Working Man - Part IV - Cutting Glass, Emptying Bed Pans, Flipping Burgers, and Washing Dishes

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

 

The next several jobs cover my time in Sidney and Kearney Nebraska from August 1980 through August 1981 when I was a Word Over the World Ambassador for The Way International. Details of this time can be found in my series So, You Want To Join a Cult. One of the rules of this commitment was to work only part time. Therefore, none of these jobs were "careers", since I didn't expect to be around more than a year

I don't know if I should count this as a job, but I did get paid. After being assigned to Sidney Nebraska as a Word Over the World (WOW) Ambassador I caught a ride with a couple who owned an old yellow school bus. They were to take me as far as Grand Island where I would meet the other members of my team and continue on to Sidney. Unfortunately the bus broke down and needed a new engine. We slept in tents behind the garage near Adair Iowa for a week while we waited for a replacement motor. The garage had a side business cleaning up after wrecks on the interstate and I worked doing that for the week. Most memorable was a flatbed carrying a load of pipe that turned over, spilling it's load in the ditch on the side of the road. Carrying ten foot long pipes up the hill (with another guy) took all day. We got to Sidney about a week late.

Sidney, Nebraska is a small town of around 5,000 people that started life as a railroad town and is known as the original home of Cabela's, since bought out by Bass Pro Shops. The WOW Ambassador program that I was part of required that you arrive at your assignment with $300 - no more, no less, and secure a part-time job. As one might imagine, there weren't very many job opportunities in Sidney. It took me about a week to find a job, the last of the four in my group to do so. I spent my day going from business to business and finally found something at a carpet store on Illinois Avenue, Sidney's main street. The Pittam family owned several businesses along Illinois Avenue, including a diner. I think Ken Pittam felt sorry for me when he hired me as a gopher at his carpet store, since it didn't seem like there was much gophering for me to do. I swept up, occasionally cut carpet for customers, and just tried to look busy! The only excitement was when I was able to work with the two glass cutters/installers. The taught me how to cut glass to size and familiarized me with with decidedly rural or small town speech patterns. "I can't feature what to do" apparently meant "I can't figure out what to do", I was also introduced to a use of the word "visit" that I was unfamiliar with. To me "visit" could be a verb: "I'm going to visit my grandmother"; or a noun: "We had a pleasant visit. In Sidney I encountered it as a synonym for "conversation", e.g. "Come to the office and we'll visit about your qualifications" was a usage that I came across in setting up a job interview. "Let's visit for a while" might be a prelude to a chat over coffee. That usage still sounds a bit odd to my ear. 

The most interesting thing that I did was work with the glass installers when the local Safeway was being remodeled. We removed all windows and glass doors from the old building and came back a few days later to install all the new glass. I was learning a lot from these guys and was excited about learning a trade. But it was not to be. As I have outlined in So, You Want To Join a Cult, the town of Sidney was fortified against us and Mr. Pittam was pressured by his church to fire me. I'm sure he felt bad about it, despite giving in to his church, he helped us out several times over the next few months. 

Shortly after being fired we had some people over, one of whom had just left a job as a Nurse's Aide in a Nursing Home. He mentioned that he was the only male Nurse's Aide and that they were looking for another man to replace him. The next morning I showed up at the Lodgepole Plaza Nursing Home and was hired on the spot. 

The residents of the home varied from fairly mobile and semi-independent to totally bedridden. I had a variety of tasks: serving meals, feeding those who couldn't feed themselves, bathing residents, emptying bedpans, and general cleaning. As part of the WOW program I was limited to part-time work - the schedule at the home, while technically part-time, was unusual. We worked a two-week schedule. The first week would be Friday, Saturday, and Sunday 7am - 3:00pm; week two was Monday through Thursday. In effect, I'd work seven days straight, then seven days off. Looking back, I wonder why the Way leadership allowed me to work a schedule like that, but I kept that same job until we were reassigned. 

Unlike other jobs, none of my fellow employees stand out in my mind, however, the residents were a colorful and interesting bunch. One memorable gentleman had been an optometrist before retiring. He was pretty mobile and could usually be found flirting with the women - residents and employees both. What was surprising about his Casanova-ish activities is that due to an unspecified malady, he'd had his penis removed! One afternoon he told me that he wished that he could pee standing up! Another resident was George, who was a big, burly, retired farmer who no longer communicated verbally. We had to do everything for him. To bathe residents like him we had to strap them into a chair which would be hydraulically lowered into a bathtub. On one bath day as his chair was at the high point in it's trip to the tub he kicked me in the face. I came perilously close to blacking out. I was always careful around George after that. Etrulia was a feisty old lady. I was assisting a female aide to clean Etrulia up after an accident when she objected to a man seeing her naked. My coworker told her that she didn't have anything I hadn't seen before, just more wrinkled. There was also a lady whose name escapes me, who would regularly announce that she was leaving. She'd slowly head toward the doors, pushing her walker ahead of her, until someone would gently turn her around and she would had back the way she came. 

As much as I'm trying to make this about my jobs, and not my involvement in The Way, the good citizens of Sidney made it very difficult to separate the two. Sidney was a relatively small town, Nebraska certainly has smaller towns, but it was small enough that the presence of four outsiders who represented a cult was noticed. I came to work one day to find an article on the break room bulletin board from the local newspaper decrying the cultists in their midst. Management received the same pressure to fire me that my previous job had. A delegation of local church leaders came to complain in person when my roommate Steve came in on a Sunday morning to lead a nondenominational church service for the residents. Every Sunday a different minister would lead a service, but on this particular Sunday the assigned pastor was a no-show, so I called Steve, who was our designated leader, to do it instead. The manager, instead of caving like my previous employer, not only defended me, but pointed out that that Steve, who they so strenuously objected to, wouldn't have had to come in if whoever was supposed to be there had shown up. And then she threw them all out. She then convened a staff meeting and let them know in no uncertain terms that I was a valuable employee and that she didn't care about my religion as long as I did my job. Anyone who didn't like it could quit. 

This was a job where I felt I was making a difference. I thought about making it a career when my WOW year was up. I worked at the nursing home until February when The Way decided that Sidney was a lost cause and relocated us to Kearney, a college town centrally located in the state. I quickly found a job at a Burger King, since the local nursing homes weren't hiring. 

My Kearney Burger King stint was my one and only experience working in a fast food restaurant. The road leading from the interstate to downtown was referred to as "restaurant row", virtually every chain eatery known to man could be found along 3rd Avenue. Due to its proximity to the interstate a large portion of our business was out-of-town travelers, including busses. The arrival of a bus was an all-hands-on-deck situation. During slow periods it was easy to make everything to order. Monitors above our stations would let us know how many hamburgers and Whoppers we needed, including modifications (it was "have it your way" after all), and the cashiers would call out the number of fries and drinks over the loudspeaker. (No self-serve drink station back then). But when you were getting dozens of orders at a time, you just kept making burgers, bagging fries and pouring drinks and hoped for the best. You'd sort out the details when second calls started coming for things you missed. It was chaotic!

I'm not in fast food places much these days, but I believe the uniforms tend toward t-shirts with a silly slogan on them and baseball caps. In my day we wore uncomfortable polyester shirts in the Burger King colors topped by a paper hat. My daily reminder of my time at Burger King is a faded scar on my forearm, the remnant of a burn that I received from a hot fry basket. 

One of the worst things about working in fast food was the schedule. I could be scheduled for 35 hours one week and 10 the next. It was impossible to budget (as if I budgeted my money back then). One week I had written down the wrong schedule and showed up for work an hour late and was subjected to a lecture from the shift manager. I threw my polyester shirt and paper hat at her and walked out. Possibly the only time I left a job without being fired and without another job already lined up. But this was restaurant row. I walked across the street and was immediately hired as a dishwasher at the Country Kitchen. 

My stint as a dishwasher, or DMO - Dish Machine Operator - wasn't too bad. The hours were regular, I started early and was home by lunch time. The owners fed the staff a shift meal and it definitely was a team atmosphere. Outside of work things were very unsettled, but work was a haven from the chaos of being a WOW Ambassador. Probably the biggest headache was the night shift throwing all the end-of-night dirty dishes and utensils into the sink and filling it with water to "soak". It was my job to get it all cleaned up in the morning. I'm amazed that I never cut myself on any of the knives lurking in those turbid waters! 

