Ideologically, I have no problem with random drug tests or pre-employment screening. A company can do what it wants in that regard and there are advantages to having a drug-free workforce. But like just about everything my employer seems to be doing lately, it has put the most unreasonable face on otherwise reasonable initiatives.

The only two on our team to get flagged the first time around were good Mormon boys without so much as caffiene in their system. Still, Willard and I both expressed a bit of concern about some others within the team. Not just teammates, but invaluable ones. Simon, the most experience veteran, had told me a couple months ago that he had declined to apply for certain jobs because of the drug test. Melvin, probably the best employee the team has ever seen, was the other. He was already stressing the unreliability of these tests.

Willard went to Maria Bullock, our HR person, and asked if the manager had any discretion on the matter. He was told that they would consider it, but not right now. Unfortunately, it was later that day that Frank and Carol tested positive. Unfortunately, their belief that we knew something about the two of them has made all future negotiations more difficult.

When Frank and Carol got dinged by the first round of tests, it was really no big loss. Carol had been causing all kinds of interpersonal problems and neither were trained on the new software. It’s been a more pleasant place to work with them gone.

The first inch of concern came when I found out that Frank had not actually tested positive for drug use; he tested “inconclusive,” but that result, his wife coming up positive, and Frank’s odd behavior that morning when he found out he was flagged for testing painted a bad picture. Fair enough, but it set a precedent for firing people for “not passing” a drug test rather than outright failing it. They did have the right to appeal, but they declined.

The next thing that Willard and I tried to get was an amnesty program. What if someone were to step forward, admit they would test positive, go on probation and pay for future tests once it was all out of his system. That way we could give valuable employees the ability to stay at the company and the company could get (in a couple months) a drug-free workplace. Win-win!

As time moved on it became increasingly clear this wasn’t about simply maintaining a drug-free workplace. This entire policy was built on the assumption that anyone that does any kind of drugs could not possibly be an employee worth keeping. No matter how forcefully we could back up our guys, if they smoked pot they were defacto useless. Word is that Maria was outraged that Carol came up positive and wished she had the ability to do more than just fire her. She wanted the company to “recoup” its losses by paying someone whose performance was necessarily hindered by drug use - which is almost funny on its face: Carol Goddard has a lot of problems, but being too laid back was not one of them.

It was becoming increasingly evident that this was not a new policy: This was a moral crusade.

And like any crusade, they were willing to accept some collateral damage in the form of prescription drug users.

The policy, as it was stated, was that if you came up positive for anything you were automatically suspended for two days pending a full physical. Anything. I expressly asked about prescription drugs. If they were prescription drugs, the answer was, then it would get cleared up in a matter of a couple days. While you were suspeded. Without pay.

What if you had all the paperwork in order before you took the test, I asked. I got the same answer: an involuntary two-day vacation.

Is there any amount of paperwork (prescription history, doctor’s note, insurance paperwork) that could prevent someone that takes Ritallin or Welbutren from being suspended? Not at the present time.

This all just about sent me in to orbit. As it turns out I do take a prescription drug that can sometimes come up positive as an amphetamine. I didn’t even know it could come up positive at this point, but when I did find out it undercut my case: my righteous indignation would be considered covering my posterior.

The more questions I asked about the policy, the less answers I got. What is the “physical” that a person takes after they fail the original? The more I asked, the less it turned out to be. It would include another test, they told me. At this point, for all I knew it was simply the same test, which I would fail again. What it came down to is I could not trust them to handle any information responsibly on this matter or any other. I briefly considered just quitting, but Clancy and I talked it through and determined that since there are tests that I can take to demonstrate that I am not on drugs, I have leverage. If I can prove that I was not doing anything wrong and they say that I was fired with cause, that’s actionable in court. I am one of the last people to go around thinking of ways to sue people, but I got her agreement that we would take a case like this to court.

Given the whole flap with OSHA that happened before I started, I wonder if they know or care that they would be leaving themselves vulnerable.

