Workin' Man - Part XII - Paying Off the Pile of Debt and More Newspaper Delivery

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 

Over the course of five or six years, in order to pay off $20,000 in credit card debt, I had a succession of part-time jobs in addition to my main job. The first position was as a night stocker at the Cornhusker Super Saver while I was still a manager at The Omaha World-Herald. I worked four nights a week, 9:00pm - 2:00am, 20 hours/week. When I came in at 9:00, my first task was go around to all displays and organize them so that the forklift crew could start filling them right away. Usually the delivery truck came in at 10:00. Another stocker and I would unload the truck and then start "stringing" the aisles, i.e. taking the stock from the pallets and setting it on the floor in front of the shelf where it would ultimately be placed. Once this was done the manager would assign me to either work with the forklift crew filling displays or to work one of the aisles. Since I was only scheduled until 2:00 it would either be a smaller aisle, or I'd work with another employee to stock their aisle. I was 40 years old, and by far the oldest one on the crew and was frequently mistaken for a manager. It was pretty routine work, but I wasn't getting much sleep. The most exciting things that ever happened was the occasional run-in with a shoplifter (company policy hadn't yet banned physical contact). The worst that happened was getting buried in a pile of bodies one night when several stockers tackled a shoplifter who I was chasing. Ouch! 

Back at the World-Herald, my disenchantment with the bonus and salary situation led me to start exploring my options. A new store had just been built in Lincoln, resulting in multiple management openings, including the Grocery Manager at the Super Saver at 48th & O. The Grocery Manager was in charge of what we called "Center Store" the food aisles of can and boxes, as well non-food items like detergent and paper towels. The Grocery Manager was considered next in line behind the Store Director and Assistant Store Director. I was hired for the position after an interview with George Hill, the Store Director. Of course, now I couldn't keep my part-time job with Super Saver, so I agreed to stay on with the Omaha World-Herald part-time. 

My new part-time position was as an assistant to my replacement. I was doing some of the same things, repairing racks, tracking single copy sales and collecting from the racks on weekends. But it didn't last very long. One reason was that my schedule at my new grocery job was not 6am - 2pm as I thought it would be, but 6am - 4pm. (9 hours work + an hour for lunch), so I couldn't get to the newspaper office until late. The other reason was that the new State Circulation Manager, who set up his office in Lincoln, unlike Omaha, as his predecessors did, was cleaning house of holdovers and filling positions with his own people. I was told I was being laid off because we "had too many part-timers", but they soon replaced me and the others they "laid off". 

I still needed a second job, so I took a job as a telemarketer. They weren't very picky about who they hired. I found out later that in a group of 20 new hires, 5 or 6 would leave on break during the first night of training. When night two of training started there would be fewer than 10 left. After one shift working the phones for real, 5 newbies would be left. Only 2 or 3 would end up staying around. It was hire in bulk and see who sticks with it. The place was open Monday - Saturday, from 8:30am - 9:00pm. I'd work an 8-hour shift on Thursday, my day off, and 4-hour shifts, 5:00 - 9:00pm on week nights. I had a  rotating weekend off at the grocery store, so I would work a full shift on my one Saturday a month off. 

Telemarketing is a hard job. There's a lot of rejection - think about how often you hang up on cold calls. But there are sales. Think about it, there would have to be, or why would companies keep doing it. I was very skeptical about my ability to make any sales, since part of our sales spiel involved getting the potential sale's bank account number and social security number. I thought surely no one would be that stupid to give that information out. I thought wrong. Most of the phone crew managed to average two sales per hour. There were a lot of hang ups and rejections, but as long as we consistently achieved our goal of two sales per hour, everything was fine. Back then minimum wage was $5.15/hour. We were paid $8.00/hour to start, plus commission. If you averaged 1 sale/hour, you received $1.00/sale. If you averaged 2 sales/hour, your commission went up to $2.50/sale. If you managed managed to average 3 sales/hour you received $4.00/sale. Once you closed the sale a verifier would get on the line and confirm your sale to eliminate the possibility of cheating. 

We sold several different products. Our main one was called Auto Savings Discount Club (ASDC) which had nothings to do with autos or savings, and wasn't a discount or a club. (It later changed its name to American Savings Discount Club) What it turned out to be was getting people with bad credit to sign up for a limited line of credit for a fee. After paying a fee a member could draw on this line of credit to pay bills in an emergency - paid back at interest of course. Eventually the FCC closed them down - they were preying on people with poor credit and it turned out they weren't even giving them access to the lines of credit. 

