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Chapter 43

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Chapter 42: Deadwood 

When the U.S. Navy evacuated Bikini islanders in the South Pacific to conduct H-bomb tests a reporter asked an unhappy native what she thought of the people responsible for the tests. She said, “They are very smart at doing stupid things.”  

The smart things stock market analysts thought Jacques Nasser was doing to make him the brightest star in the industrial management heavens looked stupid down on earth. They were stupid. 

BLI was stupid. Replacing people who knew what they were doing with machines that did the wrong things by default and a hundred times faster was stupid. Using software programs so complicated that only a small percentage of people could ever learn to use them effectively was stupid.  

Ford had a networked computer system called PROFS for filling out digital time cards, keeping track of overtime, vacations, sick days, etc., and communicating internally. It didn’t always work properly. When it did work properly the keyboard locked up if you accidentally hit the wrong key. I lost count of ways to get into trouble with PROFS. To get out of trouble you often needed a PROFS expert. You could save yourself some headaches and pad your education credits in your Personnel file by taking a PROFS class and an advanced PROFS class. Todd became our resident PROFS expert.  

At a certain point it became obvious that PROFS was more complex than it needed to be and the solution to problems that drove most users nuts was not more education but less complexity. I made a conscious decision not to become a PROFS expert and tried unsuccessfully to convince everyone else in our group that doing so only perpetuated a bad system. The system eventually went away without an organized effort to get rid of it because it was just too difficult for most people to us.  

I saw the same complexity problems with a computer aided design system called IDEAS. It was supposed to end duplication of effort in various divisions and departments throughout the company and keep everyone up to date on the latest design and engineering changes. A true genus named Joe was working on a system that did those things when I first came into Mike’s group. It was easy to follow because Joe put all of the complexity out of user’s sight. Ford bought IDEAS instead.  

IDEAS was so complicated and so alien to what it took to stamp sheet metal and mold plastic parts that I knew it wouldn’t last. It was designed for machine-tooling engine parts and required “error” tolerances so small that they could be detected only with the most sophisticated computer software diagnostic tools. ICEM-Surf had those diagnostic tools but even a “class-A” Surf surface wasn’t good enough for IDEAS. Patches that blended seamlessly in Surf had unbridgeable gaps in IDEAS. Bridging those gaps was called “stitching.” Surf models frequently had to be redone because they wouldn’t “stitch” in IDEAS.  

I made a conscious effort not to learn IDEAS and hoped that the smartest draftsmen and engineers I knew would follow suit. They didn’t. They spent more time learning IDEAS than they spent using it. They moaned and groaned as IDEAS gurus sat with them for hours at a stretch teaching them how to do things in IDEAS that should have taken them two minutes. It never occurred to them that if they were gnashing their teeth and pulling out their hair to learn how to do the simplest things in IDEAS the system had to be a bad idea. Eventually enough of them learned how to use IDEAS well enough to keep it alive for years after it should have died of natural causes. Two years after they started with it they were saying, “Once you learn it, it’s not so difficult.”  

Once you learn anything it’s not so difficult. That doesn’t make it good. I learned how to build up a high tolerance to pain. It nearly killed me.   

I had to have been the worst IDEAS student ever to take the class and I didn’t use it at all. But for reasons I never learned, the top IDEAS advocate and programmer went out of his way to get me on his side and ask me what I thought of his latest innovations. I didn’t even speak the man’s language. I didn’t want to speak his language. I didn’t like being in the same room with him. He was my Introduction to IDEAS teacher. He gave me the impression that he knew a hell of a lot more about me than he should have. His questions reminded me of Paul Schiloff’s arithmetic test. Our conversations always ended with him giving me a demonstration of how much more he knew about computers than I did.  

What was up with that? Was I in another contest that I didn’t know about? My only interest in the computer was getting it to do what I already knew how to do. If the man from IDEAS couldn’t help me with that I couldn’t see what we had to talk about.  

Striving to be smart at doing stupid things was a way of life at Ford from 1998 until the day I left in 2002 and beyond. 

Mike’s group spent months preparing for an outside firm’s audit of our functions called ISO-2000. It was supposed to insure that all of Ford’s employees knew their place in the overall organization, that our records matched the tasks we performed, and that each department complied with Ford regulations. We attended in-house seminars on the forms we would need, how to fill them out and where on the Ford web to find documents we might have to produce. Todd and Larry spent much of their workdays on getting Mike’s group ready for ISO-2000. The audit interfered with everyone’s work and made cheats out of Supervisors like Mike who ran departments that didn’t conform to ISO-2000’s preconceptions of how they should run.  

