Workin' Man - Part XVIII - Cornhusker Twilight

Well, I get up at seven, yeah

And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm workin' all the time

It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

'Cause I get home at five o'clock
And I take myself out an ice cold beer
Always seem to be wondering'
Why there's nothin' goin' down here

I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

"Workin' Man" - Words & Music by Lee & Lifeson 

Before I get into my final phase at the Cornhusker store, I neglected to mention an incident that took place during my first few years. One of the corporate directors took me aside one afternoon and informed me that he saw a pharmacy employee take a soda from the cooler and go into the pharmacy without paying for it. He asked me to accompany him while he confronted the individual. When she came to the pharmacy door she explained that she paid for it at the register inside the pharmacy and showed us the receipt. As I was explaining how she should pay before leaving the sales floor in order to avoid any misperceptions, Jeff, the pharmacist, started yelling at us. He maintained that pharmacy employees were "better" than the rest of the employees and how dare we accuse her! He then attempted to slam the door in our faces, but was prevented by me inserting my foot in the doorway. Jeff complained to Brian, the Store Director, not only saying that I (the corporate director was somehow absent from his complaint) accused his employee without cause, but that I kicked the door in! I gave Brian my side of the story. He didn't follow up, but I found out much later that he believed that I really did kick in the door. Ironically, the pharmacy employee in question was fired about a month later because it was discovered that she lied on her application about an arrest for drug possession. Jeff later walked out in the middle of a shift, leaving the pharmacy unlocked and unattended. It later came out that he was regularly verbally abusive to all his employees. On another occasion he was so out of control during an argument with Bill, slamming his fist on Bill's desk, that Bill's pen set came flying across the room. 

Well, anyway, Bill was gone, Matt K was in. At first he seemed like another "nice guy", but a workaholic. For the first month or so he worked seven days a week, 7:00am until at least 7:00pm (half day on Sunday though). I made him mad when I asked him if everything was alright at home! I was disabused of my perception of Matt as a pushover when he fired a few people within his first few weeks. He had no patience for people not doing their jobs or thumbing their noses at company policy. However, he had such an easygoing manner that when he fired people he made it sound as if it was the best thing to ever happen to them. The first employee that Matt fired was the overnight doughnut fryer. We'll call him Lou, since I can't remember his name. Well Lou was frying doughnuts one night when he slipped and ended up with his arm shoulder deep in the hot fryer oil, burning him pretty badly. Company policy was that every accident had to be reported, but company policy also required that everyone who was in an accident get a drug test. Lou, who was aware that he would fail a drug test, didn't call the manager in charge, but called his sister to come get him and take him to the emergency room, hoping to avoid that drug test. Shay, the Night Manager happened to be walking by the Bakery when she heard someone whimpering. Lou was on the floor, in a fetal position, on the phone with his sister. Shay let Brandi, his sister, take him to the ER, but now the accident was on the record and Lou had to get a drug test. Which he failed. When he came back to the store, healed enough to go back to work, Matt called him up to his office. Lou refused. The next thing we knew Matt's extremely pale complexion turned beet red and he stormed out of the office to confront Lou. Deb, the front end manager turned to me and said "I guess that's what he looks like when he's mad". Matt didn't make Lou think getting fired was the best thing that ever happened to him!

My only complaint about Matt was that his communication style was very indirect. I had gotten used to Bill, whose style was such that there was no mistaking what he meant in any situation. Matt was more the hinting type. In the year that I worked with him I can't recall him ever directly telling me what to do, but after a while I learned to crack the "Matt Code". Sometimes I would just decide that if he couldn't be direct I wasn't going to try to decipher his intentions. My last Christmas Eve at Cornhusker a few of us decided to play our own Christmas music, rather than the Muzak, over the stores public address system. One of the CDs was Twisted Sister's Christmas CD. Matt would repeatedly skip the CD to the next one, but would not ask us to stop playing it, so every time he turned it off, I would work my way up front and turn it back on. This went on all day and he never said anything. 

One of Matt's first changes was to give me my own office, instead of having me continue to share an office with the Grocery Manager. He had the maintenance guy convert a storage closet into my office! 

It was during this time period when the corporate office decided to change the responsibilities of the Assistant Store Directors (ASDs). Up until then the ASD position was largely undefined. We were like the Vice President of the United States with very little written down about what we were supposed to be doing. What an ASD actually did depended on the individual ASD, the needs of the store and the expectations of the Store Director. Going forward the ASD was to be delegated direct authority over what the grocery business called "Center Store": the Grocery, Frozen, Dairy, Spirits and General Merchandise departments. The Store Director still was responsible for the whole store, but the ASD's responsibility for Center Store was formalized. This changed my focus somewhat, since previously I had acted as a sort of manager-without-portfolio, spending my time cruising the store, looking for problems and troubleshooting. I could still do that, but I now had to think about annual performance reviews for the Center Store Managers, and keeping an eye on gross profit and labor hours much more than previously. 

