Last Hour Of The Last Day Of Work II: Last Hour Of The Last Day Of Work

As soon as I began the walk, I knew what was happening.  But, while I was bracing for the initial onslaught, instead I got what seems like a softball.  “I understand [H&S guy] found you listening to your iPod a few weeks ago?” the brewmaster began.

“Yeah, I didn’t know we weren’t allowed to,” I lied. 

“You understand the rule now though?”

“Yeah, I stopped after that,” I lied again.  I now feel stupid for that little white lie.  I fear that it made it a little easier to write me off from the start. 

For a moment I began to wonder, though, if maybe this was just a disciplinary meeting.  After all, I had just worked 9 hours of my 10.5 hour shift.  Maybe they were really just taking this small rule transgression seriously, or maybe they had perceived a general discipline problem that they wanted to address.  This would have surprised me, as my biggest fault as a brewer was still inexperience and forgetfulness, not insubordination, but given the position I was in at the moment, I clung to that thread of hope. 

“You studied Chemical Engineering in college, right?” the brewmaster asked.  He tried to sound sincerely inquisitive, but the irritation and excitement in his voice showed through.  Any optimism I had vanished, as I immediately knew what the question meant.  I had written about listening to my iPod at work.  I also wrote a bit about my education history.  Apparently he wanted to play with his prey before he ate it.  Maybe he was expecting me to deny my authorship, but that was impossible.  Every detail I had given pointed directly to me.  He wasn’t going to outsmart me, but he didn’t have to.  I had nowhere to hide. 

“Yeah,” I said, giving a slight nod of admission.

“But you didn’t finish with that, did you?”  Now his tone was reaching condescension.  He was proud of himself for being so clever.  I decided to take a little of the fun out of it.

“No, I ended up just deciding to finish up my history degree and get out with that,” I admitted, recalling and repeating what I had written as accurately as possible.    

“Are you happy here?”

“I know where this is going,” I sighed, rolling my eyes a bit.  It was three against one and I knew that no matter how I handled myself, there was no way to win this debate.  I had no choice but to sit there and take the tongue lashing.  There were brief moments that I eyed the door, positioned on the other side of the room, behind two tall, angry men.  I questioned whether I should have entered the room at all.

“Oh you do?” he said, and slapped a manila folder down on the table, which he had been holding out of my sight.  In it was everything I had written. 

“Yeah, first off I want to say I’m sorry, I really didn’t mean for this to happen.”  The unfortunate thing about such a situation, being intentionally ambushed, is that all I wanted was get to out of the room.  Instead of maintaining the presence of mind to tell them that I stand behind every word I wrote, I started backpedaling and apologizing.  Because of this, nothing I said was taken seriously.  They rationalized my criticisms as someone who just didn’t like long hours and physical labor and had therefore manufactured a laundry list of unjustified complaints about the brewery itself. 

As uncomfortable as the meeting was the saving grace was that I had complaints about three of the five managers, and those were the three I was sitting in the office with.  It would have been a lot harder for me to have to face the other two, whom I truly liked and was extremely grateful to. One was the guy who had hired me, and the other was my direct boss, who had taken me under his wing and defended me whenever I made a mistake.  In fact, for a while I felt pretty guilty about creating so many problems within the company that my friends would now have to deal with.  Thankfully, they weren’t there that day, so the people confronting me were only those I had written about negatively.

The brewhouse manager sat to my right, and was very quiet throughout the whole process.  He looked and sounded hurt, as if he were about to cry.  All he really had to say to me was to repeat my accusation of his laziness, which he clearly took exception to.  Of course, I had written that part of his problem was that he doesn’t see himself this way at all. He was always telling everyone else how hard he works, so I wasn’t exactly surprised by his reaction.  He never said anything about coming in hours after scheduling himself, though, which was the single factual basis of my complaints.

The other two did not possess his subdued emotions.  They were clearly just angry.  The health and safety manager, sitting to my left, dominated a good bit of the conversation, essentially telling me I was an asshole and saying “I don’t understand why you’d do this,” while clearly ignoring my explanations of why exactly I had done it.  He had nothing of substance to say and quickly became static that was ignored.

The conversation found focus as the brewmaster and I squared off directly.  He sat across the table and glared at me angrily.  It was hard to tell how much was an act designed to intimidate and how much was just anger leaking out.  He lectured me on all sorts of subjects like “I’ve got investors from all over the continent calling me about this,” and “how long have you been here, 5 months?” as if those things canceled out the truths I had told.  This is also when he attempted to denigrate my brewing knowledge by saying my comments on cask beer demonstrated that I didn’t know what I was talking about.  Again, I wish I had had more time and presence of mind to explain myself.  Instead, I just had to sit there and take it. 

