Installment # 53

I’m told that as a 3-4 year old, when we drove out to grandma and Popu’s summer place toward the eastern end of Long Island, and I had to pee, Popu would try to get me to go in a jar that he always brought along for that purpose in order to avoid having to stop just for me.  I was told that he would chant “Oo-la-la, pee pee in the jar” to encourage me.  I thought, “That doesn’t even rhyme” and figured he must have modified the second ‘la’ to sound more like ‘lar’ to rhyme with ‘jar.’  It finally dawned on me that his pronunciation of ‘jar’ was probably more like ‘jah’ and was pretty close to rhyming.  Donald and Harold were likely still in diapers at the time, so lost out on the opportunity to pee in a jar in close proximity to several people in a crowed car going down the highway next to other cars.

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My natural desire to speak and act like the people around me causes me to really scratch my head about people immigrating to the United States and not trying to fit in.  Those who insist on wearing their strange, off-putting garb and clinging to the old ways; who are not interested in adapting and being accepted…how does that make sense?  I know that if I made a permanent relocation to a land that was foreign to me, with hopes of having a better life, I would be eager to adopt the ways of my host country and to fit in.  Sure, I would lean initially on English-speaking people who had made the transition before me, but then I would get on with assimilation into my new society.  I would not, of course, relocate to a country whose customs I did not want to adopt or emulate.

I am really getting off on a tangent here, but the above reminds me of my attitude toward an incident that took place in Southern California a while back.  A young black male led the police on a high speed car chase, and there was an uproar about police brutality when they finally caught up with him.  My thought was that if you are leading the police on a high speed chase, you should be thinking, “Oh man, when they catch me they are going to beat the shit out of me.”  Think about the danger being created, not just to the pursuers, but to other motorists, pedestrians, to property.  The chase also takes a significant portion of the on-duty police force away from other potentially important situations in the area.  Also, when they drag the driver out of the car, they don’t know if he is on drugs that make him violent and unpredictable.  They don’t know if he is armed; if there is a dangerous person hiding in the back seat; if there are explosives in the trunk.  As the driver, I would fully expect to have a very bad experience at the hands of these angry police officers, yet this individual and many supporters were outraged that the police were more brutal than perhaps strictly necessary.

On another tangent, the first time I heard of school teachers going on strike for better wages and benefits, my thought was, “If you don’t like the pay as a teacher, then go do something else for a living.”  These are all people with college degrees.  Surely they can find jobs that pay better.  If you like teaching so much, you can always do it on the side as a volunteer.  To my mind, the prevailing rate of pay for a given job represents the value that society places on the contribution you are making, especially in the public sector.  Recently, the U.S. Post Office announced plans to stop Saturday mail delivery, and some of the Post Office employees were saying on television that their jobs should be protected – that it wasn’t fair to lay them off just because society doesn’t need their services any longer.  I say, “Get some pride about yourself.  Why would you want to continue to be paid for something that society no longer values?” That is the way my logical mind works.  Perhaps if I had an average amount of common sense and/or was not so naïve and/or not so “clueless,” I would understand these things better.  What does make sense to me is the sentiment that, “Any time someone gets something for nothing, someone else is getting nothing for something.”

One of the benefits of realizing and accepting a lack of common sense which, as I’ve said, came later in life for me, is that I am quick to apologize for any misunderstandings, assuming that it was probably my fault.  If I seem to have hurt someone’s feelings, for example, I immediately assume I said or did something wrong.  I don’t think: “They shouldn’t feel that way,” or “They’re being too sensitive,” etc.  In my young adulthood I was surprised, maybe baffled, to hear that certain groups of people did not like being called by certain terms, since I wouldn’t care what people called me.  That may be because I grew up as a member of the majority, not as a member of any minority, but I think it is also because I don’t take myself too seriously; I laugh at myself easily; I feel like the other person is entitled to his/her opinion, etc.  Over the years, however, I have developed a genuine respect for how others might feel, even if I don’t understand it.