We’ve been doing interviews for the team lately. The first candidate that we got ahold of was nothing short of fabulous. The second wasn’t quite as impressive, but I still came away with the feeling that he would be a good addition.

Being new to the whole interview game, I was wondering if I was just easy to impress. Then I met the third candidate, who eliminated all concern.

We’ve had mixed luck with graduates of the Mocum Institute of Applied Technology (MIAT). The first two we got, Mindy and Angela, were fabulous. Then we got Charlie Belcher. Simon also went there briefly, but dropped out almost immediately because he discerned that it was a waste of his time. As best as we can tell, it takes practically nothing to get an Associates Degree from MIAT — it just so happens that Mindy and Angela were bright going in to it.

This new guy? Not so much. With a little time and effort, he could become a Minor Leaguer.

The first indication that all might not be right with the guy was his website. He put it on the resume, we didn’t google him. On the site that he put on his resume, he had some rather explicit material. Humorous, but not the kind of thing I would want a potential employer associating with my candidacy for a position. But you know, we’re pretty flexible and open-minded about such things.

We remained open-minded about him until about three minutes into the interview.

At first I thought he was nervous, but less than five minutes in I just determined that he was dumb. I asked him several times how often he updated a business website that he put on his resume. At first I thought he was avoiding it because it wasn’t often, but ultimately I think he actually didn’t understand the question in any of the three ways I asked it.

“How often is blankityblank.com updated?”

“Whenever they have something new they want to put up.”

“How often did they change their catalog.”

“Whenever they have a new product or they’re out of an old one.”

“How often does this occur?”

“I don’t know. From time to time.”

“From time to time as in every couple weeks? Months? Years?”

“There’s no set schedule, really.”

“Over the past six months, how many times would you say you updated it? Two? Five Ten? Fifty?”

“I don’t know. Whenever they needed it, I guess.”

This was the first line of questioning that I had for him and I knew 1/3 the way in that he wasn’t going to be hired. I just wanted an answer. Usually after the interview we sit them down with a programmer, who will then gauge how quickly they pick stuff up. When Willard bypassed this step, I knew that we were of one mind on the subject.

Turns out we didn’t entirely agree. He felt that the interviewee was a good guy, just a snail on the uptake. I thought that he was a snail on the uptake, but felt uncomfortable at the prospect of him being alone with a female coworker. That was the extent of our disagreement. Both of us were wondering throughout the interview if the 0ther saw what we saw.

We have devised a method by which we can just cut an interview short. If one of us utters the name “Spiro Agnew” you can stick a fork in him (or her) cause he’s done. The only two concerns we have: How do you fit Spiro Agnew in to an interview? How do we not laugh when it happens?

Falstaff was unpacking into their current location when I was hired on. But even in the couple of weeks that they had been there, there had already been some flaps. The biggest of which involved cubicle space. Our cubicles are a rather pathetic 4x4′. Back then before we went “paperless” we had tons of stacks of paper all over the place. With a CRT monitor, keyboard, and mouse, there wasn’t room for anything.

Though everyone was upset, the two most angry were Todd Lanning and Carol Goddard. Lanning loudly quit over the matter. Shortly thereafter he contacted Carol, asking her to take some pictures of the cubicles. Carol informed her then-supervisor George Welton that the desk arrangements were unacceptable and that if it were not addressed OSHA would be notified with pictures. Welton took her to the HR person, who informed Carol that OSHA doesn’t give a rats patoot about a company the size of Falstaff (at the time) and that taking pictures in the office was prohibited and a terminatable offense. She said that Lanning had taken the picture and they couldn’t fire him.

As it turns out, OSHA did care. They had an inspector out within a week. Falstaff was cited and the company was forced to put in keyboard and mouse trays in so that employees wouldn’t have to have their eyes so close to the monitor. That, and a $1500 fine, was the extent of Carol and Todd’s victory. But it was a black eye the likes of which the company still hears about.

