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

Managers Part XVII - Who Does This Monkey Belong To?

In the last installment of "Managers" we looked at Assigning vs. Delegating and the concept of "monkeys". In order to effectively manage your management time you have to effectively juggle your boss-imposed time, the system-imposed time and your self-imposed time, all of which are components of your management time. 

We have looked at boss-imposed and system-imposed time in previous posts, but it's that subordinate-imposed time, which has no theoretical basis, and technically shouldn't exist, which is the biggest item that eats into your time. The key to minimizing subordinate-imposed time, which shouldn't even exist, is for everyone to know precisely what their job entails and what it does not. Once everyone has a clear understanding of who is responsible for what, it will then always be clear who is responsible for a given action or decision. 

Before we get into some examples, a little bit of what minimizing subordinate-imposed time is not. It's not a manager neglecting to train a subordinate, ignoring legitimate demands on her time, or palming off the manager's tasks onto subordinates simply out of laziness. It's not letting a subordinate fail when timely intervention might have saved the day. What it is, is setting clear boundaries and then defending them, all the while keeping in mind where you and your subordinate are on the Five Levels of Freedom.

When I was a unit manager or assistant manager in several retail stores I oversaw various department managers who were responsible for operations in their departments. For each department there was a director who operated out of the central office who gave direction, set prices and determined what products were sold, but the department managers in each store had a lot of freedom as regards to scheduling, ordering, signage, displays, production, hiring and overall day-to-day operations. With regard to most of their job duties they were a Level 4—independent action, reporting to the Store Director or Corporate Director after the fact, or Level 5—reporting only routinely. Some parts of the job were Level 3—check upstairs before acting. I routinely prohibited my managers from acting at Level 2—ask before acting, or Level 1— wait until told. 

In one store where I was an Assistant Store Manager I had a Bakery Manager who consistently would show up in my office whenever a crisis hit, asking me what to do. The man seemed to be incapable of making a decision. If someone quit, he wanted to know how to write his schedule; if a piece of equipment broke down he wanted me to tell him whether or not he should fix it; he wanted me to tell him what to order for a sale or how to build his displays. This manager wanted me to do his job for him, which increased my subordinate-imposed time. Writing schedules, keeping the equipment working, order and building displays was his job, not mine. Fortunately for me, I was a professional manager I didn't get sucked into this time wasting activity. The monkey belonged to him, but he wanted that simian to skip on over to my back.

In a different store with a different Bakery Manager there was a completely different mindset.  This second Bakery Manager, who unlike the first manager who had 20 years of experience, was new to the business. Fortunately for him and for me, he had been schooled from Day One on what his job description was. He received training from experienced bakers and other experts in the physical mechanics of running a bakery and received training from me in how to be a manager. He understood from the beginning what his job description listed as his responsibilities as well as the concept of the 5 Levels and that I wanted him at least a Level 3, preferably a 4 or 5. He never, ever came to me with a problem where he didn't have at least a proposed solution. I consider him one of my success stories as a manager.

Less obvious examples of monkeys jumping onto your back from their proper home include subordinates sending you emails asking for your input on matters that they should have figured out for themselves; subordinates leaving for vacation and leaving critical tasks undone for you to complete; or subordinates telling customers or vendors to call you regarding an item that they should have handled.

A manager can't, however, get to this point overnight. You have to train your people so that they have the ability to do their jobs, you have to communicate with them so that there is no question what their job is, and most importantly you have to delegate, give them Level 4 or 5 authority to do their jobs. You'll never eliminate, nor should you want to, eliminate all interaction with your subordinates, and they should be comfortable coming to you with intractable problems. There will always be things that don't neatly fit within the written job description, and there will always be situations that need your touch. But don't get sucked in to doing your subordinates' jobs for them.

Monkeys belonging to other people don't always jump up at you from your subordinates, they come down from your own manager (see how to minimize Boss-Imposed Time in Part XII) and across from colleagues at your own management level and from other departments. My last career was not initially in management. I started out as an analyst in a state government agency. Two and a half years before retirement I accepted a promotion to a supervisory position. I had a team who, after training from me, fed their own monkeys, and a manager who stood back and let me do my job. I was effectively a Level 5 most of the time, never below a Level 4—call it Level 4.5. My responsibilities touched or overlapped with several other departments and people would show up at my desk expecting me to solve problems for them, or take over handling a difficult customer. Since I had been steeped in the precepts of managing my management time, including identifying monkey ownership, I had no problem with politely refusing to accept ownership of their monkeys. Often their monkey should be properly fed by my manager, sometimes I just had no idea whose monkey it was. I developed a habit of declining to accept any paperwork or envelopes until I was sure it was my monkey to accept. I trained my team to not allow anyone to leave papers on my desk if I was gone. 

Not only had I trained my team to not expect me to do their jobs for them, but I eventually trained everyone to think long and hard before sending their monkeys my way!

Start at the beginning: Part I

Managers Part XII - Minimizing Your Boss-Imposed Time

Most people, no matter how high they are on the company organizational chart, have a boss. Even CEOs have a board of directors. Managers are generally looked upon as people who get to tell others what to do, which is somewhat true, but they also have others telling them what to do. The five levels of freedom apply to the manager in his role as managEE as well as in his role as managER. In the role as manager, the goal is to get subordinates as high as possible on the freedom scale in order to minimize the theoretically nonexistent subordinate-imposed time. Minimize, or even eliminate that theoretical ghost and you're left with the three valid demands on a manager's time: boss-imposed time, system-imposed time and self-imposed time.

