...pardon me if I ramble along disjointedly today...

Yesterday I received an email from a co-worker (let's call him R) who left the company about 6 months ago. The purpose of his email was to ask for prayers for another former co-worker who'd left the company 3 years ago (let's call him V). The body of the email essentially was to let us know that V had passed away.

Curious, since V is roughly two years younger than I and was in good health, I replied and asked what had happened. I felt sorry for R being the one to tell us because he and V were very good friends. V and I, however...

A long time ago, in a building not very far away, employed with this same company I was working for the one now known as the ex-boss from hell. I ran data reports, I managed metrics, I measured UPH for all parts of the operation. But that wasn't all - I also managed the inventory. Where to put it, better ways to store it, maximizing the space that we had because the space was limited. I changed item locations in the database when something got moved (because I directed the move), and managed the cycle counting of the inventory. It was fun.

And then there were the days that I would come into the office, and my cycle counts wouldn't reconcile properly. There were days that I'd come in and find paperwork sitting on my desk instructing me to move 200 items to a new location in the database. These things happened because V would move things around because he decided he could fit inventory in a better schema than I could. He'd just look at the boxes and say "move that there, and this there, and we'll have whatshername move it in the database tomorrow". I would take a couple of days looking at the physical inventory on hand, what was at customer, the age of the title, and carefully calculate where things needed to go based on what we'd be looking at coming back from customer and a certain percentage that would most likely stay out.

It was all very organized until V would get to it. And his attitude about it all was that he didn't care about the cleanup that I would do, because he was sure that I was all wrong about what I did. And that didn't just apply to inventory storage. That applied to all the metrics that I managed. He once even tried to take credit for something that I'd built (and kept on the network server) by presenting it to the VP as his own. Thankfully I'd already sent that data model to the VP earlier in the morning.

This guy and I were oil and water, and he was the slippery one. I remember sitting through a facility wide inventory and during a break he and I discussed management. He happened to have a copy of Machiavelli's "The Prince" that he was reading for a business class and the inevitable topic of being feared or loved as a manager came up. My take? I'd be fair, but I'd rather my employees like working for me than be afraid of me every time I came 'round. His take? He didn't care about what his employees felt, or his peers, or what issues they had - they must get the work done, and if he had to be an ass about it, then he would. Because he honestly Did. Not. Care. about the people around him in the workplace, except for a couple of his buddies.

Management styles aside, the way he said it totally put me off. It was a very Greed Is Good, power hungry sort of way. I know, I recognized it as the arrogant me from years ago, fresh out of college and ready to take over a company.

The last straw came about a month before he left the company - and it's still a matter of debate as to whether he left before he was fired, or they told him to go and he made it into an "I'm leaving" statement. Anyway, I was looking again at inventory and reorganizing it based on stock coming back in and needing some space utilization. As I was starting to build the new constraints on the data model, V came by and asked if he and I could take a walk out to the racks to discuss something. When we got there, he presented another idea to me of how to store the inventory - it had merit, but needed research. This was a Wednesday afternoon. I told him that I'd have to take a look at how it would work in the models and to give me until the following Tuesday to assess the feasibility of it as opposed to the model that I was working on. I knew it would take me that long to finish mine, build his, and run some tests on them both. He agreed.

The next morning I was walking out to the racks and found long stretches of them empty. Inventory had been moved around - according to his idea. And inventory locations in the company databases were now wrong. Pick lists would be screwed up. Cycle counts weren't going to happen that morning. That really steamed me because I had a goal to meet for a certain amount of inventory/racks to be counted every quarter, and this would set me back for the 4th time that quarter. I was beginning to think that he was doing this just to sabotage me because I *always* met my quarterly goals.

After a frantic phone call to the boss (who wasn't the ex-boss from hell yet) and a big time ranting, we decided to scrub the counts and get the inventory moved back as soon as possible. And have a talk with this guy. Outside the building. We did, he apologized and said to me and my boss that he was under the impression that I said to go forward with his idea. The boss knew that that was a line from what I'd said earlier that morning and just before V joined us, and told him, in no uncertain terms, to get that inventory moved back in place. It was, as the boss put it, complete BS that he agreed to let me work the numbers and feasibility study and then went ahead to do it anyway because he wanted to, damn the consquences and cleanup.

