"I Know How to Be An A**hole"

Between April of 1987 and July of 1990, I worked for Bell Atlantic Mobile Systems (BAMS), the wireless subsidiary of one of the seven Regional Bell Operating Companies formed in the wake of the break-up of AT&T.

I was the Regional Operations Manager, overseeing an administrative staff of about 25 housed in six different locations around the Washington-Baltimore region. The operations department processed the sales orders brought in by the seventy or so direct sales reps in the region, managed the operations expense budget, and oversaw another 25 contract employees who performed vehicle installations and service bay functions in that era of car telephones. I was a sort of circuit judge, managing these six locations by driving around and visiting them.

Warren was one of the contract technicians who worked out of the Timonium location north of Baltimore. This shop was close to my home, and so I would often end my day there. Warren was a big guy, a little menacing if you didn’t know him, and he could tell a story. One evening he shared the harrowing tale of his days in the Navy on a nuclear submarine, and how the Navy’s leadership conducted a drill in which they told the sub’s crew that the entire east coast had been wiped out by a massive nuclear attack. When the hoax was revealed, Warren expressed his displeasure with his command, apparently with some force because, as Warren said, “I know how to be an a**hole.” His Navy career drew to a close shortly thereafter.

Prior to April of 1987, the BAMS administrative field staff had reported to the sales manager in each of the offices. When an internal audit in early 1987 revealed significant quality control concerns with the field offices, the BAMS financial department insisted that the administrative function be placed under separate leadership from the sales function, and established a new department called Field Operations. Actual, authentic customer signatures were required on contracts, strict accounting and cash management controls were imposed, and numerous performance measurements were established. The newly-reined-in sales team chafed under these draconian and often bureaucratic processes, which they believed impaired their ability to achieve quota. Disputes were frequent and sometimes heated. ?

Of the four regions that constituted BAMS, Washington was both the largest and the least troubled by food fights between its sales and operations teams. One reason for this relative calm was our distance from BAMS HQ in New Jersey. We were largely spared the VIP visits that plagued the other regions. Another reason was that BAMS Regional Sales Manager Jerry Fountain and I had previously worked together at American Radio Telephone Service, ARTS, which had partnered with Motorola on one of two developmental cellular networks dating back to the mid-1970s. The ARTS experience, under Wayne Schelle’s leadership, forged strong bonds among those of us lucky enough to have been part of it, and Jerry and I had vowed to settle any intramural conflicts ourselves, within our region and out of Corporate’s baleful eye.

Conflict within BAMS was, as the expression goes, a feature and not a bug. There were numerous instances in which different departments had clashing goals. One example: The sales team only got paid on deals that were installed in buyers’ vehicles by the end of the month. The end-of-month crush overwhelmed our in-house installation capacity, causing the operations group to pay much higher installation fees to outside contractors, which blew a hole in our expense budgets.

My boss, a Bell System veteran, offered the best explanation: Pre-divestiture, the monolithic Bell System had no competitors. There was no rival, no foe, no entity to test yourself against. It was thus necessary to foster competition where none existed organically. So, intramural rivalries emerged. Accounting could contend with sales. Marketing could quarrel with operations. BAMS veterans of that era no doubt regard Apple TV’s “Severance” as a documentary.

My field operations team audited purchase orders. Dealing as we did with the numerous federal agencies headquartered in the DC area, we saw a lot of government purchase orders, and we learned the nuances of federal procurement practices.

All purchase orders, once cleared by the field operations team, would be forwarded to the mothership in New Jersey where the HQ operations group would review them again before forwarding them to Revenue Assurance to be invoiced. One of the many measurements on our field operations group was the percentage of purchase orders rejected by Revenue Assurance. POs rejected internally would be sent back to me so I could scold the offending office manager in my region and cure any defects.

One day, a United States Department of Defense purchase order for several cell phones costing thousands of dollars came back to me from HQ because the total on the sales order did not exactly match the amount specified in the purchase order. DoD POs were rock solid, full-faith-and-credit, etc.; all you had to do was send them a bill referencing that PO number and they’d pay. Not fast, but they’d pay. Like all DoD POs, this one included in the fine print the “close enough for government work” grace clause stating that variances of less than 1% of the original quoted dollar amount were acceptable and there was no need to re-issue a purchase order for any errors of such negligible magnitude.

The offending purchase order I was looking at this day was off by five cents. A nickel. Zero-point-bunch-of-zeroes-then-a-numeral percent; well within the DoD’s acceptable margin of error.

Like Warren, I know how to be an a**hole.

I taped a nickel to the cover sheet and wrote, “My treat. See section 14.5(b) of the PO. We’ve already squandered far more in salary expense than this five-cent error. Tell Revenue Assurance to roll the dice and invoice the government; I’m betting they’ll pay.”

A truly lovely human being named Sarah Delahanty who worked in Field Operations at BAMS HQ opened the inter-office envelope, read my note, and burst into tears. Her manager, a take-no-prisoners veteran of New Jersey Bell named Kathy Hepkema, forwarded my note to our boss, Gene Kowalczyk.

It was annual review time at BAMS. This was the year I would come to understand how all annual reviews are really about your last six weeks. When Gene sat down with me to do my review a week or two later, the subject of the nickel came up.

“You were heading for the EX rating [the highest], but I just can’t have you making good people like Sarah cry. So, it’s the MT rating [next highest] for you. Maybe you want to work on that?” He was right, it was indefensible behavior.

The stunt with the nickel cost me a few thousand dollars in bonus and salary increase. Readers who know me are surely nodding in agreement, "Yep, he sure does know how to be an a**hole," though I’d like to think I’ve changed (if not matured) in the ensuing decades. My recollection is that I apologized to Sarah Delahanty, but if that's not the case, I do so now.