We also did some political polling. The first time was for Jon Corzine, who was running for Senator in the New Jersey Democratic primary. Most of the people we called would ask whether he was Democrat or Republican, and when I responded that he was a Democrat would assert that they were voting for him.  My explanation that it was the primary, and that they were all Democrats, fell on deaf ears and I eventually just gave up trying to explain. The one that was really interesting was when we did polling for a New York City Council candidate. First we would call and ask some questions about which issues were most important, once we had the answers we would call back in a month, emphasizing all the issues that our candidate agreed with the voter we were calling, ignoring the areas of disagreement. A different script would pop up for each voter, depending on how they had answered the questions during the previous call. Tricky bastards, those pollsters. 

Before the place was shut down, I got very good at selling ASDC. The trick was to cycle through the "no's" as quickly as possible. This meant getting a sense for who was either too dense to understand what you were selling or too smart to fall for it, in addition to those were just going to string you along. Once you knew you had one of these you had to get off the phone as soon as possible and tee up the next one. Since telemarketing success depends in large part in reaching a lot of people, the key to making sales is to not waste time with the people who aren't interested. I developed an ability to detect early in the call who I should push it with and who I should give up on quickly. Getting those who I knew were a lost cause off the phone enabled me to reach more people and therefore get more sales. This was against company policy, which had a script for you to follow that needed a "no" three distinct times before you could move on. We had a quality assurance monitor who would listen to our calls and write us up if we deviated from the script. But those of us who brought in a lot of sales were eventually left alone. 

One of the recurring reasons to drop a call was when the person we were calling wasn't home. We were supposed to then try to sell to whoever answered the phone, as long as they were an adult. This never worked. We'd ask for "Bob Smith", and be told that Bob wasn't home. According to the script we were to say that we could make the offer to them - Mrs. Smith, or Bob Smith's brother, whoever - and proceed with the script. The problem - every single time - was that, no matter how well you thought the call was going, no matter how much it seemed like a sale, when you swooped in for the close they would invariably say "Bob's not home". Why bother? 

I used to get a kick out of people who were conflicted about what we were selling, but didn't want to come right out and say that they weren't interested. We'd get to the close and have to ask them for their bank account information.

Me: I'll just need your bank account number

Prospect: I don't know it

Me: All you have to do is look on the bottom of your checks, the first nine digits is the routing number...

Prospect: My checkbook is in my car

Me: Okay, I'll wait while you go out to your car and get it

Prospect: I don't know where my car is

Me: What?

Prospect: My brother has it

Me: *Click*

I don't know if people really kept their checkbooks in their cars, or they just thought it sounded like a plausible excuse, but in the two years I was there I heard this dozens of times. 

I mentioned earlier that my work schedule rotated my days off once a month. The company required a request in advance to change the schedule, but they tired of me requested a change every month and decided to just let me come in whenever I felt like it. Many weeks I worked until I made my goal for sales for the week. After I had been on the phones for around two years I was getting a divorce. After missing a few shifts to find a place to live I stopped in to the phone bank, only to find out we were shutting down because ASDC, our biggest client, was being shut down by the FCC, and the money they owed us was frozen. We eventually got paid. Once again I needed a part-time job.

By this time I was an assistant store director at the Cornhusker Super Saver, I wasn't having any success finding a second shift job, so I ended up taking a Lincoln Journal Star seven-day motor route. My territory was the southwest corner of Lancaster County - west of Highway 77 and south of Highway 33, including the towns of Sprague and Hallam. I'd start around 2:00am and deliver papers until around 6:00; head home, shower and start work at Super Saver at 7:00. Gas was around $1.60/gallon. I was making over $900/month after paying for gas and replacing the occasional tire. I ran this route from November 2001 through May 2002. It's not generally known that paper carriers are classified as independent contractors. You can't call in sick or take a day off unless you can find someone to substitute for you. So I worked sick and never took a day off. I paid for gas and tires myself. A problem being an independent contractor is that you don't receive a paycheck, you receive a check representing your net profit, with no tax or social security taken out. This means that you're likely to have to pay the IRS in April, rather than receiving a refund as most people do. I didn't report my paper route income and ended up having to pay the back taxes plus penalty and interest when the IRS figured it out. Ouch. 