ASDs, in addition to being Center Store Managers, were also the designated Safety Coordinators at their respective stores. This involved running a Safety Committee meeting each month where we would review any accidents to determine whether there was a safety issue that could be addressed or if the employee was simply negligent. We also looked at ongoing safety concerns and made recommendations for correcting them. ASDs were also responsible, as part of being Safety Coordinator, for training employees on the use of forklifts and pallet jacks. Ironic considering my several forklift accidents over the years! 

As anyone who shops in a grocery store knows, periodically "everything gets moved around". Not really, but the goal of a store reset is to optimize product placement, which does include moving a lot of things around. Sometimes it's spurred by a remodel, sometimes an attempt to change the shopping flow. When I first started with the company each Store Director was asked to send a couple of people to the store being reset. Usually it was someone who no one would miss for the day—a grocery clerk or a janitor. Around this time a new corporate position had been created: Category Management Director. The Category Management Director's responsibility was, among other things, to plan and oversee resets. Scott, the new Director, got permission to make all the ASDs the permanent reset crew. Although none of really wanted to be out of the store for a week doing manual labor, it made sense. The ASDs were familiar with all aspects of center store, and were experienced enough to require little direct supervision. You could give any of us a planogram (a visual representation of what a section should look like) and we would get the job done without further explanation. I lost track of how many of these I did over the years; it was hard work, but a camaraderie developed among all the ASDs (especially the "ASD meetings" that took place in a nearby pub after the day was done). I can't move on from this section about resets without talking about the "gondola train". For some reason a row of shelving in a grocery store is called a gondola. Sometime a whole row has to be moved. Rather than disassembling and subsequently reassembling them, the gondola train was utilized. This handy tool consisted of a device that was similar to a jack on wheels. We'd place it under the load-bearing part of a section and jack it up slightly. Jacks were placed every 4 to 8 feet. Once all the jacks were in place we would simply push the whole aisle into position, one person every 8 feet. It's grocery poetry in motion!

Despite mandating a no nepotism policy, nepotism was tolerated when you were high enough in the organization. After all, it was a family-owned company! Jane Raybould, the Vice President of Buildings and Facilities, on paper answered to Tom Schulte, the Vice President of Operations, when in reality she reported to her brother Pat, the CEO. Tom also brought in his brother Tim to run the Floral and Front End Departments. There was a story about Tim, which I long thought apocryphal—supposedly Tim didn't understand the concept of nesting folders, or even folders on a desktop computer. Every file was saved right on his desktop screen until he ran out of room and called IT because he thought he couldn't save any more files. A few years later I met the one who was his administrative assistant at the time and was assured that it was true. Tim also overdid forwarding of emails. In general everyone at the corporate office was email crazy. A corporate office director would be in the store and notice an issue with the Floral department and send an email to the Floral Manager and copy the Store Director and Tim. Tim would then forward the email that he was copied on, that clearly shows that the Floral manager and Store Director were copied on it, to the Floral manager and Store Director. As a bonus, he'd copy the forward to the company president and operations VP, who both would forward it to me. As a prank I set up an email rule whereby every email that I received, including automated alerts about our orders, was forwarded to Tim. I could definitely be a jerk sometimes. 

As Floral Director Tim set pricing and merchandising for the Floral departments. What he didn't understand was that Cornhusker, located as it was in a lower income neighborhood, didn't have many customers who were willing to pay a high price for flowers or plants. He would not allow us to mark them down, but directed us to throw them out after a certain date. In order to make a point, Dorothee, the Floral Manager and I bought a grow lamp and put it in my office and started putting all the plants that we "threw away" in there. By the time I left it was like a jungle!  

One of the responsibilities that I took upon myself was doing the sales projections. Since the amount of money that each department, and the whole store, could spend on labor was based on a percentage of sales, this was a critical task. I suspect that many of the stores' projections were based on guesswork, but they definitely weren't in the stores I worked in. I created an Excel spreadsheet where I would create a store sales projection based partly on the sales from the same week the previous year. I would then adjust that number based on the percentage up or down that the store was trending over the previous four weeks. To project the sales for each individual department I would look at what percentage of total store sales the department sales represented the previous year and multiply the total store sales by that percentage; I would adjust those numbers up or down based on a four week trend. I would further take into account things like weather, ads, or changes in competition to come up with my final figures. All of this was embedded in various interlocking formulas.

Determining the amount of hours each department could schedule required some additional math. I would start with the already projected sales and multiply by the budgeted labor percentage—this would give me the dollars that could be spent. I would subtract the manager's salary and then divide the remainder by the average wage in that department, giving me the number of hours that could be scheduled in order to come in under budget. During holiday weeks I went a step further and projected sales for each day. Most of the time these projections were spot on. I remember one year a department manager was excusing his excessive number of "outs", claiming that he didn't know how busy it would be. When we compared the projected sales to the actual sales, they were almost exactly the same. I guess he did know how busy it would be! 

