Chapter 9

I went into work Monday morning early, arriving in my office before seven. Joyce wasn't due in for another hour, but I looked on her desk to see if she might have left any work out that would give me an inkling of whether or not she'd managed to make any progress on solving my Dad's storage problems. There was nothing. I'd checked the top of my own desk earlier, and it was just as free of anything as it had been when I'd left on the previous Tuesday.

Sunday night, while we were at dinner, Dad and I had talked about the daily list. He told me to concentrate on finding him the solution to his storage problem. I had tried to think of some way I could tell him that I didn't feel confident that the problem could be resolved without him having to spend more money. I finally decided to hold off on telling him that, not wanting to sound like a quitter, and, hoping that Joyce might have already come up with an idea of her own.

By eight o'clock when Joyce came into her office, I still hadn't been able to think of a single possibility that might work. I did have a vague idea about checking to see how much storage area was free at the company's distribution centers. Perhaps we could park some of the product at the distribution centers.

One look at Joyce's face when I asked her if she'd come up with any good ideas, told me that she hadn't. I started feeling guilty because she seemed so down on herself, thinking that she'd failed me by not having a solution for the problem I'd left her with.

"Joyce, please don't feel bad about that. I'm the one who was supposed to be able to come up with some ideas for my Dad. I just asked you to think about the problem while I was gone. I wasn't expecting you to solve it for me. The way my Dad set it up, I'm not even sure if anyone could solve it. He wants us to find him something that's valuable, but he doesn't want to pay anything for it. He wants something for nothing. People don't give away warehouse space for free, and that's what he's looking for."

"Are you going to be in trouble, Mr. Parsons?" I had been asking Joyce to call me Kenny, but she just wasn't comfortable doing that. Usually, she found a way not to have to call me by any name.

"I don't think so, but we haven't given up on finding a solution anyway. I don't think my Dad expected us to come up with a solution right away. We'll think of something before we're done, don't worry." Now, after having told her that, I felt like I'd put even more pressure on myself to come up with something.

There had to be a way to get what my father was asking for. A way that we could store product without having to pay for leasing or buying a building. Perhaps there was some government subsidy or program?

Reagan was President, and he was supposed to be very business friendly. I was always reading in the papers about something he'd done to help big corporations profit at the expense of the "little people". I'd had to listen to enough outbursts from my father about how that wasn't true. Dad was still upset about all the closed tax loopholes, and he blamed them on the President.

Trickle down economics seldom trickled past corporate owners. To my father, big government subsidies made perfect sense. He had trouble with the idea of personal welfare, but corporate welfare made perfect sense to him. Maybe there was some Armory or National Guard barracks in Omaha that weren't being used. Who would I need to call to find out about that?

I went down to the loading area and spent an hour just watching the pickers working on the pull tickets. They appeared to be well on their way to readying the next day's deliveries for later loading.

Cee Cee now seemed to have everything well choreographed, like some kind of complex dance routine. I noticed there wasn't as much crowding as the last time I'd been down on the order and loading floor. I also noticed that the pallets had been spread out in a much wider arc, so that pulled orders could be checked and placed on pallets by more checkers than before. I wasn't sure why, but things just seemed more efficient and smoother than they had been before.

I found Cee Cee sitting in her office, going over some loading paperwork.

"It looks like things are going smoother Cee Cee." I was smiling as I approached her. At least something I'd been involved in was starting to pay some dividends for the company.

"Still need to make more changes. Them loaders making too many mistakes. I'm going to try something new today. Thursday, we sent out two trucks with all their orders wrong. That shouldn't have ever happened. We're going to make sure it doesn't ever happen again. Now, we got checkers with every truck being loaded, and we have a manifest for every truck. If the same thing happens again, there are going to be three people fired. No excuse for what happened, and no reason it should ever happen." She was waving the papers angrily as she spoke. I liked the way she was taking these problems personally. Cee Cee had passion, and she wasn't one to get discouraged. I felt sure she would get those loading errors straightened out. When she had a system in place that met her standards, the company route deliveries would be in very good shape. I smiled at her and left her to her work.

I stopped up at my Dad's office for a few minutes. I wanted to ask him about any government programs that might allow us to use any surplus storage capacity that the military might have in and around Omaha. He was out of his office, and Myra told me he wasn't due back until late that afternoon.

