One Over X News

Us and Them

There was a period from October 1997 to October 1999 when I could not see my children on a daily basis. They had moved to Florida with their mother. I have had other bad periods of life. Those two years were the worst.

I probably would have never finished From The Inside To The Closer had it not been for that period. I had no distractions. I also felt like a total loser for a lot of reasons. My wife had told me before she left than she had not loved me for quite some time. There had been an affair that she denies to this day but I already knew about it. I had some motivation to get things done.

I visited the kids in Florida around Christmas 1997 and again in 1998. Jina was very cold and distant toward me. We talked a little bit but it was a little bit more than either of us probably should have.

My kids came to Connecticut and stayed in my apartment with me for the whole summer in 1998. I built them new computers and when they left I shipped them down to Florida. They came again for a visit in the summer of 1999. We took in a lot of movies on my days off. We ate a lots of fast food. We went to Riverside Amusement Park in Agwam, Mass. Oh, yeah, and we played putt-putt golf a few times.

All along I thought that living apart was a temporary situation. I put in for a transfer. I was more than entitled and felt assured that my company would take care of it. I had relocated from Florida to Connecticut at their behest. They had made promises to me and my family, promises that they did may have intended to keep at the time but had forgotten over the years.

The deal has been that I would go to the Northeast to help bring the corporate culture to the new territory as the company expanded. I need only remain there for two years then the company would return me whenever I desired but could not promise me which store in Florida I would be assigned. It was a sales pitch that sold Jina on. Even though we were having a baby in September and we would be moving in October it seemd like the right thing to do. My other two children were also very young at the time. Moving was not an easy thing to do.

The mover were to pack up everything and when they got there unpack everything. That was the deal. I did not want Jina to have to stress out and besides the company was only giving me a couple of days to get up there and get settled. I had to be at work the day the furniture was going to arrive.

Of course when the truck arrived it was all news to them that they were expected to unpack. That was not the deal and it never was. I got on the phone with corporate from work and tore into someone that had assured me that everything was handled and Told them to tell the truck to pack everything back up onto the truck and move me back to Florida at company expense.

They finally arranged to have a crew come in and unpack things. Still, it was several days before anyone showed up. The house was a disaster.

The way the relocation was presented to me, it was absolutely essential that the company grow into the lucrative Northeast. The plan to one day become a major player in retailing depended on the growth. Expanding the company without bringing the culture along would be detremental to the overall success. My stock would quintuple in value if key people like me relocated.

Those who know me personally know which companies I have worked for in the past and can connect the dots, here. I do not want this to come off as a tirade against a company that I believed in for over 12 years. This is a mere statement of the betrayal that one can endure whenever the ideals of a corporation are adopted in lieu of one's own common sense and self interests.

After a few years Jina was tired of living in Connecticut. Even though she had a couple of very close friends she hated the cold weather and wanted to return to Florida. I was doing very well at the time so I resisted. I felt that a long desired promotion was finally imminent. I had even been sent to a special training camp that taught group solutions to problems. It was intended for future general managers. I did not want to take a career set back just then.

I spent more and more time at work and less and less time at home with my family. I could accept this disproportionate time allocation on a temporary basis because I was doing it for my family's future. I understood that I was introducing a lot of tension and stress into my relationship with my wife but I really believed that she understood .

The company was aware of the difficulties the company could cause for married couples. The divorce rate within company management was disproportionately high. What's more a great many of the district level managers and above were divorced or single. Either way they had very little appreciation for the tension they were putting into the home lives of the general managers and assistant store mangers.

The company even had a meeting for wifes and they presented to them what the company vision was and what each of their husbands were doing in support of that future. My wife came back from the meeting with a warped idea that in a couple of years she would be driving an expensive luxury car and we'd be rich.

My family lived very well. I don't pretend that any of that would have been possible without the incredible luck of working for one on the fastest growing retail companies at that time. We lived in a $300,000 house and I had essentially paid cash for it because I did not make enough money at work for a bank to risk financing it. I'm serious. I built a house that the bank was telling me I could not afford to mortgage. So I had sold stock, paid for the house and then with a clear deed, financed enough of it that I could afford the payments.

I hate banks. I filled out more paperwork than I ever had to either entering or leaving the military. I didn't think that was remotely possible. I was wrong.

It was the largest house in the neighborhood. Jina and I had greatly modified the design to suit us. It was a very comfortable house even though she always complained that the kitchen should have been larger.

I bought Jina a new van for her birthday one year. I wrote out a check. That was how much money I had access to. It was stupid to do things like that perhaps but until you buy a car with a check or pay cash for a house...Yeah, of course I wish I had that money now.

At the time I had a lot of stock in the company that I worked for and received stock options each year. For tax reasons I had to sell my options in order to afford to keep any of the proceeds. The stock options had usually gained so much value within a year, that I had to do something with the options or suffer the double taxation of alternate capital gains tax. In any given year in that period the income from my stock options exceeded the income from my salary. I could not afford to keep the options. I had to sell them just to pay the tax on them.

