Dragons - Chapter 50 (DRAFT)

The rest of the conference day went pretty much like that. Something would happen and it would be bad and I would feel like the world was about to crash down all around me. Then something else would happen and it would be good and I would feel like I had redeemed myself in the eyes of all the ever-watchful judges. And then something else would happen and it would be bad again and I would feel like I was back in the soup. To borrow a term, it was bipolar, but that’s what working that conference was like. You were juggling more balls that you had ever juggled before and surviving on four hours of sleep a night.

The truth, of course, is that everything -- the good and the bad and everything in between -- was all in your sleep-deprived mind. No one was watching what you were doing. They were all too busy juggling their own balls.

I had a few spare moments before having to babysit the evening sessions, so I went back to my hotel room to use the restroom and splash some water on my face. There were plenty of restrooms in the convention space, of course, but they were always full of conference goers, and sometimes I just needed a break from all their questions and demands. I’ve been accosted in the men’s room before, attendees recognizing me or my staff badge and deciding the urinals were a great place to lodge their complaints. Really? Can’t you even wait until I’m done peeing?

Before relieving myself I fished my phone out of my pocket I saw that I had a text waiting. I flipped it open I saw that it was from Jenny.

Quest Partners. 617-345-8721. Call Pamela Thornsby.

I looked at my watch. It was 5:37 PM. Florida was the same time zone as Boston so there was a chance that Pamela might still be in the office.

“Hello, this is Pamela Thornsby.”

“Hello, Pamela. This is Alan Larson calling.”

“Alan! How are you? Your wife said you were working a conference this week?”

“Yes,” I said, her voice and the pressure in my bladder suddenly reminding me of how badly I had had to urinate the last time I spoke to Pamela Thornsby, and how badly I thought I had screwed up her interview. “I’m in Miami Beach.”

“Lovely! I hope you’re finding a few moments to enjoy yourself.”

“It’s been pretty busy,” I said, “but I wanted to make sure I returned your call.”

“I’m glad you did. Listen, we’d like to bring you out to Boston soon to meet with the members of our Search Committee. Would you be able to do that sometime shortly after you get back from your conference?”

“I think so,” I said, already moving out of the bathroom. “Let me look at my calendar.”

“We’d be looking for about four hours of you time,” Pamela said as I found my briefcase and pulled my calendar out. “Either a morning or an afternoon. Whatever works best for you.”

“Uh huh,” I said, flipping pages until I found the right week. “It looks like next week Thursday and Friday are fairly clear. But I haven’t looked at any flights yet.”

“Well,” Pamela said, “we can accommodate almost any itinerary you can set up for next week Thursday or Friday, so why don’t you look into flights and email me all the details when you have them.”

“I’ll do that,” I said, flipping my calendar closed and stuffing it back into my briefcase. I should have peed before calling her, I realized belatedly.

“Email me a copy of your receipt for the airfare, too. Quest Partners will reimburse you for the expense.”

“That’s great,” I said quickly.

“And if your itinerary requires an overnight stay, let me know that, too. We can book a reservation for you at the closest hotel.”

“Okay,” I said. “Will do.”

“All right, then, Alan,” Pamela said, her voice signalling that she was about finished with her business. “I’ll watch for the next message from you. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to call.”

“I will.” Questions? Did I have any questions? “Thanks.”

“Good luck at your conference. We’ll see you next week.”

I might have said good-bye, I might not have. There were suddenly so many things flying through my mind I would never be sure. The line clicked off and I was alone with those thoughts.

Where in Boston was Quest Partners? Would I have to rent a car? How many people were on the Search Committee? Who were they? What questions were they going to ask me? Should I bring anything? What should I wear? Was I going to wet my pants? How badly was I going to screw up this time?

I didn’t have long to stew, nor even to pee. I hadn’t even dropped my phone back into my pocket before it rang again. Looking down at the tiny screen, I could see that it was Mary calling.

“Hello?”

“Alan?”

“Yes?”

“Where are you?”

“I’m in my hotel room.”

Mary paused. Then slowly, “Is everything okay?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m just freshening up.”

“Are you coming down to the evening sessions?”

“Of course.”

“Okay. Eleanor and I would like to talk to you.”

Fuck. “Where are you?”

“We’re outside the junior ballroom.” Where you’re supposed to be. “Can you meet us soon?”

“Yes. Give me five minutes.” Or ten. I really had to go.

“Okay.”

This time I was sure I didn’t say good-bye. Neither did Mary.

+ + +

“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source
http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/

The Enemy of the People by Jim Acosta

I don’t envy members of the White House press corps. Things move so quickly in our current environment that today’s headline is often tomorrow’s forgotten story.

That was one of my primary reactions in reading this book by CNN’s chief White House correspondent. Published in June 2019, it describes many events that occurred in President Donald Trump’s first two years in office -- many of which I had either forgotten about entirely, or for which many of their relevant details were only roughly sketched out in my mind.

Of course, there’s no discussion of impeachment in this book. That drama didn’t enter the public consciousness until September 2019. And that reality creates another kind of challenge for me. As I type these characters, it is December 20, 2019, a few days after the House of Representatives formally impeached President Trump. And given the tremendous backlog of posts I have for this blog, you’re not likely to be reading these words until sometime after November 21, 2020. What all has happened since Acosta stopped writing his book and I started writing this post? And what all will happen after I stop writing this post and before it gets posted on my blog? If the narrative pace of The Enemy of the People is any indication -- the answer to both questions is: quite a lot, indeed.

But, nevermind. Onward. Here’s an event that happened in August 2017 that already seems like a distant memory. As Acosta describes it:

Two days later, on August 14, Trump tried again. Stung by the intense criticism he had received in response to his remarks immediately following the violence in Charlottesville, he addressed the nation. I was in the pool that day, as it was CNN’s day to represent the TV networks. The press gathered in the Diplomatic Room of the White House, where we awaited the president’s latest comments. The story, of course, was whether Trump would strongly condemn the white supremacists behind the melee in Charlottesville, as he should have done from the very beginning. Reading from prepared remarks, he did just that:

“Racism is evil. And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans,” he said to the nation.

I hope you remember the event that I’m focusing on here. Because Trump’s management of it is emblematic of his presidency and both those who support and oppose him.

Later in the day, Trump held a separate event where he called for an investigation into Chinese trade practices. Still in the pool for that afternoon, I asked him about the contrast between his remarks from earlier in the day and his initial response to what had happened in Charlottesville over the weekend.

