DEVLIN LEARNS ABOUT LIFE/WORK
VANITIES OF VANITIES
JAMES RAYMOND FISHER,
JR., Ph.D.
© November 22, 2016
REFERENCE:
This is another excerpt from DEVLIN, THE NOVEL, which is to be a Kindle selection in early
2017.
JAMES JOYCE’S INFLUENCE
Seamus Aloysius Devlin chose St. Aloysius as his
confirmation name at his mother’s request.
“Like the saint,” she said, “you are my golden boy,” adding, “and
besides James Joyce chose the same confirmation name, and he’s the greatest
writer in English.” Devlin always
wondered if he was a disappointment to his mother.
It wasn’t until he was twelve that he learned St.
Aloysius was a Jesuit of unsullied virtue who died at the age 23 during an
epidemic in Rome in 1591. At the
Crescent City Library, he confirmed that Joyce was a celebrated writer but of a
far different temperament than the saint.
St. Aloysius wouldn’t allow his mother to embrace him because he feared
contact with women, while Joyce embraced female verities.
The saint was a loner terrified of women, while Joyce
defied the limits of English propriety and decency. Devlin wondered what his mother was trying to
tell him, but he never asked.
Devlin was comfortable as a loner, as it was his plight
to be an outsider. He was born and grew
up in the working class section of Crescent City. Although living in a small community of
33,000, there was a section of the city where many rich families had lived for
generations, an area that made him feel especially uneasy.
He could remember the Great Depression of the 1930s, just
before the war, and the times he rode
the bus with his da through blocks of mansions.
He would see fancy cars, uniformed chauffeurs, and maids in black
dresses with aprons and starched white caps, and children in school uniforms
playing in the yards without regard to soiling their clothes. He had felt outside all of that, and it had
never left him. The entire scene branded
in his memory, now reappeared
His life now was incomprehensible to him. It was as if he had imagined it, or read it
in a book. After all, his family never
owned an automobile, always rented. He
never got to know the part of the city where the rich kids lived, but he did
have an opportunity to compete with them in the classroom and athletics, and
was shocked to find they were not as smart as he was or nearly as good an
athlete.
Like St. Aloysius, he was blessed with brains, and like
Joyce, he had Irish luck and pluck.
Devlin was most comfortable on the move, suffered fools poorly, fearless
of adversaries, a rootless moralist, a traveling man moving fatedly if
uncertainly forward.
He had been lucky to work on his own as a lab chemist
since nobody wanted to work with him.
Although a junior chemist with no seniority, he was demanding to the
point of impudent. In the R&D
laboratories of Tandy Brands, Inc., he was quick to complain if he found
anyone’s work slipshod.
It didn’t help him not being a real chemist as he held a
BSCE in chemical engineering, which to bona fide bench chemists was neither
fish nor fowl, but at best a hybrid. It
was how psychologists feel about psychiatrists.
Psychologists believe they do all the research and psychiatrists get all
the credit. To them psychiatrists are
basically medical “pill” pushers with a short survey course in psychology,
whereas psychologists have eight years of clinical training.
Chemical engineers are focused on processes associated
with systemic and chronic problems in mechanistic systems. Chemical engineers can observe, evaluate and
correct what they see. Chemists deal
with molecular structures in a subatomic world, which is often beyond the lens
of the electronic microscope.
His colleagues failed to see, and Devlin was not yet
aware, that he was an engineer with the mind of a chemist and heart of a
psychologist. Book learning aside, the
hybrid was to prove both his doing and undoing as he was also a sensor of the rarest
of sensitivity.
Devlin jumped at the opportunity to ditch the laboratory
for another hybrid, chemical sales. It
was not a career move but a way to generate income for his young family of a
wife and two small children, 1 and 3, to pursue his quest for a Ph.D. in
microbiology.
He had won a fellowship to Wesleyan University in
Middletown, Connecticut in molecular biology for his master’s, and once
completed, with a placement in the Ph.D. program at Massachusetts Institute of
Technology in theoretical chemistry.
Chemical sales was a stopgap measure to complement the fellowship. With two small children at home and demanding
course work at school, jobs outside for either parent were not possible. It was nine months before the fall term.
Devlin, a dreamer, lived in his fantasy world of
ideas. A fan of James Watson the
co-discoverer of the double helix of DNA, he saw himself building molecular
models where he could enjoy science without confinement to the chemical
bench. Watson was alleged to be
extroverted with a detached morality, while Devlin was introverted with an
intrusive morality.
HORNS OF
DEVLIN’S DILEMMA
No one seemed less destined for success in sales, yet he
moved his family from Crescent City, Iowa to Indianapolis, Indiana where the
first month with Polychem, Inc. he traveled with the area manager.
At the end of the month, the area manager asked him what
he had learned. Devlin answered
straightforwardly. “All our calls were
social calls with you telling customers about Polychem’s greatness, never once
did you ask what was needed, or for an order.”
“So you think the time was wasted?” the area manager
challenged with his eyes boring into Devlin.
Devlin chose silence to be his answer.
The following Monday he came to the office to find his
colleagues gone except for the area and regional manager. Both smoked cigarettes furtively while
drinking coffee. The hair on the back of
Devlin’s head bristled to attention.
This was not good.
The regional manager broke the silence.
“We believe you’re not cut out for this kind of
work. We know you have your family
here,” the senior manager said taking a long drag on his cigarette, then
beaming magnanimously. “We’ve taken that
into consideration. We’re going to give
you some marginal accounts to service over the next six weeks while you look
for another job.”