Unless your goal is to get fired, you cannot evade boss-imposed time. In most companies there is a hierarchy, and the person above you in the hierarchy gets to tell you what to do. The starting point is the type of manager that your immediate supervisor is. Is your manager a professional manager, i.e. one who understands the principles of managing management time, including the five levels of freedom?  Or do you work for a micro-manager? Or perhaps even a hands-off manager? An example of a manager who manages at Level One would be one who gathers all of his subordinate managers together at the beginning of the day and hands out assignments. These assignments might include a to-do list and would definitely involve the managers' manager checking everyone's work at the end of the day, or maybe even at several points during the day. No one is ever given a chance to make a decision. A Level Two boss might operate in a similar fashion, but would dispense with the meeting, expecting all the managers to come to him and ask what they should do that day. 

In reality, no boss acts like this all of the time. Some might, in some areas of their oversight, hand out assignments, especially in the training phase of a new manager's career; or they might tolerate an inexperienced manager asking how to handle a situation. In my own management career, there have been times when my own supervisor acted as a Level One manager, telling me to undertake a task that had not been on my own self-to-do-list. Examples might include starting a new sales initiative, changing priorities in some area or just indulging the boss' whim. However, most managers do most of their managing at a Level Three or above, typically at a Level Four. At a Level Three, your boss is still micro-managing, i.e. still requiring a stamp of approval at every step. If your manager is not on-site, this is obviously a difficult situation. Level Four, where you make all your own decisions, but reporting after the fact, is typical for most management decisions. Level Five, where reporting is done only at regular intervals, is rare, except with very routine tasks. The reality is that most managers will have some areas where they will allow you free rein and others where they keep you on a tight leash, and most where you're somewhere in the middle.

So, how do you minimize that boss-imposed time? You have to manage your boss. How do you do that? That depends on the primary mode of management that your boss employs. If it's Level One or Two, honestly, you've got a lot to overcome. You've got one of those bosses who believe that it's the manager's job to "work hard" and to have his fingers in every pie. You've got one of those managers who believes "if you want it done right, you have to do it yourself". You've got one of those managers who views his subordinate managers merely as higher-paid grunts. Making your own decisions, or even suggesting actions, might be interpreted as insubordination. On the other hand, the manager who lets you operate at Level Five all the time probably doesn't exist in the wild! 

Managers who habitually manage from Level Four or Five can be categorized as "hands-off" managers. This isn't always a good thing. Very rarely can everything be put in these top levels. A true hands-off manager is often just lazy and doesn't want to actually manage, just sit back as a figurehead. Most managers are going to be in the Level Two - Level Four range, with occasional forays into Levels One & Five, depending on the task. To use a grocery store as an example, your daily & weekly ordering might be Level Four, or even Level Five, something your manager has no reason to get involved in. Your holiday displays and ordering might be in Level Three, where you make the decision on what displays to build and what to order, but he gets to weigh in and make the final decision. Staffing might be Level Two, you ask him what to do about hiring. Once in a while there might be a Level One moment, your boss gives you an assignment in area that you had not considered.

Managing your boss in most cases involves anticipating what decisions he would have made before he makes them, and building a track record of making good decisions. If your boss' comfort level is Level Three, the way to get to a regular Level Four is for her to agree with most of the decisions that you run by her, and this requires that you know what your boss' priorities are and what she thinks is important. Eventually she will realize that every decision that you run by her succeeds spectacularly and will move you into Level Four. When you're at Level Two the role of anticipation is even greater, since your boss is expecting you to ask what to do; having a solution ready is a sneaky way to get yourself up to Level Three. The only to be slapped back down to Level Two is to be told to stop having ideas, which is very unlikely. Moving from a Level Four to a Level Five is in some ways the easiest - you already have the freedom to make decisions without clearing them with the boss, all you have to do is to negotiate the gap between reports!

The point of all of this is that there is one person who is responsible for the Level at which your manager manages you...it's you. It's not your boss' responsibility to make your life easier, it's your job to take the initiative. The reality is that you're never going to eliminate boss-imposed time, but by careful managing of your manager, you can minimize it and increase your self-imposed time.

Start at the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part XIII

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part XXIII - Yule Edition

Let's interrupt our march through my cult years with a side visit to The Way's views on Christmas. It may surprise some people that there are Christian denominations that do not celebrate Christmas. In the early days of European settlement in North America Christmas celebrations were actually banned in some of the colonies. The Puritans in particular had problems with the way Christmas was celebrated. Their objections were manifold. On one hand they viewed Christmas as a distinctly Papist, i.e. Catholic celebration. This was in the era of religious wars between Catholic and Protestant monarchs, and the Puritans were, if anything, ultra-Protestant. The other part of their resistance was how English Christmas traditions, especially among the working classes, had become a day off from work and dominated by fun and games. And drinking. A lot of drinking. It took a long time for the Christmas observances of non-English immigrants to make their way into American ways of celebrating Christmas; but even today, there are groups such as the Jehovah's Witnesses who do not observe any special days, based upon the Biblical admonition in Galatians 4:10 not to be "an observer of days and seasons". 

The Way, at least during my involvement, talked a good game in regards to following the dictates of the Bible, but in practice found ways around their supposed standards. Christmas observance was no exception. 

It's no surprise to most people that the Bible does not give a date for Jesus' birth. It doesn't give a year either. Part of this can be attributed to the lack of a common calendar. The current A.D. numbering system was devised in what we now call 525 A.D., when Dionysius Exiguus came up with a numbering system independent of the regnal years of reigning monarchs. He calculated (although we aren't sure what he based his calculation on) that A.D. 1 was the first full year following the birth of Jesus, putting Jesus' birth in what we now call 1 B.C. (there is no Year "0" in this system). There's a lot of other theories regarding what time of year Jesus was born, ranging from the Spring to mid September, but none are definitive. The December date that was associated with Saturnalia and the birth of "The Unconquered Sun" eventually became the accepted consensus date. 