“Can you explain why you did not condemn those hate groups by name over the weekend,” I asked.

“They’ve been condemned. They have been condemned,” he replied.

They were. In the scripted press conference the president held earlier in the day, but not in his comments immediately following the event. That’s the source of the confusion.

I then followed up and asked why he wasn’t holding a press conference on Monday, as he had promised that previous Friday, before the events in Charlottesville.

“We just had a press conference,” he answered.

“Could we ask you some more questions?” I inquired.

“It doesn’t bother me at all, but I like real news, not fake news,” he said, and then pointed at me. “You’re fake news.”

“Mr. President, haven’t you spread a lot of fake news yourself, sir?” I responded.

Ah, the old “fake news” line. It was back. I’ve learned that’s become one of his “tells.” Like a poker player, Trump has a tell, giving away what kind of hand he’s holding. If he’s screaming about “fake news,” he’s almost always losing. And he was losing on Charlottesville. Trump clearly didn’t like the fact that he had been compelled by his advisers to revise his botched response to Charlottesville. That was as bad, in his view, as admitting a mistake. And in Trumpworld, as I’ve been told time and again by his advisers, you don’t admit mistakes. You double down on everything, even the stuff you did wrong.

This comment has such explanatory power. If you’re ever confused about Trump’s actions, this simple rule may be as close to a rosetta stone as you’re ever going to get. No matter what happens, never admit you did anything wrong. Combine that with the mixed messages that came out around the Charlottesville event, and you can begin to understand why it -- like many of the things he does -- was so polarizing.

Which brings us to his third crack at commenting on the events in Charlottesville, this time at Trump Tower in Manhattan. Trump had traveled to his office tower and residence in the city to meet with some of the top officials in his administration about the need to upgrade the nation’s infrastructure. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, Office of Management and Budget director Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, and a new member of the team, Chief of Staff John Kelly (who had just replaced Reince Priebus), were all in attendance.

After what had occurred the day before, I traveled up to New York with the hunch that Trump would not be able to help himself and would dive back into the Charlottesville issue. As we had so often during the campaign, we gathered in the gold-plated lobby of Trump Tower to await Trump. It felt like old times. (It should be noted that his aides told us in advance that he wouldn’t take any questions.) Trump came down the elevator, made some remarks about his hopes for an infrastructure bill, and before he could turn to exit the lobby, a question on Charlottesville was shouted his way by my NBC colleague Hallie Jackson, and we were off to the races.

It’s often that way with President Trump, especially in the first two years of his presidency. He seemed both unable to control his encounters with the press and to enjoy the verbal sparring that inevitably came about. Acosta refers to this dynamic frequently in his book. Falling off script, thinking we could win an argument, even when it is stacked against him, was one of Trump’s hallmark temptations.

It is still stunning to read the president’s remarks from that day. As of this writing, remarkably, they remain on the official White House website. In them, Trump returned to blaming both sides for the violence in Charlottesville. And that’s when I jumped in, mainly because I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

TRUMP: Yes, I think there’s blame on both sides. If you look at both sides -- I think there’s blame on both sides. And I have no doubt about it, and you don’t have any doubt about it either. And if you reported it accurately, you would say.

ACOSTA: The neo-Nazis started this. They showed up in Charlottesville to protest---

TRUMP: Excuse me, excuse me. They didn’t put themselves -- and you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides. You had people in that group.

ACOSTA: No, sir, there are no fine people in the Nazis.

As you may have noticed, I didn’t put my questions in question form. That wasn’t necessary in this case, and here’s why. I suppose I could have asked him, “Sir, isn’t it true that there aren’t any fine people in the Nazis?” But that would have suggested that this notion was open to debate. I’m sorry, but there aren’t two sides when it comes to Nazis. I think we have reached the point where we can state, definitively, that Nazis are bad people. It kind of goes without saying. But I will: If you are a Nazi, you aren’t a fine person. You’re bad. So, yes, I felt well within the safe bounds of reporting to state back to the president “there are no fine people in the Nazis.” When it’s a matter of right versus wrong, there are not two sides of the story.

I agree with Acosta. I agree with both his statements that there are no fine people in the Nazis and that when it’s a matter of right versus wrong, there are not two sides of the story. But, I still wish he would’ve asked the president, “Sir, isn’t it true that there aren’t any fine people in the Nazis?” If he had, one of two things would’ve happened. Trump would have either disagreed, and gone on to argue unequivocally that some Nazis are very fine people, or he would have clarified, as I think he believed, that not everybody marching in Charlottesville was a Nazi. That might’ve created some needed granularity in everyone’s interpretation of what was going on.

Acosta, however, wasn’t thinking that way. His next several paragraphs illuminate a different, but still very serious battle, that he was fighting.

There’s another point to be made here, one going back to the idea that a different kind of president requires a different kind of press. If a president is trying to bully his way through some tough questions, interrupting and shouting, “Excuse me, excuse me,” what do you, as a reporter, do? This is when it’s probably time to throw out the old rulebook. Trump was likely not going to candidly volunteer a comment that there are “very fine people” on both sides had I not challenged him. Sometimes the sparring he craves can be his own undoing; that’s when he often shows who he really is. And at that bizzare news conference at Trump Tower, that’s exactly what he did.

In responding to Trump’s attacks, my thinking is you have to be measured and choose the right moment. Opinions vary as to whether I have met that standard, but there are very clear moments when challenging a president’s thinking is the right choice. Who am I to judge when his thought process goes off the deep end? I think that’s fairly obvious. Whether it’s an attack on the press or a blatant lie about policy or a betrayal of American principles (e.g., that Nazis are the scum of the earth), a more restrained reaction from a reporter sets a precedent that what had been said is now acceptable in our democracy. The same goes for the president’s unrelenting assault on journalists in America. Yes, Trump’s attacks on the press are designed, for the moment, to elicit a response. And yes, that response excites parts of his base. And yes, the Trump people sit back and say, “See? It works.” And yes, some news editors say, “See, that’s why we shouldn’t respond.” But Trump’s apologists and propagandists are going to go on the attack and make our lives miserable no matter what we report. That’s what they do. If we tailor our coverage to appease them, we’ve already lost. Their reaction shouldn’t change the essential calculus that attacks on the press, if left unanswered, are just going to get worse. So the question becomes: do you take the bait or take the knife?

More often than not, I opt for the bait, which bothers some people -- both in the media and in the White House. But to those critics, I ask: does every president lie and attack the press as Trump does? No. As new presidents come along and return a state of normalcy to dealings with the news media, will there be as great a need to stand up for ourselves? Of course not. Playbooks for individual journalists and news organizations will be adjusted accordingly, as we will no longer be under attack.