Then, as the coup de grace, he told me that “our legal department will be in contact with you,” claiming I had revealed proprietary information.  He may have had serious intent here, or he may have just been trying to scare me, but a) I have never revealed where I worked by name, and b) I never did hear from the legal department. 

My memory of that meeting remains vivid, but the one thing that remains hazy is the length.  The only way I am able to estimate its length is by how much we talked about.  I’d guess there was about fifteen minutes of conversation before they ran out of things to say and addressed the future.  The brewmaster “highly encouraged” me to resign right then and there.  His tone implied it was in my best interest, and that something bad would happen to me if I didn’t comply.  It wasn’t until later that day I realized he wanted to avoid a wrongful termination suit.  I don’t know what his threat held, but I thought about the door again, not looking this time.  It felt strange to agree so quickly to something I was clearly being pressured into, but either way it was my escape.  From that room, from that day, and from that job.  He actually pulled out a blank piece of computer paper and a pencil and drafted a hasty letter of resignation that simply said “I hereby submit my resignation from [brewery]” and had me and everyone else in the room sign it.  I enthusiastically agreed.

Then, in an attempt to get the final word, the brewmaster said something that has become the one part of the story I never forget to include.  “And just think,” he said snidely, “you don’t have to call in sick tomorrow to watch your baseball game.”  To preserve his delusion of sticking it to me, I had to lower my head slightly to hide a smile. 

I was escorted to the brewhouse office to collect my belongings and clean out my locker by the health and safety manager.  He continued his “I don’t understand you” routine and even said “you’re going to have real trouble finding another brewing job after this.”  At that point I’m not sure why I bothered to even explain, as he clearly wasn’t listening to anything I said, but I repeated again that the entire message of the blog wasn’t about the brewery, but myself.  It was the story of my dream to become a brewer, and the end to that dream. 

Undaunted, he carried on with his bluster.  To finally reach an end to the exchange I hurriedly shoved the last of my belongings into my bag and walked out of the brewery.  I reached my car and looked for my keys, which had been hastily shoved deep in my bag.  The brewhouse is on the second floor above the parking lot, and has a balcony overlooking it.  The health and safety manager watched me from the balcony as I searched, clearly intent on seeing me entirely off the premises.  The longer I looked, the more my fear grew that I had left them in my locker.  But, just as my mind was finding images of reentering that building, my hand found the keys at the bottom of my bag.  And with that, I was gone.

UPDATE

Look for "Last Hour Of The Last Day Of Work II: Last Hour Of The Last Day Of Work" in this space tomorrow.  And, keep your eyes peeled for "Last Hour Of The Last Day Of Work III" (still needs a subtitle) later this week.

Last Hour Of The Last Day Of Work I: The Waiting Is The Hardest Part

The unfortunate part of what went down in October of 07 was that I never got the opportunity to tell all my readers how things ended with my employer.  Until now.

With the blog deleted on Friday, and my name on the schedule for Sunday, it was time to wait.  I watched my cell phone, waiting for it to ring, expecting to be told not to bother to come in.  Because my sleep schedule was completely off, by the time I finally did get a message from the brewhouse manager saying he needed to “talk about work tomorrow” it was the middle of the night Saturday (Sunday morning) and I was already headed to work.  Obviously this could be what I had been waiting for.  But, it wasn’t abnormal to get calls on days off, so I wasn’t sure what to think.  “Well, it’s too late to call now,” I told myself, and started driving. 

Sunday mornings I was always the first one to get to work and open up the brewery.  That morning I pulled into the parking lot looking for a manager’s car.  The lot was empty.  On any other Sunday I would go straight to the cold room and get some work started before even dropping my bag in the office.  That day I went straight to the office, checking my email and work voicemail, looking for some evidence I had been discovered.  Again, nothing.  I checked the production book where we often left instructions and requests for each other.  There was a note for me about a fermentation problem over the weekend.  Assuming this must be what the voicemail was about, and I got to work.

The brewhouse manager is the one I wrote about who made the schedule, but was still always late.  I can’t recall exactly when he got in that day, but I seem to remember it being a little earlier than usual.  Throughout the morning, as the other Sunday regulars showed up, I was thought I was feeling a slight cold shoulder.  I told myself I was being paranoid.  Sundays were never very social anyway, so I must be imagining it.  Besides, if someone knew, why wouldn’t they say anything?

As the day went on, part of me felt relieved, believing I had averted disaster.  At the same time, I was a little disappointed.  I really did, in many ways, want to be fired.  I still couldn’t wait to quit, and would do so as soon as I found another job.  The dream of freedom had been planted in my head, and now it was difficult to set that aside and get back to reality. 