We had no way to show the ISO-2000 auditors what we really did and where the breakdowns were in the process. The company didn’t want them to see any breakdowns and it took a level of technical expertise the auditors didn’t have and didn’t have the time or the inclination to learn if we could have shown them. In short, ISO-2000 was conceptually flawed. 

My sister and I stayed in touch with developments in each other’s departments to see what we had in common. You wouldn’t think that a grade-8 math modeler and a grade-3 secretary in different departments wouldn’t have much in common, but we did. I had to go to a BLI circus. She had to set one up. I spoke often with Frank DeBono’s daughter Colleen, a highly intelligent secretary I knew from the days we worked on the Highlight with Frank Horenkamp. I saw what Colleen had to do to get our BLI set up so when Sara told me what she had to do, I knew what she was talking about. When I told Sara about PROFS and IDEAS she knew what I was talking about. We saw the same patterns, which led us to the same conclusion.  

Ford Motor Co. was attacking large groups of its salaried employees systematically. It started with its secretaries in the early ’90s. It froze the upper end of their salary pay range, doubled or tripled their workloads and brought in temporary employment agency clerks and secretaries to fill vacancies instead of hiring new ones. It relied on computers to do things secretaries used to do and on educating managers to use them. Unlike most companies that hired new salaried workers as older ones retired, giving them a fairly even age spread, Ford hired many of its salaried workers in big bunches every ten years or so. It paid competitive salaries and offered the best benefits to attract the best people.  

Ford hired most of its permanent secretaries in the early ‘70s and ‘80s with a ten-year gap between mass hiring periods. Ford got away with the sex and age discrimination it practiced against its secretaries by arguing that they were overpaid compared to the Fortune 500 average. 

Ford was now working on African-Americans to pave the way to reducing the salaries and getting rid of as many older salaried workers as possible. The longer employees stayed with Ford the higher their salaries were and the higher their retirement benefits were going to be. The more older workers Ford could shed from its payroll and the sooner it could shed them, the more money it would appear to be saving.

The last barrier to Ford’s ability to get what it wanted out of its older workers was Charles and me. Going against Martin’s advice, I tried to get the news media interested in our ADR proceedings by sending out a press release to every media outlet I could contact. I didn’t violate the judge’s gag order because I didn’t include any “confidential” documents in the case. I only reminded the press that the case had not yet been closed and what was at stake for African-Americans, women and older workers at high risk of being illegally discriminated against if we lost.  

I got no response.  

After the mediation, Ford gave me a higher settlement offer than it gave Purnell but coupled it with an offer I could not accept – Jacques Nasser’s “deadwood” retirement offer. About two weeks before my second scheduled mediation date, Martin asked me to consider the offer as part of the settlement. Ford presented it to him as a “benefit” it was willing to put on the negotiation table and Marin presented it that way to me. I got so angry that I thought for a moment I would leap across the desk and strangle him. Why did I have to tell my lawyer that it was the very thing “we” were fighting; the reason “we” were suing? I think that he read me perfectly for the first time. Thus, his opening remarks to the mediator.  

You might have read Ford’s version of the deadwood offer in the Wall Street Journal or the business section of your local newspaper. It made national news in 1998 because the business reporters thought it was a brilliant managerial innovation.  

To reduce headcount, big companies traditionally presented all of its tenured employees attractive early retirement packages. The downside of this cost reduction strategy was that their best employees frequently accepted the buyouts while the deadwood stayed on. Jacques’s twist was to raise the salaries of Ford’s “best” employees substantially and offer the buyout packages only to the “deadwood.” Ford strongly advised the people who received the offer to take it. If they didn’t, they would be made ineligible for promotion, they would receive increasingly undesirable job assignments and they would be subject to dismissal. 

Ford stock rose but the reaction in the salary ranks was so negative that Ford immediately backed away from calling it “the deadwood offer.” In Ford’s official announcement of the plan, it called it the “Windows” early retirement program. My anger at Martin was sparked by his failure to see that “Windows” was just another name for “deadwood.” The provisions were identical. So was the intent.  

