I should have taken the watch.

           Anytime I make a choice or decision that I regret, or if my wife calls me on one, my response is, “yeah, and I should have taken the watch.” I know that’s an odd expression so let me explain. When I was 21, Michael who was one of my good friends from high school offered me a temporary job driving fork lift for his family’s beer distributorship. His father had died a year earlier and his mother was running the business while Michael finished college, the plan being for him to take over after graduation. I figured what the hell, I was already pretty good at forking around and it was only temporary. Well go figure, that temp job turned into the next decade of my life.

            Life was good; I was 22, a Teamsters warehouseman making $13 an hour with full benefits and not a care in the world. I got an apartment, bought a new car, and started dating this cute young woman who worked in the warehouse with us. I was good at my job, was in a stable relationship, and enjoyed my “recreational” activities. For the next couple of years life just flew by. Michael, who was now running the business, offered me a management position with the company. I readily accepted, quit the union, and became the new assistant operations manager. Over the next nine years I held different positions, from warehouse manager to data processing manager, eventually settling into inventory control manager. Over that same period the company grew by leaps and bounds; we were an Anheuser-Busch distributor and when I started working we only had 4 brands - Bud Light hadn’t even been introduced yet. As inventory control manager I went from ordering 50 items to a few 100 and then we bought a wine distributorship with over 1000 different items. Needless to say my job had become much harder.

            Michael and I had been part of a close knit group of friends in high school. He was always a little on the wild side, had been raised Irish Catholic, was the most affluent of our group, and had a propensity towards self destructive behavior that also ran in his family. His father was a hard drinking WWII pilot who died in his early 50’s, his older brother died from a drug overdose while we were in high school, and his younger sister died just a few years ago after a life full of substance abuse. Michael had always been a heavy partier and even running a multi-million dollar company with dozens of employees didn’t slow him down. When it came to substance abuse lets just say that in that race Michael and I ran nose to nose. That changed when I was 28. With the prodding (threat of divorce) of my new wife Diane, the “Breaker Girl” from the warehouse, I went cold turkey on our first wedding anniversary and quit doing illegal drugs for good. As happens so often with ex co-dependents Michael and I started to drift apart. This didn’t bode well for me as he was still my boss.

            Over the next 5 years I continued doing my job but getting more and more frustrated with Michael and the way he was running the company. Michael had gone from being an idealistic, socialist leaning kid who favored sharing his good fortune, to a union busting, money craving, hard ass, that really didn’t care much about anyone but himself and his habits. It got to the point where I felt I had no choice but to tell his mother about his drug problem and try for some kind of intervention. She listened patiently and after I was finished did what all good enablers do, told Michael all about our meeting. He was furious and that was the beginning of the end for me. Even though I had still been getting good evaluations, increasing bonuses, and pay raises, I was transferred to the wine division where I felt kind of lost.

            During that last year my wife Diane and I had started our first part-time business. It was called Steady Eddy’s Pushcarts and we did snack concessions at a seasonal amusement park. That business was doing well enough that Diane had quite her job to work it full time for the summer season. I was working it by taking partial vacation days during the week and then working on the weekends. Working at the park was fun and I had also settled into a comfortable routine at the distributorship. I didn’t mind working in the wine division but I was still angry and I showed it by being “passive aggressive”. This manifested itself in different ways that I’m not real proud of but in essence I just quite caring about my job.

            Anheuser-Busch had an incentive program for its distributors call “Dimensions of Excellence” and the company worked hard at meeting those goals. We had achieved all our goals that year so meetings were scheduled where all the employees would receive a commemorative watch as a thank you. My group meeting was scheduled for 1:00 but I was busy working on something else and since I was still pissed and being passive aggressive I just skipped the meeting because I really didn’t want the watch. A couple of hours later I was called into Michael’s office where he proceeded to tell me that I had purposely missed a mandatory meeting and that was insubordination. He then told me he wanted my resignation letter within the hour. I was in total shock and I told him I wouldn’t quit, that he would have to fire me. He then proceeded to hand me a termination letter and asked a couple of my co-workers who were also my good friends to escort me to my office so I could pack my things.

            I had worked there for over 11 years, 1/3 of my life and it was over just like that. It’s now been a little over 20 years since that happened and it’s still the most traumatic event of my life. There’s no way to know how my life would have been different but there are way too many occasions where I say “yeah, and I should have taken the watch.”


To view the column in it's original form go to page 18 of the following link.Winters Express 3/10/11