So we lived large, way too large. My kids were spoiled. We installed a swimming pool and a large deck on the back of our house for entertaining. We attended exclusive $100 a ticket News Years Eve parties each year for which I bought a tuxedo because in the longrun I would save money verses renting one.

I helped Jina buy a karate school franchise. It was her dream to go into business for herself and I tried to help her with the resources. I should have been more directly involved in the business but I was spending 70 to sometimes 90 hours a week at the store.

The franchiser provided a 'qualified' instructor who was not able to sell contracts for some reason. After a year of patience and losing money, he was replaced with another 'qualified instructor' that not only skimmed money off what little income the school was generating and cooked the books to hide what he was doing but was also dealing drugs out of the school. The later ruined the image of the school as it was apparently common knowledge throughout the community. Under the terms and conditions of the franchise, we were legally obligated to keep the franchise going even though the name of the school was destroyed. We did look into legal action against the franchiser but were advised that it would be tied up in court for years and probably we could not prevail. We had entered into the contract willingly.

Unbeknownst to me, all along the way Jina was borrowing money on credit cards to keep the school afloat. Somewhere in all that I took seriously ill, ended up hospitalized for a month and had open heart surgery to repair a faulty mitril valve.

We not only lost money in the karate school, my wife had gone heavily into debt trying to keep the school and her dream of owning a business alive. When I got out of the hospital she told me about the debt that she had been hiding from me and I sold stock to pay some of it off. Maybe that was wrong. I was always able to bail her out and she came to expect it. She hung on to the karate school and another instructor was provided that was worse than the first two. Once more she was going into debt to stay in business. But now I did not have stock that would be available for another six months. I also had $137,000 of hospital bills that my health insurance had refused to pay due to what they had determined were charged about the 'reasonable and customary', experimental or unnecessary services, double billing and every other excuse imaginable. I had worked for my company for 8 years at that time and had never missed a day. Except for my wife having two babies that were charged against the insurance and the usual checkups and visits for the sniffles, we had never used the health insurance. Someone recovering from open heart surgery probably should not have to debate every bill with an insurance adjuster that is in South Dakota.

I had a lot of free time while recuperating but did not always feel up to wrestling with the insurance company. I managed to go over every charge on every bill and had a complete understanding of the charges. I got copies of my medical records and the procedures that were performed during the surgery. This was how and when I had discovered that I died seven times during the surgery and they almost did not get my heart beating again.

The insurance was disallowing every procedure as being unnecessary, even those that had been employed to restart my heartbeat and stabilize it with a pacemaker. I sent faxes and follow-up faxes to show the insurance company the very same bills that they were sent and did not accept. I explained the bills to them. I even showed them the line and verse in the health plan where it was stated that such services were covered.

Examples: they were disallowing a $450 ambulance bill because it was above what they considered 'reasonable and customary'. I called every ambulance service in the state and got a quote for the same service and no one was cheaper than the $450. I asked the insurance company to provide me with a list of the 'reasonable and customary charges' and where those rates came from. They initially refused to do that until I threatened to call the state insurance commission. They were basing the rate on Albany, New York not Central Connecticut.

Another example: the insurance company challenged a $20,000 hospital bill and a $17,000 hospital bill because they claimed that they were being charged two different rates for the same services. The $17,000 bill clearly stated that if they company had paid within 30 days that they would received a $3,000 discount, otherwise the bill would be $20,000.

My surgery was in May, 1995. I was still dealing with insurance issues in late August and was almost ready to go back to work. Finally I had to pay a lawyer at my own expense to intervene on some of the disputed bills. In the mean time I was receiving threats from the hospitals and doctors involved, a couple of things had already showed up on my credit report. Eventually the insurance that was supposed to have a maximum $1600 out of pocket per family per year had paid everything but $7000. The fine print apparently supported their disallowing the remaining bills and so, I had to pay them. A $7000 bill unexpected considering all the other mess the karate school had gotten us into may as well have been a ball and chain. I had to borrow money against the equity in the house.

I hate insurance companies. I have no doubt that they would have preferred that I had died. It was porobably all worked out on paper somewhere that it would have cost them less.

From that point my personal life declined and grew worse. My health was fine. The doctors released me for normal duty with no restrictions. However, my career was on hold because of concerns that I would not be able to handle the stress of running a store after having hopen heart surgery. It was never really stated in those terms but every time I saw anyone at the divisional level they always asked about my health - even four years later the divisional president asked me if my health was better.

I know now that I should have been more directly involved in what Jina was doing. But I trusted her judgement. She is not stupid just inexperienced. It is hard to oversee a business when you are recovering from surgery and then going back to spending 70 to 90 hours a week running a high volume retail store.

All the time that I was waiting for a promotion that never came, my wife was decided that she wanted to go back to Florida even if it was without me. She was running away from a lot of things, but mostly the reason she was leaving became me. In 1997 she put the house up on the market for immediate sale. In October we packed up everything in the house and she moved to Florida and I moved into an apartment. Except for the aforementioned visits, for the next two years I did not have access to my children except by phone.

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posted by Unknown @ 6:41 AM