They made him cry

They made him cry, the bastards!

Buzz, he’s been here 25 years, 26 next month. Once, a few years ago, he was in charge of half the company. Never an owner, never the top Veep, just the man who kept things running and told things straight.

Then the new Exec Team came in. Buzz welcomed them because he knows he’s getting old and running out of steam. When they started divvying things up, he agreed, because he knows that one man – even him – should never have had so many departments under him. Besides, he was retiring in a short, very short while.

But this company had been like his extended family. Not a family he wanted, but a family that came to him when it needed help. He saw one owner through two divorces. He saw the security guard through his son’s cancer death. He helped keep a line worker’s furniture from being repossessed and found another Veep a job after it was apparent that the other guy was too young to retire and too old to meet this company’s high-paced needs. Buzz saw children born and accidents rushed to the hospital and houses bought with financing he encouraged the company to arrange. A lot of marriages. There is a photo of Buzz dressed in a Hawaiian skirt singing to the company at an impromptu lunchtime picnic: a little embarrassed, a little embarrassing – speaking of “sing,” Buzz can’t – but family.

Still, Buzz has his own real-life family and no illusions about which is more important. ’Never did. He saw the big 6-5 coming and knew where he wanted to be when that year hit.

And then he saw what the new Exec Team was doing to the factory family. Even as they were smiling to the crowd they were printing CONFIDENTIAL “lean” strategies for themselves. So Buzz decided to stay on a while longer to help his second family as much as he could. After all, if anyone knows the company and how it runs better than Buzz, it would only be the original founder, Ben. But Ben’s in his 70s and admits that he has only enough energy to follow the R&D that was always so dear to his creative heart. Nope, Buzz was who Ben looked to, argued with, agreed with, or overrode when they were both in their prime. There’s another owner, but he wasn’t a founder only a–

Another story. Buzz’s story, now: If you want to know how things run, especially if you’re coming from outside, talk to Buzz. From nuts to bolts to shipping to customer care, Buzz knows how things run. All you have to do is listen. He’s not even proprietary or egotistical about what he knows: if you’ve got a good idea, he’ll chew it over, subject it to the experience he has, and stand by you stronger than you can yourself. Buzz isn’t God, he makes mistakes – and he knows it – but he’s a mighty good archangel to have by your side.

All you have to do is listen.

Unless you don’t care about facts.

Unless you’ve come in with your ideas pre-set and your plans pre-determined and, dammit!, if the facts on the ground don’t match your plans: Tough. You have MBA-written management books to back you up, seminars from the khans of corporation, the winds of change blowing in your direction, the end of history as your stepping stone. You – can – change – the – facts.

That’s what everyone you listen to says: Change the Facts to match the Goals of the Plan.

Certainly don’t ask Buzz. He might come up with ideas to meet those Goals via a different Plan. Certainly don’t listen to Buzz.

Marginalize him. Divide up his authority into smaller and smaller slices. Keep him around to make Precision Ben feel comfortable, but isolate them by retiring everyone else they know. Make your decisions around them, keep them out of the loop. Precision Ben, well, him you’ve got to keep around to maintain the cash flow from his reserves. But Buzz: let him know that retirement is a reward well-deserved.

But Buzz keeps sticking around. “I have to try to help my family,” he said in confidence one day 18 months ago. “'Lean' means layoff to them. Too many of these people have given us 27, 30, 35 years of their lives. We’re not losing money. We don’t have to ‘lean’ that way. We owe it to them.”

That was last year. It’s not hard to lie to Buzz: he trusts people. So they lie. And they layoff. And, even when they offer “retraining,” they can take away the respect from a senior worker, they can make the new job so menial, they can make the company into Just Another Business so that there is no reason to stick around.

And so, Thursday, they even gave a Farewell Lunch to the long-timers going away, along with plaques and presents and a severance package complete with pre-written Letters of Recommendation that are so generically attractive that you almost overlook the fact that it says virtually nothing about the person except for the length of employment. Rosa. Fred. Joybal. Brenda. Carmenita. Who are you?

Buzz couldn’t attend the Farewell Lunch. He walked down on the floor that morning and said his good-byes and left to the doctor, his stomach aching, to avoid having to smile at the Last Day.

But a cruel trick was played on them all. The Last Day wasn’t the last day – it was just the last working day: everyone had to come back on Friday to sign off on their “voluntary termination” packages. Every ten minutes someone new showed up, trooping past Buzz’s office on their way to and from Human Resources. Where’s the Human dealing with these “Resources”? Already young minimum-wage workers are filling out application forms at the same long-desk window where the departees have to stand. Can we make the humiliation more pointed? Marcella, who was beautiful and thin when she came here 30 years ago, stands next to teenagers with glinting eyes of hoped-for employment and no illusions about any sort of loyalty to-or-from this company. Her knuckles crack a little as she holds the unfamiliar pen: Marcella can move product through the machine faster than the automated arm replacing her, but her fingers never had to memorize multi-signature forms. Ah, well, those muscle memories don’t matter now. With 17 years to go before qualifying for Social Security (if they don’t raise the age minimum), Marcella will have plenty of opportunity to learn new semi-skilled, repetitive tasks (if the jobs don’t move offshore). That’s why she immigrated to America in the first place: for the opportunities. Oh, darn, forgot! Marcella was born here. She’s just brown because… she is.

And, coming back from her awkward moments at HR and the thick envelope of papers they gave her, Marcella stopped at Buzz’s office to say good-bye again. Just like Sandy did a few minutes earlier, and Isa will in a few minutes. And Buzz rises from his seat while asking her to sit down, as he has always shown courtesy, and talks about Marcella’s two sons, three daughters and five grandchildren now, all growing so fast!, and the changing prices of housing, all so high now thank you Buzz for helping us buy it back when prices made sense, and she suddenly understands that everything she has known outside the home is over, dead, and even though it was “her” choice Marcella has second thoughts – but it’s too late now. Isa shows up at the door and Marcella leaves – she and Isa aren’t good friends but they hug, this is the last time they will ever see one another – and then Marcella hugs Buzz and leaves, while Buzz and Isa lean against the walls and talk in that old familiar way they fell into back 20 years ago when they worked three straight 18 hour days to deliver a last-minute order that helped the company meet its factor-required payment deadline.

And when Isa left, there was a break. Lunchtime, HR has closed its window, no more processing for an hour. And Buzz has closed his door, turned his back on the window to work on his PC – weekly Veep reports are due by day’s end – and in the glint of the fluorescent overhead light, tears glint down the profile of his chin.

I am proud to work for Buzz. And I damn the bastards who are making him cry.