My year was up in August, but I had volunteered to be part of another Way program and was assigned to Lincoln. The company that owned the restaurant owned another Country Kitchen in Lincoln, so I was guaranteed a job when I arrived. 

Start with Part I

Working Man - Part III - Shrimp, Trucks, Plants and Stocks

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

My uncle John Hudacek was a chef at either The Metropolitan Club or the Gramercy Park Hotel (he had worked at both at various times, I don't recall which one he worked at during this time period). When he was at home Uncle John was a mild-mannered, soft-spoken guy who was usually overshadowed by his wife, my mother's sister Marion. I was quite surprised to discover that when he was at work, he was General Patton. He was a chef well before the days of celebrity chefs, but nonetheless, he was the king of the kitchen. I wasn't there long enough to learn much about how the kitchen worked - it was understood to be a temporary job - but as low man in the food chain, I got the low jobs. The one I remember with the greatest clarity was prepping shrimp. My memory presents a trash barrel quantity of shrimp which needed to be deveined, with the heads and tails removed. If I remember correct the "veins" were reused somehow, but the rest were disposed of. I swear cats were following me home that night!

After about a month I took my trip to Ohio, and shortly after returning home I found another job, this time as a stocker a Pergament Home Center, unloading trucks and stocking shelves. Pergament Home Centers was a family owned chain of hardware stores scattered throughout Long Island. The one where I worked was fairly close to home, just outside city limits at the south end of "Snake Road" which was what we called the winding, southern portion of Brookville Blvd. It was nestled in a little strip mall that included a May's Department Store and a grocery store. I was hired as a stocker, which meant I would mainly be unloading trucks and filling the shelves. It was one of the few union jobs that I have had. 

Unloading a truck at Pergament was not easy. There was no loading dock which trucks could back up to and remove pallets using a pallet jack. We had to hook up a "roller" to the back of the truck and toss individual cases of product down the rollers to be restacked on empty pallets on the floor of the stockroom. When a pallet was full it would be moved out to the sales floor where a second team would manually price each item with a pricing gun that disgorged small adhesive price tags and then place the product on the shelves. If this wasn't labor intensive enough, we sold carpet, paneling and lumber. Paneling was manhandled by two of us and slid down the roller to be placed on what we called a U-Boat, a cart with high sides that would be wheeled out so the plywood could be placed in a display rack. Lumber was gathered up in armloads and thrown off the back of the truck, aimed with great optimism at a U-Boat. All of this was back-breaking labor. Nonetheless we competed among ourselves - the stockers on the truck trying to roll down stock faster than the stockers on the floor could keep up. This process took hours and was often not completed before the store closed at 9:00pm. Being a union shop, we didn't stay late to finish the job, but locked up the truck, locked up the store and went home. Or somewhere. 

One of the more dangerous things we did was to tie customers' purchases of lumber, carpet or paneling to the roofs of their cars. This of course wasn't dangerous to us, but was potentially dangerous to the customer. First we would stack their purchase on top of the car. We'd then tie some heavy duty twine to the front bumper, over the top and loop it around the back of the paneling and back to the front bumper. This would theoretically prevent the load from slipping off backwards. We'd then do the same to the back bumper tying it in back and looping it around the front to prevent the whole load from flying forward when the driver hit the brakes. For good measure we'd run rope through the open doors to secure the whole pile. I don't recall anyone complaining about losing anything on the way home, but I did see someone fail to make it out of the parking lot once. We didn't even get them to sign a waiver.

Like most jobs it was the people who made it interesting. There was a lot of drinking and pot smoking after work and even during breaks. A lot of us socialized after work, hitting the bars and even forming a softball team. The most "out there" was Mike Morgillo, the senior stocker. Mike had a unique way of meeting women. When we were out at a bar, he would sit a few stools down from an attractive girl and start crying. He'd then start muttering "I'm garbage...just garbage". More often then not he would attract the girl's attention and sympathy as she tried to comfort him, and end up leaving with him. It sounds unlikely, but I witnessed this happen many times. (At work, his nickname became "Garbage", it may have even been on his name tag.) Mike's Casanova ways had a limit though. A woman from one of the other stores took a shine to him. She was tall, approaching six feet tall, built like an Olympic swimmer. Pretty enough, but she intimidated the heck out of Mr. Garbage. She showed up at a bar we were all hanging out at one night and he ran out the back door to get away! 

One time our store manager noticed that we were missing quite a few of our shopping carts and asked us to see if we could track them down. A couple of us had girlfriends who worked in the nearby Mays department store, who informed us that Mays was using our carts to store and stock merchandise. Mike and I, along with a couple of others, deputized ourselves as "Pergament Security". Mike got us fake security badges and we raided Mays' backrooms, shouting "Pergament Security - we're confiscating those carts" and brought back all the purloined property. 

Pergament Home Centers had a softball league that played games on Sunday, when the stores closed at 6:00pm. Our store fielded a coed team. We weren't really any good, but managed to win most of our games, due to our enthusiasm, and possibly alcohol and cheating. Our pitcher, Azard Hussein, who was from Trinidad and Tobago, had never played softball before and pitched cricket style. I think he scared the opposing team with his running overarm delivery. Other members of our team included Richie Pergament, our sixtyish store manager who was cousin to the company president, and his 10 year old son. One of our signature moves was to all don cowboy hats at some point during the game and howl or chant, or just make a lot of noise. I suspect that many of our wins could be attributed to our opponents just wanting to get away from us.  After the games, retaining the cowboy hats, we retired to a local bar, telling everyone we were a country band called The Worthless Brothers. I believe my name was Cuthbert Worthless. 

Speaking of sports, when I was working at the store I was in my last year playing roller hockey. For many years I played pickup games in local schoolyards and even on tennis courts (we managed to severely damage the courts' surface with out metal wheels and were banned from the park) and the occasional hockey league. The last few years a bunch of my friends, my brother and cousins formed a team that played in the Grant Park Roller Hockey League. Most of us were in our teens, and due to the fact that the other teams were composed of grown men, we got beaten, and beaten up, pretty regularly. I was not very athletic, and was not a very good player but we did have some decent players, my brother Mike and friend Anthony among them. My father was our coach. Since I was not very adept at scoring goals I took on the role of enforcer, clearing the path for the better players to get the puck in the net. My number, five, was known throughout the league as the guy most likely to spend time in the penalty box. My final game came after I had stopped playing actively due to school and work commitments. I had stopped at the park to watch my former team play. My friend Anthony hurt his hand badly mid game and had to sit out the third period. I put on his uniform and skates and took his place. I was recognized as "that (expletive) number five" and got involved in a bench clearing brawl. I think we won the game!

We were inventive (or maybe cruel) when it came to pranks. One of our regular truck drivers had recently gotten divorced. One of the areas of contention was the many cats that his wife had brought into their home. Mike would meow at him when he came to deliver a load, and one time found a stray cat and put it in the cab of his truck. We'd tie a stack of pallets to a truck with a long rope, causing a parade of pallets to follow the truck down the road. Most of the trucks had signs on the back that could be changed to reflect what was in the truck. One of them said "radioactive material aboard". That got the driver pulled over. We were pretty cruel to the manager's son who worked with us when he was on break from college. We convinced him that catching a load of lumber in his arms was a safe way to unload it. 

I ended up getting fired from Pergament for an act of vandalism. My coworker Jack and I smoked some pot on our lunch break and came back to work in no shape to make rational decisions. In fact, we decided to take an axe and pop some holes in the side of the truck we were unloading for ventilation. We had enough presence of mind to throw the axe in the creek than ran behind the store. When the truck arrived back at the warehouse, of course it was noticed that there were holes in the side of the truck. An investigation was launched, but since there were no security cameras and no one was talking, it didn't look like we would be caught. Until Derek, the only Black stocker on the crew, was accused of the vandalism and it looked like he would be fired. This was probably a ploy to smoke out (pun intended) the real vandals, so we confessed. Since we were unionized I received a check for all my unused vacation and sick time. 