The time for our departure is growing near. Most of the stuff in our apartment is hers, so the number of ways that I can contribute to the early stages of preparation are pretty limited. One idea that she came up with was that I could collect all of her magazines from around the apartment and put them in to stacks. She did the same a couple months ago. So you would figure that this would take 15-20 minutes.

I expected a number of things when I married a doctor, though one thing it never occured to me was to expect magazines. Lots and lots of magazines. Truckloads of magazines every week. Not a one of which are we paying for. But… they… keep… coming…

Some of them are so far over my head that they might as well be in Latin. Others I find and read on occasion to get ideas into what things will be like when she’s a practicing family physician. I like learning new things and I’ve learned quite a bit about the medical profession. For a while I was actually looking forward to the next weekly installment of Medical Economics (and with that confession alone, you can just imagine how popular I was when I was in high school).

At some point I got overwhelmed. A lot of what was in there seemed to be variations of the same thing or some reiteration of something I learned on course to my Business Administration Education minor. While the medical stuff is over my head, a lot of the business stuff is geared towards those without a business education background. Even so, it’s always good to have one of those stationed in the restroom for a quick distraction.

But even if I devoted every waking minute to reading magazines I could not get through all of the ones she gets on a weekly basis. Periodically one of them will have a cover that says “Last Issue! Resubscribe now!” blah blah blah. Lies. All bloody lies. We can’t resubscribe to something we never subscribed to and the “last issues” date back to 2004.

These things are largely financed by advertisements. Never underestimate the deep pockets of drug companies when it comes to pushing their wares.

I would get all self-righteous about it, except that there’s an interesting article Medical Economics about using PDAs to get a leap on Electronic Health Records!

Today at work the Falstaff building had some yellow-and-black visitors.

I was off in my own world with my headphones when my cubicle started getting crowded with people looking outside. So I joined in and saw… a… lot… of… bees. A hundred? Hundreds? I don’t know. There were just a lot of them. They were in a swarm that started off about twenty feet wide, but they slowly consolidated and eventually descended upon this husk to start to build a hive. It was all quite majestic.

I’ve never been the nature-lover that Clancy is, but even I was impressed. Here you have a bunch of insects that have no real capacity for thought, yet they coordinate like no creatures with a capacity of thought can. It made me think about the trade-off between intelligence and instict, and how much we would just know, like the bees do, if we’d not try to think everything through.

The social workers down stairs, being fuzzy liberal social workers, called a beekeeper instead of pest control. The beekeeper pulled up and plopped a box on top of the hive. Something about the horizontal pillars drawing the bees. Sure enough, even though there were holes on the top of the box, none of the bees left. In fact, the few swarming about moved towards it. She then dropped a bigger box on them without a roof and then left. She came back in protective gear (she had not been wearing any up to this point), flipped the box and capped it, all but trapping them. There was a hole on the top of the box still big enough for them to get through, but again more were going in than out.

Willard is a fount of knowledge and was talking about the killer bees sweeping up from the southwest. He talked about how as they travel, rather than creating a new hive they find an existing one, overthrowing the queen. He also told me that it’s some special jelly that turns a bee in to a queen. He wanted to know what would happen if a bunch of that jelly were laid out and a dozen or so bees at it. George Welton commented that you can’t have more than one queen bee and that they would tear each other apart.

“Didn’t we have that problem in ANG?” I asked.

Ethan ponders the relationship of evil and ignorance:

According to Seth, there is no such thing as “evil”. We may point to any number of people and events and claim that evil is embodied, inherent, and proven in these things. But is this true? In our popular fiction, there are all sorts of “evil” characters, sometimes doing the Devil’s business. And who is more evil than the Devil?

Instead, evil is an extreme form of ignorance. One who practices “evil” may claim to know what it is that he or she does, and therefore reinforces the idea of “evil”. How can one be ignorant if one knowingly performs an evil act?

