Author: DOuG pRATt

Those Jobs Ain’t Comin’ Back

Bruce Springsteen recorded “My Hometown” in 1983. By the time I heard the song, I had seen for myself what he was singing about.

I was familiar with the harmful competitive effect shopping malls had upon downtown storefronts in the 70’s. What I saw on in the 80’s, during my business travels to Ohio and Illinois, were formerly thriving company towns struggling with unemployment. I was reminded of the textile mill towns back home that had been devastated by the mills moving to Southern states.

What happened to the once mighty American steel industry, that declined so rapidly in the 80’s? Were foreign governments dumping steel on the market for less than the cost of production? Or were foreign competitors making steel more efficiently, while American steel manufacturers had failed to innovate?

There’s a comment at the end of the podcast, about the steel industry showing up in pop culture. Big Steel’s influence extended all the way to a galaxy far, far away.

Ted Talk – 2

The motivator behind finally telling this story is Martin Baron’s memoir, Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and THE WASHINGTON POST. In chapter 18, “Uprisings”, Baron explains what he considers to have been his failure, as the Post’s editor, at resolving the disconnect he felt with Black staffers in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder in 2020.

Ted was hired, and after attending a week of employee orientation he joined my group. The job required a decidedly mixed skill set. It was split between a lot of hands-on technical work and teaching classes on how to use the system. (My most difficult challenge in doing that was at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington D.C.)

Someone who wasn’t comfortable with frequent air travel, technical troubleshooting under pressure, or public speaking wouldn’t have been qualified. Ted seemed suited to the job. He liked electronics, he was well-spoken, and his personality reminded me of the DJ’s I’d worked with in radio. In fact, Ted had a side gig as a club DJ.

The technical aspects of the job required a lot of time to learn; one year for basic proficiency. So the goal for new hires was to get them up to speed as quickly as possible, to start traveling and to provide the onsite training.

Everyone in my group needed to be able to fill in for one another to do the traveling and the training. For the technical work, I tried to give each of them their own specialty.

For many years I was the go-to guy for customer data communications problems. Dealing with the confounding aspects of serial interfacing and data flow control in the Universal 7-Part Data Circuit model was a big part of my job. (Thank you Intel, for implementing unidirectional XON/XOFF flow control in your modems!)

Ted had an interest in, and aptitude for, data communications. Which made sense to me, because just as I had been a radio DJ, Ted was a gear head with his own DJ setup. I welcomed the chance to train Ted and offload some of that datacomm work.

Ted Talk – 1

This will be a very long post, and I don’t want to write it in a single sitting, so I’ll publish it in sections. How many? Don’t know. I haven’t written it yet!

It’s a story that I have been unsure about writing for as long as I have been Prattling with WordPress. There will be no graphics, no audio, and no video. What there will be is a true story from the years when I was a boss. There’s a big reveal that, considering the subject, I won’t hide until the end. I had to fire Ted, the only Black man I ever hired.

Starting salaries where I worked were low. With a Bachelor’s degree I was hired for a base salary of only $9,000, which is equivalent to $31,500 today. The opportunity had a lot of potential, including an annual bonus and the chance to purchase the company’s privately held stock. That potential was ultimately realized, with the immediate benefit of being able to work with my friends from college.

The company’s low starting pay was a problem in another way, once I became responsible for hiring people into my small group. After being promoted from my entry-level position I did a lot of traveling. Personally I thought of the travel requirement as a benefit, and I pitched it that way to job applicants. Nonetheless, the money that came with the job limited the candidates who were willing to accept an offer.

As far as I know, Ted was the only Black person who was ever interested in joining my group. With no directly related experience required for the position, Ted was a qualified applicant. I recall one specific, unusual detail from his resume. He named himself as one of his references. When asked about it, Ted said he was his own best reference. I wasn’t going to exclude Ted from consideration simply because I thought it was an odd thing to do on a resume, but my internal “little warning bell” was ringing.

Perhaps Ted had gotten the idea from a resume guidebook? What Color Is Your Parachute? was popular at the time. Or was I, as a White guy, seeing an unfamiliar aspect of Black culture? I talked it over with my boss, and we decided we were okay with it. I offered Ted the job, at the same starting salary as everyone else, and he accepted.