Chapter 2: Getting Acquainted

"Are you telling me that you hired that lovely bird from the restaurant?"

"I did indeed, Doogie. She was the answer to my prayers."

"I'm sure she was, but can she do the job?"

"Doogie, get your mind out of the gutter. She is a very bright, very motivated young lady who will be excellent at her job."

"Aye, and she's got a fine set of bristols and a lovely bum to boot. I have my suspicions of you, Cameron Macdonald."

"You know my rules, Doogie. Never foul your own nest."

"Yeah, well ... just remember your rules when she's around," he warned with a sly grin.

I'd found Doogie Cruickshank to be an invaluable aid when it came to the marketing side of our business. I was a born-and-bred operations guy and needed to learn more about what made successful marketing strategy. It was a matter of matching the needs of the market to our capability. It was no use building wonderful machines that no one was interested in.

Doogie was in charge of U.K. sales at our Manchester operation when I first met him. He was a bright spark in an otherwise dim group. I had been sent as the "hatchet man" to trim out the fat and either "fix it or forget it." My first instinct was to forget it and dispose of the moribund operation. Doogie convinced me otherwise.

He was an interesting mix of accents. Born and schooled in London, moved to Glasgow, Birmingham and Southampton, so you couldn't really pick out any particular region in his voice. He was bright, optimistic, hard-working and successful at what he did. He was also the saviour of the Manchester operation by showing me what it could be rather than what it was. It took more than a year to radically change the culture there, but when we were done, it was one of our most efficient operations. It also earned both of us a promotion.

Doogie was also my ears to the marketplace. He was responsible for marketing support. That is, making sure that problems or opportunities that arose in the field were promptly addressed and action taken. It was a "make work" job in its origin: a place to put an underachieving sales manager. Doogie changed all that and made it something very valuable. He was a conduit to management and the other departments and he was very good at his job.

He would give you the impression he was a carefree playboy, but I knew differently. He had a long-standing lady friend whom he had finally convinced to move to Canada and accept his proposal. Sandra Smith-Pelly was pure London, through and through. She'd been to the best schools and was expected to marry into one of the prominent English families. Her parents didn't count on Doogie getting in the way.

"Sassy," as she was generally known, was a strong-willed woman who was having none of her parents' plans for her future. She was tall, slender, regal in her posture, and attractive but not spectacular. Considering Doogie's penchant for busty, extroverted women, she was a strange choice. Yet, there wasn't any doubt that he loved her and that his comments directed at her opposite type were just talk. She had arrived in Vancouver only a few weeks ago and promptly moved into Doogie's condominium on False Creek. As far as she was concerned, this was heaven and she never planned to leave.

I complained to Doogie, "Wray is expecting me to present the plan for next year at the management meeting in November. I'm not very pleased with what I see. I've inherited a 'do nothing' plan as far as I can tell. Maybe you can give me some ideas, Doogie."

"Most of my worries are how we're going to deal with the Chinese invasion. The buggers are going to show up sooner or later. I hope we're ready for them. You know what they're like. They'll blitz the bloody market first with pricing to knock off the weak links."

I nodded. "I'm getting everyone's attention but the ones that count. I have a feeling we're going to have to do something radical to survive that bombing."

"How radical?"

"Maybe close and consolidate operations?" I suggested.

"That won't exactly fit with the boss-man's ideas for growth, will it?"

"Nope ... but to grow, first you have to survive. We can warn the troops, but if they aren't believers then we're shouting into the wind."

Doogie nodded. "You'll come up with something, Cam. I know you. You'll find something ... somewhere."

"Thanks for the vote of confidence, but I've only been in this job for a few weeks and I'm not sure I'm going to get a receptive audience. No one wants to hear from Chicken Little.

I picked up the last of my ale, briefly considered ordering a second, then decided against it.

"Time to go home, Doogie. Sassy will be waiting for you, no doubt."

"And who's waiting for you, Cam?"

"Not a soul."

"You need to do something about that, my friend. I don't know what I did without Sassy here for the past year or so. What are your plans for the weekend?"

"Nothing, right now. November isn't the best time for golf and it's too damn cold to go sailing with Lew. I swear he'd break ice to get out on that boat of his."

"I don't blame him," Doogie said. "That's a lovely craft. I'd go anytime ... and Sassy would too. She loves to sail."

"Lew knows that," I laughed. "You only hint at it every time you see him."

"Do you think he'd sell a share in it? You know ... sort of a time-share?"

I shrugged. "Ask him. What's the worst he can say?"

Doogie nodded, drained his Scotch and set the glass down.

"Time to go, Cam. I'll see you Monday," he smiled. "Try and have some fun this weekend, will you?"

"Will do, Doogie. Say Hi to Sassy for me. See you Monday."

For a change, Saturday morning dawned clear and bright. Fresh snow on the Lions and Grouse Mountain set off the spectacular view from my apartment. I'd chosen this particular unit because it had a view of both the North Shore mountains and English Bay. It came with a price tag, but my needs were simple. One bedroom with a den that I could use as an office, a compact kitchen (I'm not much of a cook), a full-sized bathroom and a large living room with a window-wall and balcony facing north-west.

We were well into the "rainy season" in Vancouver, but it beat the hell out of the snow and cold winds of the east. It wasn't the most convenient location for a head office, but it was the traditional home for Emerald Precision Instruments and it would remain so for the foreseeable future. I didn't mind at all. A couple of extra hours flying time to the various plants was a small price to pay for the pleasure of living on the West Coast. Or, as we referred to it at this time of year, the "Wet Coast."