Ron S was a Store Director who was getting close to retirement. They "promoted" him to a corporate office position to make room for someone that had been recruited from outside the company. He had various tasks that he conducted on behalf of the various corporate directors. One week his mission was to come around and teach all the ASDs how to do sales projections. Years before some long forgotten programmer had created a feature to our primitive database that was supposed facilitate coming up with projections. The total store sales projection had to be hand entered every week. The budgeted percentage of sales for each department as well as their labor budget was entered at the beginning of each quarter. From this scant information the budgeted hours per department was calculated. It was definitely a blunt instrument and did not take into account what my Excel sheet did. On the afternoon when it was my turn for Ron to "teach" me, he walked me through the process as if it were software that could launch NASA rockets. I was already aware of this program and very aware of its shortcomings, especially the fact that not all departments were included and you couldn't add any, not to mention no way to adjust average wage. So I thanked Ron, told him that I was aware of how it worked and that I had a better method that I was using. Ron looked at me as if I had drowned his puppy and told me that he used it for years, and that if it was good enough for him, it was good enough for me. Rather than argue with him further I simply went in and changed the total sales prediction each week, since I knew he'd be checking, and continued to use my spreadsheet for the actual projections. I had similar interactions with Ron over the years, I'll be revisiting him in the next article. But it's now time to move on. After six years at the 27th and Cornhusker Super Saver I was being transferred to the 27th and Pine Lake Super Saver. 

Managers Part XIX - "Good Managers"

What makes a "good" manager? That's where we started this series almost a year and a half ago. I don't think that I'd be going out on a limb to say that what makes a good manager and what makes a good person are two sets that don't completely overlap. Granted, someone who is a bully, a thief, lazy, abusive, etc...things that might describe a "bad" person, would probably also describe a "bad" manager. But the traits that make someone a good spouse or a good buddy don't necessarily translate into the traits of a good manager. A manager must inspire trust in her subordinates in order to fully leverage the abilities of her staff. One might think that being a buddy to subordinates or rolling up the managerial sleeves and pitching in, stepping back and "letting people do theirs jobs" or passing out rewards like no-questions-asked time off or ignoring the dress code makes one a good manager. This type of manager might be a popular manager, but in all likelihood for every employee who thinks Goodtime Charlie is the greatest, there will be one or two who resent the lack of support, the chaos and favoritism that go along with the alleged positive traits. Other employees, seeing Charlie's willingness to do their work with them, will soon be expecting the manager to do their work for them.

A good manager is the fulcrum, balancing the needs of the company, along with upper management, with the needs of the employees. This means that the manager is responsible for maximizing the output of his employees, not by working them to death or by cutting staffing to unsustainable levels, but by training subordinates to function as independently as possible. This means retaining the best people, not by holding them down in positions where they are unhappy or they are paid less than what they need to be, but by giving them the support and resources to advance in the company...and sometimes even outside the company. As I've said before in this series, the job of a manager is not to do things, but to get things done.

If you try to do everything yourself, you can only do the work of one person. Lets say that you have 40 units of work to do and you are scheduled for 40 hours. What happens if the workload increases to 50 units? You'll probably have to work 50 hours. How about 65 units? Settle in for 65-hour week. Your business is pretty much capped at 65 units. But what if you have trained two assistants to take on 20 units each. They'll be slower than you are, being trainees, but they can do 20 units each. So now you have freed up 40 hours. You can drop back to 40 hours: 25 hours to do 25 units of work and 15 hours to train your assistants. Once they are fully trained, their ability to take care of 40 units each also allows your business to expand to 80 units, with you spending 40 hours on managerial tasks. You can add additional assistants as business grows, or promote your assistants to supervisors and staff another level. Of course all of these people need to be fully trained and able to work independently or you'll be spending your 40 hours fixing substandard work or giving out assignments rather than delegating responsibility.

Management is a skill set separate from the actual work of a given industry. Just because you're a good widget-maker doesn't necessarily mean that you'll be a good widget-maker's manager. In most businesses the only way for an employee to make more money is to become a manager, and in most businesses, managers are not chosen for their management ability, but for how well they performed as a subordinate. 

Do you want to be a manager? If so, be passionate about the art of management; if you want to be effective as a manager, you have to be in it for more than the money. Think about it: would you apply for a job as a mechanic if you had no experience, even if it paid double what you were making now? Would you apply for any position that you had no aptitude for, just because it paid well? Of course not! If you had a goal of becoming a mechanic you'd go to school, or become an apprentice, or even go to YouTube for instructional videos. Why then, do so many people apply for management jobs when they have no experience or skill in management? Because our culture doesn't view management as a profession, but as an extension of the underlying profession.

Do you want to be a manager? Find out what it involves and educate yourself!

Managers Part XVIII - Leverage

When I first wrote this series in 2018 I realized that I had titled this post, but never wrote it. Since I initially numbered it 15 and subsequently numbered another post as 15, I called it 15a. Well, in the reposts, I did it again and didn't insert it after XV! I'm going to insert it now and call it Part XVIII and renumber subsequent articles accordingly. 

What is leverage? Basically it's the ability that you have as a manager to influence your employees. It's how you get them to do things. It's also the amount of work that you can accomplish by convincing multiple employees to do things in quantities that you could not do if working by yourself. Let's look at the how first.

