One Over X News

The First Installment of Noh Bahdi

The Early Orange Daze
(Fictionalization told in first person)



The End:

I do not write anything to point fingers or condemn what I still believe to be one of the greatest companies in America. As is the usual case a dispute is between people and I had problems with certain people that were in positions of authority. Those people are no longer in such positions of power. For one reason or another they have left the company. There may be justice in that knowledge. Unfortunately they were around long enough to persuade me quit.

I feel that if I could have gotten through to Bernie and spoken with him as was possible in the early days, that he would have at least listened and maybe given me a new perspective that I could cling, until someone somewhere found a place for me. I was asking for consideration. I had been promised something nine years before. I expected the promise to still be valid.

Although the corporate policy for assisting employees was always compassionate and caring, my requests for consideration of hardship met with unacceptable offers that were completely at odds with what I had seen the company do for others.

A few days after my departure, I received a phone call from someone that I didn’t even know. He worked in another store in Connecticut, a store where I knew a few people, having worked with them in the past.

“Look, here it is. I feel like I know you. I hear people telling stories about things you have done. I can’t believe that Steve let you go, just like that. I don’t know the whole story and I probably don’t need to know. But I thought you should know. What they are telling you about Florida not having positions open in management is bullshit. One of their regional managers called me yesterday and was trying to talk me into moving down there. He said that he could make a position for me because he needed me there. So, I don’t know. Maybe in the past you pissed off some people and now they are in a position to pay you back. I don’t know. I just know what other people that have worked with you say about you. I am sorry we never worked in the same store. You are a straight-shooter. I respect that.”

Past promises and enticements were designed to lure me into a false sense of expectation. Some promises are always broken. I understand that there was a need and I answered the call. I understand that situations change. Life is not always fair. In the end, I did not understand why no one was listening to me. I just expected a bit more respect than I received. Maybe I thought I was more important.

In the end I proved to be nothing more than a number. I was replaced the same day. Life and the company went on even though I was not there.

Maybe I was the one that was wrong. Having a store manager that had been with the company 8 years less than I had tell me that ‘if I was good enough I could work my way backup’ really pissed-me-off. I may have been unimportant all along. It was just that I was useful at times and I have overstayed my utility.

It is an irony that I alone could fix a specific computer glitch in the store’s internal network. A few hours after I had quit, I received a phone call from an employee asking me how to fix the problem. That was perhaps the only thing that made me somewhat indispensable. “I sorry to put it so bluntly,” I replied. “I no longer work there. My hourly rate for computer consultation is $75 an hour with an hour minimum and $45 dollars trip charge. If Paul wants to pay that, I’ll fix it. Otherwise, called Atlanta. Maybe they will finally send someone to correct the problem.”

I never received a follow on call. They got along without me.



The Last Job:

For more than 12 years I worked for The Orange Giant, the powerhouse in home improvement retailing. It was supposed to be the last job I’d ever have. Honestly I would still be working for them except for the intransigence of a regional manager and the lack of concern for my personal hardship which went all the way up to the office of the CEO. I don’t blame the CEO. He probably never heard about my situation. His gatekeeper was doing her job, protected him.

At one time I felt that I knew Bernie personally. I was even pretty sure that if I called him collect he would accept the charges. He would have at least made a couple of phone calls in my behalf. In the early days of the company when I called his office he would have answered his phone. I would have spoken to him.

After stating my case to the CEO’s administrative assistant, and telling her all about my mother with Alzheimer’s, my father with Parkinson’s and my wife and three small kids that had already moved to Florida ahead of me, the administrative assistant to the CEO and co-founder of the corporation, asked me what I thought Bernie could do for me. “You have already spoken to the people that you need to. They have to make those kinds of decisions.”

“I am hitting an impenetrable wall with them. They won’t transfer me or at best they will take me as a salesperson and ‘if I am good enough’ I can work my way back up into management. Do you understand what a slap in the face that is, not to mention the cut in pay? It’s a demotion. My reward for doing what the company asked me to do is a demotion. I have done nothing wrong here. I helped the company out when it needed my help. All I am asking is consideration of my present situation. I have never asked for anything before.”

