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The Only Story About a Fat, Jolly Man and Fireplaces That Doesn’t Involve Santa Claus

In high school, I spent two summers working in my dad’s warehouse, and oh, the stories I could tell. It was like working in an office-set sitcom, with all the archestereotypes you could possibly imagine: the grizzled Vietnam vet, the struggling single mother, the Italian-American boss with Mob connections, the unattractive bookkeeping woman that nobody wants to make direct eye contact with, the guy who can barely speak English and either causes or is blamed for most workplace accidents — I could go on (no, seriously, there were more), but the point is this: much as I hated that job, it was both entertaining and educational to watch this hilarious soap opera unfold before me every day after summer school.

And who was my dad, in the midst of all this? Drew Carey: the fat, bespectacled, disgruntled middle manager who does all the work of his boss but gets none of the credit. His boss — Frankie, the aforementioned Italian-American boss with Mob connection — was a little bit abusive of my father’s workaholic nature. Because Frankie wanted to spend all his time going to Sox games, and as it happens, most Sox games happened during work hours.

Shortly before I resumed work in the summer of 2000, Frankie hired Nia as a secretary. Nia didn’t help me concentrate on an already boring job: she was gorgeous, and while I could think of a thousand reasons to hire her, none involved her typing skills. Which was probably good, since she had no typing skills. Or phone skills. Or any interest in work whatsoever. Because, if you’ve caught on, she wasn’t really hired as a secretary — she was hired because Frankie was cheating on his wife and wanted easy access to his “broad.” Also, she probably said something like, “I don’t want to be a cocktail waitress anymore, so give me a job or I’m telling your wife!”

When the hiring of Nia came to the attention of the big-wigs in Gary, it was pointed out that no other branch manager in the entire company had a full-time secretary (that’s what the assistant manager is for; just ask my dad), so if he wanted to keep her on the payroll, she had to do something else. Frankie thought she should learn the sales trade. It seemed like a good match: who better to sell HVAC supplies to fat, sleazy contractors than an exceptionally well-endowed woman in a tight dress?

The problem was, Frankie left my dad to teach her sales, and she had no interest in learning anything. Her feeling was that her job was protected. In a way, it was, because Frankie really liked to toss around his Mob connections. Apparently, his father was killed by a rival Family, so Frankie is Protected For Life. I don’t know much about organized crime, but I gather than “Protected For Life” means “if you want your ‘broad’ workin’ in the same joint as you, we’ll make that happen by any means necessary, capiche?” So Frankie would walk around implying that if anyone complained to headquarters, uh, he’d have the Mob come and kill them and/or their families. Nobody believed him, exactly, but that isn’t the kind of thing you want to be wrong about.

So Nia kept her job, and every few days my dad would attempt in vain to teach her about sales. He never got very far, but he didn’t really have to: as I mentioned, the bazongas hanging out of her dress meant instant sales. Contractors would put up with anything from her — and the longer it took her to look things up or ask questions, the better, because that meant more staring time. This kind of infuriated my dad, who is under the misconception that hard work should be rewarded in business.

Things reached a boil in the fall of 2000, when I was away at college. I missed all the good stuff, but my dad said that headquarters figured out that Nia was a stool-pigeon who existed as Frankie’s plaything. It also turned out that the warehouse manager — who also kept disappearing to Sox games with Frankie and often Nia — was also involved. Frankie was cheating on his wife with Nia; Nia was cheating on Frankie with the warehouse manager. The warehouse manager was also married.

When this came out, headquarters got pissed off at Frankie, but they couldn’t really do anything. It seemed like they should have been able to, but Nia actually had reasonably good sales, and although my dad’s company likes to be a “family company,” there doesn’t appear to be any law that says two married men can’t have sleep with one single employee at the same time. Consenting adults and all that.

But they didn’t know about the Sox games, or my dad’s Drew Carey status. When the shit hit the fan with Nia but nothing seemed like it would come of it, various “anonymous tips” came from my dad’s branch, basically saying, “Frankie doesn’t do shit, [my dad] is doing all his work.” Headquarters investigated this and learned that it was true. Frankie probably gave my dad the kiss of death before taking himself “and all his customers” (for the record, he had no actual customers because he did no actual work) across the street. That’s another sitcom element: the prime competition to my dad’s business is literally across the street.*

That was the end of Frankie, but most of the people were disappointed when my dad was passed over to be the actual branch manager. No, the company had a better idea to reward my dad’s service: he’d be launching a new branch out in Rockford.

The interesting thing about Illinois is that the people in our state outside the Chicago area seem to view the city as something out of The Sting or The Untouchables: a crime-ridden cesspool protected by the hippy-dippy liberals in power. This…isn’t that far from the truth, much the way the Chicago perspective of the rest of the state (as Green Acres with more guns) isn’t far from the truth.

Rockford is a strange place, too. It’s the second-largest city in the state — and they’re damn proud of that fact — but they have a “small-town” mindset in certain ways, like loving hunting and NASCAR and hating black people. For the purposes of this story, another example is their fear and hatred of outside influences, specifically the influence of city slickers trying to peddle their wares in the city. So when a citified company like my father’s sets up shop in Rockford, the business owners of Rockford — basically the small-town version of the Mafia, so let it be said that we aren’t the only ones with organized crime — try to shut them out.

