Termination Man: a novel (15 page)

I had been in a lot of companies over the years, and I had learned to spot the signs of a dysfunctional organization. One thing about dysfunctional companies: people don’t go out of their way to be friendly. I could sense the tension in the air at UP&S. I looked across the room and caught the eye of a heavyset woman with frizzy hair and horn-rimmed glasses. I gave her my best smile. She barely acknowledged me, and returned her attention to the piles of papers on her desk. I silently hoped that Alan Ferguson and Lucy Browning would be easier nuts to crack than this woman was.

I took a seat at my desk and did what a new guy on the payroll would be expected to do under the circumstances: I tried to look busy. I opened the top drawer and found a copy of the employee handbook. I placed the book atop Craig Parker’s new desk and began paging through it as if it was really fascinating stuff.

I had been at this no more than five minutes before I heard two approaching voices—one male and one female—and I got my first live look at Alan Ferguson and Lucy Browning. I had seen photos of them both, and read their files, of course; but that is not the same as interacting with people in the flesh.

Alan Ferguson was a balding man of medium height. I knew his age to be forty-seven; and every day of those years showed in his face. A nasty divorce will do that to you.

There are freelance Internet investigators who specialize in digging up the dirt on people’s personal lives—for employers and other interested parties. One of these shadowy online sleuths had found out about Kevin Lang dipping his toe (
and possibly more than that
) into the world of bisexual dating. This same investigator was able to determine that Alan’s wife had filed for divorce; and another man might have been involved—though the ex-Mrs. Ferguson currently lived alone.

In any case, the divorce must have been traumatic for Alan. He was apparently close to his two daughters, and was loathe to the idea of being separated from them. At one point his wife had filed a restraining order against him: Nothing violent, so far as we could tell—just the usual shenanigans of the jilted spouse: After being ejected from the house he was still making mortgage payments on, Alan showed up at his former residence one night and began ringing the doorbell. When he refused to leave his wife called the police, who gave Alan a night of free room and board courtesy of the Columbus taxpayers. He was also booked for a DUI, even though the police had not busted him while driving. He had obviously driven to his former home, and his blood alcohol content had registered above the legal limit.

It wasn't surprising that a guy like Alan would become a malcontent on the job. I’d seen this phenomenon before: When one aspect of a person’s life goes sour, it tends to paint the other parts with similarly negative hues.

But this morning Alan was cheerful enough, even jocular, I might say.

“So are you the FNG?” he asked.

“Yeah, I’m the fucking new guy,” I responded. “Thanks for the warm welcome.”

“Alan Ferguson,” he said. “And welcome to the big-time world of stamped automotive components.”

“My parents are proud,” I said, rising to shake his hand. “My name’s Craig. Craig Parker.”

“I’m Lucy,” said the slightly plump woman who stood beside him. Lucy Browning was thirty-four and unmarried. My investigator had tried to dig up some dirt on her as well, but there was no dirt to be found. Lucy apparently spent most of her free time in her bachelorette apartment. There were no questionable online activities—at least none that my investigator could find. Lucy was a textbook wallflower: She rarely went out on the weekends, and then mostly just for dinner with a group of married female friends. She was likely the lone spinster in the pack, the one who had been left on the shelf.

“I’m glad to meet you, Lucy. So tell me, am I going to enjoy working at UP&S, or are most of my new coworkers like Alan here?”

Lucy rolled her eyes. “Alan is an acquired taste.”

“Hey, what’s that supposed to mean?” Alan asked with mock indignation.

“If Alan is the worst thing that befalls you, you’ll be lucky,” she went on. “This used to be a great place to work, though, if that’s any consolation.”

“Wow, don’t sugar-coat it for me on my first day,” I said. “Go ahead and crush my spirits from the outset.”

“What Lucy means,” Alan said. “Is that this isn’t the company it used to be. I’m sure you already know that UP&S was acquired recently by TP Automotive; and now TP Automotive suits comprise half of our management team. Don’t worry: you’ll have plenty of time to see for yourself and arrive at your own conclusions. But what you need right now is a factory tour. Great fun guaranteed.”

“I can hardly wait.”

Alan instructed me to wait while he removed a hard hat, goggles, and a set of earplugs from one of his desk drawers. “You probably haven’t been issued any safety gear yet,” he said. “But we have extra ones that you can borrow.”

“Do you want me to join you on the plant tour?” Lucy asked.

Alan shook his head. “Not unless you really want to. I know you’ve got stuff to do.”

“Yeah, I’ve got stuff to do.”

“I’ll handle it, then.”

Leaving Lucy to her work, Alan guided me to the rear exit of the office area, a pair of large metal double doors. Alan pushed the doors open and we stepped into a short hallway. The bare concrete floor here was painted gray, and the cinderblock walls were painted blue and white—the same colors as the UP&S company logo. At the opposite end of the hallway was another set of double doors. I could hear the muted sounds of the factory on the other side of this barrier.

Alan stepped into an adjacent closet and retrieved my safety gear. “Put all this stuff on,” he said. “A lot of people think that the hardhat is overkill, but you’ve probably never been struck on the head by the arm of a welding robot, have you?”

“Can’t say as I have,” I said, fitting the helmet onto my head.  “That’s not part of the new employee orientation process, is it?”

“It used to be,” Alan said with a wry grin. “Human resources made us stop, though. Come on.”

Immediately before the doors leading to the factory was a small, lighted trophy case. It contained various memorabilia. This sort of display is common in factories, and I knew that this would be a requisite stopping point for any visiting customers or dignitaries who were taking a plant tour.

“That’s a quality award that we received from Honda during our third year of operation,” Alan said, indicating a small imitation gold cup mounted onto an equally small marble platform.