Astoundingly, changing the name was enough to get many white Ford employees to see it as a different program. They, too, thought that it was a terrific company benefit and complained that they were being racially discriminated against because so many black people were getting the offer and they weren’t. When they went to Personnel asking for “the package” no stigma was attached to it. It wasn’t the same as when the company went to the employee and asked him or her to take it.   

Ford went to Sam Mayers with the deadwood offer. It went to Emiline King, its first and only black female designer.  Elaine HAAS replaced the black Chief Engineer that got the offer. Black engineers my sister worked with got it. Black deadwood offer recipients didn’t have jobs outside of Ford waiting for them. The offer said that they were inferior employees. Accepting it meant that they agreed. It was like signing a Satisfactory Plus performance review knowing that “satisfactory plus” meant “unsatisfactory.” That, was the same as saying, “Yes, Massa Ford, I knows I ain’t as good as any’a dim white folks you put ahead’a me.” 

Fuck that!  

I thought that 1998 was the most stressful year of my life. It got worse in ’99 when I saw what happened to Greg Arceri and Mike Hornai. 

Jay Mays, formerly of Volkswagen in Germany and now the Vice President of Ford Design in place of Jack Telnack and Fritz Mayhew, accused Greg of incompetence. He then banished him to a studio where he had nothing significant to do and replaced him with a newly appointed grade-9 Supervisor. Greg, like all of the other clay modeling Supervisors, was a pay grade-10. If he testified for me in the lawsuit it could now look as though he had an ax to grind against the company. 

I tried to warn Mike that the same thing was going to happen to him if he gave me any credit for the work I did on the lead-time reduction process he asked me to draw up. He thought that it was too valuable not to preset to Elaine and his fellow Supervisors and he thought that he had to give me credit for it simply out of honesty and fairness. The next thing we knew, he was sitting in his office with noting to do and Mike Delikta was officially in charge of his group. Larry and Todd still ran the day-to-day operations but Mike was on an ice float drifting out to sea. 

The events leading up to what happened to Greg and Mike did not go straight to the point… 

I was so involved in engineering and I knew so much about automotive design that I became the natural choice to show engineers from outside venders what our engineers and designers required from them. When a Ford engineer working with me on a tricky Cougar headlight problem went on a two-week vacation, she asked me – not an engineer – to take her place at issues meetings. I could speak the language of the engineers, designers and modelers. Some engineers didn’t know that there was a difference and that alone created problems they didn’t know existed.  

Some engineers loved to haul out numbers with decimal points that made the numbers seem significant when they weren’t. Most engineers didn’t question numbers they didn’t understand. I did. After one issues meeting run by a German who acted as though he knew everything, I told an English guy and an American that I didn’t understand where one suspicious number came from. It was important to me because it was supposed to represent a deviation tolerance on a part in my Surf project that Mike told me was sacred.  It was giving me fits because I couldn’t get anything to line up with it.  

I asked the English and American duo about the deviation because they were frowning while the other engineers were nodding and scribbling notes as an American engineer from an outside vender presented it. I asked them where the American vendor got the number. The English guy said, “He pulled it out of his ass.” …No, he did say, “arse.” 

I told the rebels the problem I was having and they were happy to hear that they weren’t alone. They had given up hope and were lethargically going thorough the motions pretending that the number meant something for the sake of peace. Now they were energized and working like men possessed to find the answer. They found it. The information we were working with was not the same as the information the assembly plant used. The plant engineer faked it and the vendor invented a number to account for the discrepancy. The rebels gave me the right curve and it worked. The surface fell into place. All I had to do was clean it up. I figured that I could finish it by lunchtime the next day.   

The next morning I found Larry Lauth working on my computer again. He was back to trying to get the surface to match the bogus “sacred” curve and his surfaces looked worse than mine did when I tried it. This time it was Mike’s fault, not Larry’s or Helmut’s. When I went home Mike saw the new curve I created and assumed that I missed the “right” one because I wasn’t as proficient with Surf as I needed to be to see it.  We got into a loud, ugly shouting match and I went home steaming.  

For nearly a month it was so hard for me to get out of bed that I came in ten or fifteen minuses late every day. Twice I came in over a half hour late. Mike accused me of coming in a half hour late every day. I always noted the time I came in so I would know how much later I had to stay to make up for it. Never in my working life had I come in late and left early. With the pressure of the lawsuit I tried my level best to come in early and leave late but I don’t think I ever pulled it off. Worse than that, I found myself falling asleep at odd times during the day even after I had gotten a good nights sleep. One time I went to lunch, fell asleep in the parking lot and didn’t wake up for two hours.  

