A Cold Blooded Acquaintance

I had lunch today with a guy who learned about a week ago that he's being fired. His employer is keeping him on until the end of the month and then will give him 3 months severance pay. I can't vouch for all his skills, but I know he is saavy about office technology, financial management, magazine layout and design, and has experience managing all those area. He has three characteristics that, I can't help but think, contributed to the most recent firing and his history of getting the axe.

He is, I should mention, on his second go-round as chief executive of the organization that just fired him. He held the same position before and got fired from it before.

These three characteristics? First, he is an inveterate name-dropper...he knows this senator and that senator and the local mayor, etc., etc., ad infinitum. Name-dropping has never been high on my list of positive character traits. Second, he makes a point of talking almost reverently, about his own accomplishments and his own skills. That, to me, suggests someone who has deep doubts about his own worth and value. In the right circumstances, and in small doses, self-aggrandisement is a smart move; in other circumstances, it is deadly. Third, and finally, he is an avowed, deep-in-the-soul Republican. While that probably contributes to his rapport with some of the boards with which he has worked, it can't always be wise, not even in Texas.

After meeting with him today, I left with a sense of sadness about the guy. He's about 60 and will have a tough time getting situated. He just remarried (about a year after his first wife died), this time to a woman from Eastern Europe, a woman he met in an online dating service. I'm skeptical, but hope it was for all the right reasons for both of them. What makes me feel so bad, though, is that this is a guy who probably has decent skills and is capable in many ways, but his own traits make it hard to be able to, or even to want to, help him. Perhaps the most problematic for me: his political point of view. I have reached the point at which I simply can no longer forgive blind, and emphatically vocal, support for the Bush administration and its tragic destruction of this country's hopes for the future. People who are vocal Bush supporters now, after all we have seen and heard from him and his henchmen, are simply not bright enough or human enough to warrant my pity.

I have such mixed emotions. The guy is standing near the precipice and needs a hand. But I see faults that make me understand the possible reasons for his termination and I see in him a world-view that doesn't give a damn about most of the world. As much as I'm inclined to help people who are down and out, he's on his own.