While complaining elsewhere about my commute to New York City, where I loved my job but hated the commute, I said
“So, I have soft-stabbed an old lady and said “fuck you” to a total stranger. It’s time to get myself out of New York, and also an opportune time to get my family out of Newark. I call an employment agency and ask them to find me a job as far south in Jersey as they can.”
The first reputable agency I found was in Woodbridge. I interviewed there with a nice lady named Karen; I don’t remember the name of the agency. I wore my British tweeds, maybe the best investment I ever made. Karen wasn’t technical, but I walked her through my resumé and she liked it. She had programming jobs available at Hess Oil & Chemical, right there in Woodbridge, but unfortunately nothing further south. I thought to myself, well, it’s not the Jersey Shore, but it’s a step in the right direction.
When I arrived at Hess for my interview, I met with Ted, one of the two managers involved with “Data Processing”, as people called it before things got fancy. He was interested in the time-saving programs and designs claimed on my resumé, and gave me an intensive quiz on how one in particular worked. Satisfied, he asked if I had any questions of my own and how soon could I start. Then he brought me to the office of Dave, his fellow manager, to show me off.
The relationship between Ted’s department and Dave’s was not explained, but I could sense some friction between the two managers. I soon discovered that the Hess management style was to cultivate rivalries between peers. The theory behind the style is: Hands off, let them fight it out, the cream will rise to the top. This sort of rivalry produces conflict rather than collaboration; it is contagious and extends down to team members, making for an unhappy workplace.
From The Wall Street Journal, February 27, 2020: “The chief of SoftBank’s Vision Fund used a campaign of sabotage to undermine two internal rivals, according to people familiar with the matter and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.” … “The tactics included planting negative news stories about them, concocting a shareholder campaign to pressure SoftBank to fire them and even attempting to lure one of them into a ‘honey trap’ of sexual blackmail.” So, there’s an extreme example.
I was not happy at Hess at first, and after a few weeks I sneaked down to the phone booth in the lobby to call Karen and ask whether I had any obligation to the agency if I quit. (Typically, the employer pays the recruiting agency a commission equal to one month’s pay of the placed employee.) She asked if I had been there a month; when I said that I had, she told me I could leave any time I wanted to. Feeling a sudden sense of freedom, I went back upstairs and stayed for the better part of two years.
The programmer/analyst offices at Hess were nice. They were actual rooms, not cubicles, with a door, windows looking into the building interior, and outside windows looking over the parking lot and the world. I shared a two-desk office with Aldo, a flashy dresser with a big personality, who’d been with the company several years. Our desks were one behind the other, facing the windows to the interior. Aldo had been with the company longest, so his desk was behind mine, closest to the outside window.
A local retiree had built a business of visiting area office buildings, shining shoes. He was on a loose schedule, and you knew what day he’d be in your building. The first time I saw him, he showed up at our office door carrying his shine box and asked Aldo if now was a good time. This was a new one on me – I’d seen shoeshine guys working in and around Grand Central, but I’d never seen one who would give you a shine at your desk. After a few minutes of brushing and rag-popping behind me, Aldo said “Hey, give my buddy a shine too, I think he needs one.” I said “No thanks, I’m fine”, but Aldo said “Come on, it’s my treat” and directed the guy to go ahead. So, I got my first deskside shoeshine, which turned out to be a good one and oddly relaxing. Aldo liked to buy things for people, and I was not the only one he’d treat. He was generous, and at least as far as shoeshines were concerned, an over-tipper.
One day Ted came to our office with a thick folder. Working through the material in the folder, he gave Aldo a new assignment, a project that would print an inventory of every product in Hess’s 40-odd gas stations. It took quite a while for Ted to explain. I couldn’t see what was in the folder, but the whole thing sounded pretty complicated.
After Ted left, there was complete silence for a moment, then Aldo exploded. “Fuck this! I’ve been here for nine years! I want easy shit!”. A minute later, he threw the folder into our shared wastebasket. When I left the office that night, it was still there.
About three weeks later, Ted came to our office again, asking, “Aldo, how’s the gas station inventory coming along?” Aldo put a confused look on his face and asked Ted what he was talking about. A short discussion ended with Aldo flat-out denying he had been assigned such a project. For me listening, it was sad and embarrassing. Ted walked back to his office and returned with the original folder, which had been rescued from the trash by the cleaning crew. He dropped it on Aldo’s desk, and said “This time, don’t throw it away.”