“Were you here then?” I asked.

“Damned straight I was,” Alan said. “I was one of the first employees hired back in our start-up days, when we were a ragtag group of strangers, trying to navigate the odd cultural mix of General Motors and Takada Press. I was employee number twenty-three. It was a different company then. Most of our senior managers were from Takada Press, and they were pretty egalitarian about things. I mean, don’t get me wrong, there was a corporate hierarchy and all, but you got the sense that everyone’s opinion and contribution was valued. The GM management folks weren’t so bad, either. I know that some of them preferred the way things are in Detroit, with separate restrooms for management, and heated garages for management and all that. But they found out damn quick that it wasn’t going to work in this environment, all that lording over the little guys in the typical big corporate fashion. So everyone ended up pulling together, and for a while, things worked pretty well.”

Alan paused for a moment and stared wistfully at the other items in the display case. I imagined that he had memories associated with most of them. There were several more quality awards. I noticed that one was engraved in both English and Japanese script. There was an early photo of the entire company standing before the barely completed factory building—no more than fifty people in those days, by the look of it. Almost everyone was smiling—genuine smiles, from what I could tell. Their expressions somewhat resembled those in my old sports team photos from high school and college.

“Let’s go,” Alan said, turning abruptly away from the display case. He pushed his way through the double doors that opened onto the factory.

I followed behind him, the eager new employee.

The air in the factory was filled with the sharp odors of oil and ozone. There were other indistinguishable chemical smells that vaguely reminded me of my father’s garage in Dayton. I could practically feel the smells soaking into my clothing.

“It’s loud, isn’t it?” Alan shouted, and I nodded in response. I had been in many factories before, yet I still had a hard time adjusting to the noise in these environments. The UP&S factory was no exception. The aural assault here was pervasive: the clatter of machines came from every direction. For as far as one could see, masses of moving, swinging production equipment were organized into rows and islands about the production floor. Some machines seemed to be functioning without human intervention; most were attended by helmeted and uniformed workers. All of them made noise.

Even through with the earplugs and the sounds of the other equipment, I could make out the distant thump of a large press machine. It was like the footsteps of one of the dinosaurs in the
Jurassic Park
movies.

“That’s the 50-ton press you’re hearing,” Alan said, as if reading my mind. “It creates the blanks that are used to create just about every component we manufacture here.”

I nodded as if this were a very interesting tidbit, thinking that it was exactly what an eager FNG would do on his first day on the job.

“Most of the people out in the plant are very easy to talk to,” Alan explained, signaling for me to follow him as he led the way through one of the main aisles of production equipment. We’ve never had a union here, so there isn’t so much of a division between office staff and the production team. At least there hasn’t been until now.” He shook his head, still walking quickly. “I look for TP Automotive to screw that up, too.”

Listening to him talk, I wasn’t surprised that TP Automotive had fingered Alan as a potential threat to their authority. Here I was, first day on the job, a man whom Alan barely knew. And here
he
was, talking trash about his employer at every opportunity. 

We arrived at a workstation where Alan seemed to be a welcome and frequent visitor. It was a welding station; two production employees were busy loading and unloading preformed aluminum stampings into a pair of machines that welded a series of rivets onto them, sending up showers of sparks.

“Helen, Roy,” Alan said. “Got a minute?”

“Oh, I always got time for you, professor,” a tall, stocky, African-American man—obviously Roy—said. Roy looked like a former football player. He gave us a large, toothy smile. “Looks you got yourself a new friend.”

“Meet Craig Parker,” Alan said. “Craig, meet Roy Jones and Helen Dufresne. Like me, they’re both old timers. All three of us were hired back in the gravy days, shortly after Takada Stamping and GM opened the front doors.”

By now Helen had paused her labors to talk with us. “Who you calling and ‘old timer’?” she asked. Helen was probably in her mid-fifties. She had platinum blonde hair and the hoarse voice of a lifelong smoker. “I’m just a youngster yet.”

I gave her an obligatory laugh. “Nice to meet you.”

I shook hands with both of them, each one gripping my palm through the thick cotton gloves that they wore to protect their skin from stray sparks.

“Welcome aboard, college boy,” Roy said. “You stick with the professor here, you’ll be all right.”

It wasn’t the first time that I’d been called a “college boy.” That’s the way it works in most plants. In some of the rougher plant environments, I’ve even been called a “fucking college boy”—and always with an air of what passes for familiar good humor.

These little barbs serve as a safety valve for the corporate caste system when the suits and the production workers are thrown together, as is often the case in manufacturing firms. In these companies, there is always a subterranean layer of tension between the people in the front office and the people in the plant. Call it class envy if you like, but it’s simple human nature. The average production employee is perceptive enough to realize that his counterparts in the office make more money than he or she does. And then there are the non-financial perks to consider: Office employees get to sit while they work, whereas production employees are constantly on their feet. The office is quieter, cleaner—cooler during the summer months, and warmer during the winter.

I had been aware of these distinctions even as a kid, when my father would come home smelling of machine oil and metal shavings, talking about the “soft” people in the front office—the ones who didn’t know how good they had it.

And one aspect of the game is that as a suit, you always accept these little jabs with an equal measure of good humor. You can jab back a little if you want—but you can’t show offense at their calling you a college boy or a softie. Do that and you’ll upset the whole delicate balance.

“I’ve only got one question,” I said to Roy. “How come Alan gets to be a professor, and I’m a lowly college boy?”

“Alan done paid his dues,” Roy said, clapping Alan on the shoulder. “He been here in the early days, when we had to work twelve-hour days just to get things running.”