“Well you can’t expect to make what you are making in the northeast.”

“There have been managers transferred for hardship reasons one of them was from the northeast! I know him personally. He has never lived in Florida. He went there for the sake of his wife’s relatives. So I know for a fact that it is possible. He did not lose any pay. Besides a cut in pay is not so much the issue as the demotion. That was not the deal I made in 1990. When I came to the northeast, human resources promised me that as long as I spent two years they would take me back to Florida but just no guarantee as to the store. I am not asking for a specific store. I am asking for Florida I can live anywhere for a while just so I can be closer to my family. I have spent 9 years in Connecticut, busting my tail and making the company what it is today. I have hired and trained people that are now regional managers, store managers and buyers. I have worked in six stores. I have opened a new store. I have run some of high volume most profitable departments in the company. I am probably better than some of the managers that they already have in the stores in Florida.”

“Then you should have no problem proving that and working your way back up.”

“Maybe I am missing your point or you’re missing mine. I don’t know which it is but what I am trying to get across is that I am not being treated with respect and certainly the way I am being treated is unfair. I have proven myself. I am being dismissed as just another number. This company did not used to be that way and if you have been with it for any length of time, you know that is true.”

“Well, I still do not understand what you think Bernie can do for you. You have been going through the right people. Have you tried using the HR channels?”

“Yes, even my wife has called.”

“Well then I don’t know what you expect us to do.”

“Okay,” I acquiesced. “I’m sorry I bothered you. I guess I should take ‘no’ for an answer or quit so that I can be with my family. That appears to be my choices.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way.”

“It was just that I thought Bernie was still in charge and actually controlled something. I guess I was wrong. The corporation is too big for him to manage. You know in the early days he used to fear that would happen. If you would, tell him that it had happened. After twenty years the bean-counters and bureaucrats take over a corporation and either ruin it or change it so dramatically that all its seasoned veterans leave.”

* * * *

From the outset The Orange Giant was a company of destiny earmarked for a level of greatness that becomes legendary. It had great people and great, innovative ideas. Its leaders were experienced and focused on specific goals yet they were the sorts of risk takers that never say no to an idea. They simply find a way to implement the idea.

The company’s continued greatness indicates that it still draws innovation and creativity from the entrepreneurial spirit that it generates in its dedicated corps of employees. The empowerment of the front line employees to make the right decisions for the customers may have been the only innovation that really counted. It was certainly the source for everything else that the company produced.

I won’t go into the formative years as it would be my second-hand analysis of what the founders have already been rendered into text. I will tell my own version of The Orange Giant story from the direct experience working on the front lines in real stores. That is the positive part of my story.

* * * *

The day that I resigned I felt like gum on the bottom of and old shoe. I was worried about a Hurricane Floyd that was off the coast of Florida no more than 12 miles from where my family lived in Melbourne. I had told my wife to take the kids and whatever she could put in the van and evacuate. I had told her a long time before that to go stay with my sister on the west coast but she had never arrived there and I could no get my wife on the phone. As it turned out she was still in Melbourne, believing that her friends’ house being made of brick might withstand the considerable wolf’s-blow from a category 4 hurricane.

Steve, the regional manager had decided to spend that entire day in my store all day. I mentioned my concern about my family to him and he said something to the effect, “Well, you need to focus on work. This store has some serious issues. That will take your mind off of it.”

I don’t know maybe he intended it differently than I took it. It felt rather cold and inconsiderate. He was probably right though. There was little I could do and it was better not to dwell on it when all I could do was worry.

Steve had periodically pestered me with seemingly random questions throughout first few hours of the day. I couldn’t leave the front end. Three cashiers had called out sick, the head cashier and assistant head cashier were on registers and I was covering their roles until around ten o’clock when we should be adequately staffed to get some relief. I had planned to spend time in my department finishing a fall reset while my department supervisor and two of his people worked on inventory prep. We were exactly a week away from taking physical inventory and that had to be the highest priority.