In 2002 I planned on taking a trip to New York to visit family, stopping along the way to see friends. I planned on being gone for around two weeks, but could not find anyone to cover for me, so I had to quit. I still needed a second job. That Autumn I was contracted to deliver the Tuesday afternoon Star Express, a free paper put out by the Lincoln Journal Star. This was a lot easier that the rural route and it was only one day a week! And it was in the daylight! After a year or so the Star Express was discontinued. The Journal Star started a program where all non-subscribers would receive a paper every Wednesday morning. By this time I had long since paid off my debt, but was keeping the route to help make ends meet. I was making $200/month, which was the same amount that I was paying in child support for my last minor child. Once I was no longer paying child support I decided that I no longer needed the extra income and quit the last in a long succession of second jobs.

Workin' Man - Part XI - Consultants, Management Time and The Answer Man, Oh My

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 

I have learned over the decades to be extremely suspicious of consultants. They generally don't know as much as they think that they do, they make extravagant promises and make sure to feed you enough information to keep you interested and willing to keep bringing them back. I don't recall the name of this consultant, but what he was pitching was process improvement. In general I think process improvement is a good idea. In short, what it involves is looking at your processes for anything that is superfluous and analyzing the steps and handoffs involved. Are there steps that are unnecessary or don't add value? Is it generating paper that doesn't go anywhere? Are unnecessary people involved? The program started off with a weekend retreat at Mahoney State Park attended by representatives from all of the company's divisions. We were supposed to hash out a plan to implement a process improvement program, based on guidance from the consultant. What we came up with was a grass roots, from the bottom up, methodology for  implementing change in the company. According to the plan, a core group of people would go around to all the departments, interview the staff, and map out the processes involved in their jobs. Once this was all done, a team of any four people could implement a change to any department after putting together a detailed plan. Coaches, who had undergone training by the consultant, who be available to guide and advise the change teams. So far do good. Or so we thought. 

The problems started right away. The unionized sections of the company refused to participate. Other areas like the reporters didn't have a specific procedure that they followed. I was one of the coaches, and stayed busy training teams on how to implement change according to the program. But more problems cropped up when teams that had no real understanding of how divisions of the company worked were making changes to those divisions without the permission, or even the input, of the affected managers. I don't remember anything actually getting done. Ever. Eventually the Publisher (newspaper-speak for CEO) got tired of the whole thing and fired the consultant. My skepticism of consultants continues to this day. 

I was one of those people who volunteered for everything. And got volunteered for everything. One of the more fun things that I signed up for was being on staff for the Omaha World-Herald carrier newsletter. Every month I wrote an article called "The Answer Man". My non de plume was Dlarehd L. Rowahamo - which is Omaha World-Herald spelled backwards. The premise was that Dlarehd was either from another planet, or perhaps another dimension or timeline, and didn't quite understand what was going on. He constantly got things backwards, but ended up covering things that needed to be covered, like sales contests and changes in subscription price, in a humorous manner. The first few issues were a battle to stop the editors from spell checking me, since I made up a lot of words! I was once involved in a seminar where the facilitator was trying to demonstrate the value of consensus in putting together a mission statement, rather than simply a vote of the majority. My thinking was that the bigger the group, the less likely it is that consensus could be achieved. So during this consensus building exercise, I decided that I would be a contrarian and refuse to agree to the nascent consensus. The moderator tried to negotiate with me, but I dug in my heels and wouldn't agree to anything. Was I being a jerk? Absolutely, but I also effectively debunked his idea of the inevitability of consensus. I believe they abandoned consensus and decided to outvote me!

One of the things I learned participating in all of those committees was that there is an ideal number of people on a committee. Too few and you get groupthink; too many and you never come to a conclusion. Once a committee gets too big the best thing that can be done is break it up into subcommittees. Have that subcommittee do the work of crafting a plan, then present it to the larger group and have them vote on it. 

There were a lot of other projects and committees that I volunteered for, but despite all the work I was putting into these activities that were adjacent to my regular job description, they weren't really valued by management. Every year State Circulation had an annual meeting where awards were given out for outstanding achievement. There were cash awards given out in conjunction with these recognitions as well. One particular year I was sure I'd be recognized for something like team player, (for which there was an award) or for all the committees I was recruited for, but every award, like every other year, went to the sales reps whose sales went up the most. I had an epiphany. I realized that I was spending hours upon hours every week on projects that simply weren't valued and resulted in no reward or even recognition. Not even a pat on the back. The next day I resigned from every single committee and program that I was involved in and spent my time on the things that would bring me recognition, and more importantly, more money!

