Chapter 43: Breaking Point
Dave Delikta wanted me to be the project leader of a large Interiors group that was still on the drawing boards. He knew only that Tom Scott was going to be the Director in charge. He knew that Tom would need someone who could coordinate the design, engineering and modeling of hundreds of domestic and international properties and keep them on track. He said that I was the only person he knew who had all of the qualifications necessary to fill the position.
With Mike Hornai out of the picture I was the only person I could think of with all the qualifications to fill the position. I told Delikta that I would do it if he insisted but reiterated my fear of what would happen to him if he submitted my name. He again brushed aside his vulnerability. He said that he thought the job was right up my ally and he believed I would be very successful. I told him that that was the problem and I expected plans for the new department to change as soon as my name appeared under Tom Scotts on the organization chart.
Someone I trusted told me that I couldnt trust Delikta. My source didnt tell me why so I didnt know what to make of things when Delikta transferred me to his base of operations studio in the Design Center and he made no more mention of the job with Tom Scott. After a month of farting around in Surf with the rear bumper of a truck, I asked him about it. He told me that Ford canceled its plans for the new department.
The Yes I know look on Deliktas face told me that he read the Told you so look on my face. We never mentioned it again.
We talked mostly about the Help Desk. The subject came up frequently because I frequently had to ask him to submit a help ticket on my broken computer. I seldom saw Delikta lose his temper but he lost it with the Help Desk. He began to lose it with me for complaining about it so much. I could see that he was under a lot of stress and he did not look well so I didnt take his irrational outbursts against me personally.
I got a direct link to the computer Information Technology assistance I so frequently needed when I ran into an IT guy I knew named Shahied. He helped me with my CDRS breakdowns when the man assigned to do it, didnt. Like Keith Flinn, Shahied went wherever the need arose in addition to covering his assigned territory. Like Flinn, Shahied always did more than he had to do to get his job done or to look good to his boss. Going the extra mile was an integral component of his nature.
It surprised me to hear Shahied begin to grumble about racism in the Design Center and in the larger PDC complex behind it. He saw racism in Fords second-class treatment of Pakistanis like him. All I saw were a lot of Indian continent faces. I didnt know he was a Pakistani until he told me or that he wasnt a Ford employee. A year later my sister learned that we saw so many Indian continent faces in PDC because a contractor brought them into the U.S. as engineers for less pay than their American counterparts. They had to work overtime for straight-time pay.
Other surprises awaited me in the 21st century at Ford. Pete Gurich, a newly hired math modeler, was a good one. He worked at Chrysler for many years with a software package called CATIA. Pete was ten years younger than I was. Rob and Rich, two new math modelers from a job shop that used IDEAS, were twenty years younger. All of us had something to teach each other so it should have been a good mix with an ICEM-Surf expert on hand to teach all of us the finer points of Surf.
Pete had more in common with me than he did with Rob or Rich. We had a different sense of history than they did and a different set of emotional buttons wired to the world of yesterday today and tomorrow. We saw links to the past that gave us a better understanding of where we were and where we were headed as salaried workers in a multinational corporation and as Americans in the new global economy. Rob and Rich saw only what was happening in front of them day to day.
I couldnt pinpoint the difference until we started talking about baseball.
Like me, Pete had been a baseball fan since childhood. Like me, he went to Tiger Stadium to watch the Tigers a few times a year. He refused to go to the new Comerica Park for the same reasons I refused to go. Rob was also a baseball fan who couldnt understand our objection to the new ballpark. He thought that we were stuck in the past and therefore unwilling to give the benefits of the new stadium a fair trial simply because it was new. That wasnt it. Pete and I appreciated how much better the new stadium was in terms of how it looked, how well it was laid out and how many great features it offered the fans that the old ballpark couldnt touch. But neither of us could get past the name a name that had no historical connection to the game we loved.
Rob couldnt see where anything but a crumbling old stadium with bad seats and inadequate facilities had been lost. Pete and I saw a sea change that mirrored a lot of bad things that were happening everywhere in the global economy. Comerica Park was a symbol of deep-rooted American values that no longer mattered to too many Americans.