Way back in Part II - Sources of Power I discussed the sources of power that a manager had. "Authority" would probably be a better word, instead of power. They are:

1. Legitimate Power: The ability to influence other due to one's position, office or formal authority
2. Reward Power: The ability to influence others by giving or withholding rewards such as pay, promotions, time off, etc.
3. Coercive Power: The ability to influence others through punishment
4. Expert Power: The ability to influence others through special knowledge or skills
5. Referent Power: Power that comes from personal characteristics that people value, respect or admire

The blunt instrument, the source of authority that usually goes unsaid, but is a huge part of #3—the ability to influence others through punishment—is always in any manager's tool box. 

Most amateur managers know that they have the power to fire their employees. This is the most basic, crude and rudimentary leverage that you have. Most employees understand this instinctively and will follow a manager's direction, even when they don't want to, they disagree with it, or they just think it's stupid, because they know that refusal to obey the boss's will can result in an opportunity to find a new job. The problem with this, from a manager's point of view, is that even though you will get compliance, you won't get enthusiasm and you certainly won't get independent action or innovation. 

To refer back to an another article in this series, Part X, you will have employees forever stuck at Levels 1 and 2. Some managers are satisfied with this, and are happy with just basic, mindless obedience. They'll never get their people to Level 3, let alone 4 or 5, and may have to settle for Level 1 (Wait until being told before doing anything).

I got my real-life lesson in leverage when I was an Assistant Store Manager. I had been schooled in the wisdom of the Five Levels, of monkeys and left- and right-leaning trapezoids, but hadn't really learned how to properly leverage my employees. As an Assistant Store Manager, I had a lot of responsibility. I often describe the unofficial job description as "All the stuff that doesn't fall into anyone else's job responsibility". All that responsibility, however, didn't come with any matching authority, not any official authority anyway. I threw my weight around, waved my title in people's faces, (Source of Power #1) but no one was impressed. I wasn't making any serious attempt to gain leverage by winning these people over, and I lacked the foundational piece of leverage: the ability to fire someone, and everyone knew it. (I also lacked #2, Reward Power: The ability to influence others by giving or withholding rewards such as pay, promotions, time off, etc.; and #4 Expert Power: The ability to influence others through special knowledge or skills and #5, Referent Power: Power that comes from personal characteristics that people value, respect or admire; I was squandering due to my heavy-handed approach). 

I hadn't made an effort to convince people to do what I wanted them to do, and they knew I had no real authority (my Store Manager at the time was a "nice guy" who undermined me quite often, so I had no reflected authority from his support). It was after a few incidents where run-ins with employees that resulted in a reprimand from my boss that I began to employ the lessons that I had learned years before and little by little began to gain leverage, not from blunt force, but from precision use of tried and tested management techniques. I have to admit that I was given a new lease on management life when my nice guy boss was replaced by a guy who more of a bull in a China shop than I was. This enabled me to start fresh and stop my attempt to bludgeon people into obedience.

I remember an episode of Happy Days, where Fonzi was attempting to school Ritchie on how to be a tough guy. Fonzi was showing him how he, Fonzi, never actually had to fight because people were afraid of him. Ritchie tried to apply these lessons, but he was perplexed that no one was afraid of him. This caused Fonzi to amend his lessons with the observation that he (Ritchie) would have had to actually been in a fight and won for people to think he was a tough guy. It's similar to this in the management world. In order for employees to believe that you will fire them if necessary, you have to actually fire someone when necessary. 

Later on in this series I address the changes that took place post Covid. Managers' unwillingness to hold employees to company standards, including firing bad employees has had many repercussions. 

Start at the beginning: Part I

Manager Part XI - Training

How do you get your subordinates out of Levels 1 and 2 and become more self directed?

(Refer to Part X)

As a manager you can't just show up to work and expect that your subordinates will automatically aspire to Level 4 or 5 independence. You have to actually train them! And once you've trained them, you have to follow up in order to assure yourself that your subordinates really know what they're doing. Just telling a subordinate that you expect them to work independently and make their own decisions doesn't mean that they will. (And we're talking here about ability and understanding, insubordination is a completely different subject). And even after a subordinate has been instructed in the expectations of the job, doesn't mean that they have been trained. And even after you are sure that they fully understand all aspects of the job and have the ability to carry them out, being fully trained means that they are actually doing it. If you don't follow up and ensure that the work is being done you run the risk of your subordinate deciding on his own what his job should be, and that might be very different than what you expect!

Back when I managed grocery stores we had a position called Grocery Clerk. This was an entry-level position and was almost always filled by high school kids who had never held a job before. The clerks had two main jobs: retrieve carts from the parking lot and "pull cardboard". They had other duties as well, but those are the two main ones. Pulling cardboard involved methodically going through an aisle, section by section, and removing any cardboard boxes that were less than half full and then "facing", pulling all the product forward on the shelf. (This was what was called a "warehouse" store, most product was put on the shelf in the case that in came in, with the front and top cut off.) The purpose of this was to keep the shelves orderly and make it easy for the customers to see the products. Something called a "cardboard bin", a wheeled, plastic container, 4'x4'x4' was utilized to throw the cardboard in. This was mind-numbingly, boring work, but it had to be done. It was also extremely simple to master, but it was almost never done correctly.