As I reflect on this, I am beginning to understand what this means. Ignorance takes many forms. One may knowingly commit murder or arson, and know that what they do is wrong. They may identify as “evil” as they perform these acts. But ignorance drives this behavior, not evil, and certainly not the Devil.

I hope that Ethan will forgive me if I am misunderstanding what he means and am taking him out of context, but here are some of my thoughts:

I would say that most of us know someone that believes any time you disagree with him (or her, but it’s usually a him) it is because you don’t understand what he’s saying. Ignorance, sometimes, is an extention of that logic. If one is described as evil, then one doesn’t know what people described as non-evil know. This idea is dependent on a number of things, one of which is that there is an ideal state in which people are good if they are sufficiently loved for instance or, in this case, sufficiently knowledgeable.

I’m inclined to agree with the old saying that the Devil’s greatest trick was making people believe that he did not exist. I believe that evil is an entity unto itself. It is a state with a number of plausible motivations. Often, as you cite, it’s ignorance. Sometimes it’s fear. Sometimes it’s hurt (As Frankenstein’s monster said, “I am malicious because I am miserable”). Maybe there’s a better word for all this than “evil,” but I don’t think that ignorance is sufficiently encompassing.

Ignorance also implies, to a degree, that with knowledge comes righteousness. To a degree, right and wrong are not only what one knows, but how one internally organizes what one knows. Sometimes the organization paints a rather warped picture. Perhaps one can say that a warped picture is not a true one and is therefore ignorant. Be that as it may, there is no picture that is not seen through a lens of some sort, and some lenses are incompatible with virtue, harmony, and other things we would generally percieve as “good.” The issue, in my mind, is not what information is missing (ignorance), but how the existing information is organized (philosophy or ideology).

In short, if I can be short which I usually cannot, ignorance can be just as easily defined to support one’s prejudices as evil can be. Both exist (and I will absolutely concede that ignorance is much, much, much more prevalent than evil), but I don’t personally believe that one necessarily defines the other.

The first drug test in Falstaff history, that I am aware of, was not the result of diligent concern ont he part of the company. Instead, it was about fraud.

The company used to have an infestation of what we call the Callgirls. I mentioned them before, but that was written before they really got on our nerves. Shortly after I wrote that, the seating arrangements were rearranged and they more-or-less stopped working. Their job was to make cold calls, but what little time spent on the phone was spent calling husbands, ex-husbands, child support attorneys, and girl_friends. The rest of the time was spent talking to one another. They almost left in order of least irritating to most. The most tolerable one was let go on Bloody Friday. The second-most tolerable one took maternity leave and never came back. Sally Cummings decided to become a stay-at-home Mom. Leaving only Clara Burton.

Clara was a confirmed drug addict. A couple employees had husbands that were part of the drug scene and both identified her as a “crack whore.” Her expression oscillated between dazed and wired.

After hurting her leg skiing, she filed a bogus workers comp claim, saying that she slipped in the bathroom. Now the first thing that they do when you make a workers comp claim is give you a test for drugs and alcohol. If you were on drugs, of course, your accident was not the company’s responsibility. Anyway, knowing that she would test positive, she tried to convince everyone that she was framed by the nurse, who had injected her with PCP.

I’m not sure what she said to Maria Bullock, the HR lady, but I figured it had to be something (now I’m not so sure). When the results came in, she asked the receptionist to let her know when Clara showed up. Bullock’s office was in corporate HQ, but she apparently made the 20-minute drive in ten minutes. When she got in, she was high as a kite. Figuratively speaking. She loudly proclaimed in front of everyone that Clara failed the drug test and had five minutes to leave the premesis before she would call the police.

It was a beautiful sight. Besides Bullock, the most elated employee ironically seemed to be Carol Goddard.

We’re not sure if that was what put the idea of implementing the random drug tests in their mind, but they began shortly thereafter.