The most interesting thing I was involved in was an 18-month management training course. At least part of it was interesting. Honestly I can't remember most of what they covered, but we would be at training two-three days a week a couple of times a month. One class that stood out was one where we were supposed learn how to let go of our stress and to relax by means of guided meditation. I didn't get much out of it, but one of my fellow trainees fell asleep and was snoring loudly. I guess he was relaxed! The part that I learned the most from, and have carried to this day, was a week-long class called Managing Management Time. I had taken my share of time management courses before, including one that was a thinly disguised front for a company selling pocket calendars. (This was well before the days when everyone had a multi-purpose supercomputer in their pocket) Managing Management Time was a theory of management that I had never heard before. The premise was that management was a skill like any other, and separate from the skills of the people that were being managed, the ranks of whom the manager had presumably arrived from. The time management tips were really corollaries to spending your time as a manager, not just another one of the guys. One of the main nuggets of wisdom was the saying "The job of a manger is not to do things, but to get things done.  The course covered a lot of the management fallacies. One was the "Pride of Craft" fallacy, where a new manager was so attached to her pre-management job, that she would spend a large portion of her work week doing the job that she had just been promoted out of. This was in addition to all the new management responsibilities. This was why many new managers end up working 60-70 hour weeks! Other topics included the responsibility of a manager to train his subordinates to do their jobs independently, instead of micromanaging them; and knowing what things were actually her responsibility - knowing who the "monkey" belonged to! A piece of practical advice included procrastination: if nobody follows up on that task you were given, it probably wasn't that important! The main nugget of wisdom was that there was management time and vocational time. As managers we were being paid to manage, not to do the tasks that we were paying other people to do. Your subordinates might think you were a cool guy for getting your hands dirty working side by side with them, and occasionally that might serve as a morale builder, but it wasn't your job. I still have the book from this class on my bookshelf and have applied the principles consistently over the years. 

As I mentioned in the previous installment, my old manager Dave was once again my manager. He was much easier to work with this time around. Maybe he had mellowed with experience. Maybe he was thankful he had a veteran like myself on his team. Whatever the reason, it was considerably better this time around. After I had been back in my old district for a while, Dave decided to make a change. Dodge County, which included the city of Fremont, had recently been detached from its district in Region 4 and added to our region. Fremont had two busy distributorships as well as a number of large motor routes, both seven-day and Sunday only, as well as routes in all of the smaller towns. Dave asked me if I would consider taking over that district, along with a decent raise. I agreed. On my first Sunday in the county Dave and I both were out delivering papers in a blizzard! I also had my first visit to South Dakota when I was assigned to convert all the racks in South Dakota to new settings after a price change. 

Outside of Dodge County, things were changing in State Circulation. A lot of the managers who had been in charge were leaving the company. The last several State Circulation Managers had risen through the ranks within the newspaper, but one by one they were being promoted into Metro, transferred to one of our subsidiaries, or leaving the company altogether. The new State Manager was from outside the company and had already brought in a few of his friends from his previous newspaper as Region Managers. Like many new executives, he was keen to shake things up and make changes. He and Dave did not get along. The friction got so bad that Dave eventually resigned. It was funny - after Dave left a lot of the other sales reps asked me if I was worried since "my buddy" had left, not realizing that Dave and I were far from "buddies"! 

Jerry, the new Region Manager had come from our competitor, The Lincoln Journal-Star. He convinced me to transfer districts again, this time back to the Lincoln Office as the Single Copy Manager. This time around I also had some responsibility for single copy throughout all regions of the state.  This involved putting together an inventory of every rack in the state (outside of the Omaha metro area) and ordering and delivering new racks when needed. I conducting training classes on rack repair and changing pricing mechanisms. It was amazing how many sales reps had no idea where the racks were in their districts or in what shape they were in. In dealing with the Region Manager and his sales reps in the Western Nebraska Region I also got a taste of how small town Nebraskans viewed people from the urban areas - with barely concealed disdain. I remember trying to get an address for a storage facility in Kearney so I could deliver some new racks and being told that this wasn't the big city, we don't have addresses out here. (Spoiler: there was an address)

Around this time, in order to pay off my credit card debt I took a part-time job working the night stocking crew at the Super Saver on Cornhusker Highway. I'll discuss that job more in a future article. I got the job because one of the guys who worked on my crew at Food 4 Less was a manager there. He introduced me to his Store Director whose only question was "Can you work nights?" - I was hired. 