Not satisfied with the position that we don't know the actual date or year of Jesus' birth, Victor Wierwille, the leader of The Way, set out to prove that the Bible really does give us that information, and that you can discover it with some Biblical research and a little astronomy. In 1981 he published Jesus Christ Our Promised Seed which claimed to narrow down the time to a 90-minute window on September 11, 3 B.C.!

In the late 1800's a Church of England minister, E.W. Bullinger, wrote a book titled Witness of the Stars. The premise was that the constellations told a story—the story of the Bible, and that interpreted properly, you could trace the prophecies of the coming Messiah throughout the zodiac. His reasoning behind this was quite convoluted and somewhat technical, if not completely opaque and inaccessible to the layman, but Wierwille latched on to it and added his own theories. Wierwille made the assumption that the Magi of the gospels (nowhere are they called kings by the way) were the successors of the wise men of the court of Babylon who answered to the prophet (and lions' den guy) Daniel, which was why they thought a "star" heralded the birth of a king of a backwater province of a foreign power. This made sense, sort of, but like so much of Wierwille's "research", he took what was a plausible assumption and promoted it as fact. So what did he think the Magi were looking for? Certainly not a laser beam from heaven spotlighting the manger. No, based on the constellation Leo the Lion representing the Tribe of Judah, Wierwille looked for astronomical events that would have been visible in Roman Judea during the time period between when he calculated Herod came to power and his death (which was based on calculations that disagreed with virtually all those who studied that time period). I don't recall the details, but he came up with something and tied it in with the completely unrelated verses in Revelation 12 about a woman "clothed with the sun, with stars in her hair and the moon at her feet" to indicate when the constellation Virgo was visible between sunset and moonrise using astronomical software and came up with the incredibly specific time frame that if I remember correctly was an 81 minute (my memory is a bit fuzzy on the actual time frame) time span the evening of September 11, 3 B.C. It was assumption built upon assumption based on a crazy theory, but it was wrapped up in a blue book cover and presented as undisputed fact. "Teachings" featuring the claims from this book were highlighted every December, with all of us faithful Waybots telling ourselves how superior we were to regular Christians because we knew this completely irrelevant and worthless information. We were also pretty fond of changing the words of Christmas Carols to make them more "accurate" and telling everyone who stood still for a half minute that angels don't have wings. 

Even before this book came out, The Way had a split personality when it came to Christmas. On one hand they preached that we weren't to be observers of days and seasons (like Christmas) but on the other hand we did observe most of the cultural and secular aspects of Christmas. Somehow The Way's leaders thought that simply changing the name made it all okay, hence the Wayism: Household Holiday. (I'm not going to get into it in detail here, but The Way made a distinction between the family of God and the household of God, with the household being the more exclusive, special and blessed subset of the family). Even assuming that The Way was God's "household", what made December 25th a household holiday? No one ever had a good answer. What annoyed me personally though was how "Household Holiday" became "Ho Ho" and we would wish each other "Happy Ho Ho". Way employees, and those in their Way Corps training program, were given some time off during the "Household Holidays" in order to temporarily "relocate" off campus to visit family or friends (you know, just like people who did celebrate Christmas)—which was called (of course) "Ho Ho Relo". Yikes. 

Throughout my involvement in The Way I observed Christmas just like any other secular American. I had a tree, I put up decorations, I sent out cards, exchanged gifts, but I also engaged in smug superiority over all those poor, ignorant Christians who just didn't understand the "true meaning of Christmas". 

Start from the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part XVI

So, You Want To Join a Cult - Part XVI

The King James Version of the Bible in First Corinthians Chapter 12, lists nine components of "the manifestation of the spirit". The Way referred to them as the Manifestations of the spirit; most denominations called them the "gifts of the spirit". 

They are:

• Speaking in Tongues
• Interpretation of Tongues
• Prophecy
• Word of Knowledge
• Word of Wisdom
• Discerning of Spirits
• Faith
• Miracles
• Gifts of Healing

In The Way's foundational class we learned about, and engaged in (or possibly "performed") the first three. Speaking in Tongues, Interpretation of Tongues and Prophecy were important parts of Way meetings and our spiritual life. Wierwille, The Way's founder, taught that Speaking in Tongues was a believer speaking in a tongue unknown to the speaker. It took two forms. One, when used privately, was prayer to God, or praise of God. The second, when accompanied by interpretation, was a message of comfort or exhortation from God, and was typically done if meetings of Way believers. 

There's a lot of opinions among Christians about whether Speaking in Tongues carried out today is the same as what is written about in the Bible. Some denominations have Speaking in Tongues as part of their doctrine and practice, others do not. Among those that do, there is disagreement regarding how it's done. One thing about The Way's practice of it was practice sessions. Those who were new to it were encouraged by established Way people to practice speaking in tongues out loud. Nothing odd about that, but part of the practice sessions included a leader shouting out a sound, or letter of the alphabet, and the new folks were expected to say a word starting with that sound. Even if speaking in tongues was real, if it were legitimate, if it were divinely inspired, how could you consciously choose even just the sound of a word in the tongue you were speaking? Another thing leaders would talk about was "getting more fluent in your tongue". Again, if what you're speaking is inspired by God, how can you get better at it? About all I can think of is that if it were a language with unfamiliar sounds and phonemes it might take some time to get comfortable with those sounds. 

Interpretation and Prophecy were usually short messages tended to generic versions of whatever was current Way-speak, or the prevailing Way priorities. If the "theme" of the year was Living Sanctified, a typical interpretation of prophecy might be "I the Lord your God want you to live your lives in a sanctified way, speaking the truth in love to all who would hear". Never any specific instruction. 