In late February, I wrote the following:

I only started realizing this during the company meeting the other day. I am becoming, in many ways, sorry that I will be leaving this place in six months. A lot of it has to do with things that have nothing to do with the company. My job titles here have been getting progressively better. My current job is a headache-and-a-half sometimes, but it’s good enough that I’ve stopped looking for other work (and would stop even if I weren’t leaving in June), and I only have reason to believe that the job will get better once we’re over our current hump.

Beyond my personal satisfaction, the OSI team was beyond stellar. Department productivity had increased a whopping 70% in eight months with 75% the staff. The tools that we invented and the experiences we had acquired were bulletproof. We stopped really even noticing the end of the month, when a year prior we would be scrambling to make monthly reports correct. There were only two problem cases in Edgar and Charlie, but they were about to be replaced by someone far better.

The company meeting was the apex.

We had a new division cheif in Cheif Information Officer Bill Darden, who was coming in and making changes that we had been pushing for a long time and got to award the employee-of-the-month award to one of our own. After the meeting, he declared an end to the attitude that report programming is just glorified secretarial work. At the meeting Cheif Operations Officer Geoff Hansen said with great credibility that the sky was the limit with this company. The Cheif Officer of Strategic Initiatives Mark Nelson announced the new initiative with grandiose expectations. The villainous and inexperienced HR person Clifford Simmons was departing.

Melvin and I actually talked for hours over the weeks about how Falstaff was really poised for greatness. Opportunity was elsewhere. The only problem we could see with Falstaff was that it was located in Deseret.

Less than three months later…

Melvin is leaving the department next week and hoping to leave the company. Freddie is leaving the company. Simon is desperately looking for work anywhere else. Martin is pondering a $2/hr paycut to go back to the Kimball Group. The fact that I’m leaving in a couple months is the only thing that keeps me going some days. On a team that once had no one with under a year experience, the most experienced person may soon be someone that started in February.

The entire sales staff quit.

COO Geoff Hansen turned into a villain and eventually left for a lower-middle management position elsewhere.

SOCI Mark Nelson, who so eloquently gave a speech about giving it your all, left the company for an entry-level IT job at same company.

An underground network has formed to help employees find jobs elsewhere.

The new HR director is increasingly a puritanical autocrat.

CEO Bill Darden has alienated everybody in our department and has, with actions if not with words, declared that report programmers were unworthy of investment.

The office, which used to keep pretty busy until at least 7:00 is now a ghost town by 5:15.

The last one out gets to turn out the lights…

Logtar has some interesting things to say about how wasteful Americans can be.

This is a subject that has come up a couple times between my wife and I, particularly as it pertains to electronics. I come from a computer background. When a piece of hardware stops working, the usual reaction is to throw it away and get a new one. You may be able to fix it, of course, but the time and effort spend in trying to rescussitate it weigh heavier than the cost of a new one.

Clancy, on the other hand, is very reluctant to admit that things don’t work. A case-and-point is her morning light. The morning light comes on slowly every morning to wake her up more naturally. Well actually it doesn’t come on and that’s the problem. A problem suitable for replacement, say I. She, however, wants to get it fixed. She hates the idea of throwing away something that probably has one broken part.

It extends beyond that. We have two dead printers. I am of the mind that we should throw them away, though I am open to the idea of recycling the plastic. She is wondering if there is some way we can donate them to somebody who will fix them and put them to good use. In my experience (well Mom’s as she used to run a store), most goodwill organizations that sell used stuff don’t want it unless it works.

In disposable America, it’s so often easier just to toss it.

Willard has made the comment a couple times that if you go through life holding on to gender stereotypes, you will be disappointed from time to time, but not as often as one might think.

Once upon a time, my department Reports and Legal Contracts (RLC) was comprised of two teams: OSI and ANG. We did the same job. Our teams had the same structure. Yet everything was remarkably different. The OSI team was comprised almost entirely of males — mostly of a computer geek bent. The ANG team was comprised of a majority of females — mostly of a office-clerk bent. The gender, and perhaps the subtypes, made all the difference in the world.

