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