Mike mellowed out in a couple of weeks and was very good about my odd behavior. He asked me if I was sick. I told him I wasn’t. I didn’t feel sick. I was doing 60 pushups a day, 80 sit-ups a day and running in place for 30-minutes a day on a thick foam rubber cushion. My weight, which had ballooned out of sight, was down to where it should have been. I didn’t smoke or drink. I gave blood twice a year and I had given blood recently so I knew that my blood pressure was always ideal, my pulse was normal and there were no abnormalities in my blood. 

I was depressed. That’s all. I’d been there before and I was sure I’d climb out of it. The engineers who solved the Cougar headlight problem – which Mike, by the way, had gotten everyone interested in with his observation about another part of the light – looked the way I felt. They were putting in overtime on work they knew was wrong and walking around like zombies. Maybe misery does love company.  

Slowly I pulled out of my depression…No. Mike pulled me out of it.  

Helmut wanted to put a spoiler on the deck of a Cougar. There were timing issues, manufacturing issues and design issues that he couldn’t resolve by any conventional means. Mike told him that I could do it. I did, with a combination of close collaboration with the manufacturers, electronic math modeling and hand modeling the part out of high-density foam so it would be light, sturdy and easy to modify.  

Suddenly Melvin Betencourt walked in to our area with the part in hand complaining about surface defects he could see when the spoiler was painted glossy black. Al Biggs, Greg and his Master Modeler Dennis Painter accompanied him. Neither Mike nor I knew what to say. The flaws were obvious but I had made the model specifically so it could be carried around, flipped over and examined easily. I was interested in one section of the spoiler that Melvin was complaining about. I could see that it cleared the area it needed to clear with enough room left over for me, or any good modeler, to literally drag in a good surface with one template. And I could use that template to complete my Surf model.  

Melvin knew how I worked. He knew that I made the spoiler. He knew that many considerations went into it. What was he going on about?  

When Mike left with Al, Greg and Dennis I held Melvin back and told him what I did and why. He smiled cryptically, looked at me eyeball to eyeball and said, “I know.” His wide pupils said he was telling the truth.

So who was Melvin putting on that show for? What was Al Biggs doing there? Why did he look bewildered? Why did Greg look sheepish and why did Dennis look smug?  

Dennis had to know what was happening. He was with me in the studio shop when I was making the spoiler and we had a pleasant conversation about the benefits of an expert on real surfaces doing a real model as well as a computer model. We didn’t talk about the drafting and engineering work I had to do. Now it looked as though he was seeing my modeling ability the same way he saw it over a dozen years earlier when we worked together in Rod Leighton’s studio.  

I didn’t know friend from foe. I knew only that once again I was snatched off a project with major implications for lead-time reduction before I could take the last step necessary to prove that it worked. In this instance, that step would have taken no more than an hour to complete.  

Someone told me that Dennis made a sarcastic crack about me implying that I was not an expert modeler and Greg seemed to go along with him. I heard that other modelers were smiling in my face and saying disparaging things about me behind my back but my source would not tell me who they were. I guessed that one of them was Al Biggs who held the title of Master Modeler that I had to give up and the growing powers of a clay modeling Supervisor. He made cutter paths on a math model I did. He screwed it up just enough to make me look bad because he set up his milled model on a platform that was a little off center. The next time he tried to greet me with a smile and a handshake I glared at him and refused to shake his hand.  

The only other significant project I got involved in was a Taurus rocker panel designed by a “prince” from England and modeled on a picture model that had nothing in common with reality. My job was to make a rocker in Surf that matched the feasibility model, one that could be manufactured and assembled.  

Apart from the designer, I couldn’t have asked for better people to work with. Vince Ratoli was the engineer. Jim Tudor was the draftsman. They identified issues that I had never encountered and allowed me to math model the part as close as possible to the intended design. Jim Tudor set up the part in a way that cut out at lest six months of the development process. No one else had the experience he had to do it.  

Strange things began to happen with the design. It kept changing in ways that wouldn’t allow me to hold a critical cut line Jim Tudor developed. Like my old nemesis Dave Turner, the English designer gave me running changes that I modeled to his specifications as close as possible to what the real world would allow. He made incremental “corrections” in my “interpretation” of his design until he had a completely different design. Harry Strickler called models like this “forever models” because the designer’s definition of “right” was a moving target. You missed it if you aimed dead center. If you lead the target in one direction it moved in another direction the instant you pulled the trigger. 