Tobias Long and George Welton, when they were in each in charge of the ANG team, spent an inordinate amount of time simply putting out fires. Once or twice a week everything would erupt and the lead would have to pull them into a room until they made up. Carol Goddard versus The Prude. The Prude versus the Trailor Park Madonna. The Trailor Park Madonna versus La Fuega. La Fuega versus the Princess. I could go on and on, but suffice it to say there were all kinds of conflicts.

Willard never had to worry about that. The guys on the OSI team all got along. When we didn’t get along, the issues arose and were buried behind the scenes. No melodrama. Nothing like that at all, really, once Teddy Forbes left. Even when La Fuega came over briefly before leaving the company, there were few problems.

Guys, as a group, just don’t let things fester. And, true to stereotype we’re also less people-oriented. We never were at each other’s throats, but until the Kimball Alumni Club formed, no one in OSI was particularly close to anyone else in OSI. The ANG ladies would get close, then something would happen and they would become moral enemies or something. So much of it seemed to revolve around the social pecking order stuff of high school. Who could get whom to side with who. And on, and on, and on. When I first started at Falstaff, I commented that it felt an awful lot like high school. No, really, most of it came down to what a male-dominated workforce (particularly run by geeks) tends to be like (cold, not friendly but not hostile) and what a female-dominated team looks like (very, very social. Doing each other’s hair or strangling one another).

What’s odd and yet stereotypical is that the ladies would almost invariably target themselves. I had nothing against any of the ANG ladies who all hated one another so passionately. Except for Prude they were all quite nice to me. They were generally nice to Stan Axley when he was on the team. It was all catfights.

Clancy has notice similar things at Beck County Medical Center. The female-dominated groups tend to be much more dramatic than those that cross gender lines. The most prickly women almost always targetted one another.

Of course, the stereotype about catty women runs contrary to another stereotype: men are competitive and women are consensus-seekers. That usually applies to managers and (Carol Goddard excepted) that could well be quite valid. The notion of guys being competitive may be true in other facets, but computer geeks on the whole tend to be less status-oriented than say salespeople. But even in higher-pressure atmospheres, there’s a definite difference between trying to be #1 by appearing to have the best job performance (by denigrating the efforts of others, touting your better numbers, whatever) and trying to be #1 by appearing to be the nicest or most popular person.

However much more community-minded may be, it runs both ways. Communities are formed and communities are destroyed. Meanwhile, the guys often just wonder what all the fuss is about.

-{Thursday}-
It was ostensibly a meeting between Willard and myself about my departure from Falstaff in a couple of months, but once we finished talking about that the subject turned to my colleague Carol. Willard then gave the first hint that he might not be keeping her on indefinitely. He told me much of the content of this post. I knew much of it, but it was his chance to vent as he really needed to so I sat quietly.

In an interesting coincidence, Carol cornered Willard to ask if what she was supposed to do now that ANG was dying. Willard told her to find stuff to do. That, more than anything, was what was increasingly sealing her fate. Willard’s philosophy is that you find something to do when your job description starts running thin. He was waiting for Carol to do that. Carol, on the other hand, needed to be more guided. Work ethic was never an issue with her, but it had strangely become one. I suppose that was her way of dealing with a diminishing job description.

-{Friday}-
Having taken Willard’s message to heart, she sat with me all day learning how to do my job. My duties were going to be split between the two of us as we separated in the a Legal Contracts team and a Reports team. I breathed a sigh of relief. She was doing something.

-{Monday}-
Then she stopped. Monday she was calling various people taking care of insurance matters. She was sitting there. She drew me into conversation a couple of times. ANG was down to taking a couple of hours a day. Instead of picking up where she left off on Friday, she just did nothing.

-{Tuesday}-
More of the same. Willard commented that he had never seen someone so intent on milking a diminishing job description. Angela and Annabelle bluntly warned Willard that there would be massive fallout if Carol were to be put in charge of an OSI team without having any experience with the software package. She was being Clemmed.

