11 May 2007
Plan “B”
I asked my mother one time what the toughest age to deal with was, kid-wise. I think we were still in the sleep deprivation phase of parenthood, the insistent little beings still inarticulate, and able to express their needs only with loud piercing urgency.
Mom is a saint, but she rattled me effectively when she responded without even blinking: “35-45.”
She may have been closer to dealing with the problems inherent at that age, and it was a little un-nerving that she was talking about precisely the age I was at the time. The Difficult Decade is a moving target, after all, and the best was yet to come on that score. It is a good thing we cannot see the future with any clarity, since the reality would be too painful. There are certainly joys along the way, albeit fleeting. It is important to recognize them when they go by.
The younger boy gave me one of those chills yesterday when he called, late in the afternoon. He sent an e-mail of thanks to a firm in Chicago that had interviewed him for his first real job. Perhaps startled by the courtesy, the company called him back and offered him a job an hour or so later.
Things move fast these days, and I was deeply gratified that he turned the information around to me in a few minutes. The company is taking a gamble on the new graduates, but that is apparently their business model. Modest pay for a year or so to check the work ethic, and if the kids can't hack it, they are cut loose without emotion or expense. I don't know how many of the young people they are willing to thrash to get a few high-flyers; I'm sure some middle manager has a chart in the desk drawer that shows the business case.
I am just relieved that he is started up the road. What was curious was the timing of the next call I received. I was pounding out a memo-for-the-record on a meeting I had that morning. I have to be delicate on this, as you well appreciate, but someone in town has a fundamental problem in their continuity of operations plan, and it has to be dealt with in a manner that does not threaten or embarrass the people responsible for it.
Or not. Maybe the working assumption should be that everything is fine, just fine, and disaster probably won't happen. The call stopped me in mid keystroke, and made me examine my own continuity plan. I have a good job, and I like the people I work with. But the terms of reference have been migrating of late, and I am uncertain from moment to moment what to do about it.
There would be a cascade effect, of course, and I have run the numbers on that. I am inclined to accept what comes my way, but now that I have retired from a singularly inflexible way of life it is nice to know that I have choices, and I thank God for the part of the military pension that comes to me on the first of each month. It is not much, but it provides a certain planning flexibility, now that the youngest dependent is ready to fly the nest. I have several plans for multiple contingencies, which I term Plans “B” through “F.”
Kids are different these days. The call was from a young man I mentor through the alumni organization of my college. It is kick to show the ropes to the newly-minted graduates, and I like to think it is useful service. I have come to realize that our generations are not on the same sheet of music in the way we look at employment.
Something had become unscrewed at the Bureau where he works. Someone's security clearance had expired, and that caused a change in rotational assignments, and the prospects of working nights for six months.
I had a hard time establishing the terms of reference for the problem, since we were trained to accept those sorts of things with a certain grim fatalism. Of course things were screwed up. The acronym “FUBAR” would not exist if that were not the case. But I was in uniform, by choice, and that is just the way things work out sometime. Ask the kids who were extended in Iraq in order to accommodate “Plan B” to win the war.
Some of them will be maimed or killed. They don't have a choice.
My mentoree seemed to think that he did. I asked him if he liked the paycheck, and he allowed as how he did, though it was not nearly enough. He was willing to walk away from the job, to avoid working at night, and might do it today. I told him six months is not very long, in the great scheme of things, and that he should suck it up and profit from the experience.
The conversation got a little emotional at that point. Six months seems much longer to him than it does to me, which is only to be expected. I have spent several of my sixty six-month increments in the business doing things I would have preferred to avoid.
I was starting to pontificate pretty hard when I realized that becoming a Spook was not my first job out of college. I was a couple years into a promising gig in the publishing business when the company asked me to do something I did not want to do. I politely told them to go stuff themselves and walked.
I stopped in mid-sentence, my memo on the screen in front of me stuck in mid-stroke. I remembered what my Mom had told me, all those Mother's Days ago. “Do what you want,” I said. “Maybe you should try Plan B. You do have a plan, don't you? Of course, I didn't have one when I quit my first real job. I often wonder what would have happened if I had stayed.”
There was silence on the line, and I could almost hear the wheels turning.
I cleared my throat in conclusion. “Something will work out. It almost always does.”
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com