I quickly found another job. It was in the same strip mall, in the Mays department store where I had previously repatriated our missing shopping carts. I wasn't there very long. If you've followed along with my series So, You Want to Join a Cult, this was after I had been involved in The Way for over a year. I had planned on going out as part of The Way's missionary type program (Word Over the World [WOW] Ambassadors) in August of 1979, but changed my mind. In anticipation of leaving the state I put my Toyota Corona in storage in a relative's garage, so I had no means of transportation. I ended up working at Mays for about a month or so, running the Garden Center, even though I knew nothing about plants. I managed to quit this job without getting fired, assaulting anyone or engaging in vandalism. Sorry, but no amusing anecdotes from my time at Mays, although it was ironic that I was in charge of plants, an assignment that I would reprise many years later at another job. I was moving out of my parents' home and into a house with several other Way people. Without a vehicle, I needed to find something either near my new home in Queens Village, near the Belmont Raceway, or something where I could take advantage of public transportation. I ended up with a position as a clerk in the stock brokerage form E.F. Hutton & Company in downtown Manhattan. 

This was the fall of 1979. Computers existed, but personal computers did not. My job consisted of tracking the buying and selling of stock by the company on behalf of clients. I reviewed reams of green bar paper and microfiche images and entered the information on forms that were forwarded to our data entry team on another floor. It did not pay well and wasn't very exciting. I have a vivid memory of there being pneumatic tubes in the office, like those you see in bank drive-up windows. When we would finish filling out a form we would tube it to data entry. Sometimes we'd include a bag of M&M's if we needed a rush job. At the time, not knowing that I would eventually decide to leave New York as a WOW a year later, I viewed it as a stepping stone to a more responsible and better paying position. I was also attending night school at the time. After graduating high school I enrolled at Baruch College, a unit of the City University of New York, but dropped out after two years due to poor grades. I took a year off and went back in 1979. My job was in Lower Manhattan, not far from Battery Park and college was a little further north. Monday through Friday I'd take the train to work, and then after my work day ended I'd take another train uptown to attend classes. The work day may have been grey and uninspiring, but what went on outside was interesting. 

I saw the high wire walker Phillippe Petit walk a wire between the two towers of the World Trade Center. I saw the Pope's motorcade drive by our office. But lunch time was the most interesting. The corner of Broad and Wall Streets was an historic corner. The New York Stock Exchange was on one side of the street with Federal Hall, which had at one time been the seat of government of the United States, was on the other side. Trinity Church, an Episcopal Church that boasted many of the nation's founders as congregants, was down the street. But what made it interesting was the street preachers. Several years previously, when working a summer job I became familiar with many of the regulars. It had been my first exposure to the fundamentalist and evangelical strains of Christianity. Being a little older and bolder and thinking I knew something about theology I engaged many of them in discussions that, as religious discussions often go, went nowhere. 

In the Spring of 1980 I had again decided that I would go out as a WOW for The Way. But first I would travel to Rome City Indiana to take their "Advanced Class" over two weeks in June. So I quit my job and temporarily moved back in with my parents. Amazingly I was able to leave another job in good standing sans violence. I attended the class in late June and headed to New Knoxville Ohio for a week before shipping out to Sidney Nebraska and my next adventure in employment.

Start with Part I

Continue to Part IV

Working Man - Part II - "The Getty"

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

 My Uncle Richie had a buddy who owned some gas stations where he worked on Saturdays to make some extra cash. When I turned 14 he got me a job at one of them - a Getty Oil station on Sunrise highway near the Green Acres shopping center. Eventually my brothers and cousins ended up working there as well. I ended up working there for five years. 

One of my first Saturdays working I got off on the wrong foot with one of the shift managers. The full-timers all had uniforms with their names stitched on the shirts. As a part-timer, I didn't rate a uniform, but wore my own clothes. Getting set to leave for the day I saw a uniform shirt in what I thought was the trash. I picked it up, took it home and washed it, and unstitched the name "Red" from the shirt, pretty proud that I had my own uniform shirt.  The following Saturday, after reporting for work I found myself facing down a very angry Red, who was grabbing me by the front of "my" shirt and was demanding to know why I was wearing "his" shirt! I learned that day about the concept of a commercial uniform laundering service. I didn't have to deal with Red for much longer though. He and some of the other full-timers were selling drugs from the station at night and were caught by an undercover Nassau County cop. 

Back in the seventies credit card transactions for minor purchases were rare and debit cards didn't yet exist, so the majority of our customers paid in cash. The guys on the pumps were given a "bank" - a wad of singles and fives, as well as a roll each of quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies. The manager would take readings off each of the pumps, where a dial logged the number of gallons and dollars sold. At the end of the shift another reading would be taken and the difference between the two readings would determine the amount of money we should have to turn in. In addition to fuel, the station also had a small store where cigarettes and cases of soda were sold. Later a refrigerator was added and gallons of milk and cold drinks were sold. There was no cash register. There might not have even been a calculator at the counter, you added it all up in your head!. Purchases of items other than gas were tracked on a sheet of paper and added up at the end of the night. At the end of each shift the manager was responsible for adding everything up and balancing the cash receipts with the various hash marks indicating sales. There was a calculator in the back office - one of those museum pieces where you pulled a lever like on a slot machine to get your total. The back office itself was a converted bathroom. The manager's "chair" was the old toilet!

There was no such thing as a self-service pump. Three or four of us were out in all weather conditions. We were not welcome in the office or the garage, but we did have a little shack that we could find a little shade in the summer and get us out of the wind in the winter. In the winter we did our best to bundle up, but there was a limit to how heavy your gloves could be since we were handling money. The standard solution was to wear two pair of cotton work gloves and warm our hands on the tail pipes of the cars. When sweat and condensation started to make the gloves damp, we'd switch them out with a pair that we had warming up on the furnace in the back of the garage. Just before opening, a guy with a small snowplow would clear the lot, but we had to deal with customers who would brush all the snow off the roofs of their cars. On at least one occasion we shoveled it all into the back seat of one such inconsiderate bastard. Some customers thought that emptying their ashtrays onto the ground was good idea. I don't know how many realized that we were scooping up the butts and depositing them back into their cars, but they eventually stopped!   

"The Getty" featured a colorful collection of characters. When I first started I rode to work with my Uncle Richie (known as "Dick" - when his son, also named Richard came to work, they were known as "Big Dick" and "Little Dick", which my cousin wasn't at all happy with). Later I caught a ride with John S, one of two Armenian brothers who lived around the corner. There were seven Tonys working there. One of whom, Tony Z, didn't have a surname starting with "Z" and wasn't actually named Tony, but was hiding income from his ex-wife. There was Tony Beard, the assistant manager who I remember most for stealing the girlfriend of Tony C. The head mechanic was also named Tony, who we referred to a "Wire Brush Tony". The nickname came about due to his tendency to exaggerate what was wrong with a vehicle in order to jack up the cost, which we called "fucking the customer with a wire brush". Jack, the other mechanic, got his son Jack Junior a job in the garage. Jack Junior was usually high - my most vivid memory of him is seeing him comb his hair with a fork after eating lunch. Another father son team was yet another Tony and his stepson Rob. For the longest time I thought Rob's last name was "Ramsey", but found out later that the other guys were really calling him "Ramesses", a brand of condom - a clever way to call him a "scumbag" without him realizing it. The aforementioned Tony C, along with two fellow Italian Americans Dino and Gino, were habitués of the Long Island disco scene. When not at work they could be seen decked out in polyester suits, wide collared shirts open to the navel and plenty of gold chains, and of course perfectly coiffed hair. One Saturday afternoon Gino taught us all a disco line dance in the midst of the gas pumps. An unsavory aspect of Dino and Gino was the way they viewed women. They were both engaged to "nice" girls who we never saw. They also both had girlfriends on the side, Dee and Betty, who would hang around the station when the boys were working. One night my own girlfriend stopped by to say hello. I was "counselled" by Dino and Gino that I shouldn't "allow" her to come to the station, because it wasn't a place for respectable girls. 

As befitted an operation so awash in nepotism, the regular night manager was a ne'er-do-well uncle of the owner by the name of Rocky, also known by the pump jockeys as The Raisin. (Rocky had recently moved north from Florida and was well tanned and very wrinkled). Rocky didn't do much. He'd sit in the back office all night doing who-knows-what, paying little attention to what was going on outside. My brother Mike would sometimes shut the station lights off early, making it look like we were closed, leaving only the light outside the back office lit. We'd loaf around and drink beer and Rocky never, ever, noticed. Two girls from the movie theater next door would come hang out on break, whom Rocky would flirt with. We christened them "The Raisinettes". But the most interesting of all was Station Manager Al Kramer.

