Bill Roper's Journal

Too Close to Getting Killed

Sun, 14 Jul 2024 19:52:05 GMT

I told this story at the time, but it seems like a good story for today.

I was driving the minivan with the whole family in it on the way to FilkONtario some years ago. It was dark outside and we'd arrived at an area around Kalamazoo with road construction. Things were, well, insufficiently marked and lighted. I was in the left lane, following a little sports car as we both tried to pass a semi. Everything looked to be just fine.

Until the moment when the little sports car ducked in front of the truck and I saw the orange barrels. There was no more lane for me to be in.

I shouted, "We are going to hit barrels!" And then we did.

Time slows down in an emergency. If your adrenal glands work at all (and mine apparently do), your system gets flooded with adrenaline and any other hormones that the body thinks it wise to release to try to get you out of the mess that you are in.

I realized that what I needed was to be in the lane where the truck was without actually occupying the same space as the truck. I slowed down and steered to the right edge of the lane, doing my best to catch the barrels with the left front fender to knock them away from where I needed to be driving. The truck driver, who had been moving slower than I had been to start with, saw the mess that I was in and braked faster than I did, which allowed me to pop around in front of him and get out of the mess.

I was excited. I was exhilarated. We were alive and well! This was the best thing ever. That may not be how *everyone* would react in such a situation, but I suspect it's not at all uncommon, because that hormone flood needs to clear somehow.

It only took a few moments to realize just how close we had been to the semi. The right-hand side mirror was folded in where it had contacted the truck. It was easy for Gretchen to open the window and push it back into position.

The left-hand side mirror was gone, leaving only the motorized stub. It had encountered a barrel.

But we were all ok and that was what mattered. The van could be fixed.

People can't.

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Shiftless

Thu, 28 Apr 2022 03:16:28 GMT

As I was changing gears on my Ford Edge the other day (automatic, but a big stick in the middle of the console), Gretchen observed that she liked the gearshift on her minivan which is mounted on the steering wheel. Of course, if we get a new minivan some day, that gearshift is likely to go away in favor of a tiny knob on the dash, because everything nowadays is drive-by-wire. Gretchen is not sure this is an improvement.

Neither am I, due to an incident that happened when I was quite young.

At the time, our family owned a Dodge Coronet, a nice little sedan (for some values of little) where the gearshift was mounted in the center of the dashboard, because that meant that you could have a big bench seat in front and back. Given that my younger brother, Mitch, was still pretty young, he rode -- in those days before car seats and seat belts -- planted between my dad, the driver, and my mom, the navigator. This meant they didn't have to put all three kids in the back seat together, which would have inevitably ended in cries of "He's touching me!"

It was a splendid arrangement.

Right up until my toddler-sized brother kicked his legs up and kicked the gearshift lever.

Into reverse.

While we were driving across a bridge over the Arkansas River.

The automatic transmission on this car was made of stern stuff and lurched to try to obey and send us backwards. My dad reached out, shifted back into drive, the transmission lurched again, and we were moving forward, which beat the heck out of trying to back up into the river.

Subsequently, my little brother rode in the back seat with the rest of us kids.

This all comes to mind as I think of that gearshift knob on the dash.

As I recall, it's nowhere *near* the volume knob for the radio.

Which is good.

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Passing the Ethics Test

Thu, 15 Oct 2020 23:16:51 GMT

Sit back, folks, because Uncle Bill is going to tell you a story. I promise that it's true. I know that it is, because it happened to me.

I've been at my current job for 38 years now, working for three (or more, depending on exactly how you count it) different companies, ever since I got out of the Kellogg Graduate School of Management with my freshly minted M.M. (Master of Management, which is what the school called it instead of the more familiar M.B.A.) with a concentration in Finance. I was frantically slinging code back then, which makes it not so different from today, although the languages were different and the computers were a lot slower.

I was a Vice President, despite being a code slinger, because I was one of the early recruits to the business and because the company had Vice Presidents like some households have mice. There was not a lot of management involved, although there was a lot of code and a lot of finance.

One day, I got a call from a headhunter. This wasn't entirely uncommon, but I wasn't really looking to go anywhere. This was an unusual call though, because the headhunter wasn't looking for someone to sling code -- he was looking for a Chief Financial Officer for a tech startup somewhere in the Chicagoland area.

This was intriguing, because it clearly wouldn't be a lateral move. And I'm bright enough that I could probably have managed to handle the job, but I was also green enough at the time to realize exactly how much of a cram course that I'd be embarking on.

So I was listening to the headhunter and then he got to the part where he explained how the company was looking at some aggressive interpretations of various accounting rules, so a candidate would have to be prepared for that.

Uh huh. So they were looking for someone that they could hire to sign off on their "aggressive" approach. Right. The correct title for this job wasn't C.F.O. The correct title was "Fall Guy".

I made my two saving throws -- the first against unethical behavior, the second against greed and stupidity -- and suggested to the headhunter that (given the nature of the position) he should really look for someone with more experience in the area and that I wouldn't be interested in interviewing for the position.

No one has since come looking for me to fill a C.F.O. position, which is fine by me.

There is a moral to this story. It is even a moral that remains applicable in the year 2020.

I leave it to you to tease it out.

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