Baseball meant something to North America, Latin American and Japan. Comerica was a Saudi Arabian bank. Since when did baseball mean anything to Saudi Arabia? Where was the historical link to Navin Field, Briggs Stadium and Tiger Stadium? Where was the continuity to the great players who wore the Tiger uniform and the history of those times good and bad that brought us to the present? Comerica was nothing but an ad for a foreign bank that the fans were paying for with higher ticket prices. Comerica Park was a slap in the face to baseball fans everywhere who cared as much about the history of the game as the game itself.
Yes, we knew that professional baseball had always been about money but it used to be about more than that. Now it was only about money. Baseball was now about money for outrageous player salaries, outrageous owner profits, outrageous sums for TV broadcast rights and getting whatever the market would bear. Why could the average family no longer afford to go to baseball games? Because enough fans that could afford to go were still going. Why where star players charging money for autographs? Because they were money-hungry jerks who knew the market value of their signature and big time investors were making beg bucks on collecting and selling them.
So, here we were designing cars and trucks to cost consumers more money each year when the prices should have been falling. Why? Because automakers were steadily pushing the envelope to maximize profits with no connection to how they became industry giants in the first place. Instead of building more cars cheaper and making a profit on volume, they were charging whatever the market would bear and passing on the profits to their shareholders and their top executives. They didnt even care as much as they used to about market share because they were making trucks that drove like cars and their biggest profit margins were in trucks. If they could have figured out a way to sell only one vehicle a year for a large enough profit, they would have done it
Petes greatest asset to Ford, apart from his intelligence and the fact that his age helped Ford blunt the potential charge of age discrimination in hiring, was his experience with auto designers and clay modelers. Pete didnt have to be told what a good highlight looked like or what separated a good one from a superior one. When I told him how I wanted to build my truck bumper but couldnt do it because Surf didnt have the tools, he understood and told me that I could do it in CATIA. Again and again when I complained about having to take 15 steps to accomplish something that should have taken only three steps, he let me know that he wasnt blowing smoke by telling me what those steps were. He added that I could have done it in CATIA.
Gradually it became clear to me why there was so much resistance inside of the ICEM Company to Kim Grubers ICEM-DDN modeling software. It looked too much like CATIA, an ICEM software competitor. The danger of a successful DDN demonstration was that it made ICEM-Surf and ICEM-DDN look bad compared to CATIA, one proven system that did it all for the beautiful cars and trucks Chrysler was producing.
ICEM sent an expert named Mike to tutor the new Surf users. I, too, learned from him. He learned more from me. To make myself useful in a much bigger way than I could by math modeling a bumper, I spent most of my time showing Rob and Rich what it took to get the major parts of the new Explorer they were modeling to flow into each other correctly. ICEM Mike didnt know how to do it and he didnt know that he didnt know until I showed him. He didnt know how to set up theoretical plains to go around corners or to use cords to shape highlights. He didnt know when to use plan views instead of side views or tangents instead of theoretical intersections. He didnt know what a normal surface was or why it had to be established first.
I thought that Delikta noticed and appreciated what I did to get the Explorer math model on the right design track. He didnt.
At the start of 2001 I got a new Supervisor, Dan Botruff. His office was in PDC where most of his people were located. We first met in a CDRS refresher class. I saw him again when Delikta introduced me to Angela on the DN-101 project. His round face and rosy cheeks reminded me of a Cherub in a medieval painting. He was about ten years younger than I was but he projected the charming innocence of a six-year-old. His smile was disarming. He told me that he appreciated what I could do for his team and he was glad to have me. He lived his Dale Carnegie Power of Positive Thinking lessons he learned in a seminar sponsored by Ford. Len Olson, his ALIAS Primary, called him Captain Happy.
Dave Petella, the son of my young leader at American Motors, was one of Botruffs Surf Primaries. He seemed uncomfortable with being my leader and always treated me the way I imagined he would have treated his father under similar circumstances.