Al Kramer was a six-three former Marine who liked to yell. He intimidated the Hell out of us younger guys and we did everything we could to avoid his wrath. We just called him "Kramer". One of Kramer's pet peeves were people who parked on the station lot without buying gas, blocking the pumps. When he saw it happen he would emerge from the office, the door banging against the outer wall, almost coming off its hinges, as he bellowed at the poor soul who unknowingly violated Kramer's rules for parking. One early Saturday morning we found a man sleeping in his car on the side of the building. Instead of waking him up and asking him to move we told Kramer that we had asked him to move and that he refused. Kramer stormed out, started kicking the man's car door and screaming at him to get his car off the lot. We had to find our amusement wherever we could. As mean as he could be, Kramer always stuck up for us if a customer complained. I was once accused of shortchanging a customer, a quick reading and a count of my cash on hand cleared me, but the customer wanted to know how Kramer knew I didn't pocket the money. Kramer asked him how he knew he wasn't about to get a boot in the ass. 

Somewhere along the line the elder generation of employees started leaving for "real" jobs, and Kramer started giving some of us younger guys, including me and my brother Mike, responsibility as shift managers in the evenings and on Sundays. One of the first of the new generation of night shift managers was a guy named Gino (different guy than the other Gino, who actually was named Eugene, or Gene). Gino II had a habit of leaving work in the middle of his shift to visit his girlfriend (since "nice" girls don't come to the station!). One evening, while Gino was off romancin', he left me in charge. Kramer must have suspected something was up; he called while Gino was gone and wanted to talk to him. Thinking I could cover his absence I told Kramer that Gino was in the bathroom. Kramer surely knew I was lying and said he would wait. This was decades before the ubiquity of cell phones, so there was no way I could reach Gino. Fortunately, after a very uncomfortable 5 minutes on the phone with Kramer, Gino showed back up. Shortly thereafter Gino was no longer scheduled for manager shifts and I was. 

This was my first management job. I don't mind telling you, I wasn't very good at it. Working there at the time were two brothers, John and Steve VS. Their last name was Socci, but the "VS" was due to the fact that they lived in the town of Valley Stream and we already had a "John S". Steve and I, for some reason, didn't get along. It was probably due in part to my inflated sense of being in charge and Steve's resistance to being told what to do. (Check out my series on management - I thought my title was sufficient for receiving unquestioned obedience) One afternoon at shift change we got into it. At the end of shift everyone had to turn in their cash to whoever was working the counter. This involved tedious counting of change. I don't remember all the details, but I vaguely remember that there was a line of customers buying cigarettes, several workers trying to cash out, and Steve had a line of quarters stacked up 4 high each strung across the counter. Something ticked me off, I can't recall what, and I knocked over all of Steve's carefully counted stacks of coin. Steve vaulted the counter and proceeded to beat the crap out of me until some of the other guys separated us and made me sit in the back room until Steve left to go home. I had a few other run-ins with other workers, in retrospect probably due to my overbearing approach to supervision of people who didn't really need to be supervised. For some reason they still scheduled me as a shift supervisor. 

My brother Mike did a much better job as a shift manager than I did, mainly because he realized that as night manager, all he had to do was count the money at the end of the night and let everybody do whatever they wanted to, as long as people who wanted gas got their gas. One of the things that Mike liked to do was change people's names. They had hired a kid named Mike to work with us. My brother proclaimed that he was the only "Mike" and renamed the guy "Ed", which became his name for as long as he worked there. "Ed" had a girlfriend whose name I forget after 50 years, but she was renamed "Trixie", after Ed Norton's wife on The Honeymooners. A lot of guys had their names changed, but the  most long term change was a guy named Denis. Since there was already a Denis, Mike renamed him "Sid", which became the name his friends called him even after he became a wealthy businessman years later. As far as I know he's still called Sid. 

One of our ongoing pranks involved "sticking the tanks". When a delivery tanker would show up, we had to insert a ten foot pole into the tank to determine the level of the gas in the underground tanks. The openings were on the side of the building. New guys were told that the tanks were across the heavily trafficked highway! The sight of a newbie dodging traffic while shouldering a ten foot long ruler never got old! 

We had a lot of private jargon among the pump jockeys. "Rubberhead" was a favorite insult to customers we judged to be stupid, as well as "pork nose", which we applied to the usually obese, arrogant, assholes who we felt treated us poorly. One of our competitors, I think it was Exxon, had the slogan TFGB (Thanks For Coming By). We decided GTFO (Get The Fuck Out) was more appropriate to our attitude. Someone made a sign with the letters GTFO on it and tacked on to the outside of our little shack. Occasionally a customer would figure it out! We also had a couple of first generation Italians working at night, who would insult customers in Italian, but do it with a smile on their face so the customer was (usually) unaware of the insult. We all competed at telling people that they were idiots without them realizing that we were telling them they were idiots. It was a skill that would have a lifetime of useful application. 

But all good things come to an end. For me it was my adherence to Kramer's "don't park at the pumps" philosophy. A customer, who was not gassing up, blocking the pumps to go in and buy some cigarettes. I asked him to move. He ignored me and attempted to go inside. I stepped in front of him to block his progress - he poked me in the chest and told me to move, whereupon I hit him. And I hit him a couple of more times. Of course I was (rightfully) fired. Not the last time I was fired for an act of violence. A few days later the Nassau County Police came looking for me, since my victim had filed a police report. The shift manager Rocky referred them to my brother, who declined to give them any information. When he got home and told me that the police were looking for me, my father, an NYPD officer, took me to the police station and made me turn myself in. I wasn't charged, probably out of professional courtesy to my father - the closest I have ever come to being arrested.

This was during the summer of 1978. It was my first year involved in The Way and had agreed to go to their annual international get together in Ohio, helping to drive in a "caravan" of Way people. Because of this commitment I wasn't ready to take on a permanent job, so I went to work for my uncle John, who was a chef at a hotel in Manhattan to earn some money to get me to Ohio and back.

Start with Part I

Go to Part III

Working Man - Part I - Paperboy

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

Workin' Man, that's what I am - I started out delivering newspapers in my neighborhood. Had a few summer jobs, one in the police department and one for a Wall Street firm in the mailroom. I worked in a full service gas station through high school. Unloaded trucks at a home improvement store and sold plants in the garden center of a department store. Did data entry for a stock broker. Apprenticed as a glass cutter and took care of old folks in a nursing home. Washed dishes and flipped burgers. Worked in the back room of a pizza restaurant cutting up toppings and making pizza dough and drove a truck driving the supplies to different restaurants. Stocked groceries and managed the night crew. Supervised paper carriers. Was an auditor at a big newspaper and was called a "paper pushing, number crunching son of a bitch" by someone I took to court. Back to stocking groceries and worked my way up to store director. Finished up as a senior revenue agent working for state government. Now retired!

My first job was as a newspaper carrier for the Long Island Press, an afternoon daily with Long Island, New York circulation. Back in those days, and up through at least the eighties, newspapers were mainly delivered by grade school kids riding their bicycles through their immediate neighborhood. My memory is a little foggy, but it seems like I had around 40-50 customers. There was a little distribution office, not much more than a shack, near the Long Island Railroad station on Francis Lewis Blvd just north of North Conduit Ave. You'd bike up to the "office", which was about 10 blocks from our house on 255th Street, and pick up your papers and head over to your route area to deliver them. A lot of paperboys walked their routes with the official canvas newspaper bag slung over their shoulder; I had a wire rack attached to the front of my bike that held all my papers. It clamped onto the handlebars and was stabilized by two struts attached to the front wheel. It could easily hold 50 rolled-up and rubber-banded newspapers during the week, but since Sunday papers were so gargantuan, it usually took a few trips. One morning, after loading up my Sunday papers, my bike tipped over from the weight!

Customers were not billed through the central office, as they are today, but carriers were responsible for collecting, in person, from their customers. The price of seven days of home delivery was 90¢. That broke down as 10¢ per day Monday - Saturday and 30¢ for Sunday. I had a little book where I would keep track of my customers and what service they received (Daily Only, Sunday Only or Daily-Sunday) and marked down when they paid each week. Most customers gave me a dollar, which included a 10¢ tip - with the big spenders forking over $1.25! I had one particularly grumpy customer - Mrs. Diamond - who was very particular about where I left her paper and usually paid me in nickels and dimes - never any tip!

