The Casual Employee or How Many Grandmothers Can One Man Have?

Thomas was never on time for work. There were days when he would call in to say he was running late, and then never actually make it in. And as time went on, there were days when he did not call or show up for work at all.

I was the Director of Manufacturing at the medical device plant where Thomas was employed. I know what you are thinking. And believe me, everyone who worked at the company was thinking the same thing. 

Thomas should be fired. 

But none of us wanted to do it.

His absenteeism became chronic. He started making up excuses for why he was late or why he had missed the last day or three days. Or the last two weeks. There were times that he missed work for so long that we assumed he had quit. Then he would show up with some cockamamie story about why he had not been able to make it or get in touch. We should have fired him by every reasonable and objective measure. But we didn’t.

Thomas was a nice guy. I know that sounds lame. He was nice, so we let him get away with being slack. But there is so much more to it. There are layers of complexity to every situation. Some of these complexities are known or obvious, while some might be buried deep or yet to be revealed. Thomas was a uniquely nice guy and his life was filled with complexities. Or complications. Some of them self-imposed, but some landed in his lap by the nature of the home, the race, and the culture of poverty he was born into. Some were delivered to him by an inherently biased society.

Thomas had a smile that could kill. He was lanky and a bit socially odd. He wore a hairstyle that was always about ten years behind the current trend. His glasses were like that too; large and gold framed, they never seemed to fit quite right. He would constantly have to push them back up into place. He was a bit of a nerd. But a flash of that smile would make all of that disappear.

Thomas was naturally curious. He knew enough to be dangerous on everything from philosophy to black holes in space. However, he had difficulty discerning a phony conspiracy theory from real science or fact. His favorite topic of conversation was professional wrestling. Thomas was convinced that the matches he watched on TV were real. He believed all the soap opera storylines that were woven into the commentary between grudge matches and cage matches. He wanted us to believe too.

Thomas was smart and creative. His excuses for being absent or late became a source of entertainment. Our HR Manager began to compile a list. He was stung by a jellyfish. He could not find his umbrella and it was raining. He ate a sour hot dog. If it had snowed within three states of where we lived, he had happened to be there and found himself snowed in. I think he had at least eleven grandmothers die. And having more grandmothers than any one person could have is where Thomas screwed up.

Why didn’t he keep his own list of excuses to make sure he had not gone over the M.A.G. (Maximum Allowed Grandmothers)?

So, the Production Manager came to me and said that something needed to be done about Thomas. He was creating problems by causing gaps in labor when we needed it. He was causing morale issues because if other workers were expected to show up on time, they felt that we should expect the same from Thomas.  I agreed, but reminded him that the owner of the company reserved the right to fire employees. We could not take action without his input.

The Production Manager happened to be a creative genius, a poet, a humanitarian, and an all-around guru of sorts. He said that he had not meant to propose that Thomas be fired. He had another idea. He went on to explain that firing Thomas would not really benefit anyone. Thomas had proven to be unemployable by any other typical organization. Firing him just meant that he would end up on public assistance. The job gave Thomas some purpose and a sense of self-worth. And besides, Thomas was a good worker when he showed up. He was diligent and cared about the quality of the product. He was also well-liked by everyone despite the resentment some had for his unreliability.

So here was the plan. Thomas did not need to make up excuses anymore. (He did not have another Grandma to sacrifice anyway.) He could come to work whenever he wanted. We would send him home if we did not need him. It would be in his interest to call first so that he would not waste time coming in just to be sent home. That way we would be able to hire an extra person that was reliable and only use Thomas if we were busy, or someone was out sick, etc.

You might think that seems unfair; that we conformed to Thomas’s inability to get to work rather than making him conform to our schedule. Yep. That was the plan.

We took it to the owner. He listened and rubbed his chin. “I like it”, he said. However, he suggested that as part of the arrangement that Thomas would get no raises, no bonuses, and no benefits. That way if any other employees complained we could tell them that they could have that same deal if they wanted.  Our HR manager pitched in by creating the official category of “Casual Employee”.  It was brilliant.

Thomas would be able to have all benefits reinstated if he could demonstrate that he could reliably work a full-time schedule for three months in a row. The truth is Thomas was thrilled with the arrangement. I had to remind him a few times that I did not need a reason for why he had not made it to work on a particular day.