As Single Copy Manager I was always looking for ways to sell more papers. I hustled around town looking for new locations for racks, and worked on maximizing the number of papers in each location, paying attention to sales and returns. On Husker Football Game Days we rented a parking stall at the old Greyhound Station and parked a pickup truck there full of papers. We sold a paper-spirit card combo for the price of a paper (then 25¢) which counted as paid circulation. The big win was when I convinced downtown restaurants to commit to paying for hundreds of papers at a reduced rate that I would give away at the stadium with a map to the restaurant stapled to the sports section. We did this for every Lincoln sporting event and it was a great success. My circulation numbers skyrocketed. Since increased circulation was one of the things that our bonus was based on, I was making some extra money!

Like at many places, when you succeed, you're expected to keep succeeding. In an industry where a 2% increase was almost unheard of (I used to say exceeding 2% will result in a temple being built, devoted to your worship) I achieved a 20% annual increase in paid circulation. The company set my goal the following year for another 20%. I achieved a only 10% increase (still, 30% greater than 2 years previously) but received no bonus, even though sales reps with 1% and 2% increases did. I was extremely unhappy. By this time, there was a new State Circulation Manager (again), this time a transplant from the Lincoln Journal Star who Jerry didn't get along with, so I got a new, new boss, a guy named Kevin. Kevin was able to get me a salary increase, (no bonus recalculation though) but I thought it was a case of too little, too late, and resigned to take a management job with Super Saver. This meant that I needed to quit my part-time job with Super Saver and get a new part-time job to pay off my debt. I took a part-time job with the Omaha World-Herald!

Workin' Man - Part X - More Ups and Downs, Promotions and Demotions

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

Back to Southeast Nebraska, District 55. At least I hadn't been fired and I was in an area that I was familiar with. Not long after this the State Circulation Manager transferred to another newspaper and we got a new boss, who as I would find out, didn't care about the whole Grand Island debacle. For a while I kept my head down, but I had a few bumps in the road. In my previous time as a sales rep I was pretty lucky, I was always able to fill an open route without having to go out and deliver it myself. Finally the odds caught up to me. One of my Sunday Only motor route carriers was quitting. He gave plenty of notice, but I was unable to find a replacement before his last day. I had driven around with him in the daylight, and he had given me a set of directions. But the world looks a lot different in the middle of the night. It must also be emphasized that in those days the 911 addresses for rural homes had not been implemented yet, every addresses was a P.O. Route and a Box Number. Other than highways, no roads had signs, so unless you had a great sense of direction, you didn't know where you were. So, without a replacement I had to deliver the route myself. It should have taken around four hours. It seemed like the directions were accurate. I was able to move along pretty steadily for a couple of hours until inexplicably, I ran into a problem. The roads weren't lining up with the directions. There were "T" intersections where roads should have gone through, minimum maintenance instead of gravel and the like. I traced my route backwards on the directions and realized that about an hour previously I had missed the words "make a U-turn" and had been going in the wrong direction and delivering to the wrong houses for about an hour. I attempted to backtrack, but ended up even more lost, and by this time I didn't have many papers left to deliver to the correct houses, even if I did manage to retrace my steps back to where I made the error. So I went home and waited for the phone calls...there were many. The old carrier was also getting calls. I knew this when he left a message on my answering machine, screaming "Do your job, do your job, do your damn job!"

The Lincoln/Lancaster County Circulation Office had always operated as a separate region, with a manager and two sales reps, but the corporate office decided to combine the office with the southeast Nebraska District, so I ended up transferring into the Lincoln district. The location had been designed with three offices, each accessible from a hallway which ran from a receptionist's desk up front to a bullpen for carriers and bundle haulers in the back. At some point it was decided that a fourth office was needed, so they split one the three office in half, with the new office accessible only by going through one of the other offices. That was my office. The good part of this arrangement was that anyone walking down the hallway couldn't see me - didn't even know I was there, so I was able to work in piece. 

I held a few positions while there. I spent some time as the office manager, which meant I hired and supervised all the bundle haulers, miss runners and office staff. At first it meant getting middle of the night phone calls from Mike, my dock supervisor, who always thought he needed to permission to handle any kind of problem. Eventually I encouraged him to operate more independently. 

Part of my tenure I was the Single Copy Manager. "Single Copy" refers to non-subscription, non-home delivery sales. It includes vending machines, aka "racks", as well as sales in gas stations, grocery stores and the like. One of the challenges was to maximize sales and minimize returns in the racks. A directive from the Omaha office was to shoot for one unsold paper in each rack every day. The theory was that, with exactly one paper left, no one who wanted a paper would find an empty rack and we would be assured that the maximum number of papers would be sold. A separate goal was that unsold papers would not exceed 20%. The problem with this was that these two goals were mutually exclusive. If there was one unsold paper in every rack, the number of unsold papers would exceed 20%. One of my favorite parts of the job was that I could spend my day in the fresh air, repairing malfunctioning racks, replacing older racks with new ones, or just giving them a good cleanup and polish. Of course, the rack out at Branched Oak received a lot of attention!