Botruffs other Primaries also stepped gingerly and respectfully in my presence. They never questioned anything I did for the sake of improving a design or getting the design to conform to feasibility requirements without compromising the designers intent. All of them knew that I had more experience than they had in those respects and never indicated that they saw themselves as superior to me because they were better than I was at working with Surf. When I asked them a technical question about Surf or engineering they showed visible relief that I didnt question why they missed something wrong with the scan that I picked up. The younger ones seemed a little embarrassed that our roles werent reversed.
They also knew why our roles werent reversed. I found out later.
Dan apologized for leaving me in Deliktas area for an extended length of time while he was getting his department organized. He was having trouble getting workstations in his area for all of his new people including Jan Green and the two guys from the job shop. He thanked me for helping the new guys and dropped by once or twice a month to tell me how our move to PDC was going. That was more than I was getting from my lawyer on the progress of setting a date for the mini-trial.
It was obvious to me that I was in for a bad performance review simply because there were too many grade-8 leaders and Primaries ahead of me in the new structure for me to get a good one. Martin did not call me. When I called him, his receptionist told me that he was taking depositions in another case, he was out of town on business in another case or he was in court on another case. He did not return my calls.
I kept expecting to hear from Marin while events that would help my case were fresh in my mind then kicking myself for not writing them down and dating them when they happened.
Every working hour became an increasing emotional strain relieved only by my conversations with Pete Gurich. Even that became a strain as months of sitting around with nothing to do wore on. I began to suspect that Ford planted Pete to win my confidence and get me to say something that would sound incriminating in court. Pete was too good to be true. Botruff was too good to be true. Then I began to think that I was suffering delusions of grander and persecution.
The only thing certain was my nightmares had returned and they were getting worse as Good Friday, the day I should have died in Vietnam, approached. What had I done since then to justify my survival? I had to work at finding ways to do it and poured a considerable amount of energy into my smartfellowspress website. I had refinanced my home, going $80,000 in debt to self-publish and promote Iago In Brentwood. At every turn when I had to depend on other people to do something I couldnt do, they came up with ingenious ways not to do it. I feared for my sanity and I thought often of suicide. I didnt dwell on ways to kill myself but as the Easter holiday neared I feared that my subconscious would cook up a way to accidentally do me in.
Somehow I got through Good Friday but two days after Easter my brother suffered a fatal heart attack. I had to go to Georgia to help his widow make arrangements for the funeral. She refused to send his body back to Detroit where most of the people who knew him and admired him lived. It was a horrible experience. On the way back with my two sons I fell asleep at the weal of my rented Windstar a few miles from Toledo and ran off the road. By sheer luck no one got injured or killed.
Delikta did not offer me his condolences. I assumed that his oversight was due to his own deteriorating physical condition and mistreatment by his superiors. He was in constant pain. He walked like a crippled old man. His complexion was taking on a grayish ting and he was getting blasted for his unprofessional appearance in executive meetings. He reviewed my time card, treating the time I had to spend going back and forth to Georgia as a matter of making sure that I complied with Fords bereavement leave policy. I took it as a sure sigh that he was gravely ill.
A few weeks later one of my aunts in South Carolina died. This time I flew South for the funeral. When I returned, Delikta questioned whether I could take another bereavement and I ended up marking that time off as sick leave, which I didnt want to do because I was taking a lot of sick days. I didnt like to take sick days unless I was truly ill but lately I found it so difficult to go to work I sometimes called in sick just to avoid the stress.
Can you imagine what it was like for me to find a trophy on my desk with an inane definition of Creativity written on the pedestal that Elaine Haas sent to everyone in her division? No creative person I knew had been asked about it. Elaine also sent all of her people a gift written like a childrens book called Who Stole My Cheese about a mouse who starved to death because he couldnt or wouldnt adapt to his changing environment. How much crap like that was a person like me supposed to put up with? Wasnt the dinosaur metaphor enough?
Deliktas deteriorating condition added to my depression. It was hard for me to look at him without seeing by brother in his coffin. The most I could do was share with him the psychological techniques of pain control I taught myself to get though my Advanced Individual Training and Jump School in the Army. It didnt help him.
On a rare visit to Deliktas studio, Botruff told me that he was going to give me my performance review. I told him not to bother because I wasnt going to sign it. I said, Its bullshit and you know it. I hadnt intended to say that with a half-dozen witness standing nearby but it was going to be good that I did. It was going to prove in my mini-trial that Dan Botruff was a smooth and convincing liar.
