Have you ever known someone that didn't seem all THAT bad at first, but as you go to know them better, they just started getting on your nerves more and more and more? Then, one day, they're gone and you realize just how much you had come to despise them without ever really realizing it had happened?
Well, allow me to tell you about my previous boss. His name was Phil. I won't give you his last name to avoid any harassment I might get if I were to reveal it. I'm probably safer that way. I will disguise the names of my former coworkers. THEM I have some respect for. There's "Kinsey," "Dominic," "LW," "Dory," and "Stella." They'll probably recognize which they are from the nicknames I've chosen to refer to them by. Some of them are for obscure reasons and others aren't. J
I'd also like to preface this with a comment: To be libel, something has to be false. What follows is not false, but true from not just my viewpoint, but those of my former coworkers, as well. I'm sure Phil will have a completely different memory and interpretation of every single event I describe herein.
I consider the following Definition of Character rather than the worse-sounding Defamation of Character. (Nods to M*A*S*H for that play on words.)
That music that's started around now is called Something Stupid by Nancy and Frank Sinatra. It seemed somehow...appropriate. :) Enjoy it.
Phil Was Carefully Chosen
"How could a man like this get hired?" you might be asking. Well, I shall tell you. There was a man who worked for TSC (who is no longer there) that I will call "Fred." Fred was in our Metallurgy department and was on a trip for some reason. On the flight back, he sits next to this guy who does his damnedest to be left alone, but Fred is a talker, so he engages this younger man in conversation. He finds out that the younger man is the manager of a computer department at Martin Marietta in Florida. At the end of the flight, Fred hands his business card to the younger man and says, "Listen, if you're ever in the market for a job, look me up!" They depart.
Months later, Martin Marietta is laying off and the seat-mate--by now you've figured out it was Phil--sees the writing on the wall before the axe falls. He calls. An interview is set up. No one in the IS Department is consulted about any of this. [As an aside: this may be normal in other companies, but in the past at TSC, we had always been at least consulted about stuff like this and it was annoying that they chose not to this time.] Finally, there is only one viable candidate. They bring him in to meet us. Unfortunately, Stella and I were the only ones there at the time. He seemed nice enough. Then they brought his wife in and we talked to her for a while. I'll call his wife Barbie. She comes into this later on, too.
To make a long story short, at the end of the interview, the VP poked his head in and asked Stella and I "Can you work with him?" We looked at each other, thinking Yeah, we can discern something that important in 15 minutes with him and 10 minutes with his wife. We say "Yeah, he seems okay." So the VP says "Good! Because we've just offered him the position."
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how an asshole gets a job. Thanks to Delta airlines, he happened to get a seat next to Fred.
It should be noted that several years later when Fred left the company, he sent e-mail to LW (who had become friendly with him) apologizing for getting us in the pickle we were in. If that doesn't tell you something about how other people at the company felt as well, it should.
Phil and Racism
When Phil first started in August of 1994, he seemed okay. A bit loud, a bit obnoxious, a bit abrasive, but okay. We had another one like that at that time, too (I'll call him "Adolph"), so we thought "Hey, at least they'll each have someone to play with." One of the first things he told me and Stella about himself was that he's a racist, but he tries to overcome that by purposefully hiring black people. We gave each other meaningful glances, but this should have been our first sign. At any rate, soon after he came aboard, Stella left (see below) and had to be replaced. He interviewed several people, but his final candidates were two black women. One of them was Dory. The other four of us liked her and recommended that she was the best candidate.
In early Autumn of 1997, Phil and Dory were having an animated discussion in the hallway outside our office. Dory was attempting to explain why she did not do something. Phil wouldn't have any of it. Kinsey and I heard the following:
"Dory, from now on, whenever Sue asks you to do something, you just say 'YasSA, Massa! I does what you want!'"
Kinsey and I sat stunned. How could he have SAID that? We both immediately got up, anger just overloading our systems. Dory walked in and she was the maddest I've ever seen her. Normally, she's a calm, quiet person who takes all kinds of punishment without complaint, but I honestly believe that if she had had a gun in her purse, Phil would have been a dead man. We thought for sure she would report him or say something to him, but she didn't. She didn't want to cause trouble.
Kinsey said something to him about it in her next progress review, which was soon after this incident. Phil's only remark was "I was just trying to relate to her, you know, on her level." To this day, he totally doesn't understand what it was that he did wrong.
Phil and Sexism
At one time, a girl I'll call Tanya worked at the mill as a temporary in the warehouse. She was looking for a full-time job even though she was still in school, and since her degree was going to be in computers, we urged her to apply in our department because we recognized ability when we saw it. Her mother (who also works at the mill) took her back to Phil's office. He didn't even look up. To say he didn't give them the time of day would be to paint a better picture of what he did. He told them that he was sure Mercedes was hiring and she could probably get a job there when she graduated. Several months go by, and LW leaves (see below). We have to hire someone to replace him. Surprising all of us, he interviews Tanya. She is the best qualified. So he hires her. But he kept saying she was getting her business degree. She would correct him every time, but he never got it through his thick skull. She was put into a position as "Help desk" and basically a software flunky.
