2003-06-13 - 10:20 p.m.

Hise

I am wrapping up one of the weirdest fucking weeks I have experienced in a long, long while.  It's Friday night and I am happy to be home.  I am very tired and really need a mental break.  After weeks of struggling and wondering what was going to happen next at work and worrying about what I will do I find myself feeling calm.

The week started out with my deciding that if I had to I would quit my job if the company president decided he was going to try to extort $600 from my coworkers and me.  I won't go into the details, but he got it in his head that we had paid too much for shipping after he told us not to and he had to teach us a lesson.   I kept giving him opportunities to let it drop but he would not do it.  He brought it up every week.

So on Monday I figured he would make us decide what we were going to do about it.  In other words, he wanted us to punish ourselves so he would not have to do it.  But we were too busy.    So it was going to be Tuesday.  He missed our meeting and, later in the day, gave me a raise and a promotion.

My brother from another life, Viarum, had gone on a trip with the sales guy to do a production training and introduction for a new client.  Viarum hates the sales guy as much as I do and he was completely demoralized by having to sit in a car with him for hours, have lunch with him and do a presentation.  And the whole time the sales guy is asking him all sorts of leading questions and trying to get Viarum to rat the rest of us out.  Viarum called it a fishing trip because the sales guy was fishing for information on all of us.

Poor Viarum had to put up with it.  He was ready to climb the walls by the time he got back.  And I found out today that some of the questions he asked him were things like, "What would you do if your job disappeared tomorrow?" And, "Do you have some other line of work to fall back on?"

That pretty much gave Viarum the feeling that he was about to be fired.  I told him that they don't really fire people, they just demote them.  So he was depressed all week.  They are up to something.  It all goes back to the day Viarum told them that they were cheap and petty after they tried to stick him with the cost of a plane ticket when he backed out of a company trip when his uncle died.  They don't understand that he was right, it was cheap and petty.   But from their point of view, he just isn't a "team player."

I know that sounds like a joke, but it is completely true.  That's the way they see it.  Oh, my gosh the sales guy is such a manipulative liar.
 

I'm just guessing that with me walking around and moping and not looking the president in the eye and avoiding him, and their impending decision to either fire or demote Viarum, they realized if we both quit it would pretty much cripple our department for months.   So they threw some money my way to keep me there.

Doesn't all of this seem sort of unnecessary?   My point has always been that they have four really great, hard working, talented guys working in our department.  All we really want is to have a nice place to work and a good salary.  The problem is that the president just does not know how to manage a staff.  He is great at generating income.  He is great at creating profitable relationships and he has a talent for watching the bottom line.  But he has missed a tremendous opportunity and it is a shame.

There are working business models of companies that invest heavily in the well being of the employees.   Companies that do what is right and make sure their biggest investment, the people who make the company go, is well taken care of.  And it is not just paying them well.  These companies are able to build a work atmosphere where people feel they are making a valuable contribution, that they matter and are able to sign on to the company's mission.

Our company's mission is to excel and do whatever it takes and make sure we are wonderful and a lot of over doubletalk that makes no sense.

And the greatest shame of all is that every single man who works at our company would devote so much more of himself under the right sort of leadership.  But it would take a visionary and, unfortunately, we have a leader who was trained by the biggest status quo there is, IBM.  Don't get me wrong, by many gauges our company is doing very well.  Meanwhile, there are companies out there with a more humane business structure that are worth billions and for some reason these businesses are more or less ignored by short sited businessmen.

I just get so frustrated.  The potential is about 100 times greater than anyone has yet imagined.   The little rinky-dink company I work for could dominate the market if they did things differently.  But it would mean making very tough choices that would limit the bottom line in the short term.

Oh, well. What do I know?

Anyway, I do feel as though I am coming out of my funk.  My mind is starting to turn to other things.  The guys I work with who came to my show a few weeks ago have not stopped talking about it.  I think they see me differently now.  It is like seeing me on stage has changed their view of me.  And the odd thing is, it did not occur to me that it was anything out of the ordinary.   But I think now they see me as a performer.  And that's a good thing.

This evening I had a short conversation with Jamie.  It was about mimicry.  He said that if he had the ability to do different voices he would be extremely funny.  The fact is, he already is extremely funny, and I think he knows that.  But I think what he meant was that he wishes he were able to vocalize all the things that go through his mind during the day.  And he asked me if when I imitate someone do I practice it before hand or does it just happen?

People have been asking me that question all my life.  Even back in primary school kids would ask me that.  It is just something I've always done.  I used to see people do impersonations on television when I was younger and I just assumed I could do it too.  People like Rich Little, Fred Travelina and John Bynor.   I did imitations of them doing impersonations.   And in elementary school I would imitate other kids and teachers and crack everyone up.  Sooner or later one of my friends would ask me to combine the voices and, for example, imitate our teacher acting as Richard Nixon.  And I just did it.  And they kept making it more and more complicated until I had to stop.

But the answer to the question is, sometimes a voice just happens and sometimes I practice it.  There have been times when I just open my mouth and imitate something I have never practiced and it comes out perfect and even I am shocked by it.  Other times it forms over a period of time.  Like the imitation I do of Tommy.  It all started when I heard him say the word "moon."  It ran through my head for about a week and finally I did an imitation of it for Kevin.  This was when I was new at this company and was not sure what they would make of me.  It cracked Kevin up, that one word, and it just snowballed into a full blown character.

Lately I have been forming a new imitation of the Irish guy in our office.  He has a great dialect and I am fascinated by it.  It is nothing like the other Irish dialects I have heard all my life.  I thought Irish people talked like Dave Allen, but this guy sound more like my sister in law from South Carolina mixed with Canadian.  All of his sentences go up at the end like a question.  And when he says the word "house" it sounds like "hise" with a long "I".  And the number eight is pronounced "ay-at "
 

I am insane.  But it keeps running through my head and I keep practicing it by saying it out loud.  So when I drive by one of those waffle restaurants we have here in the South I will say "Way-ful  Hise" and when I have to go to the men's room I tell my coworkers I have to go and "urinay-at."

And, finally, I am reading a new book called Terrible Lizard.  It tells the story of how archeology came into being.  In the 18th and 19th Centuries people on the coast of England kept finding these skeletons of animals merged in rock and wondered how in the world that ever happened when everyone agrees with the Bible that the earth is no older than 6000 years old.  They called this new science Undergroundology and they just had a dickins of a time trying to reconcile evidence of giant reptiles though the Bible never mentions such a thing.  And, in the very early days, they could not believe what they were seeing.  One man found what looked like a thigh bone, but it was so huge it meant that the animal it belong to would have to be bigger than an entire house!

And many college professors agreed, at the time, that if these new geologists were not careful they would completely destroy the story of Noah and make mankind lose all faith in the infallible word of God.

Very interesting.

Jimmy
 

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