KJR -—- the (fools) golden age… full circle.
After slogging to shore from that soirée, I found a wonderful, friendly little company which needed me — they really needed me! However, nobody needed the company — or so it appeared when less and less business flowed with each month-end. Office rents climbed as the economic climate cooled — it was the first recession of the eighties. What was needed most — if I was to have a family, was a reliable income…
Out of the blue, a new era dawned — with old technology. The computers were dated and the people! Even worse, over the years the work grew more and more and more tedious and depressing. That didn't stop me from doing the work — very frequently putting in sixty to seventy hours per week!
After slogging to shore from that soirée, I found a wonderful, friendly little company which needed me — they really needed me! However, nobody needed the company — or so it appeared when less and less business flowed with each month-end. Office rents climbed as the economic climate cooled — it was the first recession of the eighties. What was needed most — if I was to have a family, was a reliable income…Out of the blue, a new era dawned — with old technology. The computers were dated and the people! Even worse, over the years the work grew more and more and more tedious and depressing. That didn't stop me from doing the work — very frequently putting in sixty to seventy hours per week!
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This was a war of attrition where I was destine to attrify! Year after wasted year — beyond commitment and dedication to obsession — without leadership, authentic communication or valid intellectual involvement. The final straw came on Yom Kippur 1994… I don't believe you could comprehend or imagine how someone who had given so much and worked so hard could be treated so shabbily as by those assholes — it still absolutely enrages me to think about it.
In hindsight I should have realized that even working 1,000 hours per year in unpaid overtime and making untold personal sacrifice didn't give me the right to treat the inept and thoroughly incompetent admin types with the disgust and disdain they truly deserved. There's really no worse crime than to identify ineptitude! (Especially where the unstated policy is to encourage disaster in order to ensure examples are made for others to "learn" from. This type of politics and the destruction of all I had worked for ten years to create was just too difficult to accept or support… "so what you are really saying here is that the policy of the steering committee is to not have a policy?"
The tactical game vs. the strategic move — it had after all been quietly explained before. I knew just what the script should be. The nearest analogy that comes to mind is the behavior of "Ace" in the movie Casino when he attempts to assert the ownership which he doesn't realize exists only in his mind.
Well, there's nothing like the lowest skullduggery to put things right while you clear the bodies from the playing field and rewrite the rule book to win.
Thus, for a brief instant the future was wide open…
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