It was obvious from the reports that Steve was running in the computer room and asking me questions about that his agenda was something entirely different than mine and for the most part the company’s. He was angry with me that I couldn’t drop everything and come back to the computer room and answer his questions in person. I told him about the cashiers and even promised him that I could meet with him around ten. “You’re not running a very efficient operation this morning are you?” That was what he asked me. I did not respond. It figured it was rhetorical.

Again he was right. The store wasn’t running smoothly that day. Then again I felt he was personally blaming me for it. However I was used to that sort of attitude from him. Little if anything was ever the way Steve thought it should be. Maybe he expected me to force the sick cashiers to come into work, playing guilt trips on them. They were all part timers. From experience, part-timers do not care as much as full-timers. Even if I had resorted to the guilt trips they would not have responded. Why should they? The company was not paying them any real benefits.

At ten o’clock Paul the store manager walked into the building. “How’ it been?”
“Three cashiers called out. I have been up front all morning since we opened. I walked about a third of the store before that. Steve is here. I think he is out walking lumber of building materials. That area was rough, by the way.”

“Who closed?”

“Guess.”

“Why did he leave it that way?”

“He wrote work-lists. He knew the areas that needed attention. They have his work-list and I prioritized the tasks. It has been busy down that way this morning.
Steve has been running reports all morning. So maybe they had time to clean it up a little.”

“Great,” he said sarcastically. “How about your end?”

“Outside is a mess where we are resetting. Otherwise it isn’t bad. I have my people tagging overheads for inventory. I had planned to work on the rest but you see where I have been all morning.”

“Anything else?"

“There is a hurricane a few miles from my house in Florida and I can’t get my wife on the phone.”

“There are more important matters for you to focus on here.”

I was speechless. I could not believe he had said that. It wasn’t even a joke. It was beyond heartlessly inhuman. Whatever respect I may have harbored for him as my supervisor went out with the tide awash with rage that I did not dare to express. I needed my job, I still believe that.

As another assistant manager came in he took over the front end from me and I was liberated to spend the rest of the day in my department.

Paul and Steve walked the store together, Steve pointing out things and Paul diligently writing down every word on a legal pad. No one else walked with them.
Neither of them asked anyone any questions as they walked. Neither of them acknowledged employees or customers. That was nothing new for them but in the old days of the company walking past a customer or an employee would have gotten you some serious abuse regardless your position in the corporate pecking order.

Paul hated the garden department, knew next to nothing about it and rarely ever walked it with me. It was fine with me as I was the most experienced member of management in the store and by all rights should have needed the least help. I had been through store manager training as well. I didn’t have to be walked. Even so, my priorities and Steve’s priorities were at times diametrically opposed. Steve would rather sweep floors than down-stock product. He would rather reset merchandise than prepare for an inventory that was a week away. Earlier in the year Steve had even asked me to set an end-cap of top-soil in the inside garden department. Paul had said what a great idea it was. To me Steve was nuts. “Steve I will set some fertilizer here. Top soil needs to be outside.”

“Why is that?. Is it just because it has always been there?”

“Well customers expect it to be there. That is for certain. The real reason is that it will create the most god-awful mess inside that has ever been. I don’t want to hear you telling me that it looks like shit which it will ten minutes after we create it. We sell 30,000 bags of top soil a week in peak of season. Four pallets inside in March even when we are doing a thousand bags a week are going to be still ludicrous.”

Paul said nothing.

“Fertilizer I can live with,” Steve said. “Do that then.”

* * * *

It was five minutes after four in the afternoon. I had been in the store for over 12 hours. I had skipped lunch to work on the reset. I was pretty hungry and definitely tired and now that I had a moment to catch my breath I tried calling Florida again. There was still not answer from my wife.

I had it to the point that the two aisles that I was working on could be finished the next day, signed and product merchandised. I was even a day ahead of the reset schedule that I had prepared and Paul and Steve had approved. I had purposely build in some slack time into the schedule for unforeseen interferences, such as having to run the front end all morning as had been the case that day.