Botruff moved me up near his area in PDC where I had a bigger workstation and a new computer with a bigger monitor like Petes, Robs and Richs. My workstation, apart from the other math modelers in Dans group, was only temporary until a space opened up for me with the rest of his group on the other side of the clay modeling studio. I could look down over the second floor rail and see the studio the way you would see a stage from the rail of a balcony and I could see across the empty space to people in the opposite balcony. Dans people were tucked away behind the people I could see.
To visit each other we had to go down a particular stairway, cross the studio, come up another stairway and negotiate a maze of corridors. If you took the wrong stairway or the wrong corridor it could take a long time to reach your destination. The first time I tried it, my bad sense of direction got me so turned around that I didnt get there. I felt lucky to find my way back to my cubical where I sat amid draftsmen and engineers from another department working with a different software package than mine.
With my bigger monitor I could work much faster and more accurately on the first shot than I could before because I could see more than I could see before without having to zoom in and out as much. It was nice to have. It would have been nicer if I had something to do.
Almost everyones work had dried up in Dans department making for excruciatingly long workdays. Dan tacitly allowed his people without a project to take long breaks and long lunch hours. Pete, who was still assigned to Delikta, dropped by to visit me now and then. Sometimes I went over to the Design Center to see him.
On one of my visits I noticed a clay model sports car with horrendous highlights. The clay modelers were too good to let that happen so I figured that they hadnt gotten around to fixing it yet. On closer examination, I noticed that a plan view line that was driving the bad highlight could easily be corrected and asked one of the modelers why he hadnt done it. He shook his head woefully and nodded in the direction of the designer, another prince who would not allow the modelers to touch the offending curve. Pete thought that the design was fundamentally sound and the problem would work itself out in time. I saw a year of redesign if it wasnt fixed as soon as possible.
Ray Campau was the Clay Modeling Supervisor. I mentioned the problem to him. He shook his head sadly and said that he knew about it but he couldnt change it. He was running into frustrations like that all the time. Someone had decided that the designers did all of the designing that mattered and the machines would take care of the rest. Now I knew why the scans that the math modelers got were so bad. They were built into the new way of doing things. The people who knew what to do were running milling machines and taking orders from designers who didnt know what they were doing. Eventually the model would look good but it would take a hell of a lot longer than it should have.
I never saw Ray Campau again. He retired.
Howard Thompson retired and moved to Tennessee.
Walt George Retired. I didnt now where he went.
Scott Yu quit and moved to the West Coast.
John Arzooian died.
Gail Brock, who headed the Package Engineering group on the 93 Probe, died.
Ford began offering a new round of Deadwood retirement packages. Mimi Vandermolen got one. She took it and moved back to Canada with her new husband. The last thing she said to me was, When you get old they dont want you anymore. She was 54 years old. So was I
With nothing to do and Ford looking to reduce headcount by way of the deadwood offer nobody objected to idol workers surfing the web and playing computer games. I spent several hours a day reading and posting messages on my website discussion board. You would think that we could have made more productive use of our time by studying and practicing the tools of our trade but our thick manuals were obsolete before they were printed and the online help was no help. We needed structured guidance. Eventually we got it. That is, most of us got it.
On my way to Dan Botruffs office to see what work he could give me, I saw Jan Green. She told me about a series of classes in Surf and ALLIES that Dan wanted his people to take. She was going to the training room at the time and I asked if I could join her because I didnt know how to get there. She asked me if I had registered for the class.
Registered?
Class size was limited, so the instructors wanted the people who planned to attend to sign up for the classes they wanted a few days in advance. Larry Lauth administered the program. He gave the sign-up sheet to a Primary in Jan Greens four-person cubical and sent e-mails out to all of the math modelers. I went back to my workstation and checked my e-mail, which had been working fine for weeks. I didnt see the message. I thought that I might have deleted it without realizing what it was but it wasnt in my deleted messages, either.
Larry assured me that he sent it and I believed him because I wasnt getting important messages from other sources. I got a ton of junk mail and some significant mail but not all of it and some if it arrived too late for me to act on it.