There was great pressure to perform. People who didn't often didn't last and left of their own volition. One misunderstanding about what The Way thought about Speaking in Tongues had to do with its connection to being born again. It was taught that it was the evidence, or proof that you were born again, but it was never suggested that those who didn't weren't.  In retrospect I believe most, if not all people faked it. How hard could it be to spout some gibberish? Nonsense syllables that had no apparent linguistic structure? This aspect of Way life wasn't necessarily cultlike in my opinion, unless you want to paint all Charismatic or Pentecostal denominations as cults. I brought it up to provide context for what came next: the Advanced Class on Power For Abundant Living. 

It was during the Advanced Class where we were supposed to learn about the other six Manifestations of the Spirit. Word of Knowledge, Word of Wisdom and Discerning of Spirits were referred to as "revelation" manifestations, i.e. God was directly giving you information. The final three, called the "power manifestations", were supposedly more action oriented. Miracles and Gifts of Healing are pretty much what the names suggest. "Faith" was one that I never heard an explanation for that made sense. For those of us who were not Advanced Class grads, that class seemed like the ticket to real spiritual street cred. It was the Advanced Class grads who were in the pipeline to become Way leaders, the real movers and shakers. And you go to wear the Advanced Class name tag. Let me digress for a moment to talk about Way name tag culture. 

By the time I got involved in The Way, every class, every program, had its own standardized plastic name tag. If you were at a Way event you could tell at a glance where someone was in the Way caste hierarchy by their name tag. If they had on a paper tag in a cheap plastic sleeve, with the name written in Sharpie, they were at the bottom. A newbie. Advanced Class grads had a green name tag with white lettering; WOW Ambassadors wore white name tags with blue lettering and the "wave" in the corner. (The first wave of WOWS went out in 1971, 1980, when I went, was the tenth wave) Students at the Way College of Emporia had red tags with white lettering. Way Corps had a name tag that was a slightly different shape than the others with tags in either white letters on green or green letters on white, with their Corps number in the corner. (There were others, but you get the idea) Anyone who rated one of these special nametags made sure that they displayed them. There was a fashion for a while to create "name tag ties" where every tag that was earned was displayed on a necktie. 

In June of 1980 I would be travelling to Rome City Indiana to take the Advanced Class. I had committed myself to participate in the Word Over the World (WOW) ambassador program starting that August, so it would be a busy time my last few months in New York. At the time I owned a car, but it was in storage and I'd shortly sell it to my sister to help pay for my Advanced Class fee and my WOW Ambassador move. None of my Way friends were going, so I thought it would be cool to hitch hike from Queens to Indiana. In retrospect, not the smartest idea, but I was never accused of making smart decisions back then! I had Lori, my girlfriend at the time, drive me to the other side of the George Washington bridge in New Jersey so that I wouldn't have to hitch through New York City. Amazingly, I arrived in one piece and started the class. 

One of the hallmarks of Way culture was to promote everything as the greatest, the first, the most effective, the most "accurate" teaching of the Bible since the First Century. Classes and seminars were described in glowing terms by those who had taken them before, and new people were likewise expected to react similarly with effusive praise. Anyone who didn't was suspected as having not "got it", and were pressured to see "the truth". These people usually drifted away. Let's take another detour and talk about "brainwashing". 

Anti-cult activists and families of people who joined cults are often convinced that cult members have been subjected to mind control techniques, informally known as brainwashing and that people who got involved were somehow forced to do so. My experience in The Way does not support this view. Those who stuck around after their initial contact with The Way were typically people who were those who wanted to believe. In the earlier installments I went into to detail about why I got hooked. Other people had different reasons, but the important thing to note was that no one was forced to stay, in fact Way leadership was glad to get rid of the skeptics or those who asked uncomfortable questions. Over the years I saw many people leave voluntarily, with no real attempt to bring them back into the fold. My own cousin, whose involvement predated mine, left with nary a ripple. The people who signed up for the Advanced Class, or to serve as WOW Ambassadors, were a self-selected group who were very likely to buy in to whatever The Way was selling. They were also predisposed to keep any doubt and skepticism to themselves.

I arrived at the Rome City Indiana campus primed to learn. I was ready to learn how to receive revelation from God, discern the presence of devil spirits, and perform miracles and heal people. (And do whatever the manifestation of "faith" entailed) In Part XV I talked about how we saw a lot of apparent miraculous healing during my final year as a Twig Coordinator in New York. I was convinced at the time that it was all real, and I was excited to be able to "kick it up a notch" and become just like the Apostles in the Book of Acts. Boy, was I in for a surprise. The operation of Speaking in Tongues, Interpretation and Prophecy in the PFAL Foundational Class was something that was taught practically as well as shown from the Biblical text and was practiced in groups and coached by the leaders. We didn't just read about it, we did it and worked out our spiritual muscles. The Advanced Class was all theory, with no practice. We read Biblical passages, we listened to theories about devil possession, we heard anecdotes about miracles and healings, but we didn't do anything. I was disappointed, but I kept it to myself. 

Even though it was natural and logical to expect more from the Advanced Class than what we got, anyone who expressed their disappointment and criticized the lack of practical application was "reproved". It was suggested that those people just didn't understand "Doctor" Wierwille's wisdom in how he presented the class—did they think they were smarter and more spiritual than he was? We were encouraged to hold any doubts or lack of understanding "in abeyance", assured that we would eventually understand. (Probably as we got more spiritual) There was a lot of peer pressure to not only keep one's doubts to oneself, but to act publicly as if it all made sense and was, in fact, God's Word as it hadn't been taught since the First Century. Even if it made no sense at all. 

I went back to New York with warring impulses fighting for attention: the part of me who saw this as a red flag and the part of me who couldn't admit that I had been involved in something that was less than what it purported to be. I didn't want to be one of the people who drifted away, admitting that I had been duped, I wanted to be one of those hot shot Advanced Class grads who knew more than everyone else. 

And besides, I was leaving for a year as a WOW Ambassador in a few weeks.