Newspaper carriers then as now, are considered independent contractors. We bought our papers from the Long Island Press distributor and paid him per subscription. The paperboy (or girl) was the only contact that the customer had with the newspaper. Nobody was calling to get you to renew your subscription or take advantage of their special offers. And of course there was no "online" option. I have no memory of what we paid or what our "profit" was, but I must have thought it worth it to do every day (no days off!). We were supposed to pay the distributor every Saturday after we did the bulk of our collecting Friday afternoon and Saturday morning. After my first week I pedaled up to the office to pay my bill. The distributor's assistant was there. In retrospect he was probably around 17-18 years old, but he seemed pretty intimidating to me. When I asked him what I owed, he asked me "What do you have?". When I told him, he said that was what I owed. I reported this conversation to my dad, who took me back to the office to confront the guy. As it turned out, the amount of money that I had on hand did coincidently correspond to what I owed for the week. The distributor explained to Dad and me how the bill was calculated, so in subsequent weeks I would be able to calculate for myself what I owed. 

Eventually the Long Island Press went out of business and I got a paper route in the same general area with the New York Daily News. There were a few differences, the main one being that it was a morning paper, so there was no sleeping in during the summer and I had to get my route done before leaving for school. Our papers were delivered to our driveway (by this time my brother and at least one cousin also had routes) and the distributor came around every week to collect. I was moving in to my last few years of grade school (our Catholic School was grades 1- 8; we didn't have a junior high or middle school) and, not to put too fine a point on it, I was pretty lazy. I didn't like getting up early, I didn't like having to go around and collect money from people. I would put off collecting, and only go around when I didn't have enough money to pay my bill. If the weather was bad I would dump my papers somewhere rather than finish delivering. I had a terrible work ethic. 

Overlapping with my last two years before high school I worked summer jobs in Manhattan. The summer I turned 13 my father lined me up with a summer job at the New York City Police Department. (Dad was a NYPD officer at the time) I was employed as a clerk in the Pistol License Division, which was responsible for issuing and renewing handgun permits for "Special Patrolmen" (SP's), i.e. those who had jobs like security guards which required them to be armed. For the officers in this unit, it was far from a prestige posting. In fact, it was called the "Bow and Arrow Squad", because all the cops in division had their guns confiscated for various reasons and were consigned to desk duty. I spent my days going through files of index cards, looking for SP's whose licenses were expiring and making appointments to get them renewed. When I called SP's I always identified myself as "Tom Joyce, calling from the New York City Police Department". My voice had recently changed and over the phone I sounded like an adult. People calling back would ask for "Officer Joyce", which caused much hilarity among the actual officers. It was far from exciting, but it was my first "real" job. It was minimum wage, which then was $1.65/hour, but I received a "real" paycheck, worked with grownups and commuted to work by bus and subway from our home on the fringe of Queens to One Police Plaza in Manhattan. 

The following summer our neighbor around the corner lined me up a job as a mailroom clerk in a financial services firm, Alliance Capital Management, a subsidiary of Donaldson, Lufkin and Jenrette, a major player on Wall Street. Still not exciting, but with delivering mail, making copies and functioning as an overall gopher, I stayed busy. Auggie DiBiasi, the  full-time mail room clerk, made things interesting. Long-haired, with muttonchop sideburns, he was as hippie as you can get while having to wear a tie at work. Throughout the day he had music going in our little mail room - he convinced me to buy Quadrophenia by The Who, which remains one of my favorite albums. 

What was more interesting than the work was the lunch breaks. The office where I worked was just a few blocks from Wall Street, and I could see the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center from our building. On my lunch break I would often wander down to Wall Street where there was always some street theater to be had at The Federal Building. One of the regulars was an elderly street preacher called Crazy Willie. He would park his big Cadillac in front of Federal Hall across from the stock exchange and stand on the hood, preaching incoherently. I found out from my father that the same guy had been preaching at that corner 30 years previously, when Dad worked in Manhattan. This was all pretty interesting to me and was my first real exposure to non-mainstream religious thought, craziness notwithstanding! 

I'm not certain whether this job was in my first summer after my Freshman year of high school or the last summer before I started high school. At any rate, once the summer was over I started my first permanent, full-time job, pumping gas at a Getty Gas Station, which I did for around five years, through high school and into college.

Go to Part II

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Blindness & Brainwashing

Recently, a family member referred to my time in the cult called The Way as "blindly following". Many anti-cult crusaders have referred to cult members as "brainwashed". In my multi-part series "So, You Want to Join a Cult", I thought I had presented pretty clearly why I had gotten involved in The Way, why I stayed involved in The Way, and how, without any help from the supposedly unblinded (no offense to my blind friends, by the way!) family or the equally un-brainwashed anti-cult movement, I extricated myself. 

Most people who are involved in religion begin their involvement because it was their parents' religion. Some embrace their family's faith wholeheartedly, some observe the outward forms, others question it and start to follow a different faith. Of the outward observers, if you never discussed religion with them (it's a taboo subject after all) you might never know they weren't inwardly religious. Of the questioners, some of them give up on all religion, some, for various reasons, pick a new one. Some of those "new ones" turn out to be cults. 

But what makes a cult a cult? Not their beliefs. Every faith has beliefs that seem bizarre to those outside the faith, but seem perfectly normal to those who grew up surrounded by it. The religion that I grew up in believed:

• The creator of the universe somehow caused a virgin to become pregnant with himself
• The resulting child, when he reached adulthood, had to be killed in a blood sacrifice either for atonement, forgiveness of sins or as a sign of his love, or all three
• He rose from the dead after three days
• He physically levitated into the sky after a further 40 days
• This man, God, and the "holy spirit" are all "God", yet at the same time distinct "persons"
• This man and his followers could break the laws of physics at will
• It was possible to break the laws of physics yourself by praying to, not only this three-in-one God, but his mother (who also levitated into the sky without dying) and any sufficient holy followers who were coincidently dead

I could go on and on. Naturally this isn't how a Catholic would describe their beliefs, but it's the way it looks to an outsider. And a majority of the people in this country would subscribe to most of these beliefs. Non-Catholic Christians wouldn't pray to Mary or to saints, but you can't really argue with the rest. The purpose of the previous listing isn't to make fun of Catholics or their beliefs, but to point out that if you're going to make judgments about the "weirdness" of cult beliefs, take a look at your own. 

A related measure of cultishness is whether a group calling itself Christian has beliefs that are in line with Christianity. If you are of the opinion that you can objectively determine whether any group's doctrines are authentically Christian you're likely part of one of those groups that think they have a lock on the truth. The number of mutually exclusive versions of Christianity that exist is staggering. Sometimes the difference is their opinion on church governance - episcopal or by committee? Other times it comes down to the minutiae of Christology, which the rank and file don't understand anyway. And does anyone really understand the doctrine of The Trinity? If the Bible was as clear and unambiguous as "Bible believers" think it is, wouldn't you assume that there would be fewer competing versions? Or are they all Satanic, except your version.

Some people get it right and determine that a cult is a cult because of actions rather than beliefs. But again, they fail to pick the beam out of their own eye, such as the widespread coverup of child rape by the clergy of one major denomination or the ostentatious lifestyles of many ministers running megachurches.

There are a lot of reasons why people join and stay with cults. My reasons are pretty simple. 

As a young man I was dissatisfied with the lack of answers I felt that my church offered. There was too much "take it on faith" for my taste. So I started looking around. I went to services in the churches of other denominations. I read about different religions. I was getting nowhere fast. I was introduced to The Way through a family member who was attending Way meetings. This relative worked in the same office as the local Way leader. I have no idea what her motivations were, what she was looking for, or what attracted her. I do know that she stuck around for a few months and lost interest. So either she was immune to the brainwashing, or maybe there wasn't any brainwashing. I stuck around though. 

Why did I stick around? Because it made sense. They tried to make it make sense. Granted, it was all based on the premise that the Bible was inspired by God, but that was no different than any Christian denomination. There was no "take it on faith". Anything that we were expected to believe was documented in the Bible. This appealed to me. Even though I didn't have the theological background to be able to separate the serious Biblical research from what turned out to be pretty shoddy exegesis, it was more than I was getting from my church leaders. In fact, I gave my parish priest the opportunity to address the discrepancies between Catholic and Way Biblical interpretation. All I received was a reference to 2000 years of history. If I was going to go with longevity I'd become a Hindu. 

