Jim Krosschell
LITTLE BLACK LIE I tune into the web cast about the take-over almost anxiously, even though I stopped parking my butt in their chairs more than three years ago. I work at home these days, unfluoresced, relatively free, but the wound is still raw. None of my tormentors from the company is participating in the meeting, of course, only the executives from the purchaser, gassing on for shareholders and the Public about synergies and market share and the wonderful leadership team - mostly British - they are acquiring. Are any of those wonderful people also on the line, lurking, clutching their stock certificates, looking at the graphs with satisfaction, or have they heard it all before, in private, with calculators? I have a feeling of regret amidst the vindication and the avarice. What would it be like to be there still, awaiting your fate, wondering if the skills and the knowledge you have gathered your whole career would be valued and validated by the big new prestigious owners? To be swept up with the conquerors, to get the big promotion, or at least be good enough to keep your position in the new regime: that might have been exciting. But of course the excitement would not have lasted long. It would have faded quickly, back to the grind, back to the world of anonymous business decisions that get taken more as an accident of personality than an insight of planning. Or I would have suffered the fate of my ex-boss, given six months to "transition" the Boston office, then leave, to uproot young children and wife once more for the next career opportunity. The anonymity of the web cast makes it impossible for me to know if he is listening in, and vice versa, but it doesn't lessen the desire to rub his nose in it, all that dirty spadework he did on me and several others, now justly rewarded by events. He didn't know how to trust, he had that way of doing just enough of your own job to let you know you never quite measured up. You weren't stupid or incompetent, just soft and naïve and untrained (in short, un-MBA'ed) and finally not good enough for his world. And then he turned out to be a bit player in a billion-dollar British drama. So I'm left with the transformation of shares into cash, nice enough vindication for that day in September 2003 when the man and the Brits brought seventeen years of work seemingly to naught. Geld Macht Frei, and one can only hope not to be corrupted in the process. I don't think I have been, although I think about money too much, still being employed for a little longer and dependent on wages, my financial obligations of house and family not quite secured for retirement. I'm pretty sure I survived with a conscience and a soul, and this is how I know: I was reading Elisabeth Ogilvie when I heard that the company was being sold, and in that Tide novel, she described Nils Sorensen in World War II. He didn't have to volunteer, he was well past the age of conscription, but the German U-boats were patrolling his beloved Maine coast, and so the most taciturn of lobstermen, for the sake of his family and his adopted country, endured the metal and the heat and the noise of a battleship in the Pacific, crammed in tight places with loud, profane, sweaty men, and all the while, for every one of six hundred days of claustrophobia, he was nearly sick with desire to be on his boat, in the quiet cool fog of morning. It brought me to tears. I can claim no such extremes of circumstance. But I know in my gut that business is senseless like war, and the sound of surf brings men to sanity again. The CEO signs off the web cast and the screen goes blank. But someone forgets to turn the speaker phone off and I can still hear a subdued hubbub of voices; shareholders who had come in person have approached the head table and are talking to the brass. I can't really make out the words, but the tone of collective self-congratulation is unmistakable. All the arrows are going up. Economies of scale are being accomplished. Operational leverage will occur, in this fiscal year, with demonstrable benefit to the bottom line, and the yield. Eventually I put down the phone. It seems indecent to rejoice and grieve at the same time any longer. A few weeks later the deal closes. The checks are disbursed, I get my money, and the layoffs begin. I still have friends at the company. I can't do anything for them, and I probably couldn't do anything substantial for them even if I was still there. This is the point of stock options. They cut emotional ties. They make it easy to take the money and run. The company could have been sold years ago. The MBAs had been whispering in the family's ears for a long time. That it happened now, in my absence - that's what I haven't quite processed. It makes it seem that seventeen years came down not to a career successfully prosecuted but to a cowardly entry in a bank account. And those spreadsheets I obsessively update, plotting my liberation to the coast of Maine, now carry the faint stench of a liberation unfairly won. Jim Krosschell worked in science publishing for 30 years, starting as a 29-year-old production assistant, avoiding the real world until then by grad school, Peace Corps, travel and TESOL teaching. He has mostly retired now, writing essays and a blog http://onesmansmaine.blogspot.com, and dividing his time between Newton, MA and Owls Head, ME. His essays have been published, or are forthcoming, in Saranac Review, Louisville Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Southeast Review, Contrary, Hobble Creek Review, and others. |