This, obviously, is where the title of Acosta’s book comes from. “The enemy of the people” is a phrase used by the president to describe the “mainstream media,” which he believes is biased against him and against the views of conservative Americans. I think it’s important for the media to push back against this kind of treatment, as Acosta describes, and more than that, I even think it’s time for them to drop the pretense of fairness and go back to reporting what they think is right and what they think is wrong. But that’s a subject for another day. My larger fear, however, is that Acosta is being too optimistic about returning to some kind of normalcy after the Trump presidency. As loath as I am to admit it, I think the Trump view of our politics, even the parts that give rise to “the enemy of the people” comments, are here with us to stay, regardless of who the next president is.

But let’s get back to Charlottesville.

After our exchange about “very fine people” that day in Trump Tower, Trump then tried to change to subject back to the grievance that drew the Unite the Right protesters to Charlottesville in the first place, the removal of the statue of Robert E. Lee. When it came to sides, guess which one Trump chose? The president said in all seriousness that somehow George Washington would be next, as if federal workers would dismantle the Washington Monument.

TRUMP: Excuse me, excuse me. I saw the same pictures as you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.

ACOSTA: George Washington and Robert E. Lee are not the same.

TRUMP: George Washington was a slave owner. Was George Washington a slave owner? So will George Washington now lose his statue? Are we going to take down -- Excuse me, are we going to take down statues to George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson? What do you think of Thomas Jefferson? You like him?

A few moments after that “very fine people” comment, Trump tried to clean up his mess by adding a bit of a disclaimer. “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally,” he said. “But you had many people in the group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly.”

As I said previously, in Trump’s mind, the “very fine people” comment was not directed at the white supremacists who led the protest, but other (perhaps imaginary) people in the crowd who were not neo-Nazis nor white nationalists, but who had come to protest the removal of a statue represented what they viewed as an American hero.

But whether or not Trump was serious about this nuanced point, he definitely wasn’t serious about his comparison between George Washington and Robert E. Lee. In making that comparison, I believe, Trump was yet again engaging in one of his favorite rhetorical devices, what others have called “whataboutism.” Oh yeah? Well, what about [insert someone the person you’re arguing with holds in esteem]? He did the same thing as [the person I’m defending]. Whataboutism isn’t about rational, reasoned debate. Its purpose is to create confusion and false equivalency in people’s minds, and its use is very intentional. Trump doesn’t actually think George Washington is the same as Robert E. Lee. Trump simply wants Acosta to entertain the possibility that George Washington might be the same as Robert E. Lee so that he can undercut Acosta’s argument.

But, relative to how the president handled this event, Acosta makes an even more important point.

The president’s defenders like to point to this final comment as an exoneration of his performance on Charlottesville. I call bullshit. In my view, a president of the United States should get this right the first time. It shouldn’t take four or five (or whatever number we are on) tries to get it right. Within a matter of four days, Trump had equivocated on the violence in Charlottesville, reversed himself to condemn the fascists, only to pull another about-face on the issue, basically landing where he started, essentially siding with the white nationalists who had touched off the violence. The epic fail at Trump Tower was written all over John Kelly’s face as the chief of staff hung his head in full view of the cameras.

I’ve gone at length on this particular excerpt because I think it is illustrative, both of the tone of Acosta’s book, and the way this president and the press he hates keep talking past each other. There’s a lot to learn from both illustrations, both for the people of this republic and for future presidents.

Let me close with two other penetrating observations from Acosta’s book. First...

Portions of the GOP, it seemed, were willing to compromise themselves in favor of achieving long-term party goals. If you wanted your tax cuts, you had to swallow Trump’s highly questionable behavior. Same thing if you wanted conservative judges. Trump and the Republicans may not believe in compromising with Democrats, but there was compromising going on inside their own party. They were horse trading, all right. The party was achieving a few of its policy goals in exchange for looking the other way.

I think this is spot on, and it is the same dynamic I see among my own friends and colleagues with a track record of voting Republican. They don’t like Trump. But they like what the Republicans have been able to do since he came into office. As long as they had the presidency, the House, and the Senate, they could do as they wished legislatively. And now, as long as they have the presidency and the Senate, they can do as they wish in terms of judicial appointments. For the party and its partisans, that’s what matters most.

And second, with regard to the domestic abuse scandal surrounding personal staff secretary to the president, Rob Porter…

The code of ethics of the Trump White House had revealed itself yet again, as the president fell back into a familiar pattern. When it comes to allegations of sexual misconduct, Trump almost always stands with the accused and not the accuser. He had done this before; he would do it again. Speaking to reporters, Trump expressed sympathy for his former staff secretary, noting that Porter had proclaimed his innocence.

“He also, as you probably know, says he’s innocent and I think you have to remember that,” Trump said. “He said very strongly yesterday that he’s innocent so you have to talk to him about that, but we absolutely wish him well, he did a very good job when he was at the White House.”

That statement, siding with Porter, was another reminder of just how Trump didn’t seem to understand the president’s role of providing moral leadership in a situation like this. This would not have been tolerated at a Fortune 500 company, and yet it was happening at the White House.

There’s one thing that the Trump presidency has made clear to me -- and that is how important it is for presidents to bring people together rather than split them apart. I think Acosta understands that, too, and that represents a deep measure of the distrust that exists between Trump and the press corps. Trump’s natural tendency is to take sides, so much so that every interaction and every kind is hardcoded into immutable “us’s” and “them’s”.

+ + +

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dragons - Chapter 49 (DRAFT)

When the keynote session was over, close to two thousand people had to get themselves out of the ballroom and off to their chosen lunch activity. For a great majority of them, that meant attending one of the twenty lunch sessions that we had planned as part of the conference schedule. These were highly coveted opportunities, both for the meal provided, but also for the small, discussion-based nature of the activity. We’d recruit in a recognized expert in one of twenty topic areas and limit attendance to no more than twenty participants, all in an attempt to preserve an environment where a kind of roundtable discussion could take place.

Twenty sessions of twenty people each meant that only 400 people could be accommodated, leaving 1,600 or more to fend for themselves, seeking lunch in one of the hotel outlets, nearby restaurants or food trucks, or hospitality functions organized by the exhibitors. With so many people heading off in so many different directions, the foyer outside the ballroom frequently resembled a busy subway platform, and through the years we had come to understand the value of placing staff members at strategic flow points to serve as guideposts and gatekeepers.

