just three doors down from us.  Maybe that signaled the beginning of my long streak of good luck, who knows, and things certainly seemed good for me now.  But being 13 meant that we were just one year away from the events that were to shape the rest of my life.  When you are young, it is relatively easy to measure time and mark events by the year.  It's much more difficult as you age because the years blur in the distance, like dust kicking up behind you as you drive through it.  And the increment of a year, a huge expanse of time for a child, becomes a progressively accelerating period as you grow older.  A year for a 13
-
year
-
old may seem like forever, but for a centenarian, it may seem hardly worth mentioning.  But all things considered, a year could not now, in hindsight, be very far off at all.  How were we to deal with what was coming
with
just one more flip of the
National Geographic
calendar?

I have been working with the same company for the past 27 years, and if you think by
now I am looking forward to retirement, you are completely
correct
, but it occurs to me that my employer may be counting the days faster than I am.  I should have been able to call it quits by now, but economic conditions of the past decade and a half have not kept pace with my somewhat over-optimistic financial planning.  The truth, a topic that we can discuss in much greater detail later on, is that
my job is quite easy in most respects and maybe I should not be in such a hurry to give it up.
My boss, Mr. Finnernan, is a somewhat weak-spirited man, nearly ten years my junior.  He is clearly not competent to do his job, but he is way ahead of me in a lot of ways. 

Most of the serious responsibilities are delegated to
the
associates
at
Flanders and Associates.  I was now technically considered a consultant, though no one has ever been able to tell me what the difference is exactly, other than they trust the younger associates with work that might actually matter and trust me to do meaningless and mindless work that a reasonably intelligent 15
-
year
-
old could quickly master and that nobody is very likely to screw up.  For these younger employees to show or even fake respect for people like me would be a lot to ask for, so they normally don't make the effort.

I’d recently been given an assignment that I didn’t want to do and had no interest in completing.  It was actually going to require some research and analysis, something that I rarely attempted since most of the work that I did required
minimal effort and
even less creativity.  Now the boss was going to have to get on my case because he had a deadline.  What I should have been doing for the past couple of days was reviewing the financial statements of a company that a client of ours was considering acquiring.  Although this was a rather small client with relatively insignificant financial impact to us, common business sense and professionalism
demand
ed
that they receive the same level of competent service that larger clients
command
ed
.  What I was actually doing for the past two days was reading the
Wall Street Journal
and posting blogs on
Facebook
and other websites.

My boss, who was too timid to confront me directly, kept inquiring by email as to when my
already overdue
report might be ready.  I’m working on it, was my canned response, though in truth I had not even started working on it.  What I was aggressively working on was the vacation that Joseph and I had been planning to commemorate our 60
th
birthdays.  Hopefully, if both of us could pull off the needed days away from work without putting at least one of our jobs in jeopardy, we would leave on December 8
th
for a cruise to the Caribbean.  We were going to Florida first, since I wanted to spend some time in St. Petersburg and Joseph in Fort Lauderdale.  So I was working out the logistics and timing because Joseph actually had
a lot of work to do w
hile at work, which left me with the more serious responsibility of planning the details of our long awaited vacation.

I was at my desk searching
Travelocity
when Mr. Finnernan, having lost patience with me, finally asked what I was doing.  I lied and said that I would have had the report done by now, but I was waiting on financial records that had been requested but had not been forthcoming.  No one would accept that bullshit response; the materials that I was disinterested in reviewing were actually stacked on my desk right in front of his eyes.  But my boss slithered away shyly, accepting my lame excuse rather than
having to
confront the unpleasant reality that his employee was not only lazy, but a liar as well.

I booked the hotel and plane reservations in the next half hour and feeling guilty for making my boss look bad, I emailed him and
said I
thought I had enough information to finish the assignment and that I’d have
something to him
the next day.  In the end, I spent only a few hours reading the statements and producing what even I knew to be a piece of crap for a report.

You would think that there would be a reprimand or some other consequence for such blatant incompetence, but nothing happened.  I went back to my reading and web surfing as if the work related interruption had not occurred and never even bothered to inquire as to how the client had responded to our recommendations.  Guilt or remorse or some other emotion that might have served to motivate me in
some future similar
situation did not surface.

From my many years of experience as a manager, I've learned that people tend to perform down to the level of expectation that others have for them.  The majority of people will exert an effort that is more or less congruent with the expected result, or in the alternative, the perceived value of the reward or punishment.  This expectancy assumption regarding workplace behavior can be quite useful to managers, however they need to recognize that this does not work in every situation or apply to every employee.

For some reason, which defies
explanation or even a workable
theory, there are those people who if you put them in an office and pile the work on them, will work hard regardless of the consequences, seemingly oblivious to subsequent rewards or punishments.  These are what we refer to in business as self motivated employees.  Perhaps you are one of those people
,
though I doubt it.  More likely, you have come across one or two of them where you work, and if so, you probably wish you could squish them like a cockroach, but it is actually a good thing that you can't because when you stop
to
think about it, they are in reality a help to you, not an obstacle, because they do a lot of work that might otherwise wind up in your lap, and they don't necessarily get, or even expect a bigger raise than you got for not doing it. 
That’s the real beauty of the expectancy theory of work behavior and I’d love to meet the guy that thought it up.

As a manager, that is before I was demoted to a consultant at the age of 51 and supplant
ed
by a 31
-
year
-
old recent MBA grad, I had to understand these concepts and apply them to whatever the current situation was with respect to how much work was being piled on and who I had on hand to actually shovel it.  I hope that
you
will not sense any resentment on my part for being removed as a manager; I fully did not deserve to be demoted, I deserved to be terminated.  But while I was still a manager, I faced two fundamental problems beyond the obvious one of being a decade or more from retirement.  First,
I had to figure
out who would do the work, and second, how I was going to maneuver myself into an easier position that did not require so much planning, organizing and analyzing.