On my way back to hang up my apron, I stopped in the office and yet again I tried to call my wife. There was still no answer. I asked if anyone had heard any news about the hurricane in Florida. Tony, another assistant manager told me that it was still hanging off the coast, a Category 4 storm.

As I went back out into the corridor in preparation to leave, Paul snagged me by the shirt, “Let’s go walk your area.”

I followed him out to where I had been working on the reset. “Why isn’t this finished?”

“It probably would have been if I could have worked on it this morning as I had planned.”

“You’re giving me an excuse.”

“I’m telling you the truth. Besides we are a day ahead of plan.”

“What plan?”

“The plan I gave you.”

“Regardless, you are finishing this before you leave.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“Okay, fine.”

“Then over here, these pallets of fertilizer. What do you have planned for them?”

“They are here a month before they really start selling. There was a 2% discount on them that I could not override per Divisional orders.”

“Steve wants these out of here.”

“How?”

“Call the other stores and transfer them out.”

“We will need the fertilizer in a month. I cannot get anymore of it.”

“I don’t care Steve wants it gone.”

“It won’t matter no one will take it.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I wouldn’t take anymore of it. I have enough for the fall.”

“You have until Tuesday to get rid of all of it.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“Are you nuts?”

“No. I am your supervisor and you need to do what I tell you to do.”

“Well, my supervisor is the one that told me I could not push this order back to when I needed it because the 2% discount. Apparently that was important a month ago and you didn’t want to listen to me or buck the system. It is just like the 5% discount I got on my own in the spring and you made me transfer all that grub control out because Steve said it was here too early. You remember that, Steve? We ran out of stock within two weeks. Yeah my ass it was here too early. Steve reads a bag and decides he knows more about garden than someone that has worked it for eight years. I could not get any more in and we lost sales and aggravated a lot of customers.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Paul, whatever Steve tells you do, you do it. Why? It is because he is your supervisor. I understand that but sometimes Steve is wrong. You owe it to him to stand your ground and tell him, Steve you’re wrong.”

“I think he is right. Transfer this fertilizer out.”

“I have inventory and a reset ahead of it in my priorities.”

“No, this is your problem. Get rid of these 90 pallets of fertilizer.”

“My problem in doing that is the same asshole that ordered this for us and told us we had to take it is the same asshole that ordered it for everyone else. The very same asshole that didn’t realize that the vendor would have given him 5% discount had he ordered it three months earlier. That why this is not going to be transferred out.”

“Then you have a problem, don’t you?”

“No I don’t,” I handed him my keys, “It is now your problem.”

Paul stood blinking his eyes at me, not a word emerged from his open mouth.
One of the employees that had been standing close enough to hear much of the exchange asked me in passing, “You’re quitting?”

“Yep.”

“No way. You’re not quitting?”

My replacement was in place the very next day so in retrospect I rather think that it might have been a set up. Even if there were no intrigue or conspiracy involved, I was turned out without any question, resistance or even an exit interview.

I would think that any company would want to know why an employee with more than 12 years experience and most of that time in management was quitting. How is it rational to allow a fully trained, experienced veteran to leave? Was I making too much money? It was expressed several times on the previous reviews that for a veteran I should be heads and shoulders above all others all the time. I felt that I was. I always had a total store concern.

“We could have two or three younger managers for what we are paying you. You need to keep that in mind,” Steve had told me.

Maybe it was an age thing. I was getting older but to the younger management, I was like a living fossil, an anachronism embodied, like a dinosaur grazing alongside a herd of sheep. I had been with The Orange Giant when it was primitive, even before some of my supervisors had even first heard of the company. I knew how it had become what it was. I knew things that had been tried, failed and forgotten some of the very same things that Steve and others suggested trying now.

I had been on an overnight pack out crew that had pizza and beer for lunch. I know how important it was for its people to speak their minds unafraid of repercussions.
I had been with the company when it was okay to be bold, brash and even bawdy at times. I heard the President of the company tell a group of managers in a training meeting that we were going to use every word at our disposal to communicate the ideas that we needed to share and if one of those words happened to be the ‘f’ word, then so be it. Anyone that would take offense to the use of that word can fuck themselves.

