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NOTE: Click here for Part 10: Where I worked – Mountain Bell on (1) Evans Ave.; & (2) Zuni St.
My promotion was a milestone! Joanna and I were excited – it meant more money, more responsibility, more possibilities for the future. What I didn’t know at the time was just how many more headaches it would entail as well! I was to supervise 10 women, who ranged from young to middle-aged, with the exception of two who were near retirement age. They had been with the company for decades. Whereas the rest of the office had long since adjusted to using electronic calculators, Kathy and Mitzi hung onto the dinosaur-era comptometers that they had used for eons.
Mountain Bell Telephone Co. Accounting Office, 5325 Zuni St., Denver, Billing Adjustments Unit – supervisor (October 1981-April 1984)
I have some happy memories – ones that make me smile – of those 2½ years I spent as supervisor of the Adjustments Unit. But challenges and frustrations dogged me throughout my tenure. The rest of this post will deal exclusively with those challenges and frustrations – which were caused largely by the actions of just one troublesome employee. If you can make it through this one, I promise you that Part 12 will be more positive and enjoyable. It’s kind of like the old “good news, bad news” jokes. I’ll give you the bad news first, then follow up – in Part 12 – with the good news. If you’d prefer to skip my ranting and raving about unpleasant memories, this is your cue to skip on ahead to Part 12. I promise I won’t be offended; I just appreciate your sticking with me this far! However, I should offer this caveat – it’s the tough times that prove – and even shape – a person’s character. Those challenges and frustrations definitely helped shape the person I am today and prepare me for other challenges I would face in the future.
Supervising 10 people in a job with which I was totally unfamiliar would have been a challenge under normal circumstances, but these were not normal circumstances. I had an employee who held the position of supervisory clerk, a position she had also held under the previous supervisor. As the name indicates, supervisory clerk was a clerical, not management, position; however, she made more money than the other clerks and was responsible for providing them with assistance as needed, as well as serving as the primary assistant to the supervisor. Hmmm, I guess you could say she was my Dwight Schrute, who constantly haggled with his boss, Michael Scott, on The Office sitcom, over his title – assistant regional manager vs. assistant to the regional manager. However, such a comparison would be unfair to Dwight Schrute – no matter how much trouble he caused, it was never malicious.
Well, this particular supervisory clerk had assumed that, when the supervisor, Claire Shurtz, was transferred to another position, she would automatically succeed Claire as supervisor. Therefore, when I was announced as the new supervisor, I had a bullseye on my back from Day One. She hated me because I had taken the job to which, in her mind, she was rightfully entitled, and she began plotting to undermine me in every way possible. She used her status as a Hispanic woman to file complaints against both Mountain Bell and me with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. So on several occasions I was visited by an EEOC representative, who sat at my desk and questioned me about the accusations made against me. Fortunately, the EEOC rep, Alyce WIlliams, a Black woman, concluded very quickly that she could trust me and not the employee making the accusations.
This employee also used the union, the Communications Workers of America, to undermine me. As a clerk, I had been a member of the CWA; I was – and am – a strong supporter of unions. But now I was management, and the CWA considered me as an adversary. She regularly filed complaints against me with the union. Unfortunately, the union rep, a white woman, was not nearly as reasonable as the EEOC rep. She also wasn’t ethical; she lied about me just as easily as the employee. As a clerk, I had been a loyal union member; as management, I grew to distrust union reps. I can’t begin to count the number of hours I spent preparing for meetings with union reps and defending myself in those meetings.
One day, I directed the employee to do something that was part of her job description, and she openly & loudly defied me in front of the unit, sticking her finger in my face and saying, “YOU DO IT!”
I had done everything I could to avoid trouble with her. I had bent over backwards to avoid doing anything that could be fodder for her fusillade against me. However, this blatant act of insubordination couldn’t be ignored. According to the employees manual, I could have suspended her immediately for insubordination, but I instead placed her on warning of suspension. I learned from this that, when faced with someone like this, there is no halfway solution. Did I really think that she would appreciate my simply giving her a warning instead of a full suspension? If I did, I was naive.
