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What do you say to your Enron boss?
© St. Petersburg Times "There are quite a few of them worth getting yelled at over," he said. "There are a couple worth getting your butt kicked over. But there aren't any worth dying or going to jail over." I don't think it was corporations my father was talking about the night he gave me that sage advice, but it applies anyhow. Fortunately, none of my employers, except possibly the U.S. government when it was pretending to fight a war that a lot of people considered illegal, has ever asked me to break the law. I don't think I would ever go to work for a company whose name sounds a lot like "end run" (as in, around the law) no matter how much they were paying me. Even if I did, or even if I worked for a company hired by a company like that, I'm pretty sure that I would draw the line at committing a felony while singing the company fight song. First, my company probably wouldn't do that. Second, even if it did, it doesn't have the hold over me Enron had over its employees. My company doesn't make stock available to employees, so my retirement plan and my entire future is not inextricably entwined with the company's fortunes. What money I do have invested is in a lot of different baskets so that when one part of the economy or another takes a nose dive, I am only slightly bruised. It might make for mediocre earnings; it also makes for minimal exposure to catastrophic loss. I might risk a parking ticket, or even a contempt citation for Ma Times, but anything that has penalties that involve wearing a jumpsuit and having to watch Jerry Springer every afternoon because my cellmates consider it an etiquette primer is off the table. Not only am I too pretty to go to prison, I am also too old to say, "I can do 15 years standing on my head." Most criminals are in their 20s, and for them 15 years represents less than a third of the rest of their lives. I am 58, and it might very well represent a life sentence for me. Besides, I haven't been able to stand on my head since I was 45, and I get dizzy when I bend over to tie my shoes. Of course, I also have the advantage of being absolutely nonessential to the inner workings of the corporation that employs me. I am so far out of the loop that I'm not even sure there is a loop, and that suits both me and the suits just fine. I try to imagine hearing a boss now saying, "Hey, Glidewell, these papers could take us down and send most of our top executives to prison. Please go destroy them even though you will be tampering with evidence and will probably go to prison with us." What I would say would be, "Sure, right away." What I would mean would be, "Sure, right after I make a little stop by the photocopy room and then jump in a cab to the U.S. Attorney's office." It's not that I'm disloyal; it's just that if such a situation evolved, I feel like I could be of more use to any corporation by remaining free and working from the outside to help clear the reputation of my superiors . . . preferably from Mexico. Of course, the sad truth is that the same bland looking smarmy bozos in the expensive suits we see now either explaining or denying how they lied to and ripped off their stockholders and investors will probably wind up doing less time than a kid who sells a joint -- and will do most of that time on house arrest complaining that the chaffing of their ankle bracelet tracking devices constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. Our system offers golden parachutes and soft legal landings to those who plan massive ripoffs. The rank and file of their victims get a ride in a lead balloon over a rocky plain. One Enron executive, who had called attention to the company's troubles a year ago, committed suicide last week, but in most cases, it is those at the bottom of the economic food chain who pay the biggest prices. My days of seeking employment are, I fervently hope, over, but if I were facing the market again, I would try to avoid any corporation that, honest or not, apparently paid more attention to having a catchy name than one that explains what it does. What the heck is a "Lucent," anyhow? In fact, if the personnel office took more that 25 words to describe what the corporate consultant types call "over-arching goals," I would walk, not run, out the nearest door. All I want to hear is "We make widgets," not a description of how one carves a niche for an abstract service out of the hocus pocus of modern business methods. I'll probably never get rich. But I'll sleep better.
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Times columns today Mary Jo Melone Howard Troxler Jan Glidewell Gary Shelton Elijah Gosier From the Times North Suncoast desks |