When Larry passed out the sign-up sheet for the next class, I missed that notice, too. I went to the class without sighing up. No problem. I got in and I learned enough to help me on my next project, an Explorer leaf screen, one of the toughest modeling jobs there is.
Dave Patella gave me the job with a scan that looked like something you would draw holding the eraser end of a long pencil. None of the twenty or so slots had the same shape. All of the spacing was different. Some design elements were incomplete and the surfaces the leaf screen was supposed to tie into were missing.
I should have been happy for the challenge but all I could think of was how much work went into doing it right and few people would ever see it. Who gives a damn about a leaf screen unless its screwed up?
While I was getting a cup of coffee, I saw Len Olson and told him how I felt about the leaf screen. I whined about how insignificant it was and I whined about being pegged as the go-to guy for parts that nobody cared about. Len brought me up short by pointing out what should have been obvious to me. Not everybody could do a leave screen. Damn few people knew what was involved or how to put all of those things together. He said that if he had to give the assignment to someone, he would give it to his best modeler.
Then it hit me. Nobody else in Botruffs group could have done it.
I stopped whining and went to work gathering all of the information I needed on the hood, the A-pillars and the windshield to get started. Patella didnt realize I needed all of that information. In the process of getting it, he also nailed it down. It hadnt been nailed down before. I completed the model in half the time anyone expected to see it.
The work dried up again and rumors starting flying about who got the deadwood offer. Nobody wanted to admit that he or she got it but as I looked at the ages and titles of the people in our group I could see only one candidate, a man about my age whom I admired for his breadth and depth of engineering knowledge as well as his eye for good design. He wasnt a Primary. He got the offer. He wasnt happy about it but he took it. That left me. I told Len that I didnt get the offer and I wouldnt because of what happened the last time Personnel tried to lay it on me. He told me not to be so sure, that Ford might have given it to my lawyer.
Len was right. Personnel did give it to my lawyeragain.
Martin told Charles Purnell and me about the offer, which I had vehemently rejected, because we were nearing the last stages of the ADR process before the arbitration. Ford had one last shot at us in depositions and Martin had to contact us to tell us when and where it would be held.
The morning before my final deposition I saw three people Ford counted among their most highly valued employees who said that they thought I was one of Fords most valuable employees. They looked as though I had punched them in the gut when I told them about my deadwood offer.
Gary Morales, my former CDRS instructor who was now a Design Manager in the Truck studio volunteered to testify for me at the mini-trial. He said without qualification that I was the most knowledgeable person in design that he knew. He told me that many of the suggestions I made for improving CDRS were now programmed into the ALIAS math modeling software. He added that the programmer he showed them to told him that I obviously knew some things. I knew the man he was talking about, a certified genius. Then again, so was I. I told Gary that testifying for me might be a bad career move. He shrugged it off. Ford needs people like you, he said. There arent many left.
My deposition went better than I expected. It went much better than Martin expected. The lawyer representing Ford looked too young to practice law and he made so many blunders that I easily stomped all over him. Things did not start out that way.
A black woman Martin new from previous cases they had worked on was transcribing everything for the legal record. Martin was happy to have her. I wasnt. She didnt use a tape recorder to make sure that her transcriptions were correct and I had to be extra careful not to use words that she might misinterpret the way the Minnesota stenographer had.
From our informal chitchat before the proceedings began, she made it clear to me that she was a stanch Republican, philosophically opposed to people suing the companies they worked for. She laughed about plaintiffs presenting reams of notes detailing names, dates and hours of the day they alleged showed a pattern of illegal discrimination. She said that if they put as much time and effort in doing their work they would have gotten the raises and promotions they claimed they deserved. If I could win her over, it seemed to me that I could win anyone over. In the end, I had no doubt that I did with a lot of help from Fords lawyer.