“Where’s the session with Dr. Maplethorpe!” one conference-goer shouted at me as she quickly approached, seemingly pulled along more by the current of bodies than her own volition.

“Up one level and down the hall to the left!” I shouted back, pointing towards a flight of escalators where a bottleneck was already forming.

Like a lot of the staff, I enjoyed complaining about the herd mentality that possessed otherwise intelligent people in these circumstances. To control access to the twenty lunch sessions they were ticketed, with each ticket costing the ticket holder forty dollars in addition to the conference registration fee they had already paid. This caused a lot of grousing, the average conference attendee oblivious to the fact that the lunches that came out of hotel banquet kitchens could easily cost forty dollars or more. On each ticket, which we painstakingly stuffed in the registration envelopes each attendee received at the start of the conference, we printed all the information they could possibly need about the session they were attending. The day, the time, the room location, the session number, the session title, the discussion leader -- they were all there in their laser-printed glory. And, if anyone cared to turn the little piece of cardboard over, they would see a miniature reproduction of the appropriate floor of the convention hotel, where some underappreciated human being had actually affixed a small red star in the box that represented the session’s room location.

But no one, it seemed, looked at these tickets, or tried to decipher the curious markings they contained. Why bother? When it was so much simpler just to shout “Where’s the session with Dr. Maplethorpe!” at the nearest idiot wearing a staff badge?

I and four other staff people served in this capacity for fifteen minutes or more, and, when the flow of people out of the ballroom slowed to a trickle, we all rushed off to our next assignments. The lunch sessions would be starting in another ten minutes or so, and we had to make sure the rooms, discussion leaders, and participants had everything they needed. With five staff people and twenty sessions, we had each been assigned four rooms to monitor. My four were down the same hallway as those assigned to Caroline Abernathy, and when I turned into the corridor I saw her engaged in a heated argument with an attendee.

“Get out of my way!” the attendee, who I could only see from behind -- a man in a wrinkled sport coat with frizzy white hair -- was shouting at Caroline, who stood, along with the redcoat we had hired to collect the session tickets, in the doorway of the room.

“I’m sorry, sir,” Caroline said, her voice a strange kind of shaky calm, “this session is for ticket holders only. Do you have a ticket?”

“NO I DON’T HAVE A TICKET!” the man shouted.

Both Caroline and the elderly redcoat who could have been her grandmother seemed to tremble under buffeting winds of his angry voice.

Knowing there was nothing I could do that Caroline wasn’t already doing, but wanting to take some of the pressure off her young shoulders, I stepped into the fray.

“Can I help you, sir?”

The man whirled like he was in a street fight. “What? Who the hell are you?”

His appearance gave me a momentary pause. I recognized him, and it took me half a second to remember from where. He wasn’t wearing the Pink Panther tie he had been wearing the last time I saw him, but it was the same guy. The goofball that had tried to derail Eleanor’s chosen speaker at the leadership meeting I had attended earlier in the year. I looked at his name badge, hanging from a string of Mardi Gras beads around his neck. Roger Rockhammer.

I told him my name and my title, and then took him by the elbow to try and steer him out of the flow of traffic that was still trying to get down the hallway to the other lunch sessions.

He shrugged me off. “Get your hand off of me!” he shouted. “Now, you listen to me. I came all the way from New Mexico to attend this session, and you’re not keeping me out of it.”

“But, Mr. Rockhammer,” I said as politely as I could. “This session requires a ticket and you didn’t purchase one.”

“I’ll buy one now,” he said, reaching for and producing a wallet that, I kid you not, had a cloth decal of the Tasmanian Devil stitched on it.

“The session is already sold out,” I told him, not bothering to check that fact with either Caroline or her grandmother. All the lunch sessions were always sold out.

“But there are empty seats in there!” he pleaded, his arm shooting out to indicate the interior of the session room and almost hitting Caroline in the forehead.

I instinctively looked into the room and saw the expected conference table set for twenty, the ensemble practically filling the small meeting room, with perhaps fifteen or sixteen people sitting shoulder to shoulder in fifteen or sixteen of the chairs, some already munching on a salad that a beleaguered banquet captain struggled to place in front of each. None of that surprised me. Not the tight set and not the handful of empty chairs. What did surprise me was the person who was sitting at the very head of the table, in the position typically reserved for the session’s discussion leader.

It was Eleanor Rumford. She was sitting there, silent and unmoving, a fork in one hand, but her salad as yet undisturbed. For a heart-stopping moment, her eyes locked with mine, and I knew what I had to do.

“Mr. Rockhammer,” I said, turning back to him. “I’m very sorry, but this session is sold out and those seats are reserved for ticket holders.”

He quickly inhaled and opened his mouth, but I raised my voice and rushed into my next sentence.

“No, I’m sorry. I’m going to have to ask you to leave this session before you create a disturbance.”

His face turned red with the insult, but before he could sputter another protest, another attendee approached from my right. As if I had pre-arranged it, he held up a ticket and I took it from him while Caroline stepped slightly away from the doorway to allow him into the room.

“There, you see,” I said. “Ticket holders are still arriving. Every chair will be full in the next few minutes. Now, really,” I said, taking him more firmly by the elbow, “why don’t we go down to the registration desk and see if we can accommodate you in one of tomorrow’s sessions.”

“I came here to attend this session!” Rockhammer cried, but offered no other resistance to my coaxing. In a moment I had him moving back down the hall, and a moment after that we were on the escalator together, practically alone in going down while a swarm of people were still jostling each other to go up in single file. When his legs stopped moving his lips started moving again. He protested the treatment he was receiving, loudly, I thought, more for the benefit of the friends and colleagues he might be passing on the escalator than out of any true sense of injustice.

I let him have his say, standing as stoically as I could on the escalator step just above him. We were moving in the right direction, after all, and I suspected that I might have already scored the necessary point. Down the upstairs hallway, in a small and cramped meeting room without any windows, I could imagine Eleanor Rumford starting her session, pleased that someone had delivered her from contact with her boorish nemesis.

+ + +

“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source
http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig

This is one of those books that everyone has heard of, but few have actually read -- at least few born after 1980. And maybe that’s a good thing. For me, it was a frustrating read.