As the years passed, Thomas stayed on as a casual employee. We rarely sent him home. The company had grown to the size that someone was absent most days and he could just fill in that spot. As a long term employee, Thomas understood the job and had all the proficiency that you would expect from someone who has repeated a task over and over. But he had only received cost of living increases. That made him one of the most cost efficient employees we had.

Thomas kept his job. He was a taxpayer instead of being reliant on Government assistance. I believe that whatever issues had kept him from being able to cope with a full time schedule would have been worse if he had been perpetually unemployed. Our workplace had adapted in a way that benefited the company and the employee. It was unconventional. And if I am ever in a job interview and they ask me about a moment that I am proud of from my work experience, I will tell the story of Thomas. I’m proud that I was open-minded, that I recognized the strengths of everyone involved, and facilitated the series of decisions that allowed Thomas to keep knocking us out with his smile for a few more years.

Post Script:  Thomas later passed away from complications of HIV. I will never forget him.  May he rest in peace.

Picture Power or Family on Film

It was my second Christmas. I was not even two years old. I don’t remember it of course, but there is the photo. My father, a news photographer, took thousands of pictures of me and my siblings over the years. There are a lot of great photos of the four of us. But this photo taken of us posing with our gifts around the perfectly decorated Christmas tree is special. It’s iconic. It documents a defining moment in our lives as three brothers and one sister. It would be our only Christmas in a town that none of us were born in. The one year that my father sought the greener grass of the New York Times owned newspaper in Chattanooga. A year idealized in my mind by the recounted stories my parents and siblings shared about our year living atop a mountain. The year my older siblings would sit, barefoot, in the open windows of the local church on Sundays. The windows that they would hop out of when the sermon was finished. And then they would dash to our little homestead, carefree and happy. The year our Christmas card featured all of us as cartoon hillbillies, our chimney smoke spelling out Seasons Greetings in the background.  It was the year that brought us our only white Christmas. They always ask, “Don’t you remember?”  I don't remember.

Of course all these things were photographically documented and filed into piles and piles of contact sheets and prints filling up cardboard boxes and plastic bins. But the photo was framed. It always sat in a place of honor wherever we lived after that. It moved with us back to our hometown where my father returned to the afternoon paper that he had left just twelve months before. It was always prominently displayed, a testament to a simpler time. A perfect moment. There I am sitting astride a little four wheeled scooter. Our big sister in her cat glasses proudly displaying a large box labeled Silly Safari. My oldest brother, the tall one, posed drumsticks in hand as he stood ready to play his brand new snare drum. And my middle brother, five years older, but closest in age to me. Forever frozen in time in a stance that he would be forever associated with. Guitar strap around his neck, holding his new guitar like it was an extension of himself. A seasoned veteran of the honky-tonk scene.

Photos are potent. Images last. We remember our important moments in modern history not by the news articles that were written of the account, but by an instant of light captured on film. The moment, burned onto paper, and then onto our collective consciousness. The most powerful of these impressions become our mental representation of the zeitgeist of entire eras.  Iwo Jima. The Little Rock Nine. The mushroom cloud. Kiss in Times Square.  The Hindenburg. Dr. King on The Mall. Lone man stopping tanks in Tiananmen. Ali fiercely reigning over a limp Sonny Liston. There are thousands of photographs like these that become more than single points in time. They define the time. Some may merely capture a moment when the course of history changed, but some pictures become the agents of change. Light and mirrors create reflections of our strengths and weaknesses, our victories and our failures, our courage and our cowardice. They can reflect our need for change. But they can also contain imagery that renders nostalgia into reality.

 

My family has boxes full of our own iconography. But the photo captures our own little familial zeitgeist. I have wondered if it happened to capture a moment when the four of us were forming our own identities? Or was it an image with such strength that it began to shape how we thought of ourselves? Did it set in motion lifetimes of trying to live up to that perfect moment? This is not a candid shot. We are posed next to the tinsel laden tree. Everyone has a role. My oldest brother as the drummer. My middle brother as the musical prodigy. My sister fashionable and fun. And me? I’m the cute one who can’t yet talk.

