The Longest Year
Trying to fit in just wasn't in the cards at Quad
I was prepared to take a pay cut and be put on salary, and that’s what happened. The salary was way below what I’d been led to believe it’d be for an Executive Chef there, but the benefits were good and I imagined that I’d be able to cut back on some of the offsite work because I now had administrative duties. I’d had about a month to get used to my new responsibilities before being assigned my next role, as corporate hatchet man.
Harry had put the word out that Quad Cuisine, as our department was called, was grossly overstaffed and hemorrhaging money (it was). There were around two dozen people working just in the Sussex plant, and he wanted that number cut in half. Since starting there, I’d noticed extraordinary, even deliberate, inefficiencies in the operation, but any time I questioned something I was told “That’s the way we do it”. We had one guy who’s only job was to make sure all the soft drinks were stocked in the guest houses and on the train. He claimed to have an injured spleen and wasn’t able to lift the cases of soda or water, so he had an assistant.
When Harry asked me what my thoughts on downsizing were, I told him that I agreed the department could be run with about half the current staffing levels, if those people were willing to work harder and more professionally. So it fell on me to start thinning it out.
Even though Quad wasn’t a union company, they had the structure as if it were. There was a manager named Tim whose job title was “Employee Advocate”, so he made sure the necessary rules were followed and steps were taken. He wasn’t a bad guy, that was just his job.
We’d determined that we had to lose a dozen people. I suggested we start with the ones who did good honest work, that we wanted to keep, and work backwards. There were only about 6 that made that first cut, including two third shift guys, one of whom slept half his shift and the other who had a scam going where he only rang in about three quarters of the purchases, pocketing the rest of the money. It was decided that at least these guys showed up, got along, and we knew what they were doing so we wouldn’t need to break in a new pair for the night shift and then try to figure out their scams.
Here’s how the termination process worked…
Let’s-call-her-Susie needs to go. She’s lazy, has a bad attitude, calls in a lot, and the quality of her work is substandard. When she doesn’t feel like doing something, she either says she doesn’t know how to do it or just says “That’s not my job”.
The procedure would be as follows:
Determine what her actual job is and write a job description for it. (There were no existing job descriptions or organizational charts at the time I took over, just a loose, somewhat ethereal arrangement, apparently mutually agreed upon by the cafeteria staff.)
Explain, demonstrate, and train her to do the tasks within her job description.
Document her performance, or lack of performance, over a three month period.
Meet with her to discuss her performance and come up with strategies to address her deficiencies.
Repeat steps two and three.
Meet with the Employee Advocate to discuss the situation and why she needs to be let go.
Meet with Susie and the E.A. to discuss, and to come up with what they called a “Last-Chance Agreement” which would mean that should she be unable or unwilling to perform her duties, she’d be terminated. It was kind of a hold harmless agreement.
With that in place, repeat steps two and three again, then she can be let go at a meeting including the E.A., me, a Quad Cuisine manager, and representatives from H.R.
The process usually took about four to six months to run its course, and the employees generally fought tooth and nail to keep their jobs and not have to do any additional work. It was exhausting and could be soul-destroying. Mostly, the people being let go deserved it, but there was one girl that didn’t.
She worked on the sub sandwich line in the cafeteria. She was a decent worker who tried to do a good job, but she also had some sort of disability that made it very hard for her to learn things and to keep up with the pace. The job at Quad was the world to her, because she was a single mom with three young kids from two different guys, neither of whom was paying child support. Two of her kids were special needs, and the child care and health care enabled her to have a job, earn a living, and keep a roof over her head. I fought to keep her, but it wasn’t my decision. The boss who was running the downsizing, the manager from the Lomira plant, told me to do it and that was it.
When the end came for her, she just broke down and cried. It broke my heart and destroyed my will to fire even one more person after that.
I’d never really liked the job to begin with, but after taking on the responsibilities of running those operations, then firing one person after another, having all those bosses, a pager, a Blackberry and two cell phones, calls at any time of night, intraoffice politics... I started hating getting up in the dark every morning to go into work. Imagine being treated like the grim reaper every time you walked in the door. Conversations would fall silent, people would move away from me. It wasn’t any fun, especially not for $45k a year.
I still did catering, on the train, planes, and at the Big House. I liked Harry a lot. We had great conversations in his kitchen as he read his mail, had a drink, and relaxed after work. I used some of the down time those days to try to balance the things I liked about it against the things I hated. Tried to convince myself that I was taking one for the team, serving the big picture. Hell, it wasn’t a mess that I’d created, anyway.