Start from the beginning: Part I

Workin' Man - Part XVI - New York Block Party

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 

 Office space for managers varied from store to store within the company. At 48th & O the Store Director and Assistant Store Director each had fairly large private offices; the HR Coordinator had a smaller one. The Grocery Manager and a few others shared a shelf and some filing cabinets in the "bullpen" area. At Cornhusker the old Assistant Manager's office had been converted to a security camera room, so the ASD had to share an office with the Grocery Manager. When I first arrived, the Grocery Manager's desk was a plank of wood resting atop some milk crates. The office itself was quite cramped, with several filing cabinets full of papers of various sorts. One afternoon I decided to clear out any old and outdated documents. I found schedules that were 10 years old, ads that were almost as old, memos to and from people who were no longer with the company—some whom had died. We dragged a trash bin up the stairs and filled it and emptied it multiple times. Apparently my predecessor never threw anything out!

One advantage to being at a new store was that we weren't right next door to the corporate offices. Before B&R built what we called The Taj Mahal over near 45th & W their corporate headquarters was in the strip mall next to the 48th & O Super Saver, where the Dollar Tree was until recently. (Interesting fact about the B&R headquarters, it's not owned by B&R, it's owned separately by the Raybould family who collect rent from B&R). With the corporate overlords so close, we had frequent unscheduled visits; lunch time stops to the Deli, after work grocery shopping and more. We could always count on Richard, the VP of Operations, coming in at 5:00 to buy a six pack of beer, so we made sure the path from the front door to the beer case always had full shelves. 

Russ was still active in the company then. I could always expect him to come in early on Friday evening and rudely yell at the top of his lungs that we needed more checkers. Every Monday morning Russ would gather in the conference room at 48th & O with some of his old cronies to drink coffee and eat doughnuts. This coffee klatch was so sacrosanct that he once kicked out the HR Coordinator who was conducting an orientation for new employees. I always thought it was funny how people thought Russ's abrasive manner was considered a positive trait, good ol' plain speaking, while my own was looked at as a problem. A lot of people idolized Russ. I thought he was a bully and an asshole. Though for good or bad, you always knew where you stood with Russ. If he yelled at you, as long as you fixed the problem you never heard about it again. 

The 27th and Cornhusker Highway area is in a mostly a lower income part of Lincoln. We served an eclectic mix of working class people, poor people, and immigrants from Central America and the Middle East who spoke little English, as well as students from the University of Nebraska. We also had quite a few homeless people panhandling in the parking lot. The UNL students were constantly attempting to use fake or altered ID's to purchase alcohol. Not a week went by where we didn't confiscate several fake driver's licenses. When the store was built Lincoln had only recently allowed grocery stores to sell alcoholic beverages. However, the stores were required to sell it from a separate, walled off, area with a separate entrance. By the time I started, city ordinance allowed traffic to move between the main store to the Spirits department, but there was still a separate entrance, and since alcohol couldn't be sold before noon on Sunday, there was a floor-to-ceiling gate separating Spirits from the main store, which was opened at noon. On any day, there would be people lined up outside waiting for the door to the Spirits department to be unlocked. On one particular Saturday night the key to the door broke off in the lock. No one told me about it, so when I came in on Sunday morning I went about my day until it was time to unlock the door at noon and couldn't open the door. You could enter the wine & liquor area through the main store, but not through the separate entrance. The level of whining from customers about having to walk around and through the store to pick up their Old English or MD 20/20 was unreal. You would've thought you were asking them to walk to Omaha. 

One of my favorite Spirits department tales involves a run-in with "Jesus". 

One otherwise quiet morning I was called over to the Spirits Department to help eject a customer. This customer had been banned from the store because he had thrown a can of beer at one of the Spirits clerks. He was was a giant of a man. At least 6' 5" with a linebackers physique. When I asked him to leave he began to declaim in a thunderous voice that he was Jesus and that I had no authority over him. He ranted about the FBI and the ATF and then he threatened me. Not with physical violence (although I was worried that I was about to get beaten up) but with thunder and lightning! When no lightning bolts were forthcoming, I asked him to leave, which he did. A few days later I got a call from the Spirits Manager: "Jesus is here". As I arrive "Jesus" took a deep breath, ready to begin his harangue; I cut him off "Yeah, I know, ATF and lightning and thunder...you still have to leave, Jesus" and off he went, never to be seen again.

Salt Creek ran behind the store, wound around and crossed Cornhusker Highway just west of the store. There was a small encampment of homeless people who lived under the bridge, who would wander up to the store to panhandle. Once they collected enough they'd pop into the Spirits Department for something to drink, or over to the Deli Department for some chicken. I'd usually run them off if they were bothering people too close to the store, but never got the police involved unless they were shoplifting. One exception I made was a guy with a guitar, who I let hang out at the picnic table near the exit door, he was entertainment for the customers that we didn't have to pay for! 

There were always colorful characters in a grocery store. Patrick and Nick were the Grocery Manager and Assistant Grocery Manager. They were both young guys who were good at their jobs, but were always screwing around. One afternoon they both ran past me, yelling at the top of their lungs, Nick was swinging a rubber hose and Patrick had a long handled ice scraper. It turns out that someone had trapped the rat. I'm not speaking figuratively. A large rat had gotten in from Salt Creek out back and had been spotted wandering around the store. Somehow it had gotten trapped in the Produce back room where the boys had blocked off the entrances with plywood and pallets. There was a lot of running back and forth until Mike, the Meat Department Manager and former Army Ranger decapitated the rat with the ice scraper. Mike's previous claim to fame had been dressing up in a cow costume and standing on top of a giant pile of snow advertising our Meat Department specials! 

One of the funniest conversations that I had with Nick came after he had been promoted to Grocery Manager at another store. My ex-wife was the Night Manager there. Nick came over one afternoon to ask me (seriously) what he could do to get along with my ex-wife. I told him that if I knew how to do that she wouldn't be my ex-wife!