The problem was training. What should have been done was that each new grocery clerk be teamed up with a manager for half of a shift, released for a few hours to work on his own, and then back with the manager for follow up. For the first few weeks the clerk's work should have been checked by a manager until it was assured that proper training had taken place. What did happen was that the new clerk was teamed up with an "experienced" clerk who probably was doing things incorrectly himself, ensuring that the cycle of incompetence would continue. Look in on most grocery clerks allegedly pulling cardboard and you'll see two of them strolling down an aisle, chatting (grocery clerks are almost never supposed to be working two-by-two, pulling cardboard is a one-person job), pulling the occasional box off the shelf, without a cardboard bin, then strolling to the back room to throw out the small amount of cardboard that they can hold in their arms. And there is rarely, if ever, a manager checking up on them.

A few years ago I conducted an experiment. I watched as a grocery clerk exited an aisle that he had supposedly just got done pulling cardboard in. (He had a cardboard bin). I entered the same aisle and pulled cardboard and faced the correct way. I piled all the cardboard on the floor in front of each section and then called him back to show him what he had missed. He was not happy, but he did learn what was expected of him.

The nature of the training is critically important to the ultimate achievement of higher level competence. During my final 10 years before retirement I worked for the state revenue department. My training was a bewildering hodgepodge of regulations, definitions, and statutes in a Power Point presentation. During training my mind raced, trying to keep track of all the information that was being shot at me. Most of it made no sense to me, since it was completely without context. What I wasn't being presented with was the practical information that I needed in order to do my job. After training was over and began my assigned tasks another new trainee and I figured out the actual requirements of the job by trial and error. We learned to focus on what we really needed to do the job and pretty much ignore the rest. Over the years I heard from other new hires how confusing and useless the training was. 

Eventually I was promoted to a position where I was responsible for training the new people. With my manager's permission I completely revamped the training program so that it focussed on how to do the job, with the regulations, definitions and other details presented as an adjunct to the practical instruction. I revised a checklist so that a new hire could methodically carry out their assigned tasks. The new training program was practical rather than theoretical and was key to getting employees to the goal of working independently. 

Sometimes the lesson managers get from the Five Levels of Management Freedom is that everybody should be at Level 4 or 5 and that they are just supposed to sit back and watch everyone work. (Presumably with their feet up on their desks). That is the wrong lesson! Subordinates at Levels 4 and 5 doesn't free managers from work, it frees them from other people's work so they can concentrate on managerial work. 

Getting everyone to at least Level 3 and ideally Levels 4 and 5 is the goal; but how do you accomplish that goal? Not by wishful thinking or by simply telling people to manage themselves, but by putting in the hard work of training subordinates to be not just "hard workers", but independent thinkers and problem solvers.

Training can be very time-consuming, but the result is worth the time.

Start with Part I

Go to: Part XII

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part XVII - Christianity as a Cultural Identity

With the recent focus on the (White) Christian Nationalist Movement and its connection to right wing politics, one could be forgiven for thinking that this was a recent development. Christians completely ignoring the Gospel message in favor of an us vs. them mindset? We need to get back to Christians acting Christian...right? Not so fast. 

Even going back to the days of Constantine the Great, people have always identified as Christians without having even a passing familiarity with The Bible. 

There's little objective information about Christianity in its first hundred years, but by the time Christianity became a recognized religion and later the official religion, it's evident that people were Christians because that's what everyone else in their culture was. Christian identity was inseparable from Roman identity. This tendency became more pronounced as the Arab Muslim Caliphate became a threat to the Empire's existence. Even within Christendom, the Western Europeans identified as Catholics and the Byzantines identified as Orthodox, both as intrinsic parts of who they were. 

Christianity splintered in the 1500's with the Protestant Reformation as different varieties of Christianity multiplied. But for the most part, individuals' religion was determined by their rulers and there were Catholic nations, Lutheran nations, Calvinist nations, all warring among themselves for various reasons. As time went by there was more choice among various denominations, but for the most part the umbrella identity of "Christian" persisted. I'm not suggesting there weren't sincere Christians throughout all of these eras, or that no one studied the text of the Bible or lived lives according the teachings of Jesus, but that being a Christian wasn't something that you decided to become, but something that you were.

People my age remember that one of the bloodiest religious conflicts of our lives was not in Israel or the Middle East, and didn't involve radical Muslims, but was the Catholic-Protestant Troubles in Northern Ireland. For many reasons economic and political divisions broke along religious lines. The poorer Northern Irish, who favored union with the Republic of Ireland in the south tended to be Catholic, while those who wanted to remain part of the U.K. and were of higher economic status, tended to be  Protestant. There's a lot of reasons for why this split developed, but people didn't spend a lot of time thinking about which version of Christianity they followed, it was just who they were. 

Even in my own youth, my neighborhood was made up of mostly Catholics, children or grandchildren of immigrants from Catholic countries. There wasn't violence or strife between Catholics and the few Protestants, but it was almost unthinkable that one would convert from one to another. Being Catholic was what you were. My own generation was a bit more fluid. The so-called Jesus Movement was making inroads, and young people were more willing than previous generations to explore other traditions or join new religious groups. When I decided to ditch Catholicism and join The Way, (which was, as far as they knew, Christian) my parents' reaction was similar to how I imagine it would have been if I had announced that I had embraced Satanism. Milder, but still disapproving, were their reactions when my brother married an Episcopalian or when my niece was married in a non-church ceremony. In all of these cases, most people, no matter what denomination they identified as, would be hard pressed to articulate how their religion was substantially different that the other guys' faith. 