It’s almost perfect in its representation of who we were, but also who we would become. My drummer brother is clearly the leader in the photo. He stands tall over the rest of us. He is at the ready to pound out a rhythmic tempo for us to keep in time with. No picture fully represents anyone. But it’s as if the magic of a special Christmas focused its power through the lens of Dad’s camera and “Snap!”, our places in the family were permanently printed. The drummer continues to set the tempo. He keeps us grounded. He leads the march. Every family needs a drum major who stands tall at the front of the pack, holds up his baton (or map of Disney World) and keeps us moving forward.

My sister lives up to the image as well. She is fashionable and fun. She is the most social and outgoing of all of us. She loves to meet new people and like the old saying, she has never met a stranger. The box she holds in the picture is labeled Silly Safari. The course her life has taken has been like a safari. Not silly, of course. No one’s life is silly. But she has managed to maintain a passion for fun adventures even in the face of more tragedy than any one person should have to endure. But just as the photo would suggest, she emerges from these trials with grace, a positive attitude, and fashionably dressed.

And then there is the guitar player. My middle brother. It seems that the focused Christmas magic, the gift of the guitar, and the enduring framed photograph formed a transformational triumvirate that would govern his passion for music and performing for a lifetime. Out of all of us, the photo seems to best portray the essence of who he is. If something has strings, he can play it. If there is a stage, he will be on it. He is the natural entertainer of our family. We can count on him to deliver the right comic line with perfect timing when we need to laugh. And we all need to laugh and hear music. That is his role.

So that leaves me, the baby. Could that be my role? Forever destined to roll through life on a scooter, babbling incoherently? Some may see me that way, nattering on about nothing. But honestly, if the camera was magic and transformational it must have bounced off me like Voldemort’s killing curse bounced off baby Harry Potter. So maybe the picture is not responsible for snapping us into our life long roles. Maybe it just captured a moment when my siblings were developing their own identities. I was still a lump of clay plopped on a scooter.  I could still become anything. The only thing is, I cannot think of a photo that captures that transformational moment for me. Maybe that moment hasn’t happened yet.  Maybe I’m just finding myself right now. 

Quick, someone grab a camera and capture this moment as I type this sentence.

However, I do think the picture hints at my role in our family. The scooter I sit on has wheels. And I was certainly always on the move. From an early age my parents gave me tremendous freedom to wander our portion of the city. If you lived in the general proximity, I probably showed up at your door to see if your kids were able to come out and play. I most likely was an unexpected and frequent guest for dinner at your home. I spent hours exploring the woods and lakes that could be found in pockets between neighborhoods close by. I would lose track of time and space as I hyper-focused on a Pinball machine at the local game room. My mother would call neighbor after neighbor to find me or would eventually drive up to the game-room to retrieve me. My sister-in-law recently commented that the family would often be sitting together when someone would say, “Where is LeGette?”

If my family were a jigsaw puzzle, I know the piece that I would be. If you cut the photo into interlocking shapes and then worked diligently to reassemble us, I would be that piece that is inevitably  missing just when you think you have put it all back together. The piece you have to scramble to find. The one that drives you crazy because it is missing and you need to have a complete picture. The piece that seems to have wandered off. You rake your fingers through the surrounding carpet. You get up and make sure that you are not sitting on me; I mean sitting on the puzzle piece. And then I just show up, probably in a place that you have already looked. You place me into the hole in the puzzle and the picture is complete. Our family is whole again.

My role is to be there when the puzzle needs completion.

 I don’t remember that Tennessee Christmas in the photo. The one that looked so perfect. But that does not matter. I was part of it. I have proof in the boxes of pictures. The moment is rooted deeply in my psyche. More importantly though, I have a lifetime of Christmases, weddings, graduations, births and birthdays as part of a family.

The family where I fit. The family of interlocking shapes that need each other to be complete.                                 

         

Sisters in Song

Yesterday I opened Facebook to find awful news. Pilar’s 79-year-old mother had been killed in a crash caused by a drunk driver. Pilar has been a dear friend of my wife and I ever since she started dating a high school buddy of mine back in the late 1980’s. They later married, and though it became more difficult to stay in contact as we were raising our own families, we still count them as some of our closest friends. Over the last week I have been enjoying seeing photos of Pilar and her sisters beaming with happiness as they pose for pictures with their radiant and youthful looking mother. She was visiting her daughters, who all live here in North Carolina, from their home country of Colombia. My heart sank for my friends. The happy visit that I had been following through Facebook had turned tragic.