During my early days in The Way it was obvious that my family disapproved. Almost 50 years have gone by, so it's difficult to ascertain exactly what they disapproved of. The most obvious thing earning their disapproval was that I was leaving the church. All branches of my family that I am aware of have been Catholic for many generations. In addition to the religious devotion, Catholicism was cultural. Our particular neighborhood was made up mostly of White Catholic ethnic groups. I don't think I was aware of Protestants until I was in high school. My own parents were very religious - my father attended mass every day if possible. I still remember the look of anger/disappointment on my Dad's face when I told him I was no longer going to mass since I no longer considered myself a Catholic. The theological grounds for disapproval were probably related to the disapproval of simply being not-Catholic, but since most Catholics were not steeped in the myriad details of the Bible they were unable to address my confident (or arrogant) assertions that I now was in possession of The Truth. It's possible that they were swayed by the long shadow that had been cast by The People's Temple mass "suicide" in Guyana a year after my initial involvement. A group that had been labeled a cult had done something heinous, therefore, in the minds of the general public, any group labeled as a cult was equally dangerous. Unfortunately the cult appellation had been applied without any subtlety, usually slapped on any group that differed doctrinally from what was perceived as the mainstream. Down deep, I think what made my parents think I was "blinded" or "brainwashed" was their perception that I had somehow "changed".

There's nothing like the enthusiasm of the newly converted. Whether it's religion or politics or the newly sober, it's the new recruit who is loud and in your face about it. And I sure was in everyone's face about it. It started out during the three-week introductory class. I'd come excited about some new thing I had learned and want to talk about it. To be clear, this wasn't some doctrine spun about billion year-old space aliens storing souls in a volcano, or Jesus appearing the the native Americans, this was stuff that you could trace directly to a Bible verse or two. Of course I was excited, this is what I had been searching for: answers! In response to the obvious discomfort that my parents had with what I was sharing, my mode became less excited and more arrogant that I had The Truth and they didn't. I suppose I had changed.

What my parents didn't know that in addition to my search for spiritual truth, I was also kind of drifting. I had no real goals, was doing poorly in school (not due to lack of intelligence, but lack of ambition) and was drinking a lot. I wasn't taking any hard drugs, but it's likely that I would have gone that path if not for The Way. Being involved in The Way gave me a sense of direction that came of being intimately involved in something greater than myself. I had a mission, I had purpose that I didn't have before. Making "moving the Word", i.e. proselytizing, maybe my priority seemed weird to my family, and evidence of an unwelcome and unhealthy "change", but I don't want to see that alternate history where I didn't have that set of goals. 

After a year I moved into a series of "Way Homes" with other Way people, and a year later left the state as part of the missionary program called Word Over the World (WOW). I had planned on entering the Way's leadership program, The Way Corps, but was unable to put together the tuition. A lot of people, including my family thought that my wanting to cut ties and move to another state as a WOW was prima facie evidence that I was in a cult. The truth was that only a small percentage of Way members at any given time were part of any of their programs, and some never were involved beyond the twice-a-week "Twig" meetings. The heavy involvement was mostly people my age (19-22 at the time) - people with children at home, or retirees, or men and women with professional careers tended to live normal lives. In my early days I saw few attempts at controlling the daily lives of Way members by the leadership, and there was no concerted effort to keep people from leaving. (People left all the time)

After one year as a WOW I elected not to return to New York and got married, getting two stepsons in the deal. I lived pretty normally for a while, even dropping out of Way involvement (but not Way beliefs) for a few years. When my wife and I returned to active involvement we found that The Way's founder had died and that a power struggle had broken out. When the broken glass had all settled, the founder's designated successor was still in charge, but 80% of the members and leadership and split off to start their own groups. The leader, having survived the coup attempt, became increasingly paranoid and instituting greater and greater controls. Public pronouncement's became more and more unhinged and practices and doctrines became more oppressive. There were purges. I stayed through all of that. Why?

Why does anyone stay in an uncomfortable, or even dangerous, situation? Why do people stay in crappy jobs or women with abusive husbands? I had decided, at least early in that ten-year period, that an accurate "true" teaching of the Bible was worth something. Right or wrong, I thought that The Way taught the Bible correctly, and I didn't know of any church which taught it any better. Certainly not the church of my youth, my return thereto being the subject of many family prayers. The abuses and attempts at control didn't come all at once, like the proverbial frog in the pot of boiling water, and it was a while before they came for me. For me, I was balancing the pros and the cons every day. Eventually the cons outweighed the pros. 

Rather than following along blindly, or being pitifully brainwashed, I made decisions every step of the way. Were some of these decisions based on false information? Absolutely. The Way's founder wasn't the great Biblical researcher that he made himself out to be. Were some of them based on wishful thinking. Also absolutely. Are "cult" members unique in making decisions that turn out to be bad, or get involved with and stay in bad situations? No. 

Don't assume that us ex-cultists are somehow different from the rest of you.

Managers Part IV - Reward & Coercion Based Management

In Part III we listed the Five Sources of Management Power:

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

We looked at #1, "Legitimate Power". Like the name suggests, it's indeed "legitimate", but at some point the rookie manager will realize that the title and the name tag that goes along with it is pretty ineffective by itself at influencing people. A few managers skip these next two methods, but most do not and employ the carrot and stick method of management: Rewards and Coercion. Some amateurs combine both methods, but most enjoy the coercive source of power due to the many opportunities for yelling.

Bosses who lead from the giving side of Source #2 (we'll refer to it as #2a) are often thought of as "good" bosses by many employees. They are free with praise, give them whatever schedule that they want, don't assign them any tasks that they might find unpleasant and generally give employees free reign to do whatever they want. The problem with this kind of manager is that not only is he allowing the employees to manage him but this kind of leadership inevitably generates employees who will take advantage of the #2a manager's "good nature". This engenders feelings that some employees are "teacher's pets" and "get away with murder". Many years ago I worked for one of these managers. He was the head manager and I was the assistant manager. One of the more frustrating aspects of working for him was that he would lay down rules, schedules, expectations, but would not follow up to make sure that his directives were being followed. He was great with the carrot, but never used the stick. To this day he is loved by most of his employees and would be rated a "good" manager by many...but not by all.

The giving or withholding rewards such as pay, promotions, time off, can be an effective tool of management. The expectations and standards for receiving these "rewards" should be clear and attainable and administered consistently. Every employee should know what the standards and expectation is for receiving a raise. The process for promotions should be as transparent as possible (demotions too!). Most employees aren't working their jobs simply because they love the industry they're working in. They need a certain level of pay with reasonable expectation for increases; they want a schedule that works well with their other responsibilities; they'd like to be able to take paid time off -- they have requirements that need to be fulfilled in order to continue working at their job. Providing all of these things is what the manager needs to do for the employee in exchange for the employee following the manager's instructions and meeting their expectations. Ideally the employer-employee relationship will be mutually beneficial and not even look like the exercise of power. 

There are many types of punishment that can be meted out to create the atmosphere of fear that some managers believe is necessary to compel obedience. The "write up" and it's good buddy the suspension, assigning "crap jobs" to trouble-makers, and the ever popular yelling. Rewards are listed as a separate source of power, but the withholding of rewards goes hand-in-hand with coercion. Managers who lead from Source #3 and the withholding portion of Source #2 are universally rated by employees as "bad" bosses, but for all the raised voices and threats, these managers have little more success than Source #1 managers at getting people to do what they want, in addition to the normal slacking off, you now have added employees who will actively undermine and sabotage the boss's efforts.

The problem with depending on either #2 a or b, or #3, as a source of authority is that it's essentially either bribery or blackmail. These managers are not teaching their subordinates to do their jobs well because it's their job, but because they are either getting something (a bribe) or are being threatened with punishment (blackmail).

Since the confluence of the Covid pandemic and low unemployment the last few years, the power dynamic has shifted somewhat. Employees have leveraged their manager's fears that a position will remain unfilled if they quit by allowing employees to get away with not doing the requirements of their jobs without consequences. There are still theoretical standards, but there is no enforcement of those standards. This creates a race to the bottom, where "bad" employees still receive the rewards (regular pay increases, promotions, time off requests) while the "good" employees see no up side to following the rules and eventually become "bad" employees as well. 