While serving in Germany I heard for the first time that black men do not like to be called “boy.”  I couldn’t imagine why not, even after they explained it to me.  Now of course I can see that it is an obvious attempt to “put someone in their place,” so to speak, as in, “I’m the man; you’re the boy, and don’t you forget it.”  While at Stanford, the university had a crisis of conscience, I guess, and decided it was too insulting or in some other way just not right to call their sports teams the Stanford Indians.  How do the American Indians feel about that?  I have to wonder about the process within society that led to that new-found sensitivity. 

Did the American Indian population grow as a percentage of the American population?  No.  Did they become more vocal?  Not that I am aware.  Did a great leader and spokesman emerge?  I don’t think so.  So what happened?  Did society evolve to a higher plane of consciousness and realize that something we thought was OK for generations had really never been OK?  Professional sports still has the Cleveland Indians, the Atlanta Braves and the Washington Redskins, so maybe it is a west coast thing.  What would it take for the Dallas Cowboys to suddenly realize that they were insulting real cowboys?  Who are the Cincinnati Reds insulting, I wonder.

A lesson I’ve had to learn (and re-learn) the hard way is that people in general are not nearly as ready to laugh at themselves as I am.  I have made comments that I thought were just funny, and people have taken great offense.  There was a woman at work who was a Senior Manager, same as me, and we were responsible for speaking at a department meeting.  She was as round as she was tall.  As the entire staff filed in and looked for seats in the small meeting room, a latecomer was told jokingly to “sit on Jeanie’s lap,” to which I promptly replied, “Jeanie doesn’t have a lap.”  Everyone but her had a great laugh.  Try as I might, I was never able to make it up to her, and our relationship never recovered. 

I remember my first visit to a physical therapist recommended to me by one of my running buddies.  He gave me his business card, which had his name followed by a string of letters such as PT OCS AT,C, which of course referred to his qualifications, but I thought they were overdone to the absurd, so I quipped, “What are those letters – your grades in school?”  That likewise didn’t go over well at all.  I charmed my way out of that one – after all, I was a paying patient so he reluctantly let it go.  But some people just have no inclination to laugh at themselves.

By way of contrast, in one of my first assignments as an auditor (1973) I was part of an audit team led by a senior who I liked and respected.  The team usually left and had lunch together and returned together.  At lunch time one day the senior said, “OK, gang, let’s move out smartly.  In your case, Zades, just move out.”  I thought that was hilarious and took no offense at all.  I guess others were embarrassed for me, but I was not troubled by it at all.  I just thought it was funny.  I used to think people took themselves too seriously, now I chalk it up to common sense on their part.  For career purposes I guess if you don’t take yourself seriously, no one else will.  I guess I don’t care.  Comedic actor Jim Carrey recently tweeted: “Time spent laughing at yourself is time well spent.”  I hope he is right.

Speaking of careers, when I first left public accounting in 1980 I went to work for a small “start up” company that was a client of the audit firm I was leaving.  The founder was a gruff and repulsive sort of person, but I guess because of his track record of success as an entrepreneur, I figured he was probably a lot nicer on the inside than on the outside.  Wrong!  I figured you couldn’t be so nasty and inconsiderate and be a success in business. Duh!.  In the world of Silicon Valley high tech start ups, the meek don’t inherit much of anything.  Reality is closer to a den of gladiators, where the meanest and most intimidating stay alive the longest.

But I didn’t do myself any favors.  My title was VP of Finance and Administration, but all I really knew was accounting and auditing.  Early in my tenure there, the founder (to whom I reported) said we needed to raise more capital, and did I know of any sources or leads.  I clearly remember saying (and regretting saying): “No. I was hoping you did.”  He also asked me to lead the effort to develop a business plan.  I told him I didn’t have a clue how to do that, except to make sure the numbers made sense.  I had never heard of the saying, “Fake it ‘til you make it,” and that wasn’t my nature, anyway.