My apartment was on the south-west edge of Stanley Park, not far from the beach at English Bay and only three blocks from the park. I could ride my bike or walk or jog my way around the seawall on a moment's notice. I hardly needed my car during the week. The office was less than a mile away, and a brisk walk or a bike ride on most mornings was good exercise for me. My building had an indoor pool and an exercise room which I used regularly to keep fit. What more could I want?

I'd been living here now for almost five years. I'd been promoted to Assistant to the Vice President of Operations when I returned from Manchester and then, three months ago, I was given the title of Vice President of Operations. The former Vice President had retired and my new boss, Senior Vice President Wray Henderson, had picked me out to succeed him. It was quite a surprise, considering I was barely thirty-three years old. But apparently, I'd been noticed and followed and tested enough that they were willing to take the chance with me. I was flattered to be sure.

I had my reservations about working for Wray. He'd been in his job for years and had a reputation for being very conservative in his thinking. My predecessor, George Christiansen, had been the closest to Wray of anyone in the organization. George got the unfortunate tag of being a "brown-noser" somewhere along the line and it had stuck. He was constantly waiting for Wray to tell him what he wanted and then running around trying to deliver it.

Wray was the buffer between the CEO and the three vice presidents: Operations, Finance and Marketing. There were times when I wondered just how important that role was, but it had been established long before I arrived and everyone seemed to accept it.

When I sat with Wray to discuss my promotion, he made it plain I was to report to him and no one else. I didn't have any problem with that. It was the way a corporate hierarchy was supposed to work. I was clear with him that I considered close cooperation with sales and marketing to be important and while he wasn't exactly enthusiastic, he at least acknowledged the need to stay in touch with our sales people and our customers.

Wray was also a loner, from what I could see. I had only met his wife, Marion, a couple of times at social functions. She was a lovely lady with a warm personality when it was drawn out or when she wasn't standing in Wray's shadow. She seemed to be such an opposite of Wray, but then I thought the same about Sassy and Doogie as well. In the office, Wray's other contacts were his executive assistant, Donna Witherspoon, and our CEO, John Hoffer. From what I could tell, few of us knew Wray Henderson very well at all.

As I gazed out the window at the splendid vista, my thoughts drifted back to Karen. My one and only love affair. I was taking my MBA at Western and she was in her third year of Commerce. We'd met at a friend's social and almost instantly hit it off. I got her phone number that night and called her the next day. Within a month, we were inseparable. I wasn't a virgin when I met her and neither was she, but we both had a lot to learn it turned out.

When I finished my MBA, I returned to my former job in Toronto, already working for Emerald. They had generously allowed me time to get my post-graduate degree and while most of it was on my own time, they were anxious to see me complete my studies and made sure they cleared the path for me. I owed a great deal to Emerald and their management and I wanted to repay them in my work.

I was positive I was in love with Karen, but she was in her senior year at Western and I couldn't possibly commute from London to Toronto. I would make the three hour drive every Friday night and return on Sunday night, spending at least two days with her each week. It wasn't ideal, but I was very serious about her and nearing the end of her school year, I proposed.

She turned me down.

"I'm sorry, Cam. I'm not ready to marry. I want to live a little and work on my career for a while. It's been wonderful to be with you, but I'm not the girl for you."

"When will you be ready?" I whined.

"I don't know. I'm certainly not in a rush, as you can tell. You're a good guy and we've had a very nice time together, but it's not going to be permanent. I'm sorry."

"Yeah," I said, defeated. "I am too."

And that was the end of my one and only love affair. It had been one-sided and I hadn't even recognized it. I was a convenience to her, nothing more. I felt like a fool for some time after that, alternating between anger and self-pity. A few weeks later I forced myself back into the dating game and took a much less serious attitude toward women. If they could play, I could play too.

But that got old fairly quickly. When I was sent to Manchester, a combination of a difficult work situation and the ever ebullient Doogie Cruickshank helped bring me out of that phase. I dated off and on, got lucky more than a few times and generally didn't take myself too seriously. I didn't think English women could hold a candle to Canadian women, but then I was biased, wasn't I?

When my time was up in England, I insisted that Doogie be included in our corporate plans and laid out my reasoning with chapter and verse to Wray Henderson and Clarence Woolfolk, the Marketing V.P. Happily, they agreed, and Doogie was offered the job of marketing support. He made that job something important with his actions, not his words. Time and again he saved the company from making fundamental mistakes in the marketplace. I give him credit for steadfastly turning what was an operational environment into a customer-responsive environment. It took a while to show results, but when they came, Doogie got the well-deserved credit as well as a raise and a promotion. I suspected they were grooming him for bigger things, perhaps V.P. of Marketing.

Monday morning dawned dull and rainy. Dark enough that I didn't want to ride my bike for fear of being run down by some unwary commuter. I decided that my umbrella and raincoat would do. If it got too ugly, I could hop a bus for the few blocks I had to go.

As I stepped off the elevator on the ninth floor, I could see lights on in the area of my office. Usually, I was the first one on the floor, but not this morning. As I hung up my wet raincoat in the closet and stowed the umbrella, I wondered who would be here this early. It was barely seven o'clock. I walked down the hall and almost immediately encountered Siobhan Mulcahy.

She looked spectacularly bright and shiny in the gloom of that morning. She was immaculately dressed in another business suit and greeted me with a cup of coffee as I approached her desk.