My point in bringing up these examples, is that identifying as Christian without any connection to actual Christian theology or principles is nothing new, it has a long history. Today's White Christian Nationalists are part of a long history of weaponizing religion and using it to "other" those they don't like. They have allies in Congress and in the courts. The Supreme Court majority has deferred to Christians in First Amendment cases and their doctrine of shaping opinions based on whether similar laws existed historically should scare anyone who believes that government should be neutral with respect to religion. 

So, You Want To Join a Cult - Part XVII

It was time, or so i convinced myself, to increase my commitment to God. I signed up to be a World Over the World Ambassador for the 1980-81 Way year.

I had sold my car to my sister to raise funds for my move, and traveled to New Knoxville, Ohio, Way Headquarters, where I would receive my assignment.

World Over the World Ambassadors (aka WOW Ambassadors or simply WOWs) had been sent out every year from the annual "Rock of Ages" (ROA) and returned a year later to the following year's ROA. The first Rock of Ages was a small affair. Wierwille had taken to hosting students for "summer school" every year. In 1971 it was capped off with a night of music and Bible teaching called "The Return of The Rock of Ages". At the end of the night Wierwille had challenged the attendees to commit to a year going out to assigned cities to "move the Word" (sign people up for Power For Abundant Living [PFAL] classes) and establish Way Twig Fellowships. He asked anyone who was interested to come back in October for their commissioning. The group that went out in October 1971 were welcomed back at the second annual Rock of Ages a year late, in August 1972, a pattern that continued through 1995. 

The number of days varied from year to year, starting out as a weekend gathering, expanding to seven days by 1980. For most people it was an opportunity to meet up with Way people from other parts of the country and hear Wierwille teach in person. The first few ROA's were held at local fairgrounds, but starting in 1978, the event was held on the grounds of Way Headquarters, the former Wierwille farm near New Knoxville, Ohio. The Way in 1971 was relatively small. The Power For Abundant Living (PFAL) class had only been filmed a few years previously. Wierwille had co-opted a group of Christian "hippies" from San Francisco and had started his leadership training program, The Way Corps, but WOWs would be for many years the most effective method of bringing in new members. . 

In 1980 the 10th "wave" of WOWs was being sent out, or commissioned. A record number had signed up, well over 3,000. A large number were being sent to what were called Outreach Cities. These Outreach Cities would receive whole "branches", i.e. 10 or more "teams" of two WOW "families" each. A WOW family usually included four WOWs. Teams were usually overseen by a Way Corps person who was on their "interim" year. (At the time Way Corps training included an "Apprentice" year in their home town, the second year and fourth "in-residence" at a Way location, with the year between the in-residence years on some kind of "field" assignment. These field assignments could be overseeing twigs or branches, an assignment at Way Headquarters, or as the coordinator of a WOW team. There were also WOW families sent to isolated cities or towns. I was sent to one of those: Sidney, Nebraska, a city of at the time around 5,000.

Before my WOW family and I were sent to Nebraska, most Way Twig fellowships were clustered in Lincoln and Omaha, plus a few small groups founded by the previous year's WOWs in Fremont, North Platte and Beatrice. My group of WOWs included families being sent to Sidney, Scotts Bluff, Nebraska City, McCook and two families to Grand Island. 

We spent a few hours each day in training and on the sixth night, we were "commissioned", i.e. received our assignments in a sealed envelope to be opened at a big ceremony in the big top tent where evening teachings were conducted. All of us Queens NY WOWs sat together for the ceremony. Most of my friends were sent to Outreach Cities, including my girlfriend Lori, who was sent to Chicago. In addition to my Nebraska assignment, only one other person from our circle was sent somewhere other than an Outreach City. We were to spend the seventh and last day of the ROA meeting our new WOW family and making travel arrangements. Our family consisted of Steve, an interim 10th Corps man from Texas, who would be our coordinator/leader; Gail, a veteran of a previous WOW year from Philadelphia; and Rosemarie, a relatively new PFAL grad from California. Because there were only two cars, one of them a two-seater, between the two western Nebraska families, we split up on our way to Nebraska. Rosemarie and I rode on a bus with some Way people from Grand Island. Gail, who owned one of the cars, took Steve and two Scotts Bluff WOWs in her car, while the other two Scotts Bluffs WOWs would carry all our luggage in their pickup. 

The bus broke down in the middle of Iowa. Boy, those signs just keep on coming, don't they?

Even though, in retrospect, this was another one of those recurring red flags, I saw it as a bit of an adventure. While the bus was being repaired several of us went to work for the repair shop and lived in tents behind the gas station. Eventually, after the bus was repaired we made it to Sidney, Nebraska a week late and set about the task of finding jobs and housing. 