Wildlife, in addition to the ill-fated rat, made an appearance in the form of a couple of birds who somehow had flown in but couldn't figure out how to fly out. These birds had been in the store so long that they had acquired names: Guido and Terrence.  They weren't dive bombing customers, and wherever they were crapping, we didn't see it, so after a while we just ignored them. Customers would inform us that there were birds in the store and we'd simply respond "Oh yeah, that Guido and Terrance". The Store Director put out a bounty for their capture, dead or alive. One of our overnight delivery guys shot them one night. Rest in peace Guido and Terrence. 

Speaking of colorful charters, our Human Resources Coordinator was going through a nasty divorce, and to put it mildly, wasn't making good decisions. She and a few of the single women from the store had a standing girls' night out to the Council Bluffs casinos every Tuesday. One week a few of the single boys joined them. On the way home the two cars got separated and the guys', taking what they thought was a shortcut, ended up driving down a gravel road. They didn't realize that they were heading toward a "T" intersection and drove into a field of corn at high speed. There was no cell phone signal, so they wandered off. They eventually met up with the women, but were covered in mud. Since everyone involved had been drinking, they couldn't remember where the car was. They were up all night searching for the car and they all called in "sick" to work the next morning. Now technically this wasn't the HR Coordinator's fault, yet she was supposedly the responsible adult in the group. Another incident, where she definitely was the problem came shortly thereafter. 

A lot of the younger employees, including managers, spent time together after work. The home of one employee became a "party house", whose participants included underage employees. I heard a lot of stories and not only did I stay away, but I didn't want to hear about it! One Friday evening I did hear about it. Patrick, our grocery manager stopped into the store after leaving the party. He reported to me that a strip poker game was in process and that our HR Coordinator was participating. By the time he left she was almost naked. The Store Director had a discussion with her about it. She didn't understand why getting drunk and naked with a bunch of teenagers was a bad idea!

The store put out a weekly newsletter, Nine's News (9 was the store number), where Brian the Store Director was supposed to write a weekly column, which he did inconsistently. I volunteered to fill in and little by little took over the newsletter's production. In one early edition I reported on the apprehension of a group of kids who were stealing school supplies and referred to their "ill-gotten booty". Someone suggested that "Ill-Gotten Booty" sounded like it could be the name of the bassist for Parliament-Funkadelic, and the weekly column "Words of Wisdom by Ill-Gotten Booty" was born. (Some time later the company HR Director decreed that the control of the newsletter was to be taken out of my hands. In response I published my own competing newsletter: Words of Wisdom by Ill-Gotten Booty (of course) . The "official" newsletter was pretty dry, while I couldn't print enough copies of mine. When I was transferred to another store I started an online version which was popular throughout the company, but got me in trouble more than once). 

The Night Crew was always a source of surprises. One evening one of the stockers was flirting with a woman stocker who was married to another guy on the crew. The husband confronted the would-be Don Juan back by the trash compactors and beat him up. Minutes later the one who had been beaten up came out of the back room and started throwing jars of pickles at his tormentor. Both of the them were fired. 

The corporate office decided that we weren't doing enough to promote our ads. They came up with a competition called "Big 8 Events", where each store would compete in various categories, earning points in a quest to beat all the other stores. One of the main parts of this competition was building themed displays. The first of these events was a Seafood Sale. Brian wanted to win this event, so he put me in charge and convened a meeting with the Meat Department Manager and Assistant Manager. A lot of the ideas were pretty easy to execute, like fish-themed signage and fish-shaped balloons. Sampling various seafoods was also part of the plan. (If I remember correctly I did a demo of tilapia with sautéed vegetables). It was during this event when I formulated my theory of operational feasibility.  

Operational feasibility is my name for the idea that some things may sound like good ideas, but the effort required to pull them off isn't worth the benefits derived from executing the idea. This theory was argued in managers' meetings periodically for the rest of my career with B&R. Often it involved an "event" that required extra staffing, i.e. scheduling people over and above the normal schedule. When corporate was asked how this was to be done, they would usually fall back on their stock response, that we should just schedule some "extra" grocery clerks. The corporate office was still living in the past where we would have 4 - 6 grocery clerks on hand at any given time. Reduced labor budgets had done away with this luxury. Somehow we were supposed to find several people to do product demonstrations (or in the case of the infamous tent sales, employees to sit outside all night and guard the tent!). 

The planning meeting for the Seafood Sale involved such crazy ideas as "let's turn the meat bunker into a whale!" or "let's turn the other meat bunker into a pirate ship!". As we brainstormed all these ideas, I, the guy who had to turn all these ideas into reality, kept asking how we would actually make it happen. The answer was that I could just figure it out. Nice. Someone suggested that Emily, one of our cashiers, was a talented artist and could design something. It was true, she was talented and did design something. We had an amazing blueprint for a beautiful transformation of our meat bunkers into a whale and a pirate ship. Unfortunately the professional level blueprint was translated into something that a kindergarten teacher might consider substandard, complete with paper plates for the whale's eyes. The full-size statue of Captain Morgan set amidst the meat display helped out somewhat though. 

During my third year at Cornhusker, and Brian's last year as Store Director, Brian had another promotional idea. The Pine Lake store had done a "Hawaiian Days" promotion, complete with a fake waterfall and aloha shirts. Brian challenged me to come up with a similar big idea. At the time I was hanging out at Duggan's Pub on Monday nights where another ASD, Dan, was the MC for the weekly open stage. After several beers I came up with the idea of a New York Block Party promotion. We would turn the front of the store, the "Wall of Values" into a facsimile of a New York street corner. I ran my idea past Dan, who suggested that I talk to Sean Benjamin, a local musical giant who usually played keyboards with the house band. Sean promised to put together a band for the event. 