In its formative years The Orange Giant had been the antithesis of political correctness, had that concept even existed at the time. The company was a breath of fresh air in retail as well. No one thought it was possible to do what The Orange Giant did. Some of the accomplishments were achieved because those that made the attempt didn’t know that they should fail. When they succeeded, suddenly every naysayer took note. The accomplishments of the company had even exceeded the expectations of the founders and the original investors.

It was the open expression of feelings and the exchange of ideas that were more important than protecting someone from any possible offense, imagined, fabricated or otherwise. For the most part, no one that worked for The Orange Giant in the early days was the sort that would complain about the coarse language that they heard at work. For some reason, the primitive version of the company never attracted the prudish, thin-skinned sort.

When the company began to evolve into kinder, gentler versions of The Orange Giant, I adapted to the change while some others retired or moved on. A few of us may have lingered past our perceived usefulness. Even though I had learned to exist in the changed world, I was tolerated more than I was accepted. The Orange Giant was a huge corporation, listed on the New York Stock Exchange. It could no longer do the things that it had once condoned or accepted by omission. It was now a money making enterprise and a substantial portion of the gross domestic product of the United States. Whatever the company did that was wrong gained the attention of those wishing to make money from their allegations whether there were grounds for the legal actions. The corporation had to satisfy a variety of investors. I understood the reasons for the changes and I even understood that in our gregarious and basically male-oriented pursuit of success we might have even offended some very good people of both genders that we could have used to propel our growth.

The change in attitude toward me had been a gradual thing. I suppose that at some point there was a more substantive shift. I think I missed it. I was no longer a young and coming assistant manager but a seasoned veteran. I am not sure what demarcation I had crossed or even when I crossed it. I suspect it was between the time I worked in the store at Orange, CT and the one at North Haven, CT.

I think I passed my prime a couple of years before I became ill and required open heart surgery. I had even considered that my surgery in 1995 might have held me back in promotion consideration. After that event every time senior management from Division was in my store or anytime they saw me at a meeting, they would inquire about my health. It could have been innocent concern just as I had always taken it. Yet four years after major surgery if I hadn’t had any issues with my health that were related to the surgery it was probably time to stop asking. They still asked.

I probed, pondered and puzzled over what was really going on. Despite some initial wondering, I doubt that anyone took time to question why I left. I submitted a rather detailed, multi-paged letter to which there was never a reply. Perhaps it was determined that any response whatsoever could have exposed the company to legal action. I sort of expected a nice good-bye letter. That would have been appropriate. That might have even satisfied me. I had given so much time in my life to The Orange Giant adventure that honestly they owed me something like that. The fact that I received nothing from them at all underscored the changes in the corporation.

After more than 12 years, I did not even merit a thank you, just an ‘Okay’ from a regional manager. It is ironic and a sort of justice that when he was elevated to Vice President he failed. His regional managers could not tolerate his micro-management. They ganged up on him and Arthur personally terminated him.

It is likely that those responsible for my leaving, the catalysts had spun the events to suit them, painting me ‘an issue’ that needed to be addressed. I was a manager with too many problems and distractions. I had lost focus on advancing my career. I suppose it was something like that. How long had I allowed The Orange Giant to interfere with my personal and family life? When the problems in my personal life that were borne of my neglect reemerged, the company expected me to set them aside as usual and carry on. My wife was leaving me and taking the kids with her.

Those immediately involved in my departure, a micro-managing regional and a mealy-mouthed, spineless store manager had not cared to ask for the details. I guess it did not really surprise me. I also suspect that they were happy with the way things had turned out.

When I said, “It has been an adventure, Steve. Now, it time for me to leave. I quit.” His grossly inadequate and ineloquent response to me was, “Uh, Okay.” It was expressed with all the compassionate people-skills of a wet, pet rock.

E

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posted by Unknown @ 11:09 PM