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
So, I was back to working multiple part-time jobs. The newspaper job was much as it had been a few years before. At the floor cleaning company I travelled around the city cleaning bathrooms and floors of the many businesses that Trotter had contracts with. Most of the guys I worked with were former convicts. One was the nephew of Charlie Starkweather. I think my boss was afraid of them. At one point he gave me a raise and told me that I was the crew supervisor, but asked me not to tell anyone that I was, since it would upset them. We cleaned a variety of places: a school room, a gym, a car dealership, a venue that could be rented out for weddings and other parties, and my old store that I had been fired from. After a few months I applied for a full-time salaried position at The Omaha World-Herald, Sales Representative for several counties in southeast Nebraska.
The Omaha World-Herald's staff was divided into several divisions: Editorial, which included reporters and editors; Production, the people who put together the physical paper; Advertising, salesmen who sold ads in the paper - which paid most of the bills; Administrative - Personnel, Payroll and Accounting; and finally Circulation, the people who brought the newspaper to your door, the paper carriers, bundle haulers, truck drivers and the like. I was part of Circulation.
Circulation was divided into two main divisions, Metro and State. Metro covered the city of Omaha and some of it's suburbs. State was further divided into Zones. Zone 4 was eastern Nebraska north of the Platte River as far west as Valentine; Zone 5 was eastern Nebraska south of the Platte River as far west as York; Zone 7 was the rest of Nebraska; Zone 6 was Western Iowa. Each Zone also included border counties in adjacent states. Each Zone was overseen by a Zone Manager and was further divided into districts run by a Sales Representative who coordinated paper carriers and "single copy" (store sales and vending machines, aka "racks"). Some areas, usually the small towns, received service every day, often by teenage paper carriers. The larger towns were coordinated by a distributor who handled many of the same duties as a sales rep within their town. Rural areas received papers only on Sunday, delivered by a "motor route carrier". Papers were delivered to the carriers by way of a complex web of drivers that were contracted by the Transportation Department, and who were not overseen by the sales rep.
When I first started as a sales rep I was responsible for Lancaster, Otoe, Nemaha and Johnson Counties; not long afterward Lancaster was absorbed into the office that ran the city of Lincoln, and Pawnee and Richardson Counties were added to my district. As a sales rep I didn't have an office, but worked out of my home and my car. day to day, it wasn't a very difficult job, the carriers mostly worked without any supervision. Most customers paid their carriers directly. Carriers would order the total number of papers that they needed and were billed for them by the World-Herald. What was left over was the carrier's profit.
Sales Reps were pretty much on their own with minimal supervision by the Zone Manager. The only things that your manager or the State Circulation Manager monitored was collections and sales. We would get a report every other week listing the status of each carrier's bill. If they were in arrears we were expected to send out a letter reminding them that their bill was overdue. If nonpayment went on for too long we were expected to visit the carrier and collect in person. This was hardly ever a problem. I had one restaurant owner in Brownville who had a rack out front. He liked to pay once a month and once threatened to thrown the rack in the Missouri River if I sent him another letter! The other thing that was monitored was sales. This was back in the pre-internet days when people were actually reading newspapers. We were expected to at least maintain our circulation numbers, but ideally increase them year over year. We would receive bonuses for increases of 1%, 2% or maintaining previous year's numbers. Every few months corporate would sponsor sales contests where carriers would receive cash or prizes for getting new customers. On occasion all the sales reps in a Zone would converge on a town and escort carriers door-to-door to solicit news sales. We could also contract telemarketers to increase sales as well.
If things were running smoothly, you hardly had anything to do, and your work weeks were quite a bit less than 40 hours. On the flip side, if carriers quit and you had to deliver routes yourself as well as hunt for a replacement, you might be working in excess of 60 hour weeks. One thing that I have always been good at was organization and time management, so I made sure that all my carriers were trained to handle problems themselves, including minor issues like a vending rack that didn't work or a shortage of papers.
I don't know if this was normal for businesses during this time period, but even though there was a "personnel" department, it wasn't like the Human Resources Departments that you see today. Personnel basically just made sure all the paperwork was filled out. There wasn't any annual performance reviews either. Pay increases were totally at the discretion of your manager. When I was first hired, my manager liked me, so I received decent increases. When she accepted a promotion as a Training Manager I applied for the open Zone Manager position. Not only did I not get the promotion, but I found out about it when I ran into another sales rep at the airport - management had no intention of informing me. Dave, the recipient of the promotion had started around the same time as I did. As with the lack of any kind of HR involvement in the review process, the manager had complete discretion regarding who was promoted. In this case both Dave and Jim, the State Circulation Manager, had similar backgrounds as high school football players and later, coaches. People tend to believe that people who are just like them are the most qualified. They obviously believe that they themselves are qualified, so people like them must also be the best candidates for promotion. Getting passed over for promotion might have over more easily if I had actually been interviewed for the position, but I made the best of it. The problem was that Dave was a terrible manager.