-{Wednesday}-
More of the same. Willard informs me that on Friday she will have made herself useful or she will be laid off. I went home and told Clancy about it. I was torn as to what to do. I could probably draw Carol in to undertstudying with me if I really wanted to, but if I was dragging her along it would look just as bad. I thought about telling her, but ultimately I realized that I couldn’t trust her. She would likely have exploded and gone off on Willard (whose behavior in all of this left something to be desired), implicating me. I wasn’t about to tie myself to a sinking boat.

-{Thursday}-
More of the same. She hadn’t had a single ANG request in over a day. I didn’t get as much done myself because I sat there helpless. I was the only person that she hadn’t completely alienated, and I could do nothing for her. I thought about her family. Even with Frank making the transition to OSI and continuing to work, I knew what he made and that it would not be enough to support the three of them. Stole glances at pictures of their little boy whose world was about to be rocked.

-{Friday}-
She actually seemed to keep pretty busy. I was quite relieved. At the end of the day, I figured out what was up: Willard had come through. His handling of the situation up to that point had left something to be desired. When someone’s job is in jeopardy, you never joke about their job being in jeopardy. And though he tells me tha the told her exactly what she needed to do, Willard does not always realize how subtle he is being. I couldn’t help but think that if he had drawn it as clearly as he thought he had, she would have been prompted in to action.

But anyway, he really came through. He created a special position for her, drawing together tasks that made many of us have to stay after. She would take off some of my workload and a lot of his. The rest of the time she would be learning our OSI software package. It wouldn’t be a step down, but it would remove her from an authority position. And she would be learning more useful things.

-{Saturday and Sunday}-
I was elated. It was like a giant weight had been lifted off of my shoulders.

-{Monday}-
Before going to work, I commented to Clancy that things would be much less awkward today because I wouldn’t be so worried about Carol losing her job. Frank officially started on OSI. He had apparently spent all weekend studying the language that we use for it. He was quite enthusiastic. A bunch of newhires started that day and so they had the drug screening people there. While they were there performed random tests on twelve people. The only two that didn’t pass were Frank and Carol.

They were promptly fired.

The biggest irony in this is that if Willard had let her go on Friday, she would have been eligable for unemployment. He would have been doing her a favor.

I had lunch with my friend and former coworker Marcus. I was sent on a mission by Willard to recruit Marcus to come back at least on a part-time basis if not a full one. I was told to tell him that he would be a leading candidate for my job when I move on and he would get a raise.

Unfortunately, he opened the lunch asking me how things at Falstaff were going.

For the next 40-minutes I went on a tyrade featuring a litany of complaints ranging from the outrageous to the sublime.

Then I told him that he should come back.

It’s a good thing I don’t work in Account Services.

Over the past couple months, they have been doing what they’ve said they would be doing since I signed on: converting everyone to the new software package (OSI) and retiring the old (ANG). Since January I have been the leader of the OSI programming team and Carol Goddard has been the leader of the diminishing ANG. Because of our similar positions, she has become one of my better friends at the company. So it took me a little longer to concede what I had noticed about her since I landed at the company.

The ANG Team has always been fraught with drama. The ANG team leads have always spent a good portion of their time putting out fires. There were just a couple of personalities on that side of the walkway that collided… a lot. The Prude. The Trailer Park Madonna. The Psychotic Mouse. Things improved after each one of them left. Simon was the first one to articulate, though, that however bad the others might have been, a focal point of conflict with every last one of them was Carol.

It’s not that Carol goes looking for fights. But she is an atheist born of atheist parents and raised in not-at-all-atheist Deseret. She and her husband, also in ANG, seem to have been positioned back-to-back most of their lives (they met as kids), like comrades in a martial arts movie surrounded by enemies. Mormons. Conservatives. Corporate America. People telling her what to do. I don’t begrudge her her resentment any more than I begrudge my friend Simon his. But where most people learn when to pick their battles, she faces every percieved enemy head on. When it was The Prude, or the TP Madonna, it was understandable.