During the breaks Martin and I marveled at the doors Fords lawyer opened to areas that Judge Freedman had barred us from presenting. He brought up the accusations I made about Harry Finley and Vick Clark, the nazi and the Klansman I worked for in 1966 and 67. He brought up the promotion list that Ford submitted to the EEOC. By the second or third break it was clear to Martin and me that the Ford lawyer had not come prepared with the essential facts. He kept trying to hit me with claims I made that sounded too outrageous to be true without realizing that they were true and I had the documents and the witnesses to back them up. He had to excuse himself twice to call his office.
When we left, I could see that Martin had a new respect for what I could do as a witness. He kept telling me how impressed he was. The more he complimented me on how I presented myself the more I worried. He shouldnt have been surprised and he shouldnt have appeared to be shaken by it. Yes, he did appear to be shaken, not gleeful.
Months dragged by without a final arbitration date. Tentative dates were scheduled and postponed. Domestic emergencies cost me $10,000 in the span of three months and I was getting inexplicable notices from utilities and charities that my checks were bouncing.
It took another two months for a Dearborn Federal Credit Union officer to figure out that I was getting those notices because I was using old checks with the wrong routing number on them. I found the checkbook in the bottom of one of my drawers at work when I ran short. I didnt know what routing numbers were and I didnt realize they were old checks because they looked almost identical to the new ones. I kept the checkbook around in case I got audited and I changed job locations so often that I forgot where I put it and what it was for.
Then I started getting huge drains in my checking account that turned out to be a result of a home refinancing document with a mysterious check mark in a balloon payment box. Someone made an error on my electric bill and my electricity was shut off without notice. My water got shut off without notice and my website started shutting down at the worst times possible because the server I signed up with got taken over by another company that put my data on the wrong platform. My Webmaster bailed out on me shortly after the 9, 11 terrorist attack. My fax stopped working. My cable box started switching channels on its own and my computer locked up and deleted hours of work routinely.
These were just a few of the crazy things that were happening to me at home while I awaited the arbitration date. I had nothing to do at work and the company clamped down on employees using the Internet for anything except company business. I was missing mandatory meetings because I was again having trouble with my e-mail. A Botruff meeting I did attend got me so upset that I wanted to scream. He was talking about a new procedure he was implementing called best practices.
I outlined that procedure in 1992 after my success with applying it in Greg Arceris Components group in 89 and 90. The buzzword then was benchmarking. I proposed that the company start benchmarking within it own organization, using the best methods of its employees to elevate everyones level of performance. Using extended downtime like we were experiencing to do it was part of that proposal, which looked a lot like the training blocks we were supposed to be getting in Surf and ALIAS.
And there I sat labeled deadwood, the only black face in the crowd, listing to the great things Dan Botruff was doing and proposing for our group as though he had gotten them from the gods. My head throbbed and my heart pounded so hard and fast I thought it would explode.
Two weeks later my heart did explode
Keith True, one of Botruffs Primaries came to me with a truck interior door pocket that had to be resurfaced. The handle and the pocket also had to be moved to a new location. Unlike the leaf screen, this really was a meaningless job busywork the sort of job Ford said that it would give in increasing doses to the people who declined the deadwood offer. A good clay modeler working directly with the engineer and the designer could have done it all in half a day. Math modeling it with the designer on the floor below and two engineers in different buildings so that it would stitch in IDEAS could take weeks. I hated thinking about any of it because the job itself was insignificant compared to the things I could have been doing, which were the things Keith True was trying to do.
I couldnt believe how many engineers were involved it this thing. It reminded me of the first time I visited my sister on the first floor of the sprawling PDC complex and saw a sea of white faces, hundreds of engineers working away at their computers.
I asked Sara, What do all of these people do?
She couldnt tell me.
Now, as I gathered missing data on the door pocket I knew what those engineers did. Mostly they got in each others way, creating problems to solve to justify their employment and their overtime. Thats what I had to put up with on the truck interior door pocket; five engineers doing the work that one of them could have done faster and better.
To get past one miner information roadblock I went to Dan Botruff to get him to add is Supervisor muscle to my request. There was no rush. It was a game that everyone knew everyone else was playing to look busy when they werent. I wanted to show Botruff that I was working diligently. He wanted me to drag it out but he wanted someone else to look responsible for holding me up.