Start from the beginning: Part I

Workin' Man - Part XVII - Good Cop, Bad Cop

Well, I get up at seven, yeah

And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm workin' all the time

It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

'Cause I get home at five o'clock
And I take myself out an ice cold beer
Always seem to be wondering'
Why there's nothin' goin' down here

I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

"Workin' Man" - Words & Music by Lee & Lifeson 

 B&R moved their managers around on an unpredictable schedule. After I had been at Cornhusker for about three years Brian was transferred to the 48th & O Super Saver and Bill, who had been the Assistant Store Director (ASD) at the 56th & Highway 2 Super Saver, became our new Store Director. Bill was about eight years older than me, but it felt like he was from my parents' generation. I don't know what the corporate people had told him when he was promoted, but he was under the impression that the store was a complete mess and that he needed to clean it up. In some respects he wasn't wrong. The previous store director was very slack on discipline, and had his favorites, but overall the staff knew their jobs. Bill charged in like the proverbial bull in a China shop. At the same time a new store Human Resources Coordinator was hired. Todd was a former principal in a small town, and was just as keen as Bill to instill discipline in the troops. This drastic change in approach served to change the way I was perceived by the staff. Before this change I was "the asshole" who was too strict, and was perceived as being mean in contrast to Store Director Brian. Compared to Bill and Todd I was suddenly the nice guy, even though I hadn't substantially changed my approach. It's all relative. My daily routine was exhausting. I spent half of my time talking Bill out of firing people who simply weren't used to his manner, and the other half talking good employees out of quitting or telling Bill to go fuck himself. 

Brian's easygoing ways may have caused me problems, but I benefited from them as well. I had received absolutely no direction from him when I started, and quickly learned to enjoy the lack of oversight. This enabled me to determine my own job description. Bill was more of a hands-on manager—not so much as telling people what to do, but constantly wanting updates on what they were doing and how they spent their days. I found this out during the second New York Block Party, which took place shortly after Bill took over the Cornhusker store. During the first event I stepped back from all other responsibilities and devoted myself to overseeing the promotion. The planning for Block Party Year Two had been underway for quite a while before Bill transferred, so he was unaware of all the details involved, and was equally unaware that I would be spending 100% of my time as master-of-ceremonies, and not involved in my regular day-to-day responsibilities. Bill did not think it was a good use of my time, and that, coupled with corporate's lack of enthusiasm, I did not attempt a third New York Block Party the following year. 

Bill, despite his brusque manner, and tendency to be a borderline micromanager, thought of himself as a father figure to the staff. He saw himself as approachable and encouraged employees to come to him with their personal problems. This was most emphatically not how anyone saw him. This didn't stop him from attempting to give people advice, or sharing his opinion of how they should live their lives. On several occasions he asked me about my own Wiccan-Pagan spirituality, which he thought was "weird" and didn't fit in with his Christian-centric world view. One afternoon he opined that my life would be better if I'd just go to church. I brought our HR Coordinator into the room as a witness and let Bill know that his remarks were unwelcome and that further occurrences would result in a formal complaint. He apologized the next day, but I don't think he really understood what was wrong with what he said. 

Todd didn't fit the mold of the B&R Human Resources Coordinator (HRC). Unlike many HRC's, he saw himself as a part of the store team, where most HRC's identified more with the corporate HR apparatus and Donna, the company HR Director. Todd wasn't afraid to lay down the law regarding dress code, time clock, scheduling, performance reviews and the like. One of the things I learned from Todd was how to deal with the inevitable attempts that employees made to deflect blame when they were being written up or counseled on their behavior. We'd talk to somebody about coming in late and they'd want to tell you about someone else's supposed infraction in order to take the heat off. As a school principal he had seen it all before. When an employee tried some whataboutism, he would calmly state "We're not talking about that right now, we're talking about you". 

Many times I have said that Bill drove me crazy every day of the two years that I worked with him. However, the man was loyal to his team, and would stick up for them against customers and even the corporate office. I received a phone call one afternoon from Tom, the Operations Vice President. He relayed to me an accusation from a member of the company Loss Prevention team, who said that I told him to "follow the Black people". I informed Tom that not only had I not said that, but would never say anything remotely like that. Tom continued to lecture me on the importance of not acting in a discriminatory or bigoted way. I interrupted him and reiterated that I did not say what I was accused of saying and would not listen to a lecture predicated on the assumption that I had. And hung up. I was sitting in Bill's office during the conversation. Bill immediately called Tom and defended me, insisting that I was not the type of person who would say something like that, and demanding that Tom back off. Which he did. 

One of Bill's remarks to me still makes me laugh to this day. One morning the Night Crew was getting ready to leave before they had finished "facing" the aisles—the store was a complete mess. I instructed the remaining stockers to grab some cardboard bins and start pulling off excess cardboard and getting the store in order. All but one stocker complied. This individual, a thuggish young guy who was dating the daughter of one of our managers, had been a troublemaker, bullying some of the other stock crew. I saw him down one of the aisles, just idly moving items around, not doing much of anything. I repeated my instruction to grab a cardboard bin. He refused. So I fired him on the spot. When he asked me why he was being fired I told him to go home and look up "insubordination" in the dictionary. The next day Ron, the father of the idiot's girlfriend, told me that he was telling people that I fired him because he didn't know the definition of a word. Bill was not happy that I fired the guy without his input. On my next performance review, in the category for "makes reasonable, rational decisions", Bill gave me a low mark and said that I had been irrational when I fired that stocker!