In summary, my dad’s company sent him on a suicide mission to lead a branch to success — as he had almost single-handedly led the Arlington Heights branch to success — where there could be no success. So after struggling for about six months, to such an extent that one of my dad’s employees (who transferred from a different branch) had a stress-related heart-attack that killed him, Rockford contractors finally decided to start doing business with them. But it was business on their terms, loaded with all-expense-paid (by my dad) dinners, extreme discounts, and then came the really bizarre stuff: my dad had to go to the Winnebago County Fair and bid on — and win! — a live pig one contractor’s daughter had raised. He won it — at a cost of over $500 in company money — and we had loads of pig carcass in our freezer for months. It was fairly disgusting, even from a meat fan. Also, he had to pay for sponsorship of a local racecar driver.

Maybe it seems innocuous, but it was always done in the shadiest possible way: “You don’t sponsor this racer, we don’t buy from you.” That was the bottom line: there were plenty of other HVAC wholesalers in Rockford, and plenty of them are Rockford-and-Rockford-only, so the only way they’d do business was if my dad danced while they shot at his feet. And so my dad let that happen, because his success at this job depended on the success of the branch, so he would do whatever it takes to be successful.

Adding insult to injury, the regional manager was brothers of the assistant manager. So when my dad, for example, needed help swaying Headquarters toward doing something risky, he didn’t get any help from his regional manager, who wanted his brother to take over as branch manager. If my dad failed, his dream would come true, so he did as little as possible to help. Also, if the regional manager did say to go ahead with something risky and that he’d help them come around to it — if it was successful, that was easy enough, but if it failed, he’d blame my dad and say he had no part in it. My dad was a renegade branch manager who played by his own rules.

So here’s what really fucked my dad in the end, over two years after he had started there: they have these fake fireplaces** that heat homes with that fun fireplace ambience, but they don’t require expensive home-destruction to install a chimney. A group of contractors, undoubtedly after “accidentally” pushing their previous HVAC dealer into a cement mixer, told my dad that if he invested in these fireplaces — which his company doesn’t normally sell — they would sell like hotcakes. Apparently they were all the rage in Rockford, but once they started selling them, my dad would have to keep up with demand and keep them displayed prominently.

My dad proposed this idea to Headquarters, who nixed it. He went to the regional manager, who bottom-lined it for my dad: if they invested in these fireplaces and they didn’t sell, the Rockford branch was finished, and so was my dad. So if he was absolutely sure they would sell, he should go ahead with it. If not, he should just tell the contractors to fuck off.

My dad went with it, and here’s the problem: he was absolutely duped by those contractors, one of whom (apparently) had a stake in a manufacturer of these fake fireplaces. So my dad had a ton of them, nobody was buying them, and one or more of the contractors was laughing all the way to the bank. See, because it didn’t really matter if the contractors bought them and installed them in homes — my dad had already bought them and was just reselling.

True to the regional manager’s word, my dad was finished in Rockford. He would have been finished in the company, but to reward him for many loyal years of service, they merely double-demoted him, back to being the warehouse manager in Lombard. Then, when he proved that he couldn’t wrangle the ragtag bunch of assholes in the warehouse the way he had in Arlington Heights, they demoted him again, back down to driver. Then they actually promoted him, back to the assistant manager at Arlington Heights position he had had three years earlier. Kind of a humiliating experience, and one of the many reasons I have a problem with letting jobs — especially jobs I don’t want to do — suck me in. I know corporate loyalty and enthusiasm is rewarded, but I always feel I have to keep a distance, or else I’ll get so involved in the job that I wouldn’t even notice if people were conspiring against me, like the regional manager and assistant manager were in Rockford.

As an ironic postscript, the Rockford branch did remain operational, with the assistant manager stepping up to the plate. And it became one of the most profitable branches in Illinois. Shortly before my dad received his demotion and left Rockford, he started dealing with some dot-commer who went bust. Dot-commer knew a bit about the contractors’ world, so he had spent time developing a website — basically, a contractors’ version of Amazon.com. Everything they ever needed, shipped right to their warehouse or jobsite.

But he needed some suppliers in on the ground floor, and since he was based in Rockford, he started checking out the bigger businesses in the area — the ones that would have the most “stuff.” And essentially, the website works like this: contractors find what they want, buy it, pay for it, et cetera. Dot-commer receives the order, which he then sends directly to whomever would be the supplier. And the suppliers would actually ship it direct, not unlike Amazon’s Marketplace sellers. In the meantime, Dot-commer’s selling price would be a bit more than what the suppliers charge him, to ensure a healthy profit. And since apparently the website was massively successful, as a result so was the Rockford branch. If my dad could have stayed a few more months, perhaps they would have forgiven the fireplace fiasco.

But probably not.

*I suppose I should state here that this entire lump of bullshit involving Frankie and Nia, plus all the other bizarre and hilarious interpersonal bullshit I witnessed during that summer, eventually became the subject of a screenplay I wrote a few years ago. Despite the sitcom elements, it wasn’t (really) a comedy. It was kind of a dark, depressing look at working life, and how everybody gets caught up in these soap operatics, but at the end of the day, it’s all meaningless. Or at least that’s the way I feel: you can make and sometimes keep friends while you’re working, but sometimes they’ll stab you in the back, and most of the time you stop being friends as soon as one of you leaves the job. So in the end, all the relationships that are forged mean jack shit, so why get wrapped up in the drama?

**Link Note: I have no idea if this is what my dad was rambling on about or not, but it seems like the right thing, so I’m gonna go with it.

Posted by Stan on March 2, 2006 12:19 PM  | Permalink | Family: The Horror… | Digg It