If All Else Fails, At Least I Can Serve As a Horrible Example

My father worked at the RCA plant in Bloomington, Indiana for many years where they built television sets for a grateful nation. I am still not quite sure what my Dad did there, but it had something to do with parts inventory and quality control. When I was in my early teens he would sit at our dining room table poring over computer printouts listing part numbers, cross-checking them against other lists he had neatly hand-printed on separate sheets of paper. I would sometimes help him with this cross-checking task, and he taught me how to read out the part numbers in just the right way to make his part of the job easier. After a hard night’s work we would turn to Scrabble to take our minds off anxieties about the day to come.

Although he rarely showed it directly, he was frustrated by his work, and often felt that managers above him were not listening, or not intelligent enough to understand his ideas about how to proactively prevent one of the most catastrophic things that can happen on a moving electronics assembly line—unexpectedly running out of a part. Although computers were clearly used in this operation, it seems somehow that they weren’t used effectively, and parts shortages or shipments of poor quality unusable parts happened frequently enough to cause a good degree of heartburn. It was only later when over a couple of summers I actually worked the assembly lines to earn money for college that I got a fuller sense of the direct impact of parts outages on operations (as well as a clear object lesson in why a college education was essential if I didn't want to continue in a similar line of work). Imagine Lucy and Ethel in the chocolate factory when the line goes out of control and substitute circuit boards and silvery hot solder baths.

I think my Dad suffered from the same curse I suffer from at work today, likely an inherited trait—strong fear of inadequacy and failure. One of his coping techniques was to utter the following ironic mantra: “If all else fails, at least I can serve as a horrible example.” He actually spoke these words sardonically to his management at times--using the horrible example phrase when all other methods of selling his ideas had failed. In so doing he revealed himself as far more of a rebel than I ever had the guts to be. The searing need to bring high value to your work every day can overwhelm to the point where no accomplishment is ever good enough. Like any other overpowering need, it can be crippling. Demanding perfection from yourself can set you up for constant failure in your own mind.

But hell—at the end of the day if all else fails, at least I can serve as a horrible example.