After a while, I felt that my stock was going back up and I had recovered from the Grand Island incident. A Regional Sales Manager position was opening up in Region 4, northeast Nebraska. Dave, my nemesis from years before, was being transferred from there to Region 5, since Michelle was leaving the company. I applied for the position, figuring it was a longshot. I had previously applied for an open Regional Manager slot in Western Nebraska, but had been turned down, so I was surprised that I had been selected. Since I lived in Lincoln, the new position would require a lot of driving, the region covered a lot of ground - all northeast Nebraska north of the Platte River from the Iowa border to Valentine, including South Dakota border counties. But once again I was walking into a mess that wasn't obvious until I got into the middle of it. 

Omaha World-Herald Regional Managers directly supervised 5-6 sales reps, each one overseeing a district of several counties. Most of my sales reps required very little supervision. Two exemptions were Max, a sixtyish guy who lived in Ord, and the sales rep for the district that included South Sioux City. The South Sioux City district had a lot of turnover and was in the process of converting to office billing when Dave transferred the sales rep from there to an open district in Region 5 - this took place in the short interim after Michelle left, but before I was promoted and Dave was running both Regions. This left me with an open District on Day One. I'll get back to that - let's talk about Max.

Max was probably younger then than I am now, but he came across to late thirties me as a curmudgeonly old man. He was one of those guys raised in a rural community who thinks "city folks don't know nothin'". He could be counted upon at every monthly meeting to loudly point out that his (rural) district was different than all the (supposedly) urban districts. The "big cities" he referred to were Fremont, Columbus, Norfolk and South Sioux City. Max also liked to wake up at 6:00 AM and start making phone calls. In the newspaper business, if there was going to be an emergency, it was going to take place well before dawn. If your alarm went off without you having had to go out and deliver a route, the possibility of an emergency had passed. Emergency or not, Max would call me some time between 6:00 and 7:00 AM, usually just to chat. I wasn't much of a morning person in those days, so a call from Max usually interrupted my sleep. After telling him one morning to not call me before 8:00 AM unless it was an emergency, he decided that undermining me would be a good career move. He would call up to the main office, usually the State Circulation Manager's secretary, and tell her that he couldn't get ahold of me. She would then call me, and I'd pick up. He was constantly going over my head and complaining. But this was just a minor irritant. 

The South Sioux City District didn't have a distributor, just several large motor routes, but some of the problems were similar to what I had encountered in Grand Island. The city and nearby Dakota City were in the process of being converted to office billing. The previous sales rep, under the previous Regional Manager Dave's direction, had taken over the billing, but had not fully turned it over to the central office when he transferred to another district, which I was unaware of. There were, like in Grand Island, a significant number of customers who had not been receiving bills. So, when I hired a new sales rep, he had a mess to deal with. It quickly overwhelmed him. If I had dug a little deeper, asked a few more questions, I might have anticipated the situation and gotten the other sales reps in to help with the billing and conversion. But the depth of the problems caused things to spin out of control quite fast. I had scheduled a meeting with my new sales rep to get an update on his progress. He met me at his door in a dirty t-shirt with a box full of unsent bills with the news that he was quitting with no notice. He also called my boss to let him know what a terrible manager I was. 

Troy, my immediate supervisor, met with me shortly thereafter. He had already communicated a few weeks earlier that he wasn't happy with my performance and that things needed to improve. Things hadn't improved. He gave me three options:

1. Stick with it, but if no improvement in two weeks, I'd be fired
2. Resign, i.e. leave without getting fired
3. Accept a demotion

I knew there was no way to turn it around in two weeks, and I didn't want to start job hunting, so I opted for number three. Troy was gracious about it and allowed me to inform my team of my decision myself. My demotion brought me back briefly to my old area - District 55 - Omaha, Nemaha, Johnson, Pawnee and Richardson Counties. Dave, who I had previously had problems with, was no longer the asshole he had been when I worked for him previously, possibly because he had a bunch of rookies as sales reps and was happy to have someone with experience on his team. 

Before I go on about my third stint as a sales rep in District 55, I want to divert to a few other things I got involved with over the years: the consultant-inspired "grass roots" process improvement initiative, the 18-month management training, and the various things I volunteered for.