Once they were gone, though, the infighting did not. She and Adam got in to it. Then, most amazingly, she and Angela did. Angela is a rather difficult person to get on the wrong side of. Only Golden Boy (and to a lesser extent Adam) had really managed to. Then she got in to it with Annabelle. Annabelle may be the most passive person I have ever met that didn’t have serious emotional issues (she may, but she seems well adjusted once you can get her talking). It was getting harder and harder to blame Carol’s sparring partners.

Then she made an enemy of Willard by going over his head to CIO Bill Darden in a dispute between her husband and Annabelle. Darden replied that she needed to choose her battles and that this was a pretty small disagreement to be involving the CIO and she promptly came to believe that Darden had it in for her to.

Carol isn’t a bad person, but there really is something to be said for knowing when not to make a fuss. Particularly when you’re given a leadership role. Willard and I commented that we tended to run things through a filter that would filter out things we might say that would give us negative productivity in whatever we’re trying to accomplish. Carol has no such filter. She’s been fighting so many enemies for so long that she can’t stop viewing everybody that way. Once Willard turned, I officially became the only coworker that she didn’t have a beef with.

This was, to say the least, a pretty perilous position to be in when your a team leader of a department that was about to be retired.

-{Next: The Fate of Carol Goddard}-

Several years ago I was dating a girl named Julie and was preparing to propose to her. Though we’d never openly discussed it, Julie had been periodically pointing out rings that she liked and didn’t like. As with other aesthetical things, we didn’t particularly share the same taste. It didn’t really matter, though, because the ring I was going to use was an old family ring on my mother’s side. There was also a wedding ring back there, too, though from a different source. Mom’s family, however, was generally of modest means. I did not suppose that the ring was anything by befittingly modest. I was fine with that, though it did not seem what Julie had in mind.

I found a way to indirectly ask her if she would have a problem with a more modest ring. I told her that I liked the idea of using family heirlooms. She was indifferent to the heirloom aspect of it all, but said that she would gladly accept any ring that I would have to offer whenever the timing might be right for such a thing. Then she asked “So just curious. How modest, exactly?”

The ring became a focal point of some of the doubts that were festering in the back of my mind. Not that I thought she would reject the ring. At that point she was hanging much more tightly around me than I was holding on to her. But though it’s one thing to lose a $2,000 investment if an engagement or marriage doesn’t work out. It’s another to lose a deep family heirloom. The former hurts financially. The latter spiritually. The fact that before I was even considering proposing I was already contemplating the effects of divorce was a lightning rod for my increasingly anxious mind. I was increasingly realizing that even as I was planning to spend the rest of my life with her, I wasn’t wanting to.

A couple weeks ago Clancy and I went out for a pizza and ended up at an art exhibit that was on the first floor of the second floor restaurant. The artist was absolutely amazing. His paintings centered on the western landscape. What initially was going to be a quick passthrough ended up with us looking at every framed painting as well as looking through the book. Naturally, we caught the attention of the guy manning the exhibit. He was gentle and charismatic with his sales technique. We told him rather honestly that we did love the paintings but that we were not at a time in our lives where would could afford such things.

As we left, we noted that he probably didn’t believe us. Salespeople notice things and Clancy’s engagement and wedding ring were undoubtedly among them. The wedding ring has over a dozen not-big-but-not-tiny diamonds on it. The engagement ring has three larger diamonds and a few specks of ones on either side. I don’t know how many there are total. It was not what I had in mind with Julie years before. It was, in fact, something I think she would have really approved of.

Being the wonderful woman that I married, Clancy cares less about the diamonds than about the family history. She, like myself, is less than impressed with some of the flashier rings in today’s style. Luckily the diamonds are set low and are therefore unobtrusive. But they sparkle and even low-key Clancy kind of gets a kick out of that.

I take Julie at her word that she would have graciously accepted any ring that I had to offer. Even so, it’s a bit funny that had I saw the ring I never would have asked the question which had the answer that put me ill-at-ease.