Back in my office, I called Virginia in Omaha. I spent fifteen minutes on the phone with her, asking her questions about current and anticipated future storage needs. She had a breakdown of the numbers, but, she too had no good ideas about how to solve the problem. She did tell me there were three rail cars at the siding by the new warehouse, but then she also made me aware that all three were currently used for temporary storage by the company. When I asked her about getting more rail cars, she told me that our siding only supported three or four cars, and that the side loading door bays could only service three rail cars at a time anyway.

It was Joyce who had the idea first. I was telling her about the information I'd gotten from Virginia when she asked me how long the railroad would let us use the rail cars without our needing to ship them. I called Virginia right back for the answer, but she didn't know. Instead, she gave me the name and number of the woman at the railroad office who handled scheduling for rail shipments with our company. I gave Joyce the name and number, telling her to call to find out how our use of the rail cars was set up.

I left to go check in with Edith, Ellen, and the rest of the phone room staff. Every time I went down to the order room, it seemed like they had done something else to make it seem less like a workplace, and more like their own private clubhouse. This time the new improvement was a black recliner. Ellen was sitting back in it, the chair in its most reclined position, her order pad in hand, talking on a headset she was using instead of through a regular telephone receiver. As soon as she saw me, she sat up and started hurrying through her phone call. I went over to the other end of the room and said my hello's to Edith, Myra and Linda. This Myra wasn't my Dad's secretary, she was the phone order person, a woman who never seemed to stop talking. Linda said hello, then excused herself to go into the order room.

After speaking with Edith for five minutes, I felt caught up on everything that had taken place since I'd left work the previous Tuesday afternoon. Edith seemed to still be in good spirits, and was even talking about trying to get a limited driver's license, so she could drive to and from work for herself. She said she had contacted a lawyer to look into the possibility for her, and was saving her money to retain him to make the appeal to the judge who'd suspended her license the last time.

I told her that I knew a lawyer who might help her get a limited license back, someone who would do it on credit, so she could make payments to him. I needed to contact Frank Clooney anyway, to see how he was coming with my idea of helping the older boys from St. Cecelia's get adopted. I figured that he would know someone in Bolling who was good at getting work related restricted driving privileges restored.

I took Ellen out for another long lunch. I told her about the trip to Chicago, and about how good a time Shirley and I had enjoyed together. Once again she started complaining about how Shirley and I got to have a lot of fun while she stayed at home and didn't have any.

"Ellen, you're getting very close to the point where you are going to lose me as a friend. Ever since you and Shirley became friends, I've had to deal with Shirley's concern about all your problems. It has already caused us to have several fights, bad fights, fights where we ended up too mad at each other to even speak about things."

"You can't blame me, Kenny, I wasn't even there for most of them."

"I can blame you, Ellen, and I do blame you. You're using your unhappiness to deliberately try to drive a wedge between Shirley and me. I'm not going to allow it to continue. The next time Shirley and I have an argument about you, I'll make sure you are completely out of my life. I like you, and you're a big asset to the company, but I'm not willing to keep you around if you come between Shirley and me."

"See, that's how you do things. I told Shirley that you'd start threatening me. You don't want her having any friends except for you."

"Ellen, you know that isn't true. You're too smart to play dumb like you have been. I know that you knew exactly what you were doing when you played on Shirley's worry and concern for you. I've also watched your mother, and I know she isn't nearly as dependent on you as you've led us to believe. I've given you this warning, and you better realize that I'm serious. Stop doing things to come between my relationship with Shirley. I won't put up with anymore of it from you."

She sat there in the restaurant staring at my face. I could see that her quick mind was working at full power, trying to plan a next move, one that would allow her to continue on with whatever her plan had been. I'd come to the conclusion that she had to be setting all these things up deliberately, some plan she had to come between Shirley and me. I assumed it was because she wanted me for herself. It might sound conceited, but that was what I believed. To me, it was the only thing that made sense, the only reason why she might have acted like she had.

"Even if I don't do anything, you'll still find a way to make it seem like I did." Ellen spoke quietly, sounding resigned to being on the receiving end of yet another injustice.

"Ellen, I've never done anything to hurt you. In fact, I've gone out of my way to be helpful to you. Until things started happening with you and Shirley, things that always seemed to make us fight with each other, I never had any problems with you. I love Shirley, and I won't let anyone come between us. If you continue to try to do that, I've told you what will happen."

"You'd fire me?"

"You for sure, maybe your mother too. I'd do what I felt I had to do."