Tanya could only take the abuse for a month. She transferred to another department. On her recommendation we interviewed a guy I'll call Pete, who had gone to school with her and got the same degree. When Phil hired Pete, suddenly Pete had a computer degree. The position he was hired into went from help desk and software to hardware technician. See, men get computer degrees and women get business degrees. Men can handle hard stuff like hardware, but women are just incapable of this. It's ironic to note that less than one year later, Tanya was working for TSC in a completely autonomous position in the other computer department (Process Automation) doing hardware, software, and a whole lot more, and Pete was still in our department doing Dory's old job--software. Phil just couldn't get a clue if you BEAT him with it. Both of them expressed their desire to work as they were later to Phil, but he ignored them and assumed their expertise based not on skill set or degree or personal desire, but on chromosomal differences neither of them had any control over.
Another incident of flagrant sexism with Phil came in his first couple of months of working there. He used to do these departmental meetings where he'd come in and sit in a chair in our midst and tell us stuff he thought we ought to know. At first, he put his chair in the middle and made sure that he was at least partially facing everyone. Soon, however, he was sitting with his back to Stella. She tried to call him on it, but he made no comment. He ignored her from that point on. Soon after THAT, he was sitting with his back to both Stella and Kinsey, talking only to me and LW, the two males in the department. Kinsey tried an experiment one day to see if it was sexist. She made a suggestion to Phil. He ignored it completely. A few minutes later, LW made the same recommendation. It was brilliant at that point. Amazing how the Y-chromosome affects your ability to make good suggestions, doesn't it? Needless to say, we called him on it. He apologized, saying he had no idea that he was doing it. And the sad part is: He probably didn't.
Yet another incident came recently (well, Summer of 1997) when the company had mandatory sexual harassment meetings. Phil was busy, so he didn't go to the meeting with the rest of us. Afterwards, we were telling him about the meeting when he said "You know, sexual harassment is one of those things that you either just understand or you'll never get it no matter how much they try to get it through to you." Less than 10 minutes after that, he made a sexual remark. Yeah, I guess it IS something you just have to know. And he doesn't.
One of the guys at work was looking over my shoulder at my desk one day as I showed him some screen savers which came with Windows 95. Phil walked in and said "Oh, that's a chick screen saver!" Never mind that two men were looking at it.
He was heard to remark to a British man who was at TSC for consultation that Mustangs and Camaros are "tit cars" and that any man driving one is just a throw-back to the 70's. Phil's son bought a Mustang soon after that.
We had a consultant on site from a small company that has a very family-like atmosphere. It had just been bought by a large corporation and this consultant who I'll call Jim was very upset by it. Phil kept saying "Oh, come on, Jim! How much money did they make on that sale, anyway?" Jim kept saying he didn't want to talk about it because it was too emotional. Phil said "I don't think you're cut out for this, Jim. You're too emotional. Just like a woman."
He just did NOT get it.
When his wife (remember Barbie?) became pregnant with her second (Phil's fourth) child a couple of summers ago, Phil strutted around like a studded stallion for months in spite of the fact that he went and got a vasectomy immediately following that blessed (and unexpected) event. After the first ultrasound came back on which you could see gross features, he took LW and I aside in the hallway, hitched his pants up and said "Yep! It's a boy. I could see his nads on the ultrasound." "Nads," Phil? Jesus. LW and I were both looking for an escape route. I guess we were expected to laugh uproariously, clap him on the back and all have a group ball-scratch? Sheesh.
When the kid (Isaac) was actually born, Phil sent out a lovely e-mail to commemorate the event. It wasn't "Isaac was born on this day and weighed such and so and was this long." Oh, no. He described in gynecological detail every moment of the birth. LW and I were so disgusted we had to delete the e-mail after about 3 sentences. Why would anyone think that people want to READ that kind of nonsense?
Phil, the Fair and Impartial Leader
Herein, I'll discuss Phil's lack of ability in fairness and impartiality. This is a LONG section. J
Stella and Adolph (remember him from above?) always had it in for one another. Something about their personalities just set off sparks in the other. They never did quite get over it. After Phil had been working there for maybe 3 months, an event took place that I still refer to as The Phone Incident. It highlights Phil's utter lack of ability to manage impartially and fairly. Adolph was in another department that had been split off from IS a few months back. As such, there were still some open wounds about who had what responsibility. This particular day, Adolph had been helping us do something on our VAX computers, which he knew the most about. He and Phil were sitting in our office talking about it. Now, allow me to digress for just a moment and mention that both Phil and Adolph had private offices, but chose to have their meeting in my office, which I shared with Stella, Kinsey, and LW at that point. So there are approximately 5 people in the office (I wasn't there--I've heard about this anecdotally). Both Phil and Adolph have what I can politely call booming voices. They also both tend to scream everything and talk over everyone else in order to be heard. The more it looks like you're trying to get a word in edgewise, the louder they'll get. Okay….
The scene: Kinsey's and LW's desks are next to one another, Stella's is across the room. Stella is on Kinsey's phone, however, and has the phone cord (the curly one) dragged across the room. It's not bothering anyone. Sitting at LW's desk is Adolph. Sitting behind Kinsey in an extra chair is Phil. Kinsey is at her desk, LW is at his.
Everyone's trying to do their work, but nothing is getting done because Phil and Adolph are yelling at each other at the top of their lungs. It's not a fight--it's just their normal tones of voice. Finally, Stella (who is on the phone with a vendor attempting to work through a problem we have with their software) can't take anymore. She turns around, covering the phone with one hand and says "Hey, guys! Can you keep it down? I'm on the phone!" She said it calmly, not screaming, but probably annoyed that these two men with private offices chose to have their meeting in our office instead. Adolph leaps up, forces his way past Phil to Kinsey's desk, shoulders her aside, and puts his finger on the 'hang-up' button. "Well, you're not NOW!"