You go through a heavy industrial area of a large city and there it all is, the technology. In front of it are high barbed-wire fences, locked gates, signs saying NO TRESPASSING, and beyond, through sooty air, you see ugly strange shapes of metal and brick whose purpose is unknown, and whose master you will never see. What it’s for you don’t know, and why it’s there, there’s no one to tell, and so all you can feel is alienated, estranged, as though you didn’t belong there. Who owns and understands this doesn’t want you around. All this technology has somehow made you a stranger in your own land. Its very shape and appearance and mysteriousness say, “Get out.” You know there’s an explanation for all this somewhere and what it’s doing undoubtedly serves mankind in some indirect way but that isn’t what you see. What you see is the NO TRESPASSING, KEEP OUT signs and not anything serving people but little people, like ants, serving these strange, incomprehensible shapes. And you think, even if I were a part of this, even if I were not a stranger, I would be just another ant serving the shapes. So the final feeling is hostile, and I think that’s ultimately what’s involved with this otherwise unexplainable attitude of John and Sylvia. Anything to do with valves and shafts and wrenches is a part of that dehumanized world, and they would rather not think about it. They don’t want to get into it.

John and Sylvia are a couple that our author goes on cross-country motorcycle adventures with. The author here is noodling on their apparent hostility to the mechanics of the machines that carry them around the country, and is obviously trying to make it symptomatic of a larger societal trend -- away from the human and towards the machine as the center of our philosophic life.

That’s well and good. But this is where the frustration begins for me. Because when the author talks about technology, he’s talking about the industrial technology of another time. And although his book was published in 1974, when he waxes against technology like this, I have a hard time not envisioning the technology of turn-of-the-20th-century dystopian epics like Metropolis. I can almost hear the Giorgio Moroder music playing.

And that really leaves me flat. So even though he talks a lot about the isolating effects of technology...

Technology is blamed for a lot of this loneliness, since the loneliness is certainly associated with the newer technological devices -- TV, jets, freeways and so on -- but I hope it’s been made plain that the real evil isn’t the objects of technology but the tendency of technology to isolate people into lonely attitudes of objectivity. It’s the objectivity, the dualistic way of looking at things underlying technology, that produces the evil. That’s why I went to so much trouble to show how technology could be used to destroy the evil. A person who knows how to fix motorcycles -- with Quality -- is less likely to run short of friends than one who doesn’t. And they aren’t going to see him as some kind of object either. Quality destroys objectivity every time.

...he seems to be speaking about another time -- a time in which humans still had a predisposition to objective dualism between themselves and their technology. In the late 2010s, after social media and smartphones have effectively reprogrammed our brains, I’m not sure humans still see themselves as separate from and hostile to their technology.

What he complains about with regard to Aristotle...

What I find in Aristotle is mainly a quite dull collection of generalizations, many of which seem impossible to justify in the light of modern knowledge, whose organization appears extremely poor, and which seems primitive in the way old Greek pottery in the museums seems primitive.

...is exactly how I feel about him and his ideas. Through long sections of the book, which he unironically frames as his own Chautauqua, the modern reader has to patiently wait for the author to come to conclusions that philosophers much more ancient than him have already reached and moved past.

If the purpose of scientific method is to select from among a multitude of hypotheses, and if the number of hypotheses grows faster than experimental method can handle, then it is clear that all hypotheses can never be tested. If all hypotheses cannot be tested, then the results of any experiment are inconclusive and the entire scientific method falls short of its goal of establishing proven knowledge.

About this Einstein had said, “Evolution has shown that at any given moment out of all conceivable constructions a single one has always proved itself absolutely superior to the rest,” and let it go at that. But to Phaedrus that was an incredibly weak answer. The phrase “at any given moment” really shook him. Did Einstein really mean to state that truth was a function of time? To state that would annihilate the most basic presumption of all science!

But there it was, the whole history of science, a clear story of continuously new and changing explanations of old facts. The time spans of permanence seemed completely random, he could see no order in them. Some scientific truths seemed to last for centuries, others for less than a year. Scientific truth was not dogma, good for eternity, but a temporal quantitative entity that could be studied like anything else.

The Phaedrus mentioned above is not the fictional character from Plato’s dialogue. It is instead the alter ego of the author himself. We eventually come to learn that the author was once a professor of philosophy for whom these mental meanderings became so shattering to his sense of identity and permanence that his personality split and his world fell apart. The motorcycle trip that he is on -- and during which he is evidently writing his Chautauqua -- is an attempt to pick up the pieces and repair the breach.

But to me, with no wish to diminish his real suffering, the author’s journey to nihilism and back is tedious and boring. Again and again while reading his text, I found myself scribbling in the margins comments like: “I’m sorry that you started with the false understanding that the world is permanent. But just because the revelation that it is not shatters your fragile ego, it does not mean that others have not comfortably built their own stability in what you now call chaos.”

And when he starts talking about Zen, the Buddha, and Quality, he frankly loses me entirely. The most salient piece of wisdom in the book comes long before those complications. It goes like this:

Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world. He then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it. … He makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life in order to find in this way the peace and serenity which he cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.

And those aren’t even the author’s words. They’re Einstein’s. The world as it is and the world as we perceive it are two different things. That’s the only dualism that matters -- now and forever. For those who wish to lead an examined life, they can either build their castle on those shifting sands, or they can contend that nothing can ever be built, and destroy themselves in the process.

+ + +

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dragons - Chapter 48 (DRAFT)

The meeting with Dr. Lancaster was basically uneventful. I had never met him before, and he turned out to be a kind and pleasant old man who was simply distrustful of computers. I was obviously late getting to the speaker ready room, and when I arrived Dr. Lancaster was already deep in dialogue with one of our lead audio-visual techs.

“If you’re more comfortable with thirty-five millimeter slides, Dr. Lancaster, we can certainly accommodate,” the tech was saying. His name was Ray, a good guy, but he had the habitually droopy eyes of a regular weed smoker.

“You can?” Dr. Lancaster replied, the surprise evident in his voice.

“Sure,” Ray said, looking up at me as I joined their little circle. “I’ve got a few slide projectors on the truck. If Alan here gives the word, I can get one set up in the back of the ballroom and then use the i-mag camera to send your slide image to all the main and delay screens.”

Dr. Lancaster turned my way. “Are you Alan Larson?”

“I am, Dr. Lancaster,” I said, shaking his extended hand. “I’m sorry for being late.”

“No trouble at all. But I hope you can understand what this young man just said.”

I could and I did, and in a few minutes more the plan was approved and understood by all. It was a simple fix, really. Something that only required a little creativity and an AV budget in excess of six figures. My mind, however, was frankly not on Dr. Lancaster and his technology phobia, but on the conversation Mary and I had just had.

