CSotD: Hard-boiled decisions
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My only quibble with today's Rhymes with Orange is that Farmer Brown Inc. isn't waiting for the chickens to get past their egg-laying years.
Though, of course, the hen is only passing on what she has heard.
Fair enough. It's a common mistake to assume some thread of logic in these matters.
I reported on business for about a decade and always felt there were parts of it that I didn't get, that seemed counterintuitive or just plain wrong.
I remember, at one point, being in a gathering of banking execs and investment gurus, just at the point where the US was passing Brazil as the world's largest debtor nation and asking why that was not being reported as a bad thing. They all started explaining it and I understood every word they said but none of it made any sense at all to me, so I decided I was just never going to get it.
Lo and behold, a quarter century or so later, we're all getting it, right where those chickens are about to get it.
My theory? None of the business writers get it, so they just act as stenographers, passing on what they are told and assuming that it must surely make sense to somebody else.
So on Friday, I heard on the radio that Yelp had held its IPO and, sure enough, the stock started out at X and then quickly jumped to Y. And the person reporting this made it sound as if Yelp in fact possessed some intrinsic value that had made this happen.
Yeah, right. And so does a Joe DiMaggio rookie card or a copy of the first comic book to feature Submariner.
The big difference is that, when someone decides a particular comic book or baseball card or Van Gogh painting is worth big money, they don't schedule layoffs to justify it.
As I have ranted here before, I once worked for a newspaper chain that was perfectly profitable until the heirs of the man who founded it — which is to say, a handful of people who had nothing whatsoever to do with creating any of the company's value — sat down with Warren Buffett because they felt that they should be able to get more yachts and polo ponies for doing nothing than they were currently able to purchase.
So they set about increasing the value of the company by failing to make capital improvements and in other ways generally jacking up the profit side by artificially suppressing the cost side.
And one of the things they did was to offer buyouts in order to get the people with the most experience to leave so they could make the other people "do more with less" or, in some cases, hire rookies who didn't know what the hell they were doing but would do it for even less than the people who were doing more.
This "severance package" was a (two week) paycheck for every year you had been there, which, for me, would have been the equivalent of six-and-a-half months pay.
The packages were allotted to each department in the numbers they wanted to cut, so that the marketing department, which consisted of a special publications editor, three graphic artists — one of whom doubled as a marketing assistant — a tech person, the readership services director (me) and our department head, got one package.
Aside from the department head, I had seniority and the deal was that, of the people who asked for the package as of deadline day, the one with the most seniority would get it.
This put me in the driver's seat and I really had to think about how much I could do with half a year's pay and how easy it would be, at 50, to start over somewhere else.
At last, I decided it was too good an offer to turn down, so, on the final day, I went to the publisher and asked about it and she told me the package in my department was no longer available. And since there was only one person in the department with more seniority, there was only one possible reason I couldn't claim the package.
So I went to my soon-to-be-former boss and said, "Let's go get a cup of coffee," and he said, "Sure." And I said, "Not in the break room. Down the street." And he said he didn't have time for that and I said, "I know you took the package" and he decided he did have time after all.
It turned out he was leaving at end of business that day, swearing never ever to work for a publicly traded company again.
And it also turned out that, by requesting the package, I had painted a big fat bull's eye in the middle of my forehead, announcing that, with a bit of squeezing, I might be persuaded to quit. Which they did, and, sure enough, after about eight months of corporate leprosy, I found another gig and they replaced me with a part-timer.
On my last day, my new bosses finally (after two weeks of knowing I was leaving) called me into the conference room to find out what I did there, since they didn't know. I no longer had to pretend to like Michael Bolton music, since I was leaving, but otherwise this is about how much they wanted to know about my job responsibilities and what I had brought to the company.
It was no big deal, no big surprise and, in fact, they'd already so gutted the program in the course of getting me to quit that its subsequent de-funding and disassembly was less a murder than it was just a case of desecrating a corpse.
By contrast, I had a friend at a major daily who had built their classroom program for 20-some years and was a national figure in our corner of the industry, and her meeting with the Bobs came right out of left field while her enviable program was going full-throttle.
While she sat in that unexpected meeting, they cut off her phone extension and deleted her email account, and then, when the meeting was over, they didn't even hand her the customary cardboard box to fill — they frog-marched her out of the building without letting her take any of the personal items from her desk.
Moral of the story?
The Bobs are everywhere.
And don't think, just because you continue to lay eggs regularly and dependably, that they won't offer you a severance package.
Bobs don't count eggs. They count beans.
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