When you work in Corporate America, it takes things from you.
You know that going into it, or at least you should. It’s been the case for quite a while, but any pretense that corporations cared about their employees was stripped away for good in the 1980s and 1990s. Companies changed the names of their personnel departments to “Human Resources.” Layoffs were rebranded as “rightsizing,” or “productivity gains.” People and jobs were referred to as “headcount” and “FTEs”, short for “full-time equivalents,” and CEOs like Jack Welch started saying the quiet part out loud. His thoughts on Human Resources:
“They’re not the health and happiness, picnics, benefits team. They’re the development team, developing today’s and tomorrow’s leaders. If you’ve got an organization where HR is relegated to forms and benefits, you’ve got the wrong game going.”
That fit perfectly with his Neutron Jack reputation of eliminating people and leaving the buildings standing. Employees, in his view, shouldn’t be viewed as people to be kept healthy and happy. They’re just business assets to be developed, used, and then tossed aside.
That philosophy took hold in most of Corporate America. We saw benefits reduced, and pension plans eliminated, and job security destroyed. Employment became a transaction instead of a relationship between a company and its employees.
I know this first-hand. I was in that world for over thirty years, and personally witnessed the evolution of the business/employee relationship. I also decided to accept that deal, the bargain that I’d get paid pretty well but would be asked to accept the instability, and the compromises, and the impersonal relationship with my employers (one of whom was Jack Welch). I willingly made that deal.
So I knew things would be taken from me. I didn’t specifically know what they would be, like being told to spend the first Father’s Day after my dad passed away sitting on an airplane flying to Europe, my face constantly turned toward the window so the guy in the next seat wouldn’t see me crying as I thought of my dad and my kids, but I knew that was the sort of bargain I’d made.
And so, when I had to spend my fortieth birthday in Toronto running some workshop with my friend and colleague, Chris, instead of being home with my family where I belonged, it wasn’t really a surprise. It fit squarely into the terms of the arrangement I had with an employer that didn’t care when I was born, or with whom I’d rather spend the important events in my life.
But there was a silver lining to that particular trip. Chris, like me, was a baseball fan, and he agreed that we should spend one of our evenings that week taking in a Blue Jays game at Rogers Centre, which I still think of as SkyDome.
Let me tell you a bit about Chris.
He was a really smart guy, an engineer who had lived all over the country. While getting his Masters as BYU, he got into trouble on his first day on campus because he wasn’t aware of their twice-daily playing of the national anthem and didn’t stop and put his hand over this heart for one of them. He was also a champion skeet shooter, and an Eagle Scout, and leader of his son’s Boy Scout troop, and a connoisseur of single malt scotch.
He loved the outdoors, and regularly biked and hiked and played golf. And he was funny, a quick wit who once told a room full of Swiss people that the best chocolate in the world was made in Hershey, Pennsylvania, just to watch them all get agitated. (Yes, it worked.) I traveled with him several times. The conversations were always interesting, and he always knew great places to eat.
One of the many places he had lived was in Baltimore, living in the same neighborhood as Mark Teixeira, who was in high school at the time. Chris became a bit of an Orioles fan while living there, so when I told him I wanted to catch the Blue Jays game, and that they were playing the O’s, he was happy to go with me.
We wrapped up our workshop a couple of hours before the game, dropped our stuff at the hotel, then walked to SkyDome. We were pretty early, so we decided to go to the top of the CN Tower before the game, knowing there was a restaurant at the top where we could probably grab a drink.
In retrospect, I think Chris was indulging me because he knew I’d missed my birthday at home with my family. We could have stopped at any number of places in downtown Toronto, but I thought the view from the top of the tower would be neat, and he decided to tag along despite the fact that, for all of his love of the outdoors and adventures, it turns out he was deathly afraid of heights, something I didn’t know at the time.
I should have known it though. A year earlier, at some silly team-building event on the side of a Swiss mountain, our whole group had gone on a zip-line outing. There was an alternate event for anyone who couldn’t or wouldn’t do that, and Chris had chosen the alternative instead of climbing a couple hundred feet up a tree, clipping onto a wire, and whizzing down the slope. I guess I should have been paying attention.
When we got to the top of the tower, I walked out into the observation deck area and noticed it had a glass floor you could walk on and look straight down to the street level.
I stepped right out, thinking it was pretty neat. I looked up to share my excitement with Chris and saw that he was still back on the carpeted area, looking at me with a “Hell no” look on his face. I walked over and asked if he wanted to walk on the glass. His verbal reply was a more graphic version of the look on his face. It started with an “f.”
I stepped off the glass and chatted with him for a bit. There were kids and elderly folks walking around on the glass, so I pointed them out and said that it was perfectly safe. I could see from the look on his face that that wasn’t going to work, so I pulled out the big guns.
“What would you tell Sam if he wouldn’t walk on the glass?”
Sam was his teenage son, the apple of his eye. We both had sons named Sam, coincidentally, so we talked to each other a lot about them. I knew that, as Sam’s scout leader, Chris regularly had to challenge him to expand his comfort zone, try new things, and learn new skills. He’d been relocated for his career many times, the job again taking something from him and his family, like comfort and friendships, as they moved from place to place. But Chris tried to look on the bright side a lot, and saw the many relocations as at least having the advantage of exposing his kids to new places and people, to always be learning and growing. It was something he always wanted them to have, new experiences.
So that question got to him, and the look on his face changed. And briefly, very briefly, he then stepped out onto the glass. He didn’t linger, and he didn’t look down very much, but he made himself take those steps. Then he walked back over to me and said, “Now I need that drink.”
So we found the restaurant, and he had his standard single malt scotch, neat. I ordered a beer, and when they arrived, he held up his glass and said, “A toast…to walking on the glass.” I smiled, and we touched glasses and drank. Then he thanked me for convincing him to try it, and told me he’d tell the story to his son Sam whenever he needed to motivate him just a little extra.
We finished our drink and walked to the game. The Blue Jays weren’t very good that year, so we had no trouble getting tickets on a random Tuesday night. We were disappointed that the dome was closed, because it was a beautiful July night, but we had hot dogs, and a couple of beers, and watched a pretty good game that the Jays eventually won in the bottom of the ninth. We even got to see a Hall of Famer play, though we didn’t know at the time that’s where Scott Rolen was headed.
A couple of months after that game, the company relocated Chris and his family again, this time to Zurich. He became involved in a Boy Scouts chapter there for Sam, and threw himself into his new home as much as I would have expected. Three years later, in October, 2011, Chris had a heart attack on the front steps of the local office, and died on the spot. He was just 55-years old, the same age I am now. This funny, smart, personable, energetic, family man literally died on the job.
When I heard the news, I was crushed, but I also had two very clear thoughts, his gifts to me. The first was that I wouldn’t suffer the same fate. His death is the principal reason that I left that life at the earliest possible opportunity. When people ask me what it’s like to be retired, I correct them. “I still work,” I tell them. “I only retired from working for other people.”
My second thought when I heard the news was that I was glad I had convinced Chris to walk on that glass. Otherwise, he may have never had the chance.
Beautiful story, Paul.