I don't know if Dave had been the kind of coach who yelled at his players, or if it was just his personality, but he was rude and abusive. He made unreasonable demands and was a master of gaslighting well before I knew what gaslighting was. He was quite a contrast with Mary, our previous manager. By all accounts the sales reps in our zone were all doing our jobs competently, and Mary just got a promotion, so her methods must have been acceptable, but like a lot of newly promoted managers, Dave acted like things needed to be fixed. He had the "new sheriff in town" attitude. It got bad enough that several of us went over his head to complain to Jim, his immediate supervisor. Rather than taking us seriously, all of us were branded as complainers. The good news was that Dave and the manager from northeast Nebraska switched places. Michelle, the new manager was much easier to work with, but we all had targets on our backs.
As the new year began I approached Michelle, our new manager, about a pay increase, which up until that time had been awarded automatically every January. I was told that raises were given for performance, not seniority. Obviously the result of speaking up about a bad manager had resulted in me being tarred as a "bad" employee. I was able to negotiate a re-evaluation of my performance in three months. During that time I did absolutely nothing different, but received a raise anyway. This was to be a pattern for my thirteen years with The Omaha World-Herald: alternating between being a star performer and getting in big trouble (sometimes my own fault, sometimes a victim of circumstance)
After I had been a sales rep for a few years, the State Circulation Manager created a new position - Special Projects Coordinator. It was an ill-defined position that boiled down to executing any bright idea the State Manager came up with. The first idea was to turn Sunday-only delivery areas into seven-day delivery areas. Most rural areas only received home delivery on Sunday, with Monday - Saturday papers arriving in the mail. The reason that this was the case was that it cost too much to pay someone to deliver papers over routes that were sometimes over 100 miles long and took hours to deliver...every day. Carriers made their money on the difference between what they were charged for the papers and what the customers paid them. On a small in-town route there wasn't much expense involved in delivering papers, but on these large motor routes where there were often miles between customers, the World-Herald added on what was called a "rate adjustment" to make the route financially viable for the carrier. Turning these Sunday Only routes into Seven Day routes would have meant increasing the rate adjustment. Without getting too deep into the math, the profit on a Sunday paper was quite a bit higher than for a daily paper, so the rate adjustment would have to be increased by a factor of 10 or 15 at least, not merely six. This was clearly financially unsupportable. Add this to the reality that most, if not all, the Sunday motor carriers worked a regular job during the week and would be unavailable Monday - Saturday. This would mean replacing them with someone willing to deliver newspapers every day. If they could be found. After working on this for a couple of months we were able to do this on only one route, and the initiative was abandoned.
My next assignment as Special Projects Coordinator was to fill in as Acting Collections Manager after the previous manager retired. The OWH was in the process of converting customers from paying the carriers to them being billed centrally from the corporate office. This would mean that instead of paying a bill every two weeks, carriers would receive a biweekly check for their profits. (They would still be collecting cash from their vending machines and any stores they delivered to). This meant that I would have to audit carriers and distributors to get a list of all their customers, as well as how far they had paid in advance. What we would do with this information was enter the customers' information in the Circulation database. If they had paid in advance, as most did, the distributor would turn that money over to the corporate office. Future billings and payments would be handled centrally. The problem was that most distributors were spending the money instead of setting it aside to cover future bills. Let me illustrate with some math:
A city of 24,000 might have around 7,000 households, and possibly 2,000 subscriptions. Back then a seven-day subscription was $2.00. So, at the beginning of a 13-week billing period the distributor would have collected $52,000. I don't recall what we charged the distributor per subscription, but let's say that it was $1.00. That means that every week the distributor owed the World-Herald $2,000. Let's say the carriers made 50¢ per subscription, that another $1,000 a week. So at the end of 13 weeks the distributor will have paid out $39,000 and have a profit of $13,000.
A smart distributor would put that $52K in the bank where it would earn interest and draw from the account to pay the World-Herald and his carriers. But what was happening was that the $52,000 in the bank was very tempting. Time and time again distributors were using that $52,000 (only $13,000 of which was ultimately his if they were still in the job through the entire 13 weeks) and spending it. I was aware of a couple of people who bought vehicles with that money that wasn't theirs. They would then scramble around to pay their bills and their carriers. They were constantly in a cash flow crisis mode. But it really became a problem when a distributor quit mid-billing period. Let's illustrate with more math:
A distributor quits after week eight of the billing period. Theoretically he should have $20,000 in the bank which represented 2,000 customers who had paid their $2.00/week in advance. This money should have been turned over to the new distributor because it wasn't his! Time after time distributors quit without turning over the advance payments, leaving the new distributors immediately in the hole. A similar issue occurred when we were converting a distributorship over to office billing. An audit would determine how much advance payments a distributor was holding, and they would be billed for that money. If they were properly managing their cash flow there was no problem. The customers would be billed when their subscription expired and the distributor would receive a check for their profit every week. In many cases, they weren't properly managing their cash flow and would abruptly quit when they were billed for thousands of dollars that they had already spent.
My job for about a year was to go around auditing distributors and carriers on large routes in order to facilitate the conversion to central office billing. As part of this process I was tasked with taking those who owed us money to court. Sometimes it was small claims, sometimes it was district court. The World-Herald did not send a lawyer in with me, although their legal department helped draft papers.
This was at the same time the most interesting and the most frustrating part of my time with the paper.
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