Before we get to Sources #4 & #5, let's summarize the first three:

Legitimate Power, #1, is theoretical, in other words, it exists on paper, but doesn't get exercised in practice unless there are some of the other sources to strengthen it. Sources #2 and #3 are methods by which a manager can motivate employees to excel, but they must be applied evenly and fairly, with expectations, consequences, and benefits all communicated clearly. Employees have power too -- they can withhold their labor by quitting, they can push management to honor a union contract or standards laid out in the employee handbook. But once hired, the employee and the manager have agreed to the terms of employment.  

Start with Part I

Managers Part III - Sources of Power

Managers have power over their subordinates. How they choose to exercise that power determines whether or not they are a "good" or "bad" manager. Here is a listing of some sources of power and brief definitions:

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

Some of these are related - for example, Reward and Coercive Power are two sides of the same coin. Both of these to some extent flow from Legitimate Power. 

Before looking at some of these categories, I want to emphasize that the ability for a manager or leader to exercise power depends to a certain extent upon the degree to which an employee allows the manager to have that power. For instance, I don't play the lottery, or gamble at all for that matter, but I used to joke that if won the Powerball, I wouldn't quit my job like so many people do, but I would continue to come to work but simply refuse to do anything that I didn't want to do! Some of these categories of power won't work if the employee doesn't really need the job, or has the ability to change jobs quickly. 

Source #1, Legitimate Power is kind of like an unspoken contract - the manager gets to tell you what to do simply because of the title, you have to comply due to your lack of one. However, this source of power is largely theoretical. A manager who is relying solely on Source #1 will likely only get people to follow directives when physically present. Employees who are dealing with a manager who leads predominantly from Source #1 will be the kind of employees who "milk the clock", who sneak extra cigarette breaks, who look really busy while not actually getting anything done. Managers can use "because I'm the boss" as an argument ender, and this may end the immediate argument, but it rarely solves the problem. 

The amateur manager believes that the title is all that it takes to  make one an effective manager. The Source #1 Manager isn't necessarily "bad", usually just inexperienced. 

Leading from Source #1 isn't illegitimate, it's actually called Legitimate Power, but it can't be exercised in a vacuum. It's true, that a business owner has delegated to the manager the responsibility to get things done, including directing the work of non-management employees, but getting things done is going to require the cooperation of everyone. As we look at the other sources of management power, we'll see how that cooperation can be earned. 

Start with Part I

Continue with Part IV

Managers Part II - The Purpose of a Business

Before we look at the qualities of a manager, let's look at the environment in which a manager functions - a business. The first thing to remember about a business is that it exists primarily to make money for the owners or shareholders of the business. Whatever charitable impulses that an owner may harbor, no matter how much he donates, none of that would be possible without turning a profit.

A few years ago I attended a shareholders meeting for the company that employed me. The company had what is referred to as an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP). The way it worked was that a certain percentage of the profits were set aside as profit sharing to most employees, allocated according to their salaries. The company president, the son of the company founder was talking about this program as if it was an example of his father's care and concern for his employees. The founder himself, at that time pushing 90, was in attendance. He was asked what his reasoning was for setting up the ESOP. He responded that he thought it was a good way to legally lower his tax liability and still have use of the cash. A pretty honest answer, one that his son apparently wasn't honest enough to give. The point is, that maybe your company's owners do care about you on some level, but the bottom line is money. Many people who have seen their jobs migrate out of the country have found this out. (Since I first wrote this, the company in question used the windfall from the 2017 tax law change to buy back all the employee-owned stock) 

In a perfect world, businesses would figure out what needed to be accomplished and when it needed to be done, calculate how many people it took to do it and hire the exact number of people they had determined they needed. They would set a pay rate that was sufficient to draw in enough people who had the skills needed. People would apply for those jobs because the pay and the schedule were what they needed and the requirements were within their abilities.

What happens in reality is that a business first determines what percentage of sales they will spend on payroll. This percentage tends to be fairly consistent within industries. Now this obviously means that as sales fluctuate, what a business will spend on payroll will also fluctuate. This, despite the fact that many things still need to be done even if no customers walk through the door. Managers are expected to manage their employees' schedules to conform to these percentages. Managers who can't do this usually find out fairly quickly that they are no longer managers.

So, what we're talking about here is that the manager, who is first and foremost a representative of the business and not your buddy, is being paid to make sure that the company is making as much money as possible. How that manager maximizes profits will determine whether the employees think he or she is a "good" manager or a "bad" manager, but make no mistake about it, Priority #1 is always to turn a profit. Anything that gets in the way of that, even you, will eventually be eliminated.

This is the environment in which your boss operates, every day.

Start with Part I

Go to Part III

Managers Part I - What Makes a Good One?

For most of my working life I was a manager or a supervisor. Even my last job before retirement, while not classified a supervisory, had many supervisory responsibilities. Eventually I became an effective manager after unlearning many bad habits. In the nineties I took a one-week management class called Managing Management Time, which gave me a lot of insight into what a manager was really supposed to do. During my time as a Retail Grocery Store Director I taught many of these principles to my department managers. I'm revisiting this series, which I started in 2016, since the relationship between management and managed has changed since the Covid pandemic of 2020-2021. 

First off, I'm not going to engage in the trendy supposition that being a leader is different than being a manager or a "boss". A manager is a job title, or it can be viewed as a skill or career path. Leadership is a quality that one can have, whether or not one is in a position of "official" leadership. "Boss" is simply a colloquialism for "manager". I will use these terms more or less interchangeably.

A manager, in simplest terms, is someone whose main job responsibility is to "get things done" by way of managing, directing, coaching, analyzing and planning. A manager has goals and objectives that he or she is tasked with achieving and usually has a group of people that assist in achieving those goals. What makes a "good" manager versus a "bad" manager? Sometimes that depends on who you ask. A front-line employee might view a good manager as one who steps back and lets everybody "do their job". A front-office director might view a good manager as one who get results. The problem with those viewpoints is that they each ignore the other. What an employee might see as "doing her job" might just be what is convenient or "the way it's always been done", while the front office's focus on results often ignores the fact that there are real people achieving those results. A good manager balances both sides of the equation.

What I am going to explore over the course of several blog posts are the qualities of a "good" manager, with reference to examples of "bad" management. Some of the characteristics we will look at are:

• The Purpose of a Business
• Delegation
• Influence
• Respect
• Knowledge
• Empowerment
• Teaching & Coaching
• Accountability

I may use examples of leadership in politics, the military and sports, but I will be focusing on the role of managers in business.

Hopefully these posts will give a good overview of management as more than just people telling other people what to do.

Go to Part II

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part V

When I first agreed to take the Power for Abundant Living (PFAL) class I was unaware that the Bible study that I had been attending was part of a larger organization. Up until that point I had not attended "branch" meetings, or met any Way people outside of the group that met at Tom & Joe's apartment.

The PFAL class would be taught in approximately three hour increments on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday over four weeks at a home in the Flushing neighborhood of Queens. As I have mentioned in earlier installments, the PFAL class had been taped in the late sixties, but at the time I did not realize I would be watching a recording. Wierwille was talked about as the "teacher" of the class. I had also heard about someone named Jerry, who was mentioned as the class instructor. Unaware that The Way called someone who coordinated and oversaw the running of a PFAL class an instructor, I conflated "instructor" and "teacher" and thought a guy named Jerry Wierwille from Ohio would be teaching the class in Flushing. What was actually happening was that Jerry McSherry (his real name) would be in charge of running the class for me, my cousin Kathy and seven other students. He would be assisted by several other graduates of PFAL who had responsibilities such as parking, refreshments, and audio-visual (actually just audio). We would be listening to cassette tapes of Wierwille. (A video version, on Betamax of all things, was only run if there were 12 or more students.) Charts and illustrations that would ordinarily be part of the video, would be shown to us by a class crew member who sat up front with a flip chart.

As I mentioned, each class session was approximately three hours. Two hours of teaching, a break, and a third hour. The first few sessions were pretty hard to get through. Imagine trying to sit through that much talking without even anything to look at other than some cheap flip charts. But part of what kept us going through those first few sessions was that we had paid for it. $100 was a lot of money for a barely employed college student in those days. We lost one student halfway through, but the rest of us stuck it out. 