Stella leaped to her feet to kill Adolph, but for some reason the others kept her from doing it. Phil was sitting right there the entire time…and did NOTHING. He claims it was because he was just too shocked, but later whenever reference was made to this incident, he thought it was funny. Funny. Nothing was ever done to Adolph, and Stella left the company after about 3 more incidents of this type, citing Phil as the top reason she could no longer work for TSC. The fact that neither TSC nor Adolph was sued still amazes me.
Oh, Adolph was told he had to apologize to Stella for his actions. They all thought it was quite amusing. He poked his head in the office, looked around the corner with a smirk and said "I apologize for my actions earlier. They were rude and uncalled for. Will you accept my apology?" Stella looked at him with contempt smoldering in her eyes and said "Your apology is accepted" in about the most hate-filled voice I have ever had the pleasure of hearing. We all knew that neither the apology nor the acceptance thereof was sincere.
Let's see. What can I tell you about next? Oh, I know!
One of the many things LW was responsible for at the mill was the Novell server. He and I shared responsibility for it, actually. We were attempting to upgrade the server and give networked Office 95 to everyone (at the time we had dumb terminals--no one had local hard drives). A noble cause, but doomed from the start. Phil made LW's progress review depend on it. When it became apparent that it was not going to happen and probably SHOULD not happen, he made his progress review depend on something else, equally unattainable. And something else. And something else. We're supposed to have progress reviews at a minimum of once per year. But for some reason, Phil took a disliking to LW and kept doing this nonsense. As a result, LW went for 2 years without a review or a raise because of Phil. Dory, who had been hired considerably after LW, ended up making more because she had had her periodic reviews (I guess Phil thought that if he didn't at least do that, Dory might sue for racial discrimination, which proves how little he actually knew her) and LW did not.
Another of LW's projects was the CAD server. The CAD system is an NT server with AutoCAD on it and enough disk space to hold the thousands of technical drawings of all the equipment at the mill. The Engineering department uses it rather extensively. Well, for some reason, they ALSO took a dislike to LW. We don't know why. But they started doing stuff like deleting 1000 files and then telling LW he had to recover the information from backup. He'd spend an entire day doing this. We found out later because they admitted to another co-worker that they would backup the 1000 files before deleting them and then delete them on purpose, just to see what his reaction time was. He'd waste days on this.
At least one time during all this, he didn't get it recovered well enough or something. Some data was actually lost. Phil went with LW to a meeting with the entire management of the Engineering CAD department (4 people--TSC is a small company). They discussed what had happened calmly and rationally. They came to the agreed conclusion that what had happened was no one's fault--it was accidental, and we would make every effort to fix it. Meeting adjourns. LW is the first one out of the room. He then hears (he has EXCELLENT hearing) Phil say "*sigh* This is ALL LW's fault. I'm taking him off this project." Needless to say, LW called him on it. He claimed he never said it. At least one of the people in the room that day says he DID say it. He DID end up taking LW off the project and giving to Dominic.
Now that we're on the subject of Dominic, allow me to tell you how HE was mistreated by Phil. Dominic was hired as a temp because we needed someone to do all the hardware "dirty work" that was taking LW's and my time away from the important projects, like getting Windows 95 working on the Novell network. Dominic was strung along for most of 3 years as a temp. Phil kept telling him to try Mercedes (his favorite place to throw people he didn't want to deal with). Phil kept telling Dominic that he just didn't have the budget to hire him permanently. Meanwhile, the company has hired 100 people. Meanwhile, Phil himself has hired Dory to replace Stella when she left, while telling Dominic that he doesn't have the budget to hire anyone. Finally, after almost 3 years, apparently the budget was there and they hired Dominic.
Our department is structured in such a way that each of us (including Phil) would get the "on-call" pager for 1 week at a time. The requirement given to us by Phil was that the pager had to be on at all times, we had to answer it within 15 minutes, and if we had to go out of town, you had to find someone else to man the pager until you got back. We all followed these rules religiously so that the users at the mill would be able to get the help they needed 24x7. Except Phil. Phil would just get tired of getting awakened in the middle of the night and turn off the pager. Or he'd go home for lunch and leave the pager on the bedside stand while out jogging for 3 hours. That kind of thing. The users got to where they hated Phil so much they would manufacture problems just so they could call and page him at 2 AM. Our metallurgical department would wait until 4:50 to take complicated stuff to him knowing that he usually left at 5:00.