I was in trouble. That much was clear. I had challenged her leadership and, at least from Mary’s point of view, disrespected her. I had been with the company long enough to know what eventually happened to people who did that.

After the keynote session began, and Dr. Lancaster was satisfactorily embarked on his 45-minute presentation, I quietly stepped out of the ballroom and called home.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Jenny. It’s me.”

“Alan? Oh my god, what’s wrong?”

“What makes you think something’s wrong?”

“It’s the middle of the day. You never call home from the Annual Conference in the middle of the day.”

“You’re right. Something’s wrong.”

“What is it?”

I told her in as few brushstrokes as possible. Caroline’s desperate call. Amy’s cackling laugh. Gerald’s drubbing down. Mary’s suspicious ignorance. My fateful decision. It took a lot longer than I expected to get it all out. About halfway through I started pacing back and forth across the teal and green carpet in the ballroom foyer, but Jenny remained patiently silent throughout. Only when I was clearly finished did she offer any words of wisdom.

“Alan, honey. You’re fucked.”

I stopped pacing.

“I am, aren’t I?”

“You crossed the dragon. She’s going to roast you alive.”

I was nodding my head. “And not quickly. She’s going to make my life miserable.”

There was a strange silence on the phone. For a moment I thought the call had been dropped.

“Jenny?”

“I’m here, Alan.”

“What are we going to do?”

This time there was no hesitation.

“We’re going to get you that new job. Have you had a chance to call Quest Partners yet?”

“No,” I said, starting to pace again. “Maybe you should call for me.”

“I can’t do that, Alan. They want to talk to you.”

“I’m juggling a lot of balls here, Jenny. Can you at least find out if they want me to fly to Boston, or if they are going to send someone to interview me.”

“They want you to fly to Boston. They even said they would pay for the ticket.”

“They did?”

“Yes, I told you that last night.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Yes, I did. I could tell you weren’t listening to me.”

I stopped. Now it was my turn to nurture a strange silence. Jenny often accused me of not listening to her when we spoke on the phone. And to be fair, I often didn’t. She had a habit of drifting off into the details of her day and I usually had the details of my own day on my mind. But this time there was something different in her tone of voice. Something hostile. And threatening.

“Alan?”

“I’m here, Jenny.”

“You need to find time to call them soon. Now more than ever. Do you or do you not have the name and number?”

“Text it to me and I’ll call and leave a message late tonight. I’ll have to look at my calendar and find a good time for a vacation day. Are there any days in the next two weeks I should avoid being gone?”

Jenny and I had long ago synchronized our calendars, but she filled hers up with so many tentative appointments and reminders that I could never tell what was adjustable and what was carved in stone. If she needed me to do something, the only surefire way of confirming that was to ask her, assuming nothing.

“I’ll adjust. Pick the day that works best for you and get it done.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Do you want to talk to your son?”

“What, are we done?”

“Alan, I’m in the middle of about twelve things right now.”

It was funny how easy and difficult phone conversations with Jenny were. We’re married, and have been for enough years that getting down to business is simple and straight-forward, but even so, there are certain things that never seem to get said.

“How are you feeling today?” It suddenly felt like the most important question on earth.

“I’m fine. Don’t you have to get back to your conference?”

“No, it can run without me for a few more minutes. I want to know how you are doing. I love you.”

“Well, I love you, too. And I really am feeling fine.”

“How’s Crazy Horse?”

“Fine. I have an appointment with Dr. Andrews this afternoon.”

“But nothing’s wrong?”

“No. Just a well baby check.”

“Okay. Let me know what Andrews says.”

“I will. But don’t you dare call me until after you’ve spoken to Quest Partners.”

Before I could respond one of the doors to the ballroom burst open and Bethany Bishop appeared. She looked quickly left, then right, and, spotting me, violently motioned for me to come inside.

“Got to go, honey.”

“Sure. Talk to you later.”

“Alan!” Bethany shout-whispered at me. “We need you!”

I was already moving towards her, tucking my phone back in my pocket. “What is it?”

“Dr. Lancaster is freaking out!”

That didn’t sound good. As soon as I stepped inside the ballroom, Lancaster’s amplified voice filled my world, it didn’t sound kind and pleasant like it had in the speaker ready room.

“Hello?” it said caustically. “Is there anyone there? Can someone please fix my slide?”

I looked up at one of the delay screens and quickly took in a complicated scatter diagram of some kind. Then I looked back to the AV riser and saw a flurry of movement and activity. Amidst the murmur of an audience interrupted, I practically leapt up the riser stairs.

“What’s going on?” I demanded.

“His slide’s in backwards,” Ray said. “I need to pull the carousel and reverse it.”

“Hello?” the voice continued to taunt. “Is anyone back there?”

“Go!” I said, and Ray leapt off the riser and practically sprinted over to where he had previously set up the 35mm slide projector.

I looked up and saw the perspectively diminutive form of Dr. Douglas Lancaster at the far front of the room, on our stage, standing behind our podium, his hand up to shield his eyes from our spotlight, peering with difficulty into the darkness for someone to help him.

“Give me the VOG mic,” I said to the AV tech stationed by a soundboard larger than my kitchen table.

Without question, he picked up a handheld microphone, switched it on, and handed it over to me.

“We’re attending to the problem now, Dr. Lancaster,” I said into it, my voice booming like the voice of God out over the ballroom sound system.

“Well, thank heavens,” Dr. Lancaster said. “It appears I haven’t been abandoned after all.”

A nervous chuckle rippled through the room, and suddenly all the projection screens went blinding white. Looking over, I saw that Ray had popped the slide carousel off the projector and was in the process of plucking the offending slide out of its slot so he could reverse it.

“Oh my!” Dr. Lancaster gasped. “That’s not better, that’s worse!”

“One moment, please,” I said as calmly as I could into the microphone, but Ray was already clicking the carousel back into place, and as quick as that the slide with the complicated scatter diagram was back on all the screens.

“Eureka!” Dr. Lancaster exclaimed. “That’s what we’re supposed to be looking at. Now, if I can bring everyone back to where we left off, I wanted to point out this large cluster of data points in the upper left quadrant -- and, indeed, now it is actually in the upper left quadrant!”

Dr. Lancaster continued his presentation, the audience quieted back down into its typical somnolence, but I continued to stand there on the AV platform with the live VOG mic in my hand. Ray returned and stood by my side, but made no other movements and spoke no words. We undoubtedly were both waiting for the same thing.