Botruff picked up his telephone and called the engineer in charge. He started right in with a crisp, commanding tone and made the door pocket issue sound like the industrial equivalent of D-Day. Then he did something that I would have thought was out of character. He lied.
We have to have it before one oclock, he said.
My jaw dropped. Botruff winked at me.
Ive got a man standing here waiting for it and he has other work to do.
If I had been on the other end of the line I would have believed him. When he hung up he smiled at me. I frowned and asked him why he lied. I was too busy trying to process how smoothly he did it to register his answer. All that filtered through my numbed brain was something about lighting a fire under people to get them moving.
The day after Halloween, my fathers birthday, I started to call in sick just because I couldnt stand the idea of going to work. The mini-trial tentatively scheduled for November or December had been pushed back to the January or February of 2002. How could I last that long? The boredom and politics at work were killing me. I didnt think that was literally true and with all the days Id take off in 2001 I couldnt talk myself into staying away from work just because I hated the situation I was in. There seemed to be no end to it.
I recalled the time I came in two hours late a few months earlier and saw Shahied at the snack shop. He looked as drained as I felt and told me that he, too, just got into work. He told that he hated working for a white guy Ford had recently hired who didnt know as much as he did. He was going to a new building and he couldnt get there fast enough. I remember feeling that I had lost another friend and Ford had lost another outstanding worker where it counted most. When I got to my workstation I remembered feeling depressed, rather than relived that nobody noticed I hadnt been there. It was as though it didnt matter to anyone but me.
Around lunchtime Dan Botruff dropped by to tell me that I missed a mandatory safety class. I was upset because I didnt get the message. He told me not to worry about it because he missed the class, too, and both of us had to go to a make-up class the next day. It took a while to get him to understand that I wasnt upset about missing the class. I was upset about not getting the message. He told me that everyone got the message and I probably overlooked it or deleted it by mistake. I asked him to pull up a chair and see if he could find it in my mailbox or my deleted messages. He couldnt find it, either. He also couldnt understand why I was so upset.
His attitude was, So the message disappeared in cyberspace; so what? Now I had it and we were going to the class. No harm, no foul.
I felt a bad headache coming on. I ignored the tightness in my chest and tried to relax, to persuade myself that the lost e-mail was not a harbinger of bad things to come while Botruff joked about weird things that happened on his computer.
While we were sitting there, Botruff asked me to pull up the door pocket and handle. He checked the highlights, as though anybody gave a shit about it and said it was awesome. He could have meant anything. Awesome was Dan Botruffs favorite word.
That night as I prepared for bed dreading the day ahead, the tightness in my chest got worse. My left hand trembled uncontrollably. Beads of sweat popped out of my pours. My heart pounded ferociously and my consciousness started spinning away. I felt a new kind of muscle cramp on the left side of my chest followed by a new kind of pain that crept up to my shoulders and down the back of my arms past my elbows like fire ants on the march. I didnt know what was wrong but when something ripped painfully below my heart I knew that it was serious. I wished that I had paid as much attention to the lessons my shapely high school Physiology teacher tried to teach as I did clever way of peeking down the magnificent cleavage of her lab coat.
Ah, Miss Meekins, the Halley Berry of Chadsey High
Oh, well
I staggered to the bathroom and gobbled five or six aspirin tablets, then staggered back to my bedroom and dressed for whatever was next, hoping that I wouldnt lose consciousness before I finished. Was I having a heart attack?
Nah. My arms hurt much worse than my chest did and I was so sick, so close to losing consciousness, that pain wasnt as bad as the nameless drain of energy. If you can imagine being extremely nocuous without the nausea so sick that every purposeful thought was a gargantuan chore, you know how I felt. I sat down in my living room easy chair thinking, This is it. Im going to die. Damn. Its kinda scary.
I tried to assume a natural pose that wouldnt look as though I didnt die in pain when somebody discovered my body. I couldnt do it because the pain in my arms kept me writhing and conscious every time I thought I might be able to fight through it and slip away with a little dignity.
None of my mind-tricks for controlling the pain in my arms worked for more that two or three minutes at a time. Suddenly a horrible thought crashed though my foggy brain. What if I dont die? What if I stay like this for years? I sat bolt upright and called 911.