Whistleblower–Middle-Management Hell

Whistleblower – The Story of an American Middle-Manager

-----Original Message-----
From: Jarvis Grant
To: [e-mail]
Sent: 12/17/2004 10:05 PM
Subject: homs

Mikal

am employee. need to cover identiti. worry bout things i think shoul;d
share. worry bout saying them cause dont want lose job

hiding id thru yahoo

little feel shuld say w/o concrete dtail but do not blive cansay w/o
problm for me

wud like to blive i can b opn w u bout it

but not sur gud 4 me

what can expect if serious, serious, many, many msconduct can pruv at
exec lvl?

like co feel responsibility to say

whatshud do?

root

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Jarvis Grant sat at his computer a week before Christmas Day contemplating the possible options. It was clear that his career with CARPS was to be short-lived. And that kind of sucked, because he liked working there. He liked the people (for the most part), liked his job and didn’t like the thought of being pushed out on to the street. Mostly because his reports were damn fine people and as for his job… and also… well, he was good at what he did.
…….

One August morning he hopped in his new (to him) Honda Civic, cranked up some Cheap Trick (greatest hits given him by his wife) and headed off to work. It was to be his first day at CARPS and that was pretty exciting. A new challenge. Steady, solid hours. In terms of the pay, it was a lateral move, but he longed for interaction with people, having spent the preceeding 4 years working out of his basement.

The start-up internet solutions company he and his brother had started couldn’t get to break 10k in monthly billings to save his life. It’s not like he hadn’t tried. He had. He had, in fact, tried like hell to make it work. Jarvis had tried everything. Every single angle he could think of. He had been raised to believe that if you worked at something hard enough (and long enough) things would eventually give way and fall in your favor. Finding that this was not the case was a real drag and shook his confidence more than just a little. It sort of called into question a whole bunch of other presumptions he had adopted and/or found himself imprinted with.

So, when the opportunity presented itself to work for a “legitimate”, publicly-traded company, he stopped, looked around and to his surprise came to realized for the first time he was in fact the last one aboard the good ship “Start-Up” he had dumped his life into building. He tried desperately to recall what it was like to work 40 hours a week. But even when he tried really hard, he couldn’t. Truth be told, he hadn’t had a 40-hour work week in something like 5 years. And that 5 years seemed like an eternity ago.

Anyway, the long and short of it is that when Jarvis realized he was alone on the wayward craft and that the ship was floundering in perpetual irons of a post 9-11 economy, he dove into the deep blue sea and swam for an unfamiliar, though much fabled, shore. As he swam from the listless craft, he couldn’t help but feel he was leaving someone behind and letting them all down. But as he thought about his one-time shipmates, he realized for the very first time they had done exactly the same… only some years before. Then he got a bit angry. Interviewed and got the position at CARPS and took the job.

Now “Southern Girls” is a great song. The perpetual AAA minor-league bridesmaid (never a bride) that is Cheap Trick could write a great song from time to time. This was one of those great songs. Jarvis thought to himself how much better it sounded on vinyl, but decided this was a function of some degree of romance for his younger-eared self. The days of vinyl were long over, but he still called his CDs (the few he had) “records”. Or worse, “albums”. In reality, these terms, though they represented “low-technology” of the punch card days of yore, were ultimately better descriptions for the era of rock n’ roll he was likely to listen to. And, as for the cover art, that lost and rarest of forms, well that had gone completely south. His favorites were literally reduced to liner notes on “jewel cases” and didn’t nearly convey the same significance, either textually or tactile-ly.

Having been a one-time minor league rock star hailing out of the shit hole that is was Mesa, Arizona, Jarvis was not opposed to loud music at all. But we he was opposed to making other people listen to his loud music. What that meant was that in order to listen to Southern Girls, which had had the shit compressed out of it somewhere out in California for re-release on CD, Jarvis would need a third arm. He could not bring himself to disturb the peace on his way to his first day on the job. It was a courtesy thing, he would say. But it was also an embarrassment thing. Particularly at stop lights, where others around him were really municipal prisoners for 30-odd second intervals. Few things pissed him off more than being bludgeoned by someone else’s bad taste. Audio assault was a real possibility on this trip in particular, which took him through the heart of West Allis (or, as the natives called it, “Westallica”). Now, truth be told, punishment by Metallica had become rather rare, though not completely unheard of in these parts. Rather, what one was most likely to be unwittingly brutalized by these days was the relentless trunk-thumping “urban-core” rattling the shit out of the windows of the host vehicle and the vehicles of those lucky enough to be within a 33 foot radius of said rolling boom box. And while Jarvis had none of the qualms about Urban-Core one would anticipate from a degreed professional from the surburbs (re: white Irish guy in mid-thirties), he still thought it wasn’t very cool to subject anyone to unnecessary punishment. His thoughts on the matter of noise pollution, though a bit silly really, were, if not set in concrete, strong enough that he would turn his stereo down and roll up his windows to spare unsuspecting commuters next to him as he was waylaid at the many lights planted along Greenfield Avenue. It reminded him of Japan in this respect. And it was this type of respect for others that made lines at streetlights in Yokohama so dim at night. Masses of strangers turning off their headlamps for the benefit of those dark-haired pilots pinned in front of them. What a concept.

Now Greenfield Avenue runs from the heart of New Berlin to the heart of ‘stallica proper. It was not known to Jarvis whether it was quicker to take this route to work that morning. But he did know it beat the shit out of taking the freeway. And if not because of the time that was to be saved going to and from work (unverified), certainly from the point of view of not having to deal with the many jackasses the freeway seemed to comprise of whenever he himself bothered to use it.

So it was that on this particular morning track number three was interrupted no fewer than 23 or four times. A wave within a wave, really, like the windows on the two-door the delivery of Southern Girls to his cranium went: up and down… up and down. And this kind of sucked, because Southern Girls is, and in Jarvis’ mind always had been, too short of a song to begin with. Had the CD actually had grooves on it, these would have melted away for the number of times he had found himself “rewinding” to the beginning of the track on this particular day. And so it was with a bit of anxiety that he did it at all.

Anyway, it was a decent morning and he was all set to get on with it. He pulled into the parking lot with confidence and found his way back behind the old Sam’s Club that was now vacant but for an NPO that hardly needed that much friggin’ space anyway, turned the stereo way down, and looked for a spot to park his shiny, economical, entirely practicable Honda Civic coupe (with retractable “moon roof”).

He locked the silver car remotely. And, just to make sure he had, he thumbed down the button on the key fob again and it beeped. Jarvis walked to the “front” door (which was decidedly not in the front of the mammoth building, but rather facing the railroad tracks in back), tugged on the handle and walked through the foyer where he was met by the brilliantly shiny whites of a smiling Mrs. Irongate. She greeted him warmly. This came as sort of a shock to Jarvis, who had come to appreciate how exceptional this woman was at her job. He had cause to know, as she had given him “the Heisman” over the phone no fewer than thirteen or so times. For such a small woman she executed stiff-arms with the proficiency of an all-Pro halfback. It was enough to put the fear of God into any prospective Customer Service Manager who, having interviewed for the job and having waited a judicious amount of time without hearing a word from Mr. Mallethead (President of the CARPS threshold division), was presumptuous enough to anticipate the courtesy of an update regarding his/her candidacy (re: whether he/she had any real hope of getting the nod for the job). This was altogether a different woman than he had expected. And for that, he was thankful.

….