As a routine part of our jobs, we are also required to be at the mill at odd times, or sometimes around the clock. During late Summer of 1997, we had a major computer that ate itself. It was a large SQL server. As the DBA, I was assigned to "fix the problem." Kinsey is my backup. The problem with the computer was that we had it in an environment where there was water dripping from the ceiling a few inches in front of the machine, mill dust covering everything, and the building it was in would vibrate every few minutes because of activity taking place outside. We had the machine measured and it was taking several G's on each axis. It was rated for a fractional G. Kinsey and I knew this was the problem, and we told Phil. He did not listen. He made us stay at the mill building and rebuilding this machine over and over again until we could do the SQL statements in our head. During one two-week period, we worked 115 hours, 44 hours of which was in one 48-hour period. Kinsey and I couldn't take it. We were zombies. Both of us were irritable, dog-tired, and racing towards the wall of burn-out at a phenomenal speed. Kinsey had to say good night to her two young girls over the phone several times. They were asking "Mommy, when are you going to come home?" None of which Phil cared about. He still required us to be there for morning meetings and we'd get reprimanded if we didn't attend. I'm not sure how many times we told Phil that the machine needed to be moved out of the room it was in or just replaced. It didn't matter. It wasn't until someone ELSE told Phil that that he chose to believe it. We had to get the vendor of the machine itself to tell him. Suddenly, it was a good idea. I've never wanted to kill anyone as bad as I wanted to kill Phil during that 2-week period of that summer. The SQL server was down for quite a while before we got a replacement for it, and then rebuilt the old one using all new materials. Also in our department, we have an unwritten policy of getting comp time for the kind of over-and-above duty Kinsey and I put in. Neither of us got one single day of comp time. Not one. Phil said he couldn't afford to have us both gone for that kind of time. What a guy, huh?
In fact, he did something else with that machine that was stupid. We were trying to figure out where to put the machine in our already-too-full computer room. I told him at least 2 times verbally and once in e-mail where we could put it. He didn't respond. So one day, he's talking about not having anywhere to put it and Kinsey and I are both standing there. She says "Phil, there's plenty of room in that corner over there to put it." He was amazed. "Shit! Why didn't you tell me this before?" I had to print out the e-mail and show it to him before we could convince him that I had BEEN telling him the very spot for weeks.
Phil was nothing if not inconsistent. During 1996, we were told that we could not take any vacation between March and October because of projects that would REQUIRE us to all be on-site for those 6 months. We were told this in February, so since each of us had 2 weeks of vacation we were left with trying to put them before March or after October 1. I had three weeks because I've been there more than 5 years. Well, each of us gave our vacation schedule to Phil separately. He accepted them all and approved them. No one ever said anything. Suddenly, about 2 weeks before Christmas, the higher-ups started asking questions about coverage for the IS department. Phil had to ask us again what our schedules were because he had (of course) lost any paperwork we had given him. Turns out that all of us had requested and been GIVEN the week of Christmas off. Dominic was a temp, so he didn't have vacation yet, so the consensus was that the rest of us could still leave and Dominic would be there to handle some of the calls, and would have our phone numbers should anything that he couldn't handle go wrong. This wasn't sufficient. Word from on-high came down to Phil: Pick two people and tell them to cancel their plans. We have to have two regulars PLUS Dominic here for Christmas. But rather than accept the responsibility for this, Phil decided he would handle it a different way: he came into our office on December 10 and told us to decide amongst ourselves who was going to have to cancel because he "didn't want to make the decision." We were furious. Actually, there is no word in English that even begins to describe how we all felt. Livid, furious, apoplectic--none come close. In our fury, 3 of us cancelled, not willing to force the others to decide. The fourth (Dory) tried to cancel hers, too, but we convinced her to go. Well, that very day (December 10) was the day of the departmental Christmas party given by our VP for all the people in all his departments. We did not go for various reasons. First and foremost was that we were livid and couldn't trust ourselves to remain calm. But Kinsey and I were with a vendor who was getting $95/hour to show us something, and he had been cordially disinvited to the party. So we stayed with him. Dory went to get food, but came back to finish working on her project at her desk. LW stayed to answer the phones and provide user support while Kinsey and I were occupied with the vendor. Well, when Phil came back from the party, he was angry. He couldn't believe that we would be THAT unprofessional to allow our emotions to cloud our better judgment. He said we should have gone for political reasons, but that "it's just one of those things you either understand or you never will." Yep. He once again proved his own rule by being the exception.
Oh, and where was Phil during that Christmas, you might be asking? Well, he hopped on a plane and WENT on his scheduled vacation. Isn't that convenient? So did the VP. So did the VP whose complaint forced us to have to cancel our plans.
So the new year arrives. It's 1997, and we've been told that we cannot allow an unfortunate event like the previous Christmas to happen again. (Notice how it's suddenly OUR fault?) So we have to schedule our vacations for the entire year in January. We rankled, but did it. Since I had 3 weeks, I scheduled 2 and told them I wanted to reserve the other week for spur-of-the-moment decisions. Sometime in August, I told Phil I was going to take the entire week of Thanksgiving off, as well as two days the previous week. Unbeknownst to him, the two days in the previous week were for a job interview in Atlanta, but that's all water under the bridge at this point. J A couple of weeks before Thanksgiving, he comes to me and says "Some Brits from British Steel are scheduled to come talk about the Y2K problem on the 25th and 26th of November." For those of you without calendars nearby, that's the Tuesday and Wednesday of the week of Thanksgiving. The week I had told him 3 months previously that I wanted off and to which he had agreed. I had planned to take the previous Friday, that entire 3 day week, and the Monday following for a NICE vacation. I reminded him of all this, and his response was "Well, Mr. Jones [not his real name] isn't going to reschedule. You'll just have to cancel your plans." Mr. Jones [again, NOT his real name] is a Brit and had apparently forgotten the US holiday of Thanksgiving. Well, my fury by this point had boiled over, so I cancelled ALL my vacation days until the end of the year. I sent Phil e-mail telling him that as far as I was concerned I had no more vacation at all and that I would work Christmas day and every weekend if that's what they wanted, but that I was sick of having this done to me. Phil ignored the e-mail, no doubt deciding I was being emotional "like a woman." Anyway, Phil, myself and Mr. Jones had a meeting a couple of days after this to discuss the agenda of the meetings on the 25th and 26th. During the meeting, Mr. Jones said something about the Brits staying for that Thursday as well. I reminded him of Thanksgiving and made some comment about already having had to cancel my vacation for the other two days. Jones looked stunned. "Really?" He turned to Phil. "Why didn't you tell me he had vacation scheduled? I'd have rescheduled the meeting for the week after." This STILL burns me up, just thinking about it. Mr. Jones bent over backward to try to make me less bitter, reducing my required attendance from both days to just 4 hours of one day. Of course, by this point I had already cancelled everything except the job interview days. Those I told him in no uncertain terms I would have.
