There are
things they don’t want you to put on your resume or wipe onto the sofa. After a lifetime of jobs and an even longer
string of interviews, I find I have gathered a jar full of truths. They are small nuggets of reality, not taught
in school, never shown on an overhead or reflected in a Power Point
presentation. They can only be collected
by traversing humanity, one job at a time, playing by the rules and being
observant.
I should
mention here that time travel can not free you from these truths, as documented
events will show: from the era of hunting and gathering, through the age of
industrialization and deep into the information age this planet has been
infested with people and aye – there’s the rub.
To the best
of my calculations there are only 26 pure and decent business owners on the
planet. The rest have suffered and given
in to the pangs of greed, paranoia, and rabies.
Do not scoff my friend; I have seen many a rabid business owner or
manager struggle hard to avoid yanking off their necktie and biting you on the
ankle.
However,
that isn’t what I’m here to discuss.
Today we are going to talk about the sofa. Some of you I’m sure refer to it as a
couch. Either is fine. Don’t worry about it. Know however that we are not talking about
the chair, or the coffee table, only the sofa.
As a small
child, Migaleito Nunzeio grew an odd, almost unhealthy affection for the family
couch. It was where his family members
sat and talked over the day’s events. It
was where they all sat to watch television and laugh together, and it was
sometimes where his father slept. He
wasn’t sure why.
Upon
graduating from high school, Meggaleito designed and built his first sofa. It had taken him some time with several
false starts but the final product was a masterpiece. As sofas went it was a beauty. Meggaleito took several pictures of the sofa,
arranging the various pillows here and there for each picture. He then set out to show off his masterpiece
and to take orders. Yes, Meggaleito
Nunzeio was soon knee-deep in the sofa business.
It wasn’t
long before The Nunz, as his friends called him, needed help. He couldn’t keep up, not with doing all of
the work himself. He soon had to raise
his prices so he could add employees.
Over time, there were frame builders, people to purchase the materials,
truck drivers to deliver the finished product and seamstresses galore.
Nunz soon
had a design department, an accountant, and one person just in charge of safety. As his business grew, so did the
expenses. After several complaints,
Nunzeio found he had to add a quality department just to make sure that things
were being done right and the amount of hours he was putting in caused him to
hire people to supervise every department.
Meggaleito soon had Mangers, Directors and he had hired an advertising
agency.
One of the
problems, as it turned out, was that none of these employees felt the same way
about sofas that he did. Nunz had a
passion for sofas. Sofas were his life.
His employees, on the other hand, were consumed with… well, all things
employee. They wanted more pay for what
they were doing. They wanted overtime,
they wanted weekends off, they wanted more vacation time, and none of them
really wanted to work for a living.
Sitting at
the dinner table one Saturday evening Meggaleito Nunzeio examined his
life. He took a long, hard look at the
product that was coming out of the factory and an even harder examination of
what it was costing him. He wasn’t proud
of the sofas that were being delivered to his Customers, and he didn’t much
care for the materials being used, or the level of craftsmanship. The Nunz wasn’t happy with much of anything.
That Sunday
afternoon Nunzeio sat and wrote out his resume.
He listed his high school education and then began to write about his
passion for sofas. He wrote about
building a sturdy frame, using only the finest hard wood, top quality glue and
dowel rod construction. He spoke of
double stitching every seam with high-grade thread and he had always included
free Scotch Guard and one yard of additional material should the Customer
desire extra pillows.
When Mr.
Nunzeio had ended his resume he discovered it to be nine pages in length. He was absolutely delighted. Although no one would ever see his resume, in
writing it, he had reawakened his dream.
On Monday, he would be making some changes. He would hold a company-wide meeting. He would voice his concerns for the current
sofas being produced, for their inferior materials, poor designs, and expensive
price tags.
Mr. Nunzeio
would inform his employees that there are certain things you should never put
onto a sofa, like poor quality, inferior materials, and high price tags. Overcome with emotion and in his broken,
immigrant English he held up one finger and said to his assembled workers;
“I want us to get back to the
truth. I want to feel good when our
product is delivered to the Customer. I
want us to be proud of the work we are doing, and every single one of you is
going to help us to get there. For the
next three days, I am stopping production.
You will all report to work, but instead of going to your assigned jobs,
you will come in here to the lunchroom.
We are all going to give our ideas on how to work together to put our
hearts and love into our work. We are
going to reduce the cost of manufacturer, while at the same time increase the
quality. If, at the end of three days we
do not have a solid, workable plan, I will close the factory for good, and we
will all be out of a job.”
Looking
into this jar of truths that I have collected over the years I can see that
even though I never bothered to poke small air holes into the lid - these truths
live. They have a life all their own,
requiring nothing but for us to stand in line, behaving as humans.
We line up
to register for classes, that throughout the years others have lined up
for. We follow the business model shown,
we learn the examples given, and we display behaviors deemed acceptable to
produce raises and promotions. We all
stand in long lines muttering, “Think outside the box, think outside the box.”
when in fact we love the interior of the box.
The box is us;
it is our exploration of space, just as it is our inhumanity to others. It is our ability to love nature, and our
arrogance in how we treat our future. We
are frightened of change even though it is what we seek. We push our limitations while holding tight
to securities.
On August 3rd.
1956, Meggaleito Nunzeio closed his factory doors for the last time. Some of his employees went and stood in the
unemployment line. Others set out for
new adventures and a few headed into a panic and seriously wrong directions.
The Nunz
sold the building, the sewing machines, the time clock and the lunchroom chairs
and tables. He closed up his house and
climbed aboard a luxury cruise ship and headed for a tropical vacation.
On January
12th, as Mr. Nunzeio sat along the rail of the upper deck looking
out over the vast ocean he contemplated the work of a cobbler. Here, he thought, was a person who had dedicated their
life to the repair and refurbishment of shoes.
Although an honorable and worthy trade the cobbler had fallen to a
rapidly changing market. In the blink of
an eye it became cheaper for people to buy new shoes than it was for them to
repair their old ones. New, synthetic
materials, formed instantly in stamping machines, run by minimum wage employees
took the place of handcrafted, quality footwear.
Then, as he
thought back on his very first sofa and of how proud he was to have made it
himself, as would a cobbler might have, taking pride in its quality, a lady close to his
own age walked up and asked if she could join him there on the bench.
As they sat
looking out at the ocean, she said:
“Are you here alone?”
Noticing
her hand-made leather shoes he thought to himself, I like this one, and he smiled for the first time in a long time.
ZC
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