Looking back, it seems like a miracle that we were able to pull this off. We set the weekend of 9-11 for the blowout, which was around three weeks away. The key was to only plan to do things that we could reasonably pull off and to delegate tasks so that no one was doing too much. We ordered a giant New York Block Party outdoor banner. We worked with the local Coca-Cola distributor to create a "stoop" made out of cases of Coke. "Doors" were made by our banner maker and one of our cashiers created lifelike stuffed dummies who would be lounging on the steps. Our Smokehouse contributed sausage and peppers that we sold from a street cart. The Bakery supplied bagels at breakfast time that we gave away. We set up a boxball court and gave away prizes to anyone who could beat me. A local signage company donated a 20-foot long panorama of the New York City skyline. Tables decorated to look like taxis were scattered around for people to enjoy their food. Décor included flyers featuring New York sports teams, and posters with the iconic New Yorker magazine cover of New York as the center of the universe and the New York subway system. We had t-shirts made that featured the New York skyline. Sean provided a band that included himself on guitar, Brian "Pickle" Gerkensmeyer on bass, Josh Hoyer on keyboards and saxophone, Leniece Micek singing and Dan Caulkins on drums. I had asked my friend Kevin to help me put together some music for the event to be played over the PA system when the band wasn't playing. I had envisioned a collection of New York themed songs: Billy Joel's New York State of Mind, Frank Sinatra's New York, New York, and songs by New York artists. What I got was a collection of what Kevin's friend thought was popular in the cooler New York clubs. Oh well. 

The one idea that I had to turn down was the suggestion that we turn the forklifts into taxi cabs. My response of "how are we going to do that?" killed the idea. 

I thought the whole event was well received. Store Director Brian thought it was great. Everyone in the store was excited to put it on. The customers thought it was amazing, we certainly brought a lot of them into the store. We certainly understood the assignment! But of course, the downer was the corporate response. Not one director from headquarters showed up. When I sent the company president photos of the set up, his only comment was that it must not have been successful since the store looked so empty (I took the photos at 6:00am) and wanted to know how many extra sales we brought in. Par for the course—the top dogs were always critical of ideas that they didn't think up themselves or projects that they didn't initiate. We didn't let the bastards get us down and did it again the following year!

Start with Part I

Go to: Part XVII

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part XVI - Agreeing to Disagree...Or Not

One of the problems in looking to the Bible as a rulebook on how to live life is that it's not arranged in any easy-to-access order. There's no index, it's not arranged by subject matter and there seems to be a lot of areas that simply aren't covered. The true believers will tell you that's because it's not supposed to be accessible to the disbelievers, but that if you have the Holy Spirit within you, understanding will flow naturally.

How convenient. 

Of course, I'm one of those disbelievers, and this series is about how I, an agnostic, look at the Bible. I don't believe that it was dictated, or even inspired, by God, or any other permutation of the idea that it's "The Truth". I'm just looking at it like I'd look at any other piece of literature. Viewed in that light, it's confusing. 

One of the sources of confusion is the dichotomy between the "Old Testament", aka The Hebrew or Jewish scriptures, and the "New Testament", aka the Gospels and the Epistles. The Old Testament is without question written for the Jewish people. The New Testament is more universal in who it's intended for. The Old Testament describes God in starkly different terms than does most of the New Testament. Most Christians ignore this difference, pretending that it's not there. Although there is a subset of Christian theology called dispensationalism which explains the difference by theorizing that God has different "dispensations", or administrations, where the rules of the game change. It's obvious that the institution of the Law of Moses changed the ground rules that existed before, and that Jesus' life, death and resurrection represented a further change. The Book of Revelation is without question a different milieu than the world as we know it, ending with a still different new Heaven and Earth. Dispensationalists can be thanked (or blamed) for the popular belief in "the rapture". An early Christian movement, founded by Marcion, believed that the differences were so great that the Old Testament God was a different God than the God of Jesus. So it comes down to either explaining away the differences in a pretzel-like manner, or just ignoring them. 

Another dichotomy in the New Testament is between the Gospels and the Epistles of Paul. Jesus was primarily concerned with action, while Paul was mainly concerned with belief. Even though each of the four Gospels has a different emphasis, and even contradict each other, Jesus isn't telling people to simply believe, he's always talking about how one should behave oneself. Paul on the other hand, while he does touch on a few things to do and not do, it's all in the head—it's believing in Jesus, believing that he was raised from the dead and so on. 

The epistles of Paul are not an instruction manual on how to be a Christian, they're mostly in the form of letters addressing specific problems that various church communities were having. There's not a lot of internal inconsistency within the Pauline letters, but there's no definitive listing of doctrine and practice. The Catholic/Orthodox traditions tell their people to not worry about it, the leaders will tell you how to act and think. The Protestant traditions do that too, while maintaining the illusion that their people can see what the Bible teaches for themselves...as long as it agrees with what the leaders say it means. For any doctrinal position it's typical to jump from section to section and book to book putting together a supposedly coherent position, because you won't find it clearly delineated in any one place. 