I had just finished college and moved into a small rental house with a friend. We decided to have a keg party. My roommate and I had invited pretty much everyone we knew. It was turning into one of those parties where you expect the police to show up and shut it down due to complaints from neighbors. Amazingly, that did not happen. My future wife and I had just recently started dating each other and she was at the party as well. We were well into the revelry when people began asking, “Where is Kenny?” He had always been a reliable participant in all of our group’s parties. There were no cell phones. We could not just call and say, “What is holding you up, dude?” We soon found out what the holdup must have been.

Kenny pulled into the driveway in his enormous seventy-something automobile. As he stepped out of the car with his usual giant smile on his face, the other doors on the car also opened. Kenny had brought friends. Girls. Kenny, tall and handsome, had brought a group of dark haired, exotic, gorgeous girls to the party. It did not take long for word of this to spread through the party. Every male in the house practically stampeded out the door and surrounded these stunning sisters who were from Bogota, Colombia. I don’t know how long any of them had been in the States at that point, but they were clearly still learning English. They were all smiles and their limited ability to speak fluently in the language of the other partiers did not stop them from boosting the already lively mood of the event.

It turned out that Kenny had met Pilar at the Mexican restaurant she was waiting tables at while she worked on perfecting her English.  As our group of friends made our way through our early twenties there were many more parties and get-togethers. Kenny and Pilar along with Pilar’s sister Rocio were reliable friends that you could count on to always be there for every opportunity to celebrate the New Year, someone’s birthday, or just a casual night hanging out at a local bar. Sometimes one or two of the other sisters would join us.

My friend Kenny was a talented musician and artist.  I wanted to learn to play guitar. I knew that starting at age twenty-something would be difficult. Like learning a new language becomes harder once you have passed a certain age. Since Kenny was a musician, I always wanted to show him when I learned something new on the guitar. If it was at a party, he would join me in another room and I would attempt to play whatever song I was working on. I liked showing him because he was always supportive. “Dude, you are rocking it”, he might say. Many times Pilar and Rocio would come with us to listen. They would clap and say nice things about what I’m pretty sure was some dreadful sounding stuff. During all those times, none of them mentioned that Pilar and Rocio were talented musicians themselves. And I never asked.

At one New Year’s Eve party, and our most well attended one, I told Kenny that I had learned a new song. We went back to the other room, only this time quite a few more people came along. I twanged out my version of Military Madness and by the end several more people had come into the room. I must have been getting better. Someone actually asked me to play something else. I had nothing. It was like I could learn one song at a time, but without song sheets and time to re-practice I could not play anything else. Kenny said that maybe Pilar and Rocio would do a song. Pilar reluctantly agreed and I gave her my guitar. She said that she was not very good, I had no idea that she even played at all.

And then she started this unique strumming with the back side of her fingers and using her thumb along the bass strings. She started singing in Spanish. I had never heard anything in this style before. Colombian folk music. Almost as soon as Pilar started singing, Rocio joined in. The song was sung in a combination of harmonies and rounds. Shortly after they started, the entire group at our New Year’s Eve party were crowding into the small room. It was beautiful, happy music. It was the music of a family. Immediately clear that this was something that they had done for years. They knew their parts. They explained later that they had sung these songs their whole life as a family. On this night, they were having to handle their own parts but also the parts their other sisters would normally cover. I was amazed.

People that came to that party would talk about it for years. I had friends that I had even forgotten were at that celebration come up to me years later and say how they remembered those beautiful girls singing their hearts out in Spanish and how amazing it was. Over time, I would ask them to sing at every get-together. They made playing and singing seem effortless. Occasionally I was fortunate enough to hear at least one more of the sisters join in with the same effortlessness and talent.

These sisters, who had shown up at my party all those years ago, are much more than beautiful girls as I had seen them that night. They are talented musicians. They are brilliant artists. They are whip-smart engineers. And they are all consistently kind people. But mostly they are sisters. Sisters close to each other in a way that I think is unique to the culture that they were raised in. A culture clearly fostered by their mother that they lost this week. I know that this sisterly closeness and love is strong and that will keep them going as they move through this tragic circumstance. They will lift each other in song.