Now we step backwards a little to December 1996. It was my grandparents' 60th wedding anniversary. As part of the big event my mother and I had planned, we had spent months sending mail all over the country getting different people to send stuff and sign cards and just generally make it a day to remember. The culmination was to be on the night of the 17th at a nice restaurant near my home town of Eutaw. I had been telling everyone since March of our plans, and I made it abundantly clear that under no circumstances--including a fire at the mill--would I be called out of their anniversary. Well, you've probably guessed where this is going by now. Phil decides that SOMETHING that very night is so important that he MUST find me. I don't even remember what it was at the moment, but it was something that could have waited. I think he just sadistically wanted to be a control-freak and assert his dominance over my life. Well, he TRIED. First, he called my home number and left a couple of obnoxious messages for me to call him. When I didn't, he called LW at home (waking him up) and demanded to know where I was. LW told him I was at my grandparents' anniversary party (which Phil should have known by now--I had only been talking about it for nine months). He then demanded to know what my mother's name was and where she lived. LW claimed not to know (he's met my mother and has even been to her house). He then demanded to talk to MRS. LW to see if SHE knew (he'd been married less than a month and I had not known her prior to their engagement earlier that year, so why she would know is beyond me). When that panned out as well, he called Kinsey at home and demanded the same information of her. She also played dumb. And it's a damned good thing both of them did. If Phil had managed to find me that night, I would have quit on the spot and all that would have been left of me at work would have been a pristinely clean desk with a note on top saying "Fuck you, Phil."
A few months before Phil announced that he was leaving and made all our lives SO much more livable, he had a meeting with Mr. Jones and the president of a company that wrote the business software we pretty much run everything on. During this meeting, Phil announced that there were no bugs in the software and that everything was running fine. It wasn't until after he left in June of 1998 year that we started to realize how big a lie THAT was.
Phil, the Family Man
Phil took his family to the beach. Among them was his 18-month old child, "Isaac." He took little Isaac out floating on his (Phil's) surfboard. With no flotation devices. They're just floating around in the waves having fun when suddenly a larger wave than normal hits the board, capsizing it. Both Phil and Isaac go under. Phil comes up….and sees no son anywhere. After several tension-filled moments, the baby's head bobs to the surface and Phil pulls him out of the water, coughing and crying. He said that it wasn't until that night when he was trying to go to sleep that he realized how horrible it was. So the next day, he took him back out, and I quote: "So he wouldn't be afraid of water." Again, with no floatation devices. He said that Isaac "seemed a little apprehensive."
Phil's oldest son (who turned 18 in 1998) was about to graduate from high school, after which he was entering the army. Phil refused to attend his son's high school graduation because "he didn't earn it." He said he'd attend his boot camp graduation when the time came because he knew he would have EARNED his way through that. Apparently, in Phil's family, being proud of your offspring relies on their doing WELL in school, and not just average.
Phil wasn't the only person in his family who was unbearable. One day, we had just "confiscated" a small dorm-sized refrigerator that had been unused for 6 months and we had moved it into our office and were cleaning it out. Kinsey was spraying some Windex into it when Phil's wife (the aforementioned Barbie) walked in. Without missing a beat, she looks at Kinsey, whose back is turned, and says "Oh. So that's what you do." Sarcasm dripped. God only knows what Phil had told her. I could see that Kinsey wanted to just cram the Windex down Barbie's blonde little neck but resisted the urge. Isn't it nice to know that people like that can find one another and procreate, making yet another generation of assholes?
Don't ask me HOW, but shortly before Phil left, we got into a discussion in the office that led to being naked in your back yard. I think we were joking, actually. So, Phil chimes in and starts to tell us this...story. I'll try to relate it as well as I can. He likes to read the funnies after he gets out of the shower and before going to bed. So he's naked and is about to step into the shower...and realizes he doesn't have the paper. He thinks "It'd take too long to get dressed," and decides to just get the paper. Au naturale. A buffo. In the nude. He dashes downstairs and out the front door with his wife yelling "Phil! What are you doing?" He dashes down to where the paper is lying on the front lawn (nude, remember), grabs the paper, and high-tails it back inside. It must be noted that 1) it was late at night and probably few people actually saw him, and 2) he DID have the semi-decency to actually blush when he told us this at work in the office. I guess even he realized it was somehow...inappropriate to do so.