No longer content with the union and the EEOC representation, this employee hired a lawyer and filed a lawsuit against both Mountain Bell – for discrimination in promoting me to supervisor rather than her; and me – for “retaliation,” claiming that placing her on warning of suspension was an act of retaliation for all of the complaints she had filed against me with the EEOC and the CWA.
Soon Kathy McKibbin – who, by the way, of the 30 or 40 bosses I’ve had in my life, was by far the all-time best – and I soon began meeting regularly with our company lawyer, Bruce Smith, to plan our defense against my employee’s (notice that I’ve been careful not to name her; even 40 years later, I don’t want to tempt fate) lawsuit. Bruce was a very quiet, calm, taciturn man, friendly but serious. At one point, he asked Kathy and me, “Did either one of you do or say anything to (employee) that you regret or feel you shouldn’t have or feel you should apologize for?” Both of us answered no, we hadn’t. We had treated her fairly and honestly every step of the way. Bruce then said, “Then don’t worry. Just tell the truth. Don’t volunteer anything. Just truthfully and succinctly answer the questions that are asked, and we’ll be all right.”
That reassured me, and I really didn’t worry. I knew that (employee) tended to talk a lot and ramble, and believed that any judge and/or jury would see, as had the EEOC rep, that she was untrustworthy. Kathy, on the other hand, continued to worry about the outcome. I kept trying to reassure her, as Bruce had. I was confident of our case. It was a nuisance, but it wasn’t going to kill us.
Our trial began on Monday, October 3, 1983. Our attorney was permitted to have one defendant at his table throughout the trial. Kathy, representing the company, was that person. As for me, I had to sit in an anteroom with other witnesses and wonder what was going on in the courtroom. Finally, I was called to the witness stand. I really don’t recall the specifics of the questions or my testimony. It was pretty much a blur. What I DO recall, however, was the reprimand I received from the judge. Employee’s lawyer was a stereotypically sleazy “mouthpiece.” First of all, he was much like his client in his lack of coherence. Second, it was obvious that his strategy was to confuse me and trip me up. At one point, he asked a question that totally confused me. I really didn’t understand what he was asking. So I tried to ask for clarification – “Do you mean . . .”
It was then that the judge interrupted me and sternly admonished me, “Mr. Jones, we have had this legal system in this country for 200 years, and in our legal system the lawyer asks the questions, not the witness.” Wow! Did he really have to get so dramatic? There was nothing I could do but meekly reply, “Yes, your honor,” and try my best to answer the sleazy lawyer’s question. I have no recollection of how that came out!
The trial concluded Thursday afternoon, October 6. I don’t fully understand how this works (hey, I withdrew after only 3 semesters in law school; maybe they covered this after I left), but this particular trial had a six-person jury, and the decision was handled jointly, part of it by the jury and part of it by the judge.
Early that evening, we were called back to the courthouse. A verdict had been reached. When directed, Kathy, Bruce, and I stood for the reading of the decision. WE WON! It was just as Bruce and I had said . . . we truthfully and succinctly answered the questions that were asked, and we had won. Employee, who didn’t have a good case in the first place, continually sunk herself with her emotional and rambling testimony. I still have a copy of the judge’s decision in my files here at home. Despite his treatment of me when I was on the witness stand, he wrote glowingly of my qualifications for supervisor – he said that it was clear that my qualifications were far superior to those of (employee). It didn’t hurt that I had scored exceptionally high during management assessment at the training center, whereas she had received a rating of Poor.
Since the announcement in early 1982 that a Philadelphia judge had directed AT&T to divest itself of local service companies, our department had been steadily preparing for 1-1-84, the magical date when it would all take effect. It was an almost 2-year slog in which our focus was constantly on preparing for divestiture. In December 1983, it was announced that AT&T’s new Information Services (ATTIS) company was offering Mountain Bell employees an opportunity to transfer to ATTIS as of 1-1-84. Our defeated employee opted to take advantage of this opportunity to slink away from us.
Whew! She was finally going to be out of my hair. I recommended an excellent employee, Cindy Stage, to take her place as supervisory clerk. Cindy had already, as a clerk, frequently taken it upon herself to offer assistance to the other clerks when they asked. She deserved this promotion.