I remember taking a trip for the company from the San Francisco airport to San Diego.  Having worked at that airport for eight and a half years, ending in June 1973, I thought I knew of a quicker, easier place to park than in the actual parking structure.  But this was 1980, and things had changed. (Things are constantly changing at a major airport, but when you work there, you don’t notice it so much).  Anyway, I found a place to park the company car free of charge, and then walked in my dress shoes, carrying my luggage, all the way to the check-in counter.  Along the way I realized that was really a dumb thing to do.  But it gets worse.  While at the company’s San Diego location, someone at the Cupertino office wanted to use the car.  There was no way I could explain how they could find the car, much less why I parked it there.

Remember that I am a person who was able to graduate from Junior College, Stanford University and Cal Business School (MBA from the University of California at Berkeley) while working full-time, buying a house, and starting a family.  Intelligence and common sense are not mutually exclusive, but they can certainly live separately in separate people!  Or as I said earlier, I just didn’t know that it couldn’t be done.  Probably another key to my success in college was that I didn’t question authority or assignments; I just did them.  There is also that tendency of mine to overestimate how long something should take and so start early, peck away, and be done on time.  Some people with a lot more time on their hands than me were chronically late with deliverables.  I am the opposite of the type that needs a crisis in order to get motivated enough to get the job done.  We hear so much about staying up all night and “cramming” for exams because that is the way some people perform best.  Glad I’m not one of them.  I could never have sustained that for a month, let alone the six years that it took to get through the six years of higher education.

People with common sense are inclined to question things that seem trivial, foolish, or not necessary to them.  I didn’t have time to waste on that; I just did what I was told, and believed everything the teachers said.  Even though I was on average 5 years older than my classmates (23 versus 18 at the start), I saw the teachers (later “professors”) as authority figures.  I remember when one of our kids was at Pioneer High School and commented that one of their teachers seemed to need to justify themselves, regarding their career choice to be a high school teacher instead of something in the “real world” that paid better.  That kind of thought would never have crossed my mind in high school or college.  I just was not that aware and did not question what I saw as authority.

I remember one of my high school football buddies talked me into going with him to speak to the Principal about one of our teachers.  He wanted to report that he thought our teacher was, not a Communist, but a “dupe of the Communist Party.”  We were probably 15.  I had no idea what my friend had heard in class that made him think that.  My awareness and powers of discernment were immature (dormant?) for my age, and probably have been all my life.  This was in the late 1950s during the time in America when, unbeknownst to me, Senator McCarthy was creating a list of suspected Communists and “dupes of the Communist Party” in the United States.    Our House of Representatives created a “House Un-American Activities Committee.”  I remember hearing about that.  Many of the more outspoken people in the entertainment industry were blacklisted at that time, and couldn’t get work.  It bordered on a witch hunt.  I guess my friend heard more about this stuff than I did, and his overactive imagination took over.

At 23, I was married, had been in the military for 3 years, was ready, willing and, to my own surprise, able to learn.  Most of the students around me were fresh out of high school.  They were there because that’s where their friends were, or that’s where their parents sent them, or that’s where they had been brought up to expect to go after high school.  To me it was an exciting opportunity that I never expected to have.  Well, actually, an opportunity I never expected to be ready for or qualified for.  It was many years later that I could see that I did not have the personal attributes that would allow me to put my education to best use.  In later years I found myself in interviews addressing why I had such a powerful education and such a mediocre career.

They say, “You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy.”  There is something similar with me.  Neither of my parents finished high school; none of my many cousins went to college, at least not while I knew them; none of my friends growing up ever expected to go to college.  I remember I used to caddy at a private country club, and the golfers (members) seemed to live in a completely different world than me.  I never wondered how I could get from the “caddy class” of society to the “country club class.”  I never saw myself that way.  It was the same in the military.  I never wondered why I was an enlisted man or why I shouldn’t be an officer.  I suppose my Dad never wondered, either, why he was one of “the little guys” and not a big shot.  When the opportunity came for higher education, it never dawned on me that I would need certain personal attributes commensurate with the education in order to achieve my highest goal, which was CFO of a publicly traded company.