But THAT is not the funny part. The funny part is that Kinsey went home and told her husband, Wilson, this tale (as we ALL did--my friends all knew about it in rather short order). Wilson works nearby and tends to like Chinese food. So the very next day, Wilson goes to a Chinese restaurant near the mill, and sees Barbie in there. Being a lover of humorous stories, he mentions the incident to her. Barbie, it must be said, was NOT amused. :) When Wilson told Kinsey what he had done, she immediately rushed in to warn Phil, but it was too late. When she walked in, he was on the phone and all she heard was "Yes, Dear. No, Dear. Yes, Dear."
As another shot at Phil's family (yes, it's low, but you come to understand him better), I have to tell you about his oldest son, Gavin. Gavin was 14 when Phil first graced us with his presence. In the four years Phil was our (mis)manager, Gavin was arrested four times. That's once per year. But, of course, it was never HIS fault. Oh, no.
The first time was when Gavin's older girlfriend stole her father's car and drove it over and picked Gavin up WAY late at night (like maybe morning by this point). They only discovered he was gone from the house when the police called and Phil had to go down and pick up his son at the station. Phil was probably proud of him for having the balls to do it. It wasn't Gavin's fault though, you see. The girl coerced him into it. SHE stole the car. SHE was driving. Gavin was merely an innocent victim.
I don't remember all four instances (I'll get corroboration from Kinsey later). One of them involved Halloween. Gavin and some of his friends were driving around in a car egging other cars. What a guy, huh? Well, they egged one car and the guy in it slammed on the brakes, turned around, and started chasing them. Panicked, they ran away. And turned down a dirt road. Which turned out to be someone's driveway. Whoops! They pull up at the end of the road, and, not having any brains, decide they have to run for it on foot. Now....here's where Phil's story gets a little...well, let's just say he ignores reality. According to Phil, Gavin and his three friends take off running and come to a barbed wire fence. They make it over this fence and are running like mad when they encounter the second barbed wire fence. Gavin makes it over the fence, but his three friends don't. So (here it comes) Gavin--being the kind and considerate boy that only a son of Phil could be--goes back to help his friends. And they all get caught by the police, who have apparently been called by now. Does anyone believe that story? Anyone? Anyone? Beuller? See, Gavin wasn't the one egging. And he was only trying to help when picked up by the police. What a guy! I smell a future senator!
It should be noted that Barbie is 13 or so years younger than Phil. Since he was 36 when he started as our (mis)manager, that would put Barbie at about 23. She is not an unattractive young woman, and has a great figure, and is blonde (hence the name I chose to call her). So...here's this (comparative) goddess wandering around in the house with a 14-year-old son from a previous encounter (I'll get to THAT in a minute!) with a woman. In the four years we were privileged to have Phil around, the relationship between his teenaged son and his twenty-something wife was getting more and more strained. Finally, it snapped. I only know that at some point, they got into a shouting, screaming argument (in the front yard, apparently). The culmination was that as long as it was her house, Gavin wouldn't be allowed to sleep under her roof. He could VISIT, but he could not spend the night. When Gavin left for boot camp, they SOLD his furniture. Fred MacMurray, he's not. Donna Reed, she's not. Wally Cleaver Gavin is not. Their younger son had, by this point, elected to go back and live with his mother. Smart boy. Barbie's daughter by her previous marriage couldn't get out, unfortunately, being too young.
It's time, now, to relay Phil's family tree. This is what we know:
Phil & some woman from college ==> Gavin
Phil & his first wife ==> Wayne (the younger son)
Barbie & her first husband ==> Melissa
Phil & Barbie ==> Isaac
We quit TRYING to keep score at some point. So, none of Phil's children have any two parents in common. It was also never explained to us how he got custody of Gavin since we're fairly sure he was not married to the first mother. Isaac happened, in fact, because of the mixed lineage. One summer when Gavin and Wayne had been sent off to spend a month or two with their mother and Melissa had to spend some time with her male biological DNA-contributing parental-unit, Phil and Barbie had just a LITTLE too much free time on their hands and apparently spent most of it horizontally. Isaac was born in March or so of the next year.
I should probably mention one last thing.... Tuscaloosa Steel has annual picnics. The first one after Phil started was in August and he did not bring his wife. I don't remember why, but it was maybe because she hadn't moved here, yet. Anyway, I didn't go to the next one, but I heard from others that Phil and Barbie were there. Phil, of course, didn't introduce anyone to his wife. That wasn't his method. He just went on about his business (probably speaking only to those managers with whom speaking would get him something at work). Afterwards, we heard that a lot of the other spousal-units were asking who that whore was in the too-short shorts and halter-top. Yep. Barbie. :)
Oooh! Oooh! One last thing, and then I PROMISE I'll stop bringing up stuff about his family. Maybe. :) At Phil's first Christmas party (Tuscaloosa Steel has an adult Christmas party and a Children's Christmas party), he comes in with his entire family. There are seats around a lot of tables and there have to be literally dozens of empty seats because no one is there yet. Another employee (we'll call him Jason) and his family are working their way to some empty seats in the midst of a whole bunch of other empty seats. I mean, there is NO ONE ELSE seated, okay? So Jason and his kids and wife are just about to sit and up comes Phil, Barbie, Wayne and Melissa (Isaac wasn't even a gleam, yet). Phil says "Hey! We were gonna sit there!" Jason, not to be a jerk, just gave Phil a look and moved. But it didn't go unnoticed. By the following work-day, that story was all over the mill. Phil has this tendency to believe that if you are not a manager, you are Not An Important Person (tm) and he won't speak to you. Especially if you wear a blue uniform. You Can Do Him No Good, So You Are Not A Person. That attitude didn't win him a lot of friends, either, as you can well imagine.