The math model couldn’t be milled on the picture model because the picture model had nothing in common with it and Helmut refused to mill it on the feasibility model. The project turned into a morass that we couldn’t get out of and the old rocker had to be carried over to the new Taurus production model.  

On November 17, 1999, Carol Murdock from the Design Center’s Personnel office drove to VC-2 though wind and snow to put a package on my desk – the deadwood package. November 17, 1967 was the traumatic day I got laid off from Ford. I got an instant headache. My vision blurred. My chest tightened. I had trouble catching my breath. My heart pounded as tough I had run flat out up a high step hill. I thought I was gong to faint. I thought then that I was feeling a terrible mixture of rage and frustration because I wanted so badly to kill the bitch and I knew I couldn’t do it.  

I could hear Carol talking to the secretary at a desk near the stairwell that I had thought of hurling Les Martin down when there was no desk and no secretary there. I reached into my desk drawer for a bottle of aspirin capsules and gulped down two of them where I sat staring at the deadwood package Carol had laid on my desk. I didn’t trust myself to go to the drinking fountain in the hall where I could see her. 

When I calmed down enough to think rationally, it struck me that the timing of Carol’s visit might have been a brutal coincidence or someone might have sent her to my desk hoping that it would trigger a nervous breakdown or a violent assault. Maybe she didn’t know she was carrying sensitive explosives in that package. What harm could it do to tell her? I approached her and told her that we needed to talk. 

I told her how offended I was by the deadwood package. I told her what the date meant to me. She told me that she didn’t now those things and, like Jane Fonda and Mark Fuhrman, she apologized for any pain it might have caused. She said she wanted to help me. She sounded sincere.  

I told Carol about my frustration doing work that involved no leadership and no challenge apart from the purely technical challenge that other Surf users got from making Surf do what they wanted it to do. I told her about my appreciation for what honest teamwork could do and the joy of breaking new ground with an elite team of dedicated professionals. I told her how much I hated doing anything ordinary or meaningless. Her face lit up. She told me that she sensed I had a ferocious drive to excel. She said she could feel it.  

Yes! I thought. She understands! Maybe I won’t have to take my lawsuit to trial. This looked and felt like the mediation I was supposed to have 350 days earlier. I pointed to the jump wings I wore on my watchband and the special challenges I had to overcome to get them. I told her that I wanted to do great things for Ford and that I did them every time I got the opportunity or created the opportunity. Carol listened sympathetically and told me she would see what she could do.  

I went back to my workstation and read though the provisions of the deadwood early retirement program confident from my talk with Carol that I would never see it again. When I read that a candidate for the program had to be recommended by his or her Supervisor, my wrath turned on Mike Hornai. He said that he had nothing to do with it and he didn’t even know about it. He talked to Helmut Schroeder who was supposed to approve the recommendation.  Helmut knew nothing about it, either. Mike looked up Carol Murdock’s phone number. I called her and she told me that the “Windows” offer to me was no reflection on my performance. She said that Ford offered it to all of the plaintiffs. 

It looked for a while as though the workload in Mike’s former group was slowing to a crawl although new members with ICEM-Surf experience were added to the group and Mark Ritz was working as hard as ever.  

Some older members of the group, like Janice Green and I, still couldn’t do class-A surfaces. We practiced everyday on dummy projects but made little progress. Angela’s name came up more and more as the person designated to make all of us better Surf users. She didn’t come to us because she was a mile away in another building. I hated the thought of going to her but when I psyched myself up enough to do it, she told me that she didn’t have time to answer my questions. She had too many “important” things to do.  

Mark Ritz tried to help me but he always lost me somewhere and got shanghaied to do a hot job before he could put me on the right path.  

Les Martin did help me. He showed me a menu class-A surfacers used that I didn’t know existed and tricks that Dave Robison showed him to get around problems that couldn’t be solved easily the way Mark constructed his surfaces. I began to see clearly that different ways of using Surf accounted for many of my problems. Like different clay modeling styles they couldn’t be mixed. You could go as far as I did with any approach but to reach the next level you had to choose one math modeling style over another and follow each step in the correct order.  