Also, there was the World Series.  That night, my Boston Red Sox were going into Game 4 of the Series with a 3-0 lead.  They could clinch it tonight.  I had written about the thought of calling in sick to for the first time in my life just to watch the game.  As I worked, my mind wandered in two directions.  One was the drama I had possibly created.  The other was baseball.

 I had come to the decision that, since I lived an hour away, I would find a bar near the brewery to watch the game.  I could nurse a beer over the course of the night and head straight to work when the game ended.  I hated that plan. I belonged in Boston with friends.  I promised myself one more time that, as soon as I quit, I would move back. 

It wasn’t until about 1 PM (my shift started at 4 AM) that the brewhouse manager came looking for me in the cold room.  “We need to talk,” he said.  I put down the pitcher of wort in my hand and followed him through the brewhouse, towards the offices.  As we walked he nodded to the health and safety manager who fell right in behind me.  We silently walked straight to the brewmaster’s office.  I was told to have a seat at the conference table.  I had sat at this table once before for my three month evaluation.  They had left the door open that day.  This time, they did not.  

Such a long long time to be gone and a short time to be there

Almost a year and a half ago I started this blog.  I very honestly – and naively – thought it would be read by very few people.  I understood that the internet is a public place, but so is a telephone pole in Salisaw, Oklahoma.  In other words, just because something is publically posted for anyone to read doesn’t mean that any given person actually discovers it.  I thought that if I posted it publically, but only told a select audience where to find it, no one who I didn’t want to see it would ever come across it.  Boy, was I wrong.

I made my first post here on Wednesday October 24, 2007, the beginning of my weekend at the time.  In the next 24 hours I made 3 more posts.  By Friday, I was alerted that I was being linked and mentioned on Lew Bryson’s blog, another beer writer with a relatively large readership.  I knew this was a problem.  If anyone from work discovered the blog, I would be fired.

Because, believe it or not, I didn’t want this to happen, at least not in this way, I immediately went into damage control mode.  I deleted the entire blog so hastily I didn’t even keep a record of what I wrote.  It wasn’t until a few days later that I actually realized I might want the copy for one reason or another, and was lucky to discover that it survived in many places.  I started an email conversation with Lew asking him to do me the favor of removing all mention of it from his blog, explaining why.  He was extremely courteous and expedient, for which I have to thank him.  It was too late, though.  As I was to learn, it had already fallen into many of the wrong hands.  While it may not have felt that way at the time, this ended up being a good thing.

Many people have wondered why I did what I did, and why I reacted in the way I did.  The answer is far more complicated than the assertions that I was a disgruntled employee trying to smear the company, or that I was just a pussy who couldn’t take a tough job and wanted to bitch.  What I’ve come to realize in the time since it happened, is that I really had two levels of motivation.  Again, the question has been raised as to how I possibly could not have realized that I would be discovered.  I think I truly didn’t know if I would be or not, and I was OK with either one happening. 

Scenario 1: Only a few friends read the blog.  On the one hand, this is really what I expected.  I have always had an attitude of “who the hell am I?” that made it pretty difficult for me to imagine anyone actually paying attention to anything I said.  I knew no one from work would just stumble across it, but I somehow never anticipated the possibility of someone like Lew linking to it, escalating the level of exposure monumentally.  In many ways, this scenario was all I really wanted, or all I thought I wanted.  It would become a comprehensive way to tell my stories to all the friends I had who are into beer.  And, as I mentioned, it would be a way to vent.  I obviously was frustrated on a daily basis and it would feel good to get my frustrations out, even if virtually no one was reading them.  This way, I would be able to leave on my own terms and find a job that was better for me.

Scenario 2: The blog gets real attention.  Over time, I’ve realized more and more that, despite not expecting it, I really did want this in many ways. 

First of all, I really did want to be fired.  I had mentally checked out of the job and was more and more miserable there by the day.  You can call me a pussy all you want, but the truth is I worked my ass off and kept my mouth shut.  The first month or more, I was even happy to perform every ugly task.  I had no problem with my salary, my hours, or my responsibilities because I was doing something I loved: making beer.  I saw my hard work as noble, because it was taking me somewhere.  It wasn’t until I started to see that my hard work wasn’t accomplishing the two goals I had (making a product I believed in, and gaining experience to leverage into a job I truly wanted) that I became miserable. 