Somewhere along here I relocated my family to the Jersey Shore, another step in the right direction, and we invited Aldo and his wife to spend a day at the beach with us. They didn’t have any kids of their own, but it turned out they got along great with ours. At lunchtime we went up to the boardwalk, with Aldo insisting as usual that it would be his treat. When the waitress took our orders, she started with Aldo, and when she got to what he’d like to drink, he said “Coke”. When she asked “Small, medium or large?”, he looked almost hurt, and replied “Big. Everything’s big with me.” Even years later, “Everything’s big with me” remains a Smithee family catchphrase.
At Hess, an employee’s office location could be downgraded as a punishment. One programmer screwed up somehow and got himself relocated to the back row of a six-desk interior office. On the other side of the wall behind him was the men’s room, and when he complained about the noise of toilets flushing, he was told to listen closely and keep a record of how many times it happened each day. He didn’t stay with the company long after that.
Hess had a mean, public way of firing people – at 4:15 on Friday afternoon, the PA system might click on and you’d hear a name called out, with that person directed to “report to” his manager’s office. Those hearing the announcement would think to themselves, “…and bring your coat”.
Life in the Cube
The morning after the moon landing in 1969, everyone came to work proud, happy, and suffering from lack of sleep; we couldn’t talk about anything else. This time we were all on the same team.
Another subject that took up a lot of employee time was arguing over the expected outcome of the upcoming fight between Cassius Clay and Jerry Quarry. Quarry was clearly the departmental favorite, but it didn’t work out that way.
Fun fact for oil company programmers: there are 42 gallons in a barrel.
Hess had an excellent cafeteria. Anything you wanted – a hot meal, a custom-built sandwich, maybe both; multiple desserts, seconds on anything, all were yours for fifty cents a day. The unspoken goal was to keep employees inside the building at lunchtime, not burning up time driving to outside restaurants and back.
Management sometimes reacted oddly to an event, making up new rules. Ted’s mother ran a keypunch service that kept track of bowling league scores, and on the q.t. each week Ted brought in a pack of punched cards and ran a program to calculate and print the latest standings. On one occasion he misdirected his printout to the printer at the refinery across town, which happened to have payroll checks mounted. For several weeks following, arriving employees had to open their brief cases so the guard could see they were not bringing in punch cards.
In December 1970 the Esso refinery in nearby Elizabeth was bombed, one of the era’s hundreds of protest bombings by underground radical groups. The explosion injured 37 people, blew out windows for miles around, and caused millions of dollars in damages.
Protest bombings were commonplace then, averaging about five a day nationwide, and the bombers usually called ahead to warn targets to evacuate. There were false warnings as well, with the Hess building an occasional target. We were never told why we were being ordered to evacuate, but evacuate we did, wandering around the parking lot and socializing while the police and fire department searched the building. This occurred maybe a half dozen times, a week or so apart.
One morning Aldo and I were in our office when someone we’d never seen before walked in and proceeded to open the doors of our storage cabinets. I asked “What’s going on?”, then a second later realized, and said “You’re looking for a bomb, aren’t you?”. In this case, the company had rolled the dice and decided to put us all at risk rather than suffer more lost productivity.
At Christmas, employees received a frozen turkey and that year’s model Hess truck, always a cool and sturdy toy. When the turkey shipment arrived, they were dumped in an empty room and we were called downstairs, one department at a time, to each take one. One year the merchant who ran the lobby newsstand was invited to take one for himself. We arrived to find him crawling across the floor, checking each label to find a bird that weighed a few ounces more. Two Hess executives looked on, shaking their heads.
A signup sheet was circulated to include your home address if you were interested in exchanging Christmas cards. I was friendly with a technical writer in another department, Anne, and if I had to go to her office to discuss some business, I would hang around for a while just to talk. She was pretty, smart and divorced, and had a little boy named Scotty. She sent me a Christmas card, and Mimi, a fan of all traditional rules of etiquette, found a lot wrong with it. Besides addressing the card to me only, not to “Mr. & Mrs. Paul Smithee” as would be proper, she signed it “Love, Anne and Scotty”. “Anne” was not a name I had ever mentioned in my at-home recounting of life at Hess, so I had to explain her role there, and added “Scotty is her son.” Reexamining that long-ago discussion, I can see that Scotty’s identity was not something I should have known.
There is a saying that the four letters in “Hess” stand for holidays, evenings, Saturday and Sunday. The data processing department was pretty much immune to working overtime, but one Saturday an executive wandering through the building visited our floor and noticed no one was there. Thereafter, we had to have at least one person on duty over the weekend, “In case someone has a question”.
One day my cousin John told me he had seen a billboard advertising for computer programmers, on Route 66 in Neptune, not far from my house. A billboard?! They must be desperate. I’ll just drive by and get the address.