As quietly as I could, I clicked off the microphone, but did not yet release it. “Is that the only one that’s going to be backwards?”

“Beats me,” Ray said. “He’s the one who loaded them.”

We stood and listened to Dr. Lancaster describe at length and in great detail what he often described as the “surprisingly elegant” meaning of his small and scattered clusters of data. I can’t speak for Ray, but I know the elegance was lost on me. The population density of Rwanda, the emergence of diseased allele pairs in Hawaiian Geese, the frequency of dangling participles in 19th Century Russian literature -- he could have been talking about any or all of these things and I couldn’t have told you. I was simply waiting for him to advance to the next slide.

“And so,” Dr. Lancaster eventually said, “if we look at the same data set six months later, we see...” There was a flutter on the slide carousel behind us and the image on the screen switched in a flash of white light, a similar but different eye chart, the clusters of blue data points in an alternate configuration, but the words, the words on the x and y axes, fortunately, thankfully, and happily, in the proper orientation. “...that much has changed. What was dominant has now become sub-dominant, and what was sub-dominant has all but disappeared.”

I handed the microphone back to the guy behind the soundboard.

“Stay on it, Ray,” I said. “If he put one in wrong, there might be more.”

“Will do, Alan. Sorry, man.”

I shook my head. “It wasn’t your fault. I’ll stay close until his presentation is over.”

Ray nodded solemnly. He looked grateful, like I had just packed him a fresh bowl. I just sat myself down on one of the empty chairs on the AV riser. Something inside me told me the threat was over, that this one slide was the only one that Lancaster had loaded backwards, but that same thing told me to stick around regardless. It was only one slide, but one slide was going to be enough. There would all kinds of hell to pay.

+ + +

“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source
http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/

The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro

Sometimes, when I have a difficult time figuring out what’s going on in a piece of celebrated fiction, I find myself stepping out of my role as a reader and I mentally put myself in the role of the author. No longer concerned with enjoying the pleasure of well-formed characters and plot, I find myself open to the difficult and painful experience of writing, of creating something of meaningful value on our difficult and distracted world.

It was in this frame of mind that I came across the following paragraph in Ishiguro’s celebrated and frustratingly opaque The Unconsoled.

‘This is quite ridiculous!’ I had lost all patience. ‘I’ll find my own way. You’re obviously quite unable to appreciate that a person might be very busy, working on a tight schedule, and simply can’t afford to dawdle about the town for hours. In fact, if I may say so, this wall is quite typical of this town. Utterly preposterous obstacles everywhere. And what do you do? Do you all get annoyed? Do you demand it’s pulled down immediately so that people can go about their business? No, you put up with it for the best part of a century. You make postcards of it and believe it’s charming. This brick wall charming? What a monstrosity! I may well use this wall as a symbol, I’ve a good mind to, in my speech tonight! It’s just as well for you I’ve already composed much of what I’m going to say in my head and so am naturally reluctant to change things too much at this late stage. Good evening!’

In the context of the story, this is our narrator and protagonist, Mr. Ryder, complaining about yet another obstacle to his plans and desires: in this case a wall bisecting the city, impenetrable, and separating him from the concert hall where he is set to perform.

But in the larger context I believe that Ishiguro is here almost blatantly talking about the novel he is in the process of writing.

It is ‘ridiculous.’ It doesn’t ‘appreciate that a person (i.e., reader) might be very busy, working on a tight schedule, and simply can’t afford to dawdle about the town (i.e., the novel) for hours.’ It is full of ‘utterly preposterous obstacles.’ And what does the author do? Does he get ‘annoyed’? Does he ‘demand that it’s pulled down immediately so that people can go about their business (i.e., understand his novel and move on)’? No. The author ‘makes postcards of it and believes it’s charming.’ And he uses the wall as his symbol.

This, more than anything else, I think, explains what’s going on in this novel. Much of the Internet calls it Kafkaesque, and it is in the sense that it reads very much like that common dream we’ve all had in which we want to accomplish something but are thwarted at every turn. And that leads me to only one conclusion.

The Unconsoled of the novel’s title is actually none of its characters. It is, and can only be, the reader him or herself.

+ + +

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dragons - Chapter 47 (DRAFT)

On the way out of the staff office, I physically bumped into Mary Walton. I was moving so quickly and with so much determination, I nearly knocked her off her designer heels.

“My god, Mary, I’m sorry,” I said, reaching out to catch her before she fell. “Are you all right?”

“Yes, Alan,” she said, clutching my arm in an attempt to right herself. “I’m fine.” Her hand brushed coldly over mine as she disengaged. “Where are you off to in such a hurry?”

“I have a ten o’clock meeting with Dr. Lancaster in the speaker ready room,” I said truthfully. I didn’t have to explain to Mary that Dr. Douglas Lancaster was our keynote speaker, a mentor of and personally selected by Eleanor Rumsfeld. “He wants to go over the technical requirements of his presentation.”

Mary looked at her watch, the sparkles of its diamonds flashing me as it came out from under the sleeve of her suit jacket. Although much more expensive than the one I wore, it undoubtedly told her the same thing mine would have. It was nine-fifty-six.

“I thought we had set this as the time to discuss the situation with Amy Crawford.”

I suspected that Mary knew we had said nine-thirty and that she was the one who was twenty-six minutes late, but her tone was challenging, daring me to call her out or contradict her. It felt like she was testing me. In a lot of my interactions with Mary lately, I realized, it felt like she was testing me.

“I thought we said nine-thirty,” I said simply. “Should we reschedule?”

“No,” she said quickly. “This shouldn’t take long.”

“Okay,” I said, and then stood there silently. After finding conviction among my recent introspections, I no longer wanted to have this conversation with Mary. It didn’t look like I was going to be able to avoid it, but I certainly didn’t have to initiate anything.

After a pause, Mary carefully checked our surroundings. “Is there anyone in the staff office?”

“No,” I said.

“Let’s go in there.”

“Okay.”

Standing safely behind the closed door, Mary got right down to business.

“First off, Alan, I want to let you know that you did the right thing bringing this to my attention.”

“I did?”

“Yes, absolutely. Our relationship with Wes Howard is a very important one. Had you decided to confront him last night, there’s no telling what kind of damage you might have done.”

The blank look on my face must have prompted Mary’s next response.

“Inadvertently, of course. I’m not saying you would do anything to intentionally harm the firm, Alan. You’ve always demonstrated good judgment in these matters and last night was no exception.”

Wait. She’s praising me? For doing nothing?