Phil's Management Techniques
Phil once told our department that we weren't an effective team because we didn't yell and scream at each other enough. I kid you not. That is what he said. In his mind, if I need information that is keeping me from finishing project X and Kinsey has the information, I should yell at her to get it to me and just harass her until she complies. This is just THE stupidest, most blatherbrained idea I think I have EVER heard. After he told us this, we would go around shouting at each other whilst grinning. "I NEED THAT FILE *NOW*, DAMMIT!" "WELL, YOU CAN JUST WAIT! YOU'LL GET IT WHEN YOU GET IT!" Phil would just walk out of the room, shaking his head.
Phil openly admitted that each of us was grossly underpaid, but kept saying that there was nothing he could do. "There just isn't enough in the budget," he'd say. Or "Jones isn't going to be willing to pay the national average. If you don't like it, get another job somewhere else." Then they advertised for a new position called Lead Computer Systems Specialist. It was the position a step above mine. The guy Phil picked (I'll call him "Joe") had less experience than either Kinsey or Dory, yet he was being offered MUCH more than either of them were getting at the time. How do we know this? Well, Phil told us. Yep. He just up and said something one day about how he hoped we wouldn't have a problem with how much more than us this guy was getting paid. We were shocked that he would just ADMIT it like that. Then he had the audacity to be completely taken aback one day when all four of us just attacked him and demanded to know what Joe was making. We felt we deserved to know since we were going to have to share an office with this man with less experience who was making more money, and who WE were going to have to train. He didn’t tell us, but I can guarantee that by the end of the conversation ("hand to throat," as Stella commonly referred to it), he knew just HOW dissatisfied his little team was. We basically called him a liar and told him he was beneath our contempt. We never did quite overcome that conversation. It wasn't long after that that Phil started looking for a job elsewhere. Awwww.
You know, now that I look back on it, we were just doing what he told us! Didn't he say that if we had problems, we should yell and scream and get in each others' faces?
It should also be noted here that Joe never did actually come to work at Tuscaloosa Steel. He and his wife came to Tuscaloosa from their home somewhere in New York to do a kind-of "check-it-out" thing. The wife said "Uh-uh, nope, no way am I moving there!" and so he reneged on his acceptance of the position. The others of us (LW, Kinsey, Dory, Dominic and me) were trying very hard not to be angry at Joe for Phil's idiocy. We made signs that said "It's not Joe's fault!" and hung them all over the room, in an attempt to remind ourselves that all Joe was doing was accepting a position paying more than he was getting at his current job. He had no way of knowing the seething hornets' nest he was about to descend into. It was very much for the best that his wife said "no."
A Short Digression
I'd like to say just a short bit in Phil's defense, if you can believe it. I know that we were not the easiest group of people to manage (or fail to, in his case). We expected to be treated fairly and with logic, and we now know that those are not his techniques. We expected to be kept informed of decisions that would effect our lives and our salaries, but once again, his technique was to keep us in the dark on the assumption that no news was good news. Prior to Phil, we had been getting our progress reviews on time and had gotten 7% raises each year for a job well done. Phil's technique was one of late or no (negative) progress reviews and a 3% or less raise each year regardless of the job done. Yes, some of this came down from higher up, but again, we unreasonably expected our manager to fight for us. Again, we just didn't understand his techniques, which were to tell us how hard he was fighting for us while simultaneously agreeing to whatever his boss proclaimed without a word put in for us. We expected to have him on our side, but again we were rather foolishly brought into reality by finding out that Phil was almost never on our side if it made him look bad. Again, we were just unaware of his management techniques. Phil always claimed that he was more mature than all of us because he could yell and scream and call you names one minute, then laugh and joke with you the next, wondering why you were so angry. I guess we're just immature, that way.
From his point of view, I guess we're all just a bunch of pouty little spoiled children who haven't gotten the Slap of Reality yet. In fact, when I would complain to non-TSC friends of mine, they would come to the same conclusion--until presented with the anecdotal evidence herein presented. They all agreed that Phil was quite possibly the worst manager anyone had ever heard of and that he was purposefully trying to force us to quit so he could hire higher-paid grinning lackeys who would do his bidding without griping. Once again, I guess we were just too dumb to figure out his motives.
And that's all I have to say in his defense.
Even In Leaving, He Was a Jerk
When Phil left, those of us left behind to cope with the chaos immediately took ownership of his directories and read every file in there. :) His resume was a work of art. In it, he took credit for all the work each of us had done. He was a SQL DBA. He was the payroll administrator. He single-handedly came up with our network design. He was helpdesk. He could leap tall buildings in a single bound while simultaneously rescuing a kitten from a tree. God Himself only knows what horror he is wreaking on the company he left us for, but we only hope they keep him, so we won't report the blatant lies on his resume. In fact, should they call, I'll (choke down the vomit and) say "Oh, yes! He did all that and more! He was truly a great manager, and we loved him so. Would you consider letting him come back?" I might have to do a LOT of time in Purgatory (if I actually believed in it), but it'd be worth it.