There were some checks in the plus column.
I got to go to school to learn how to drive a forklift so I could drag pallets of food around the plant from the delivery docks to the kitchen.
I got to go to WCTC and get qualified as a First Responder in case we were out in the middle of nowhere on the train and a client had a heart attack or other medical emergency and no one else was there to help.
I got to learn the ins and outs of a complex, multibillion dollar corporation, and meet people I probably wouldn’t have otherwise.
I learned a lot about how computer programs like Outlook, Excel, and Windows work.
I got more Playboys than I could ever look at (they were printed at Quad and overruns were sent to sell for a dollar each in the cafeteria).
That wasn’t nearly enough to make it worth all the headaches, though…
My last official duty at Quad Graphics was to make the food arrangements for Harry’s funeral.
There had been a fatal fire at the Lomira plant, and it had affected Harry quite a bit. People who knew him better than I did said he hadn’t really been himself since then. I guess the combination of that and the WTC tragedy had gotten to him. Maybe he wasn’t paying attention to things like he usually did, and maybe he took more medication than he thought. It’s all speculation, but in the end his death was accepted as an accidental drowning at the Pine Lake house. The word spread fast, and I got the call to come to the Pewaukee plant for a meeting the following day.
I was given instructions as to what Betty wanted and where. There was to be a service at the Basilica, a reception at the Calatrava, as well as a bunch of family and friends things at the house. For three days, I made calls, organized work gangs, rented things, moved food from place to place, and caught an hour or two of sleep when I could close the office door and turn the light out. There were others who had their tasks. Air condition the Basilica. Arrange for a hundred or so pallets of bottled water and ice tubs for people waiting in the hot sun to view his casket, extra lights and electricity, things like that.
Everyone worked together and it got done for Harry and Betty. I’d never had to order ten thousand silver dollar rolls, or the butter, ham, turkey, etc. for them. Multiply that by twenty different items. We bought all the 16-20 count shrimp in Milwaukee and most of Chicago. then had to thaw, cook and peel them. Fifteen gallons of cocktail sauce, cases of lemons…
The next week, that least favorite of my five bosses, the manager from Lomira, wanted me to take a walk with him. When we approached the H.R. department and I saw the two girls sitting at the table with a folder, I knew exactly what was happening and I didn’t even care. I was too tired to care about anything, so when we sat down, I didn’t have the patience to listen to his bullshit. I’d heard it many times before, so I cut him off in the middle of his “We hate to have to do this…” speech and asked the H.R. twins what my severance package was going to be. “Not good enough for everything I’ve done for you here” I said, so we called the VP of Personnel, one of my other bosses. She told me to come by her office when we were through. I signed the paper. I went to her office. She told me how sorry she was that it worked out this way and so on, then proposed their “Executive” severance plan to me, being that I’d been the Executive Chef there and all.
It was actually pretty sweet. Six months pay and insurance, as well as something they called “executive career counseling” which was basically third-party high-end job coaching and placement and some other things I can’t remember. I left and slept for a couple days. I don’t remember ever being that burnt out. I felt used and discarded, foolish for doing all that work for so little money, and resolved to never do that again.
I’d promised them a year, and that’s what they got. I got an education, a few stories, and I reconnected with Brian. In the end, it was ambition that got me fired. The VP told me that she’d wanted to make me a “manager” (remember those gold letter name tags?) after the year, because I’d replaced Tom, who’d been one. The “manager” from the Lomira plant, who for some reason was in my chain of command and the guy who wasted more of my time there than anyone, wanted to be the lone manager of Quad Cuisine and had been instrumental, with a lot of help from Tom, in getting Tom let go. He wasn’t keen on sharing power again. I had no knowledge of any of this, of course, but when she told me, a lot of things fell into place and made more sense.
I look back on that time as a year of penance for my bad decision to return to Delafield a second time.
This story has a happy ending. My unwillingness to accept the initial severance offer got me the executive career counseling that introduced me to a bombastic, relentlessly optimistic retired attorney, now career counselor, named John, who was buddies with two brothers named Ron and Dale Kuhlman, who he’d met lunching at the bar at Pepino’s on Capitol Drive a few years before.
Ron was involved in building a golf course and country club called “The Legend at Brandybrook” and they were in the process of looking for a chef…