I hit a learning wall with Mark, Robison, Todd and Les on the fundamental matter of “proper patch structure.” Surf had hidden mathematical limits for stretching, joining and trimming surfaces or giving them the appearance of being trimmed when they weren’t. To the extent that you knew those limitations you could build a patch structure that allowed you to do everything necessary for a class-A surface. I got bogged down in the choices my teachers made in creating their patch structures that forced them into inferior design choices. In clay you worked back and fourth between curves and surfaces to get the optimum curves and surfaces. You could do it in CDRS and in DDN but in Surf, you had to let the surfaces dictate some of the critical curves.  

Mike Hornai understood proper patch structure but he was not a good Surf user because he had the same problems I had with boundary curves and real or theoretical curves on surface. He knew how important they were. His best Surf users didn’t. He infuriated them by standing over them and directing them step-by-step to show him things in a precise order they didn’t think were important. They argued and complained but in the end they saw that Mike was always right. I could see it all along.   

Mark Ritz worked with Angela to prepare an illustrated booklet on how to do things that weak Surf users like Jan and I were having the most trouble with. I couldn’t get past the first page because their illustrations of what constituted a “perfect” highlight or the “best” surface transitions were just plain wrong. Surf’s diagnostic tools said they were right.  

In one example, two patches were joined in different ways; a, b, and c. “A” was unacceptable by any professional standard. “B” was unacceptable by Surf standards. C was supposed to be ideal and the instructions went on to explain how to achieve it. I would have chosen “b” with a slight modification. To me, “a” and “c” were unacceptable. 

I called Mike over and asked him which transition he thought was best. I didn’t tell him the one I picked. He picked “b,” as I knew he would. With no prompting from me, he drew in the identical modification I would have made. Cal Morrison, Chares Purnell, Ray Campau, Dave Hackett, Dennis Painter, Sam Mayers, Bud Magauldi, Dug Gafga, Dave Delikta, Jack Telnack and Fritz Mayhew would have done the same thing. With Surf it was a point that could be debated. With IDEAS it could have been a job stopper because the patches might not have stitched. 

Mike’s opinion meant nothing now because he was no longer in charge. He wasn’t worried because he didn’t think Ford could do without him. Nobody else on the horizon had ever been through a program from start to finish. He knew where the booby traps were and how to disarm them. Delikta didn’t. When things started falling off the table, Mike figured that Ford would have no choice but to put him back on the job.  

Things did start to fall off the table but Ford never put Mike back on the job. They let him languish until he finally got the message and retired.  

Slowly I became aware of the fact that I was also languishing with nothing to do. The group’s workload hadn’t slowed down. My work had stopped. Larry was handing out assignments and Delikta was calling meetings of his leaders though Larry that I didn’t hear about until they were over. I asked Larry what happened. He told me that he sent me the notice in my e-mail. My e-mail didn’t work and Larry knew it. I had a lot of technical breakdowns.  

The Surf software installed on all of the computers had bugs. Mine was the buggiest of the lot. My savior was a computer technician named Keith Flinn who fixed my computer every time I called him. Everyone called him before or after they went to the Help Desk. But another Information Technology group handled my e-mail. I had to call someone from that group to fix it and they did…again and again and again….    

Meanwhile, somebody invented a new title called “Primary.” It allowed a new expert Surf user in our group who was younger than my youngest son to act as a Leader. Now Larry said that he didn’t tell me about the Delikta meetings because they were for Primaries. I was not a Primary.  I flagged down Delikta and asked him what was going on. He told me that Larry told him I didn’t want to go to his meetings. He invited me to the next one. I attended that one. Throughout most of it I was lost. 

Delikta and his Primaries, who included Mark Ritz and the new guy, used acronyms I didn’t know and frequently referred to people, places and events I never heard of. The only thing I could tell for sure was that Delikta was in over his head and his Primaries weren’t giving him the help he needed to lead his expanded department efficiently. I got the impression that Personnel was setting him up to fail.  

After the meeting I told him my impression. He conceded that I might be right but he said he didn’t worry about it because he had skills that were in high demand and he could go anywhere to work. He told me that he might have a big job for me. I warned him that if he gave it to me he could get into trouble because of the lawsuit. I pointed out what happened to Greg and Mike. He brushed it aside and said that politics meant nothing to him. Besides, no one had put pressure on him one way or another with respect to me…He should have waited a few days.