In Conclusion
Phil, if you're reading this, I hope you have some glimmer of understanding just how much we have all come to loathe you and every decision you ever made. There were several dozen people who left Tuscaloosa Steel in the 18 months prior to your leaving. The ONLY one I have yet to hear a single word of regret for their having left is you. Your decision to leave Tuscaloosa Steel is the only one in your 4 years of being there that not a single person disagreed with. You made more people happy by your decision to leave than you could possibly know, and we want to extend our thanks to you for finally realizing that you were not wanted and getting the hell out. We so don't miss you, it's not even funny. Everything is calmer, happier, and less antagonistic than it ever was while you were here. I only regret that you single-handedly cost us 4 good people. If it hadn't been for you, we probably wouldn't have lost any of them.
If you're from Phil's new place of employment and you're reading this, I hope you take what I've said to heart. He should never be trusted, and you should probably look at your turnover rate in his department. Mark my words, it'll go up. People just can't be expected to work in an environment like that for long.
[Added a month or so after the above was typed.] We recently heard through the grapevine that the first person at his new place of employment has given up and left. It took only slightly more time than Stella leaving Tuscaloosa Steel (she was the first to leave, and after only 4 months). As I said: Mark my words, it'll go up. I LOVE it when I'm right.
[Added April, 1999--almost 1 year since he left] I've now had a couple of people mentioned herein read this. Notably LW and Kinsey. Both agreed that yes, I've captured the essence of Phil. Both had suggestions for stuff I had forgotten to add, which I have added. Others not necessarily mentioned herein have read it, as well, and have been most amazed that we stuck it out for four years with this walking afterbirth. Tanya is going to read it, next, and I'm sure she'll have some things to add. She only lasted one month in our department because of him, and she had to share an office with him! Can you imagine? Yoiks! I eagerly await her additions....
[Added June, 1999.] Tanya has read the page, and she didn't have much to add, oddly enough. She sat in his office because there WAS no place else to put her. I think it was for about 1 month. After that, she left the department. In spite of what management may believe or choose not to believe, there is a direct correlation to those two events.
I'd also like to add some other stuff here. After Phil left TSC we got e-mail back from him a couple of times. Here are a representative sample, with the names changed correspondingly to protect the innocent.
Yesterday I got my first bonus check. 40 percent. Folks here were disappointed, because it was 45 percent last month. We made a million and a half in profit last month.
So how did TSC do last month? Remember, the claim last January was, we break even in June...
This, after TSC hadn't had a profit check in MONTHS if not years. What a jerk.
Pete told me Kinsey was the new I.S. Manager. Congratulations, Kinsey! I'm sure that six months from now, you'll all be thinking, "Jeez, are we glad that Phil left!". (of course, I'm sure Kinsey's thinking that NOW :) In all seriousness, Kinsey will probably make a better supervisor than I ever was - if I ever was one.
Gee. I guess Phil even knew HIMSELF how poor a manager he was. Actually, I know he knew because he used to constantly tell us how bad he was at managing. Not that we had to be told that....
The next one requires a little set-up. Phil's wife Barbie was surfing the web one day after he had left and she was still attending school in Tuscaloosa. She is looking for someone else when she runs across MY web site. Back then I had a comment or two about good-ol' Phil on my main page. I don't even remember what it said. So she sees this, tells Phil, and he goes to my web site. He then sends Pete this comment in e-mail, which Pete then sent to me:
Isn't that just...sad? I mean, here's this man who is proud of being thought a jerk. I only hope that...no. I have no fear that he will ever realize how much of a jerk he is. So no use wasting a wish.By the way, I got a good laugh at Kaa's personal web sight [sic]. You can tell Kaa that I feel honored to have made such a big impact on his life!
[Added August, 1999] LW and Mrs. LW re-read this page. Both wanted me to add a remark about how Phil handled LW's leaving. So I tried to come up with a place to add it. I couldn't, without making a new category, or adding a little Author's Note. Sort of like...this one. :)
LW had been interviewing--we knew this because unlike Phil, we actually cared about our coworkers' lives. So we suspected that he was leaving--we just didn't know when. Unfortunately, I was out of the office when this happened (I believe I had been at the mill until after midnight the night before and had come in at 10 or 11 AM), so I'm relaying it anecdotally. LW and Kinsey and Dory were all in the office, and Phil had come in. We were in the midst of interviewing to find someone to fill a position we had open. Phil had been interviewing and it was down to the final two candidates. He came into the office (as he often did) and sat on our countertop and complained that he wished he could hire both candidates. Without missing a beat, LW clicked on File | Print in the Word document he had been editing. He nabbed the page off the laser printer that was on his desk, handed it to Phil and said "Now, you can." It was his letter of resignation. I only wish I had been there to see the look on Phil's face. Not that Phil should have been surprised. When you purposefully make someone else the butt of your own incompetent management, you can't expect them to bend over nicely and just take it for very long. To put it bluntly, there was no love lost between Phil and LW. Or Mrs. LW. Or LW's mother and father. Or LW's dog. Or LW's mother-in-law. You name 'em, they probably would have happily drowned Phil.
[Added September, 1999] I recently found out that Phil was a Siamese (co-joined) twin at birth. He and his brother were born joined at the penis. Tragically, during the operation to separate the two babies, both twins died and only the prick lived. [Thanks to some comedian for this one, which was originally about Donald Trump.]