XXII

The search for a 'real job' never stopped. I scoured the daily newspapers and trade magazines in the public libraries in town and away from it and wrote to about every job that I could even somewhat relate to. One offer came from a man In Ohio. He had bought a dye casting company and planned to expand to Virginia. His location would be in a 'seed building' in Chatham. His products were casings for automotive components such as carburetors. Yes, back then carburetors were still common and fuel injectors not so. Anyway, this gentleman was looking for an Industrial Engineer. That, of course was the title of what I had gotten my college papers under. But my concept of industrial engineering was vastly different from his. He needed a trained technician who could handle four stop watches and one note board to make time-motion studies out on the floor and then develop better methods and also measure vast quantities of product using no time for this and develop statistics about dimensional stability and all such good stuff that Mr. Meredith dreamed up as 'industrial engineering' long before any of us were borne. We had done such stuff in school, of course, but back in Switzerland that part of the job was relegated to clerks while our interest branched in work physiology and industrial organization and such. Under these diverging thoughts the relationship between this potential employer and myself cooled down very fast. The plant came to run under a different I.E staffer , but within two years closed and disappeared from he local scene.
Another job offer also came from and Ohio entrepreneur. He had developed a system by which the electric meters installed by a power company could be remotely read. It was an interesting system back then. The signals between the central reading station and the meters traveled along the electric power grid, so that it was only necessary to hook up the local sensors and start reading. This entrepreneur peddled his development and began to make small inroads with the power industry and was looking for more manufacturing space than he had available in a corner of a warehouse in Ohio and he had put his eyes out to Virginia. He was looking at a suitable plant in Roanoke. He and his two sons would move down to Roanoke and they expect me to sell our Lynch Station home and be on site by the time the three of them would show up.
He conducted his interview with me in a motel room in Lynchburg, under the protection of a lawyer and his main question was about my 'personal data'. I never understood what he was after until many years later. He wanted to know if I was a legal immigrant and for some reason could not ask me outright. Perhaps the laws in Ohio covered this in much the same way as we may not ask for the age of a job applicant or his or her sex, even though the answers may really be obscure at the time of the interview and yet very important when it comes to filling a job in the best interest of the enterprise. Well, since I never got rid of my German accents, that relationship cooled down also, even though he was looking for a quality engineer and we both felt that I was capable to handle that job. I do not know if that outfit really set up the plant in roanoke, but then moved away again. In any case, there is no such manufacturer in Roanoke today.
Then came an announcement sponsored by the US Navy! They had a job for a civilian who would review work procedures and organizational processes in the Norfolk Navy Yard and take responsibility for improvement. I wanted that job so badly, I could taste it day and night. Knowing a little bit about ship building and millwrights and their unions i saw my bag filling with millions of dollars saved from the waste baskets of government procedures. I wrote my application and got no answer and rote again and heard nothing back. I at last made an appointment with Dan Daniel, our area representative and chairman of the Congressional Navy Committee. I got to see him and laid my case before him and he agreed that I was the right man for the job and he promised to work at it to get it for me. That night after this interview with Dan Daniel I slept soundly!
For weeks I heard nothing and at last gave Dan a call. No - he had not heard anything either but he would check. He called back saying that the job was still open and that my application was in the running. Again, two or three weeks later, I called Dan again and he checked again but it took longer for him to reply to me and it turned out that the Navy 'had withdrawn the job offer without filling the position'. My sleep was a bit tainted by bitterness, that night. How can you waste taxpayers money and not be called to order?
Then came a call from my sister Lulu. She was working with a private employment agency in Brattleboro. Funded by VT tax money, they searched for people who need a job and searched for employers who needed people and brought the two together. She had located a company in Brattleboro and they need a Quality Control Manager. Would I be interested in the job? Of course I was and tok a flight up to Bradley where Lulu picked me up and took me home to her house on the hill and next day I got dressed up and went for my interview.
The job was offered by a manufacturer of cosmetic brushes and plastic bottles for creams and lip gloss and mascara and such! It was a German outfit that had expanded to the US and had a small plant with some 50 employees in the Industrial Park at Exit 1 in Brattleboro. The CEO, or whatever his legal title was, was a German himself, as was his wife who acted as the sales manager. He labeled himself as a 'turnaround artist', which put some questions into my mind about the company's prospects, but I did nit follow up on that line.
The job situation of the QC manager was a bit confused. They actually had a man in the house who had been handling this job for a few years but had recently announced that he wanted to do it no longer, so they needed a replacement. This ex-manager, however, was going to continue working for the company and would, as a matter of fact, work under the new manager as a member of the QC staff. Well, I thought nothing of that and the CEO thought it was great to have a guy on his staff with whom he could actually talk some German and we came to an understanding I prepared to move to Vermont.