My excitement over (employee’s) departure was tempered by the announcement that Kathy McKibbin was retiring. She was replaced by Nancy McKowen, whom I did not know. It wasn’t long before Nancy told me that I would be going to the Corporate office downtown to interview for a job there. A Corporate assignment was the goal of many a supervisor. It meant that we would no longer have to deal with handling personnel; evaluating them; meeting with union reps, etc. However, I had spent my entire tenure as a supervisor with this albatross of an employee around my neck, and now I wanted to find out about life as a supervisor without someone constantly trying to undermine me. I wanted to stay as supervisor in the Billing Adjustments Unit.
When I told Nancy McKowen that I didn’t want to go to Corporate, she clarified herself: “You don’t understand. I’m not asking whether you want to go. You are going for that interview, and you are going to take that job if it’s offered.”
Oh, okay. It turns out that she already had someone in mind for my job – a young man who had worked for her in her former location. She was bound and determined to move me out and move him in. So I went for the interview, was offered the job, and took it. I worked downtown in Corporate from April 9, 1984-March 31, 1987. During my recent trip, I didn’t make it downtown – just didn’t have time – so those 3 years will remain a story for another day.
Not all of my frustrations from my tenure as supervisor involve my disgruntled supervisory clerk, but those memories dominate, because this situation was constant from the time I took the job until she transferred out over 2 years later. There are a couple of other memories, however, that also make me cringe.
My 3rd-level manager (Kathy McKibbin’s boss), Doug Gillespie, once took advantage of Kathy’s vacation absence to call me to his office and order me to “accommodate” a business office supervisor by changing my ruling on certain losses so that they wouldn’t harm her evaluation rating. I was going by legal directives that stated that this money should be recorded as “uncollectible.” Doug told me that the Business Offices were our “clients,” and my job was to “get your nose out of those regulations” and keep our “clients” happy. Doug would have never pulled this if Kathy hadn’t been on vacation, because he knew she would call him to account for it. But, with her on vacation, he could intimidate this peon 1st-level supervisor and order him around. I followed Doug’s orders – didn’t have a choice, but I documented the counsel I had received in a phone call with our Legal Dept., and Doug’s contrary instructions to me, just in case any question ever came up regarding this matter.
Another frustration involved the only man who worked for me in my 2½ years as supervisor. He was a young man who was in the Army reserves. Kathy and I had already been contacted by Mountain Bell’s investigators, who had discovered that this young man – while on his annual 2 weeks Army active duty – had charged phone calls to his sergeant’s phone number without authorization. We called him in and talked with him. Doug Gillespie wanted us to fire him on the spot, but Kathy and I argued for leniency. The guy was young, had a wife and baby, and we wanted to give him another chance to prove himself. Unfortunately, this is one time that Doug was proven right. It soon came to my attention that there were personal long distance calls showing up on the account for my office’s phones. Because of the young man’s history, I had to suspect him. One day, after all of the clerks had left for the day, I went back to his desk to take a look. I found evidence linking him to the long distance phone number that had shown up repeatedly on our toll records. This time, Kathy and I had no choice. We confronted him with the evidence, he confessed, and we fired him. It turned out that he had been frequently calling a girlfriend in Dallas. So much for his wife and baby in Denver!
There’s a somewhat comic “sequel” to this story. A few years later, after Joanna and I had moved to Texas, a couple of men in dark suits came ringing our doorbell. They were from some federal government agency. This same young man – whom I had fired for theft in Denver – was applying for a government job in Dallas. (I guess he had wound up moving in with that Dallas girlfriend.) To top it all off, he had given them my name as a character reference. This guy was not only a lying, cheating, thieving sleazeball – he was dumb as hell, giving them my name as a character reference. I told them everything – from his charging calls to his sergeant’s number to making long-distance calls on Mountain Bell company phones, to cheating on his wife and baby. I assume he didn’t get the job. I hope they started checking this guy out carefully to see what other crooked things he might have done. It’s a sad story for his wife and baby, but his utter stupidity – which is what caught him every time – is good for a laugh. Unbelievable!