Now we come to Friday - more changes were made because V had a brand new idea and ran with it. Didn't call the boss, didn't call me, didn't care about what cleanup needed to be done. Someone working in the racks said that yes, I was supposed to be told about this but didn't know who was responsible. Long story short, I ended up pulling my boss out of a dental appointment because of the changes that were made. And the fact that on a Friday afternoon at 1pm (and on Fridays at that time, I usually left around 3) I was being given a 4 page, 3 columns on each page, back and front handwritten list of items to move in the database. Basically 6 hours of data entry moves that needed to be made before Monday morning.

To say that I was steamed is an understatment. I just about took the roof off the building in my phone call to the boss. I found out later that the boss chewed some new holes in V, and apparently was suspending him for a week. I should also mention that V had an old friend who was his lead on the floor, and this guy was just as bad as V. Anyway, this friend ended up bringing in a crew on Saturday to put all the inventory physically back in place and conduct the move that I had continued building in my original data model. And I came in for a long 8 hour day to move all the inventory. The rest of the managers were on hand due to compensation review for the production staff and we all met on this issue. The boss just about lost it - I never knew he could get that angry ever. I never thought *anyone* could get that angry ever. And the boss chewed some new holes in V's buddy too over all of this in the presence of me and a few others.

I still have all the emails printed out from that situation, and I'm surprised that I was as calm as I was when documenting what was going on to the boss. When V left the company, I opened a bottle of wine that night and danced happily in my kitchen because I knew that I could handle his buddy without issue.

This is but one example of many that occured over a 3 year period that I worked on the same team as this guy. I can't say honestly that I worked *with* him because he never participated in the give and take that teamwork is. He just went ahead and did his own thing, much to everyone's chagrin. The ex-boss apologized for promoting him into management a year later.

Fast forward 3 years: V's buddy was a pain in the arse too and also challenged me regularly after he was promoted into V's position. And then demoted (the ex-boss apologized for promoting that one too, against everyone's better judgement and opinions). And then shuffled over to another department where people really didn't like him very much either from what I gather, and has been gone from this company for almost a year. V was the farthest thing from my mind when I got R's email. Curiosity, and nothing more, made me reply as to how someone so young and so healthy died.

V, apparently, had had enough of life and took his own. Via bullet. I felt bad for R that he had to tell us, but had no reaction to this news. Frankly I can't say that I'm surprised or not. I can't say that I'm sorry to hear this, or am relieved about it (in terms of never running into him professionally) either. I feel... nothing.

It's a sad statement that it happened and he's left behind a wife and a young son (much younger than my youngest daughter), but even that isn't stirring any emotion from me. It's a real shame that he felt that this was the solution to his problems, whatever they may have been that drove him to this decision but that doesn't bring any feeling either. Various friends, and DH, have commented that I'm not a cold uncaring person by not feeling anything because of the acrimonious nature of the relationship between V and I. I'm more concerned about dealing with the people who *are* affected by this here that I still work with, but so far, I've not had to deal with any of them. I wonder why he did it, but don't really care all that much because the end result is the same - he killed himself, and that was just another stupid dumbass decision of his. And he made many that fell in that realm.

So, that's where this lies. I feel more emotion over the fact that I don't feel anything, and some little part of me thinks that I should. That's where the conflicted part of this is. For those keeping track, yeah, I'd probably shed a tear for the ex-boss if it had been him, because at some point I actually did like the guy, but V never gave me anything to like about him. As I said before, he didn't care about the people that he worked with. I don't know how many more of them feel the same way that I do, but I'm not going to go borrow trouble and find out.

Have a great weekend folks... sorry to be a downer with this one, but I needed to get it out in case I make a reference somewhere else in this blog in future about it. It's just one of those really screwed up things.