The first three or four nights were variations of the theme of "the Bible is true". He really hammered into us the premise that what the Bible said was the standard for everything else. I sort of already believed that, despite not knowing much about the Bible. Toward the end of the first week, two things got my attention and piqued my interest. One was that the Bible interpreted itself. You didn't need someone to interpret it for you, because if you just read what was written, in context, the meaning would be crystal clear. The other was that by the end of the class, Wierwille would provide undeniable proof that Jesus Christ not only existed, but rose from the dead. After that I was all in.

In retrospect, the approach was brilliant. Even if you didn't believe that the Bible was divinely inspired before you took the class, twelve hours of verses on the subject was bound to wear you down. Looking back, it was pure circular reasoning, but he wasn't trying to convince the skeptical. His oratory wasn't going to convert an atheist, but if you had any tendency toward a Bible-based mindset, his teaching was going to sweep away any doubts about the heavenly origins of the Bible, and therefore it's veracity. And that set the stage for the second week, when things really got serious.

Now that we "knew that we knew that we knew" that the Bible was true, we were ready for some crazy stuff. In the midst of all the "The Bible is the Word of God" stuff, we were admonished to read what was written, not only right in the verse, but in the context, how words were used before, how words were used when the King James was written, and be aware of customs in Biblical times. This made sense, you really couldn't argue with it. But Wierwille then started showing us parts of the Bible where what we had always been taught was wrong...according to him. 

He started out by simply pointing to a plain reading of the text where it contradicted what "everyone knew" about the Bible. He started off with some fairly innocuous things, where the "accurate" reading didn't make much difference in how we lived our lives, or even touched on contentious doctrinal issues. This was brilliant. Since we had already been convinced that the Bible was true and accurate, how could we argue against what we could read right there in the pages of the Bible?

Eventually, however, the stakes got higher. After several sessions of having much of what we always thought we knew shown to be false, any confidence in what our priests or ministers had been telling us had been undermined. Ostensibly, this was to show us that we had to read the Bible as written and allow it to interpret itself. The real reason, as I saw much later, was to set up Wierwille as the authority, despite the encouragement to read and study ourselves.

The final week of the class was devoted to what Wierwille called "the manifestations of the spirit", which most denominations called "the gifts of the spirit". The most well-known of these was speaking in tongues, although other "manifestations" were touched upon. Wierwille billed speaking in tongues as proof of the truth of the Bible. 

For most of the third week we were regaled with instances of speaking in tongues in the Bible culminating with a group speaking in tongues session right at the end of the final session. In contrast to the dry pseudo-intellectual tone of most of the class, this final session was emphatically emotional. Wierwille asked the class rhetorically, just before we were "led into" speaking in tongues, "don't you want to speak 'the wonderful works of God'?" before having us stand and, in unison, and backed by the crew and other graduates of the class loudly speaking in tongues themselves, speaking in tongues as Wierwille's recorded voice encouraging us. 

For many people, including me, it sealed the deal. Not only had I been led, step by step, through an intellectual shedding of previous beliefs and acquisition of a new perspective, but it all came together with an emotional capstone. 

The Way had successfully got me to change what I believed about God and the Bible, but I still wasn't committed to regular involvement. I wasn't in a cult...yet.

One of the words you hear associated with cult involvement (not just religious!) is "brainwashed". Those who have not been involved in a cult (or believe that they haven't) picture cultists who have been made to accept new, obviously wrong beliefs against their will through some kind of mind control. It's more complicated than that. People who are in cults always choose to change their beliefs and choose to elevate the cult leader's ideas above what they previously thought. This article lays out how The Way set the foundation for cultish control through a step by step appeal to logic and rationality, even though its conclusions wouldn't stand up to close scrutiny. For more on brainwashing, see this article. 

Start from the beginning: Part I

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part IV

I re-posted Parts I - III last week. I will be reposting these regularly. You can start from the beginning, here: Part I

By 1970, Wierwille no longer had a loose association of Bible Fellowships and Sunday night meetings at his farm, he had an organization. The "hippies" as some labelled them, provided the raw material, the enthusiasm and the field leadership that he needed to expand his influence. Once he gained legal control of the associated entities of The Way East and The Way West he continued to consolidate his control. Even though he had legal control over his Power for Abundant Living class and its distribution, the organizational chart was still quite loose in the early to mid-seventies. Local fellowships tended to grow organically as people started taking the class and continuing to meet in regular Bible Studies. Leaders of the home fellowships tended to be chosen by local consensus, as well as availability. Two things changed that dynamic: the WOW Program and The Way Corps.

The WOW (Word Over the World) Program was basically a missionary program. People would commit a year of their lives to spreading "the Word", setting up fellowships and running Power for Abundant Living (PFAL) classes. The idea was that a group of four WOW "Ambassadors" would be sent to an area that did not have an existing Way presence. The WOWs would take a part-time job, but would spend the bulk of their time "witnessing". The goal would be that at the end of the year a local fellowship would be established, or an already existing one would be strengthened. The WOW program was wildly successful. By the end of the decade there was a strong Way presence in all 50 states as well as a number of other countries. The annual gathering at Wierwille's farm, called The Rock of Ages, was when the new WOWs were "commissioned" each year, and the previous year's group "welcomed home". By 1980, several thousand were going out as WOWs each year.

The Way Corps was a multi-year program where people were groomed to be the leadership in The Way. It was initially a two-year program spent at the Way headquarters, but eventually an apprentice, or preparatory, year spent in the candidate's home city, was added, as well as an interim year "in the field" to practice what was learned before graduation. The number of Way Corps graduates increased from a dozen or so the first few years, to 500 or more by the sixth year of the program. The local fellowship leaders who had developed naturally were supplanted by Way Corps graduates appointed centrally at most levels of the organization. When I became involved in 1978, there were nine "branches" of 7-10 fellowships each on Long Island. Neither the leaders of the branches, nor the "Area Leader" who oversaw all of Long Island, were Way Corps graduates. Within a few years this would be reversed, and even some local fellowship leaders were replaced by Way Corps graduates. This changed the makeup of The Way from a loose confederation of home Bible Studies to a rigid hierarchy with branch leaders leading 7-10 "twigs" (what home fellowship were called, based on a "Way Tree" analogy), Area Leaders overseeing multiple branches and "Limb Leaders" overseeing an entire state.

A bureaucracy was also developing at The Way headquarters as well, with leaders over the "Trunk" (all of the United States), International Outreach, a Way Corps Director and multiple departments responsible for everything from publications to vehicle maintenance. The Way Corps was slowly morphing from a program of voluntary service to a lifetime commitment to go wherever The Way sent you and do whatever they told you to do. The WOW program, even though it was only a one-year commitment, was a program with a lot of rules and expectations, its rigidity solidified the expectation that leaders were to lay down rules and expectations, rather than altruistically serving. In a short 10 years, the structure of The Way changed from people freely attending local fellowships without many, if any, demands placed upon them, to a rigid hierarchy and more onerous rules and requirements to attend meetings and classes, including those in far away cities and at The Way's headquarters in Ohio.

It was around this time that the epithet "cult" began to be attached to newer religious groups, and The Way was included. The tragedy of Jonestown occurred just as The Way was peaking in membership and influence. Family members of Way followers started getting concerned. "Deprogramming" became, if not common, then at least not unheard-of. Books on cults often included The Way, and occasionally Way members would be kidnapped by "deprogrammers" hired by the family. Some left The Way after this experience, while others escaped and returned. The presence of deprogrammers in conjunction with hostility toward The Way by families of Way members and by many churches helped to foster and "us vs. them" mindset among the Way rank and file. Wierwille stoked the fires by teaching that opposition to "the ministry" was opposition to God, and that Satan was stirring people up in order to attack "God's people". For many Way people, this was a vicious cycle: outside opposition encouraged defensiveness and an isolationist mindset while that very attitude fueled opposition. Parents could not understand why their children, who had been faithful members of the local church, were now preaching that The Way was the only place where God's truth was being told, not seeing how their opposition was a catalyst, feeding the stridency of Way rhetoric.

The Way never retreated to an isolated "compound", cutting themselves off from the world, even though they had several "root" (there's that tree symbolism) locations that were self-contained communities. The majority of Way members lived and worked among non-Way people, held regular jobs and met in private homes for their weekly meetings. They seemed normal. But something very different was going on beneath the surface.

Start with Part I

Continue with Part V