“Mary,” I said, my suspicions suddenly on full alert. “Have you already spoken to Wes?”

“Yes. Just now.”

So that’s why she was late.

“He has assured me that he will not bring Amy to any more of our events.”

It took about five seconds -- five seconds of me staring open mouthed at Mary -- for the full meaning of her words to hit me. When they did, I felt like the earth moved under my feet.

“He’s not going to bring Amy to any more of our events?”

“Yes,” Mary said, her voice already shifting to her this-matter-is-closed tone. “As you witnessed, it’s too disruptive. Amy is a former member of our staff, someone who left under difficult circumstances. Her presence brings the questions surrounding those circumstances back to the surface, and too many of our staff members, as young as they are, can’t be expected to parse them appropriately. It will inevitably cause them to compromise their professionalism, and that harms both the firm and the client that Wes represents.”

Mary stopped herself short. “What?” she asked me. “What are you looking at me like that for? Once I explained it to Wes he knew exactly what I was talking about.”

My mind was racing. Four minutes ago I had been ready to fight my way to the top of the pile, and now I felt like my legs were about to give out underneath me. But some of my piss and vinegar was still swirling around in my gut, and it was telling, daring, demanding that I tell Mary how utterly fucked up she and this whole sorry affair was. Mary, it wanted me to say, the problem isn’t that Wes Howard brought Amy Crawford to our event. The problem is that Wes Howard is a predator, and his prey are all the young women you hire to work long hours for little pay. You’re either oblivious to what is really going on or you are complicit in his crimes. All telling him he can’t bring Amy around is going to do is put other members of your staff in his crosshairs. Why the fuck do you think Caroline was crying and begging me to come get her? Amy Crawford isn’t the one who needs to be banned from our events. Wes Howard is!

“Alan? What is it?”

I realize now that this was one of those rare moments of truth. And to my credit, despite all the wrong turns I would take at so many other crossroads, this time I decided to ever so carefully proceed on the high road.

“Mary, I don’t think just getting Wes to agree to not bring Amy around addresses the real issue.”

“Oh? Why not?”

“Because, there’s nothing to stop him from…”

“From? From what?”

The words were there, I was just having a hard time saying them.

“There’s nothing to stop him from...from hitting on other members of our staff.”

“Oh, Alan! Don’t start with that, please! We’re talking about grown-ups here.”

“Yes, Mary, we are. And as grown-ups, we shouldn’t be afraid to admit what’s really going on.”

I’ve subsequently had a lot of time to think about those words, those words that came so blithely out of my mouth when I was alone with Mary in our conference staff office. And with the benefit of tremendous hindsight, I see that few words spoken have ever been more both the absolutely right and the absolutely wrong things to say.

Mary visibly paled. “Look Alan,” she said with sudden frailty. “I won’t have you speaking to me like that.”

“Like what?”

“With such disrespect.”

I put up a pair of surrendering hands. “I meant no disrespect, Mary. It’s just that people are talking, and they don’t see this thing the way you do. The problem isn’t Amy Crawford. The problem is Wes Howard.”

“You know, Alan,” Mary said, her voice shifting tone again, regaining most of the self-satisfied dominance she typically displayed. “People are talking about more than just Amy Crawford and Wes Howard. They’re talking about you. You and your inability to lead them effectively.”

It was probably meant to knock me off my feet. But these were the trenches, and despite the legitimate power Mary was able to wield over me, the trenches were where I was used to fighting.

“Is that so?”

“Yes,” she said icily. “Michael resigned because of you, and now Gerald is asking me to reassign him to another client.”

“He asked you what?” I couldn’t help it. I knew she was only trying to rattle me, but the idea of Gerald talking about me behind my back did exactly that.

“He doesn’t want to work with you anymore. He says you’re a terrible leader.”

I had a few choice words about Gerald, too, but I bit my tongue.

“Everyone is entitled to their opinion, Mary. What’s yours?”

Judging by the expression that passed over her face, I’d have to say I both surprised and impressed her with that one.

“Honestly, Alan, I’m no longer sure.” Now she was a mother, expressing her disappointment with an ill-behaved child. “You’ve shown so much promise in so many areas, but ever since this latest promotion your priorities seems to be off.”

“Off?”

“Yes, off. You don’t seem as dedicated to the client’s success as you used to be. I’ve opened several doors for you, but you’ve been reluctant to step through them.”

“What are you talking about?” I really didn’t have any idea. Her corporate-speak was like a foreign language I had forgotten how to speak.

“Even Eleanor has noticed,” Mary continued. “She thinks I’ve promoted you too soon.”

That didn’t answer my question. “Mary,” I said again, doing my best to keep my voice level. “What are you talking about? What doors haven’t I stepped through? I’ve been working my ass off, doubly so since Susan left.”

“You probably shouldn’t bring up Susan with me, Alan,” Mary said, her voice under better control than mine. “She’d still be with us if you would’ve handled that situation better. Both Don and I think you’re the reason she decided to leave, too.”

Now I was starting to feel dizzy. What the fuck are you talking about?

I will probably never know if those last words actually came out of my mouth, or if they only rang out in my enraged mind, because at that very moment the staff office door opened and Angie Ferguson came barrelling into the room, a balanced stack of empty registration boxes in her arms.

“Alan!” she practically shouted. “There you are! Dr. Lancaster is waiting for you in the speaker ready room. Did you forget or something?”

“I didn’t forget!” I snapped back. “I’m having a conversation here.”

The stack of boxes and the way the door opened prevented her from seeing Mary. She turned in place and, in her surprise and movement, tipped the stack of boxes in Mary’s direction, who had to bat them out of the way to keep them from hitting her in the face.

“Oh, god, I’m sorry, Mary. Didn’t see you there.”

“It’s all right,” Mary said in a tone that indicated it was anything but all right.

Angie kept moving into the room, tossing the few boxes that remained in her grasp into a corner of the room, the place we had already designated as the trash zone. “Should I tell him you’ll be late?” she said as she busied herself with retrieving the remaining boxes from around Mary’s feet.

“Mary?” I asked.

“Go,” she said, her attention seemingly more on Angie’s movements than anything that had been said between us. “Don’t keep Dr. Lancaster waiting any longer.”

I stood there for a moment, waiting for Mary to say something else. We’ll talk later. We’re not finished here. I’ll get you, you son of a bitch. Anything that would acknowledge the hostile and unprofessional exchange we had just had, but there was nothing more coming.

“Okay,” I eventually said and left the room.

+ + +

“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source
http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/