Like a lot of stores, the Frozen Foods department wasn't allocated enough hours to have its own manager, so the Dairy Manager was in charge of both departments. 

(This was one of those grocery store things that I never understood. If you want a department to be run right, you should be able to hire someone to manage it full time. In addition, there should be enough hours scheduled to hire some part-timers to keep the department stocked when the manager isn't there. But for some reason the Frozen department labor percentage was set so low that you could only schedule around 20 hours in most weeks. The Frozen Foods Manager had to work in another department, or manage two departments, in order to work full time. Ridiculous. Then, because most departments required some attention every day, you'd have to move people in from other departments to pick up the slack. Their hours were being charged to another department, but they were still working in Frozen, so on paper it looked like Frozen was achieving its labor budget. Why not reduce the budget of the other department that apparently had excess hours and give it to Frozen? I have no idea. In smaller stores this situation applied to Floral and Spirits departments as well. 

So, anyway, Kim was manager of both the Frozen and Dairy departments. She did most of the stocking in Frozen Foods herself, and had a dependable clerk doing most of the stocking in Dairy. She was also pregnant and was due just before Thanksgiving. Our plan was to promote Justin, an up-and-coming young man, to the position of Dairy-Frozen Assistant Manager while Kim was on leave. He trained with Kim and was ready to take over...until he quit to take another job outside the company a week before Kim went into labor. (He did this two more times, with different positions. On the third time I lobbied hard to get Bill to not promote him, but he did it anyway and I got to say "I told you so") We scrambled around to come up with a Plan B and decided that I would do all the Frozen ordering, Bob, the Dairy clerk would handle his department, and Kory, the Assistant Grocery Manager would take over stocking Frozen and building displays. Neither Kory nor I knew what we were doing. 

One morning, about a week before Thanksgiving, I came in to find that only one of the three towering  Frozen pallets that had come in the night before had been stocked, and Kory had class that morning and had to leave. It was a Thursday, which meant that the Store Director and the Grocery Manager had the day off. I was responsible on an ordinary Thursday to order grocery and run the store—now I added to my to-do list ordering and stocking Frozen. (Did I mention that I didn't know what I was doing?) Stocking was going slow, as I kept getting interrupted, and there were a lot of customers in the aisles since it was our busy season. Late in the morning I was asked by the Scanning Coordinator if I was going to build a display for the Mrs. Smith pies, which were in the ad, and did I know that the shelf was completely empty? So, I diverted my efforts to creating a pie display, until I could get that done I rolled out a couple of pie pallets onto the sales floor, which began to be attacked by customers. Even after I got the display built, it seemed like I was refilling it every half hour. It helped when the swing shift supervisor came in at 2:00, which gave me some help in Frozen, and someone who could handle calls to the check stands, phone calls, etc. Around 10:00pm I was finishing up, (I was at 14 hours by that time) restacking the pie backstock pallets in the walk-in freezer, when I cut it a little too close backing the forklift out of the walk-in and tore the whole door frame off. The freezer lights went out. (But fortunately, not the fans). I had to call in our HVAC guy to fix it. 

One of my management tenets is that a manager shouldn't get tied down to "doing things" in one part of the store, and should be patrolling the whole building, making sure that "things got done". Since I was focussed on Frozen Foods all day, things weren't getting done in the rest of the store. When Bill came in on Friday morning, he observed that the store looked pretty rough, and confronted me as I walked in the door, demanding to know what I had been doing all day to justify the store being in such as mess. I took a deep breath, did a lap around the store, and told him. 

This wasn't my only forklift accident. On Christmas Eve Bill called me to the back room; a beer truck had just arrived and Bill wanted me to get on the forklift and unload it. I was in the middle of half a dozen things already, so, grumbling, I jumped on the forklift and headed out the back door...and tore the overhead door off. (It was not rolled all the way up). After much begging and pleading we got someone out to fix it (remember, this was Christmas Eve). Later in the day, Bill called me up to his office and asked me to shut the door. I just knew that I was in trouble. Bill asked me if I was curious why he hadn't said anything about the damage to the door. When I replied that yes, I was curious, he responded with that he was the dumbass who didn't roll the door up all the way!

Eventually Bill and I settled into a rhythm and grew to respect each other. My final annual performance review with Bill took place shortly after he was transferred to another store. He gave me high marks and noted that we made a good team. Looking back, it was my time working with Bill when the staff began to view me as a leader worth following, not just the guy with a title who they were forced to obey. A lot of this was due to the contrast of my style of management with Bill's. Some of it was due to my own maturing into the job and the relieving the pressure of working for a manager who was a "nice guy". I'm sure that there were still people who thought that I was a jerk, but overall, the staff respected me. Bill left after two years, transferred back to 56th & Highway 2 as the Store Director, and I had one more year at Cornhusker under the new Store Director, Matt K, before I was transferred to the Pine Lake Super Saver. 

Start with Part I