Issue Oriented

I didn't feel like flogging any dead horses tonight, so I dug up the old story that I told you about in my last post.  I think it explains why I support some of Trump's agenda even though I don't like the guy's personality.

THE DORR-OLIVER AFFAIR
by Talks With Beagles

When I used to work at the paper mill, back in the beater room, we had this piece of equipment called the Dorr-Oliver.  Some people referred to it as "The Dinosaur"; because it was big, and old, and didn't work any more.

Now in those days, I was on a committee that was working on a project to bring some new equipment into the plant.  Whenever we did a project like this, there was always some money in the budget for site clearing, which means getting rid of all the old junk that is in the way.  Now the Dorr-Oliver was not exactly in the way of this project, but the electrical power source for it was, and had to be site cleared to make way for the new stuff.  This meant that we would never be able to start up the Dorr-Oliver again, even if we wanted to fix it up and make it work, which nobody seemed interested in doing anyway.

One of the committee members was a guy we’ll call "Mitch".  He came up with what I thought was a pretty good idea: Why not site clear the whole Dorr-Oliver instead of just the electrical part?  Was there enough money in the budget to do this?  Yes there was. Nobody had said a good word about the Dorr-Oliver in years, so I was surprised when a number of people objected to Mitch’s proposal and we argued about it for a long time. Finally, I suggested that we take a poll of all the people who worked in the beater room and just go by majority rule.  Everybody said that they didn’t have time to take this poll, so I volunteered to do it, but they still weren’t exactly thrilled about it.

After the meeting, a guy who we’ll call "George" came up to me and said, "Talks With Beagles, if you really want to get rid of the Dorr-Oliver like I do, don’t tell anybody that it was Mitch’s idea.  Nobody likes Mitch, and they will all vote against the proposal regardless of what they really think about the Dorr-Oliver."  I replied, "What are we, in high school here?  This is about twenty tons of scrap iron, not about somebody’s girlfriend."  But George seemed really sure of himself, so I agreed to do as he said, just to prove him wrong.  But George wasn’t wrong.  Everybody I polled refused to vote at all unless I would tell them who originally came up with the idea.  I had promised George that I wouldn’t’ do this, but I had also promised the committee that I would have the poll done by the next meeting.  Now a poll in which everybody abstains from voting isn’t much of a poll, so what was I supposed to do now?

It just so happens that there was one guy who had been on vacation while all this was going on, let’s call him "Paul".  Now Paul wasn’t exactly what you would call a morning person, so I caught him first thing in the morning when he came back and asked him if he wanted to get rid of the Dorr-Oliver.  Paul mumbled" Sure, whatever", and I took that as a "yes" vote.  Then I want back around to everybody else and told them that all of the people who had voted so far had voted "yes".  This wasn’t exactly a lie, but I felt a little bad about it anyway.  It came to pass that this was a self-fulfilling prophecy because, after I told them that, everybody voted "yes" anyway.

Some time later, I was telling somebody all about the Dorr-Oliver story because he had been working in a different department at the time and didn’t know about it.  I think we'll call this guy "Bruce", since that was his name.  To that very day, I still hadn’t understood exactly what had happened, and I told him that too.  "Talks With Beagles," said Bruce, "I’ve always known there was something strange about you, and now I know what it is. Did you ever wonder why half the people in this plant call you a "radical" and the other half call you a "big suck?" ( Actually, I had tried to tell people when I first hired in that I was really a reactionary, not a radical, but nobody seemed to get it, and I finally gave up trying to explain it to them.)  Anyway, back to Bruce:  "This is because sometimes you support management in their efforts, and sometimes you oppose them.  Sometimes you stick up for your fellow union members, and sometimes you don’t.  I always wondered about this myself, and now I know the answer: You are issue oriented rather than people oriented.  If somebody comes up with an idea, you support it if you think it’s a good idea, and you oppose it if you think it’s a bad idea.  At no time do you consider whose idea it is and whether you like the person or not."
"Well," said I, "Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?"
"Well," said Bruce, "Maybe that’s what you’re supposed to do, but you are the only person I know that actually does it, and I know a lot of people."

Bruce was right of course, but I had never really thought of it that way before.  It sure explains a lot of the difficulties I’ve had dealing with people over the years.  That doesn’t mean I intend to change anything about myself.  After all, what’s more important here, getting elected King of the Homecoming Dance, or getting rid of the Dorr-Oliver?

Funny thing, though, we never did get rid of the Dorr-Oliver after all.  It was still sitting there when they closed the mill back in 1990, and it was still sitting there when they opened up again under a new name in 1993.  This was supposed to be a totally different company, but the same people were running it as before.  They just changed the name on paper.

I worked for this "new" company for ten weeks, and then they kicked me out for some unknown reason.  They wrote it up as a layoff, rather than a termination, which meant I could go back on unemployment compensation.  The bad news was that I would have had a hard time appealing this action as an unjust termination.  ("Layoff" means they have run out of work for you to do, which was not true in this case.  "Termination" means you did something wrong and got yourself fired, which wasn't true either.)  There would have been nobody to appeal it to anyway, because this "new" company didn’t have a union like the "old" company did.

I felt pretty bad about being kicked out of the paper mill the first time, but the second time didn’t bother me nearly as much.  What bothers me the most, though, is that the Dorr-Oliver is still sitting there, all rusted out and useless, while a whole lot of people like me, who still had a few good years left in them, are out in the street. TWB