What about the Ten Commandments? Isn't that a list telling us how to act? Yes and no. Yes, in that it's a list in the Bible. No—for several reasons. If we're taking the dispensationalist position that the Old Testament was for the Jews and not written to The Church, why would we pay it any attention? If we are supposed to heed the "Ten Commandments", why not the other hundreds of commandments? Like the ones involving dietary and grooming rules. Or the ones that allow slavery or that a woman marry her rapist. Quite a quandary. But what most people do not realize that no matter what position you take, there are two contradictory versions of the Ten Commandments (or Ten Words) in the Book of Exodus:

https://contradictionsinthebible.com/2-ten-commandments/

Ten Commandments (Ex 20:1-17)

1. I am Yahweh your god; you shall not have other gods before my face!

2. You shall not make for yourself a statue or an image.

3. You shall not swear falsely by the name Yahweh, your god

4. Remember the Sabbath day.

5. Honor your father and your mother.

6. You shall not murder.

7. You shall not commit adultery.

8. You shall not steal.

9. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

10. You shall not covet you neighbor’s house.

 Ten Commandments (Ex 34:14-26)

1. You shall not bow down to another god; for Yahweh is a jealous god!

2. You shall not make molten gods for yourself.

3. You shall observe the festival of Unleavened bread.

4. You shall redeem every first born of your sons!

5. You shall observe the Sabbath.

6. You shall make a festival of Weeks.

7. Three times a year every male shall appear before Yahweh, god of Israel.

8. You shall not offer the blood of my sacrifice on leavened bread.

9. You shall bring the firstfruits of your land to the house of Yahweh your god.

10. You shall not cook a kid in its mother’s milk.

So, which version do you want to follow? Or post in your classrooms? 

In addition to the fact that there are two distinct and clearly contradictory versions of The Ten Commandments right there in the text of the Bible, the way that the first, more popular version, is interpreted varies depending on the church tradition or denomination, there are eight distinct traditions or versions which divide the seven verses in Exodus differently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Commandments

1. Septuagint
2. Reformed Protestantism
3. Ashburnham Pentateuch
4. Talmud
5. Samaritan Pentateuch
6. Augustine
7. Roman Catholicism
8. Lutherans

"I am the Lord your God"

One tradition lists this as the First Commandment

Seven combine it with "You Shall Have No Other Gods Before Me" as the First Commandment, the remaining tradition separate them into the First and Second Commandments

Four traditions combine it with "You Shall Not Have False Idols"  or "Thou Shalt Not Make Unto Thee a Graven Image" as the first commandment

The other three call "You Shall Not Have False Idols"  or "Thou Shalt Not Make Unto Thee a Graven Image" the second commandment.

The next few are called the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th if all the previous commandments are combined into the First;  3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th if not

"You Shall Not Take the Name of the Lord in Vain" is third/second commandment
 
"Remember the Sabbath Day to Keep it Holy" is the fourth/third commandment

"Honor Thy Father and Mother" is the fifth/fourth commandment

"Thou Shalt Not Kill" is the sixth/fifth, although one version counts it as the eighth commandment

"Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery" is the seventh/sixth commandment, although since one source reverses this and the previous command, it is 3 for seventh and 5 for sixth

"Thou Shalt Not Steal" is eighth/seventh commandment

"Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness (Lie?) Against Thy Neighbor" is ninth/eighth

The next three commandments are all combined into one commandment as either the Ninth Commandment in one tradition; or as the Tenth Commandment in 4. Three traditions split them up as follows:

A. "Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor's House" One combines this one with "B" as the Ninth Commandment; Two combine this one with "B" and "D" as the Tenth Commandment

B. "Thou Shalt Not Desire Thy Neighbor's House" One combines this one with "A" as the Ninth Commandment; Two combine this one with "A" and "D" as the Tenth Commandment

C. "Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor's Wife" One combines this one with "D" as the Tenth Commandment; Two list this as the Ninth Commandment, not combined with others

D. "Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor's Stuff"  One combines this one with "C" as the Tenth Commandment; Two combine this one with "A" and "B" as the Tenth Commandment

The one exception adds "You Shall Set Up These Stones, Which I Command You Today, on Mount Argarizem" and combines all the "covets" as the ninth commandment

(4 of 8 combine all 3 "covets" into #10, 3 combine 2 of them in various ways)

Even though there are actually fifteen commandments, (if you count every one that at least one tradition considers a separate commandment), the Bible, just before the listing, specifically calls them ten commandments (or words, sayings, or matters), but does not clearly delineate where one "commandment" ends and another begins. Maybe whoever wrote it thought it would be obvious, or that it was unimportant. Here they are separated out and listed in order:

1. I am the Lord your God
2. You Shall Have No Other Gods Before Me
3. You Shall Not Have False Idols
4. You Shall Not Take the Name of the Lord in Vain
5. Remember the Sabbath Day to Keep it Holy
6. Honor Thy Father and Mother
7. Thou Shalt Not Kill
8. Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery
9. Thou Shalt Not Steal
10. Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness (Lie?) Against Thy Neighbor
11. Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor's House
12. Thou Shalt Not Desire Thy Neighbor's House
13. Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor's Wife
14. Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor's Stuff
15. You Shall Set Up These Stones, Which I Command You Today, on Mount Argarizem

Periodically there are legal disputes about posting the Ten Commandments in courthouses and in government buildings. The rationale being that the commandments are all basic moral/ethical stuff and no one should have any problem with them, even if they did originate in a religious book. There are some problems with that position. Some of them are hardcore religious and not just "do unto others..." stuff.

The first three to five, depending on how you're counting, address who you should be worshipping, when you should do it, and how you should talk about the god who is the object of this worship. For anyone who worships a god different from the god of the bible, this is not something that they they would want to do and it certainly shouldn't be displayed in a government setting. If you think that the whole world, or at least the whole country, consists entirely of Christians and Jews (and depending on how you view Allah, Muslims), then you might have no problem with this. But that's not the reality— there's a large number of people who worship or honor different gods (or no gods at all), in addition there's that pesky First Amendment.

The "covet" prohibitions are also problematic. Most people would agree in theory that these are things that you shouldn't do, but when you get down to it they are prohibitions against thought not actions. So once again, this comes down to strictly religious rules, not anything that could or should be encoded into secular law.

Honoring your parents (unless your parents are evil bastards), no stealing, lying, killing or cheating on your spouse...I'll give you those. The Five Commandments sounds okay.

Start at The Beginning: Part I