I suspect that everyone there was pretty shocked when they learned about the blog, because I was never one to complain.  I did what I was told, even if I didn’t like or agree with it.  Ironically, as you’ll see, the “Why I Hate My Job” posts were a three part series, and I never got the chance to post the third part.  That was where I was going to explain why there wasn’t anything inherently wrong with the job, it just wasn’t for me, and I knew I needed to move on because I wasn’t going to be personally satisfied there.  I’m still asked by friends constantly if I ever think about getting back into brewing.  They say that they understand why I didn’t like working where I did, but that maybe somewhere else it would be different.  I always respond that I just don’t know that the job has what I’m looking for anymore.  So, in a lot of ways, I was like a cheating spouse careless about covering their tracks, hoping to be caught and get out of the relationship I’m not happy in. 

Secondly, I had grand aspirations of being an agent of change.  As mentioned, many people viewed what I wrote as “smear.”  I suppose it’s an issue of semantics, but for me to have been smearing the company, I would have had to be saying things that were untrue.  To this day I stand behind everything I said.  I believe in doing things differently than we did there.  In fact, I have read people saying there are “inconsistencies” in what I wrote, but I challenge anyone to point one out.*  While I didn’t like the way things were done sometimes, I was never treated poorly.  I had no vendetta against the company or delusions of bringing them down.  Hell, I had more friends there than I did adversaries.  I knew that, even if it was widely read, my writing would have no impact on their success.  I wished no harm on the brewery, only improvement.  What I really wanted to do was give them a good hard look in the mirror.  They knew about the criticism of the brewery from the beer geek community, but they shrugged it off.  They thought that critics were just people who don’t enjoy their style of beer, and that they shouldn’t be listened to.  I truly hoped that calling them out publically would help them see the difference between the mediocrity they were achieving and the greatness they could reach.  I personally love well crafted English ales, and I think the brewery had good recipes and potential, but just lacked the commitment to quality required to make them great.  In debates about “the big three” of Bud/Miller/Coors I often hear people defending them by saying they may not make the most exciting, best tasting beers, but they are great at what they do which is consistency and marketing.  They are massively successful at these things.  On the other extreme, there are truly great craft brewers that might not turn huge profits, but they make the best tasting beers in the world.  My former employer is stuck somewhere in between don’t seem to realize it.  They don’t make the best beer, and they don’t make the most money, but they apparently think they’re excelling at both.

*The only thing I might slightly retract in hindsight is the mention of fining the cask beer, which really was just poorly worded.  I understand that we were making traditional English ales, and that the English tradition of cask ales calls for a perfectly clear brew.  What I was trying to say was that, while this may be the heritage, this is not a priority to the modern American cask ale enthusiasts that I know.  The raw, unprocessed feel suggested by the higher temperature, low carbonation and thick, creamy texture are reminiscent of the days long before large batch industrial brewing techniques.  A cloudy appearance goes hand in hand with this experience, which makes fining a cask seem completely ludicrous to me.  I understand that in this case it may not be a matter of right and wrong, but just entirely different sensibilities.  To me, it was just another sign that we were focusing more on superficial distractions than what the beer actually tastes like.  It was suggested to me by the brewmaster that my mention of this demonstrated that I “didn’t know what I was talking about” which I’m hoping you can all realize isn’t the case at all.  

 

So, since I now know that I can’t change them, or the brewing industry, why am I back writing about it?  There are plenty of people who will just look at me as the turd in the punch bowl.  As I was asked on my way out the door, “why do people feel the need to say negative things about anyone?”  All I can say to that is I love beer, and when you love something you want the best for it.  Any critic, of beer, film, literature, politics or anything else, wants to see success.  When I drink a beer, I don’t want to hate it so I can go on the internet and trash it, I want a great experience.  When I see the potential for something better, I feel a responsibility to demand that potential be realized.

I am not sure exactly what direction this blog will head in the future, but I plan to have a lot of positive things to say about the great happenings in the beer world.  The job of a journalist is to inform, not to sugarcoat.  I’m reviving this blog because I just want to write about beer, and I know this is somewhere I will find an audience.  I can’t expect everyone to like my opinions or even me (hell, I know some people already don’t like me all that much) but all I ask is that you read. 

This is obviously a work in progress, and things might get moved around a bit, but somewhere on here you will be able to read the original posts that started it all, with only a few minor edits solely to correct typos and clarify the meaning of a couple sentences.  I recognize that I was pretty hasty in my posting back then and the writing isn’t great at times, but I wanted to present it as is.  I’m planning posts on my last day of work, what I’ve been up to since then, and the long overdue “Why I Hate My (Former) Job (Part 3 of 3).”  After that, I’m not sure.  Any feedback would be greatly appreciated, even if it’s just to say you’re reading.