We made the decision to sell our home in Lynch Station, even though Tiiu did not like that Idea at all. She was at that time working at the Altavista Insurance Co. and saw that she could keep up the mortgage payments without much trouble, even if I could not at first send any money from Vermont. But Iivo at that time was studying at William and Mary and Kaarin was at Longwood College and neither would come home other than during breaks so Tiiu would be living alone in that old house. Today, and often since, I wish I had listened to her. As things turned out, our lives would have gone a different road. But better?
We contacted a real estate agency and while the agent was in our house a buyer cam in and bought the place! The word about my moving out of town and a live agenda had picked up on it and brought that buyer in on a hunch we might sell. We settled on a date of title transfer and signed the papers and drove off to Vermont to take our first foothold.
Lulu, of course, expected us to move in with her while we were looking for our new house. Tiiu just came up with me for a few days and then drove back Lynch Station to arrange the move.
Of course I had previously talked to my predecessor at the plant and learned some inside information about the company, but nothing that would have warned me of what was coming for me. It turned out that my new boss was one of those detailists who wants to have his fingers in every pot and nothing thought nothing could happen unless he told us to make it happen. I was not yet familiar with the layout of my office when the first storm came through. A customer had refused acceptance of a whole shipment of ordered goods on the basis of his own statistical inspection at his dock. He found fault with the product at a percentage rate higher than contractually agreed, so here we were with a truck at the door with a load of fifty-five gallon drums filled with our production, and the customer wast clamoring on the phone for a date when we would ship him a load of good product so he could start his own production lines back up again. Therefore: drop everything and sort out the good from the bad and ship again by nightfall. The boss was raging! To expedite things, he called all embers of my department into the conference room and read the riot act. My predecessor was, of course not present, having special dispensation for some reason. But here were three inspectors and one chief inspectors and I, listening to the ravings of our great leader. We were not allowed to reply but were told how worthless we were and at one point he did not even refrain from calling the chief inspector unprintable names. At the end of the harangue she left with tears in her eyes and i was on one side trying to console her, also getting things on the road so that the client would get at least a partial shipment of his goods, and hankering to get into my bosses office to tell him what damage he was doing with this approach. But when I got to his door, he had left!
This modus operandi wast a constant. I put the word out that the machine operators were to watch their output quality and if they could not maintain a level of constant good quality to shut down their machine and call their supervisor. I was not going to post inspectors everywhere to 'inspect quality into the product'. He countermanded this order and delivered a lecture on available vs. needed capacity and the need of timely delivery and declared his (!) machines absolutely had to hum in order to fulfill the commitments his wife had accepted on her sales route. Meanwhile, the maintenance department and the production supervision were playing cards in their offices, because we were not even allowed to stop for routine maintenance. Production stopped when the machine said it could do no more. There were barrels and cases of goods going out the one dock door and returning back to us from irate customers for us 'quality guys' to 'make the best of it'.
It was clear that this could not continue. It was the reason my predecessor had thrown in the towel which I so gullibly picked up. before six months were over, we parted ways and I was sitting in Vermont without a job, the old house in Virginia sold to a stranger and locked to us and no prospects for a new job. The search started again. Vermont was hopeless and in other state the employment situation was at least temporarily bad. Luckily, Tiiu and I had not found a suitable house anywhere around Brattleboro, so at least we felt free to jump at any opportunity as soon as it would show itself over the horizon. Summers I passed the time on Lulu's property, which had enough work as it was, and after the second winter I took a temp job on Stratton Mountain selling ski lift tickets. This, in a way, was a fun time, but it was not pointing into any future. A friend of ours had moved to Vermont from New York. He had put his wife to work which was easy with her training as a nurse, while he went fishing and boating in summer time and returned to his seasonal job on Snow Mountain as a trail groomer. Happy him! I was back in the libraries reading all available news print between the two coasts and occasionally found something promising. of all the applications I sent out and interviews that resulted, one remains in vivid memory: it was a design engineers position in Eastern Mass. I sat in the char in front of my prospective bosses desk and watched him frown over my resume. I knew he had read it before and he had already made up his mind that I was not going to get a job, but he had a quota to fill to make himself look good to somebody. Finally, he looked up from reading and said: "you're some kind of a job jumper, aren't you!" He said it as a statement, not a question, so I replied with an impromptu: "Superficially, it looks that way, I agree. But if you look closely at the data in front of you, your will find that i stayed on a job for five-and-a-half years on the average, which is just two years longer than the national average!" He grinned, had no reply, but promised to contact me once they had made their decision. I expected nothing from that source, and got nothing.