The regional manager tapped his cigarette on the table
with the ash falling to the cement floor of the makeshift office in a Quonset
hut. He looked down at the ash dreamily,
and then continued. “You can upgrade
these accounts if you like to earn commission.”
He smiles knowingly. Marginal
accounts were marginal because they were devoid of prospects or otherwise
ignored. “And he can call on our competitors’
accounts in the area, too, can’t he boss?” the area manager chimed in.
The two managers looked at each other holding back
raucous laughs simultaneously covering their snickering mouths. “Why of course,” the derision look never leaving
either of their eyes, as the regional manager continued. “By all means, call on them.” What had they to lose? It would eventually prove more than they ever
suspected.
Their eyes twinkled with devilish relief, reveling in how
easily they had put this matter to rest.
Fuck this upstart their nonverbal posture declared. He brought it on himself. At that moment, Devlin felt surprise, dismay and
cloying fear. He was being reminded once
again that he was born on the wrong side of the tracks. A visceral kind of hatred moved through his
body that surprised him, but rather than deflating him it energized him with a
feeling of surreal superiority.
“Well?” the area manager said.
“Well what?” Devlin said levelly. “Obviously, I can’t get started without the
accounts now can I?” He waited, and
their smiles dropped. “They’re not
ready, are they?” You could cut their
collective shock with a knife and break the blade. They weren’t expecting him to be composed. What did they expect? For him to beg for his job, to apologize for
the incompetence of the area manager, what?
“I’ll be back in two hours to pick up these marginal
accounts,” he said stressing the word, ‘marginal.’ He couldn’t believe his composure. Where did it come from? Then he added, “I’ll call first to make sure
they’re ready.” They smoked, their eyes
masked in disbelief, as he turned and left the office, tall and straight,
ignoring the secretary who had her ear to the door.
When he was near his car, he almost collapsed. What was he to do? He was in a situation he’d never been in
before. Sure, they didn’t like him much
in the lab but they liked his work. He
had always succeeded near the top whatever the competition: in sport, school
work, even as a laborer in summer jobs at Tandy Brands while going to
college. Life was not a game to him;
life was serious business. He harbored
as much contempt for the hardy fellow well meant but with counterfeit sincerity
as for the scoundrel, but he had never suffered for it, until now.
He had played competitive football, basketball, track and
baseball in high school, not as a teammate, but as an individual. He never hung out with jocks at lunchtime in
high school but instead helped others with math word problems in the bleachers
of the school gym. He was in athletics
but not of athletics. He was in and of
academics, which were rational and impersonal in the world of ideas. It was only there he felt at home with a
sense of belonging.
What should he tell his wife Sarah? He decided to tell her nothing. His one fortification was his Irish Roman
Catholicism with its myths and rituals, its legends and histories, its mythical
Jesus at the expense of the historical Jesus.
THE SPECIAL
ONE
Devlin now paid a visit to Indianapolis’s Sacred Heart
Cathedral. Inside the womb of the church
he took in the scent of incense as he knelt in a pew thinking, strangely, of
Dostoyevsky. He wondered if the great
author went to church, once spared death by the firing squad. It certainly changed his life. Was this a deathlike experience for him?
Dostoyevsky had a fever for the Special One, not as the
Anointed Christ but as the vine to which he felt tethered. The “God” thing was a problem for both he and
Dostoyevsky. Why did the Special One
have to be God, when clearly Jesus was quite a man?
He doubted if he would see faith and science on a
collision course but rather believed they were parallel universes. Devlin’s faith was the heart of his
imagination, science the mind of his reason.
Why should these two worlds collide?
Yet they did for the Special One whose faith was His science. Jesus told it as He saw it and saw it as He
told it, and for that He was crucified?
The Special One had contempt for hierarchies, for pomp
and circumstance, for grand costumes and exalted pretense. He wore his badge of lower class like knighthood. Devlin wondered why this had not survived in
his church.
The Special One was a rebel, an outsider, who despised
the herd mentality. He formed a
community of dregs and sinners. What
would the Special One think of the church in his name?
When Devlin was a small boy, he went to St. Boniface
Church and School, there Father Sunbrueller could not raise his rhetoric above
sin and the fire and brimstone of hell.
There was no place in his sermons for the Special One. Jesus rarely talked about sin or, indeed,
hell. Devlin wondered if the Special One
would accept the seven deadly sins, sins he never defined, or would he see sin
as he did in terms of waste and deceit.
“Dear Jesus,” he whispered as he thought of his life
going forward with a potpourri of marginal accounts, “I am nine years younger
than you were when you died. My cross is
my refusal to be predictable. My wonder
is whether my life is about over or ready to begin.” He waited in silence for an answer. When none came, he got up from the pew and
walked into the late morning sunlight to take on the world.
DEVLIN STUMBLES INTO SUCCESS
The marginal accounts he acquired were spread out
throughout Indiana as far north as Lafayette in the northwest and Fort Wayne in
the northeast, as far west as Terre Haute in west central and far east as
Richmond in east central, as far southwest as Evansville and as far south east
as New Albany, and of course including Indianapolis, and all other small and
larger towns within those parameters.
The accounts all used steam for heat and processing,
water for air conditioning with cooling towers, often using well water heavy in
dissolved solids such as iron and calcium.
There were drycleaners, bottling plants, canneries, small hospitals,
small parts manufacturers, industrial bakeries, office buildings and shopping
centers with medium to large air conditioning systems, small paper mills, and
some thirty state facilities in which Polychem had a consulting contract to
service their power plants. These
facilities included hospitals, sanitariums, men and women penal institutions,
and state schools for children of special needs.
Devlin had had a month’s training at Polychem’s corporate
headquarters in Chicago about the generic technology involved in preventing
scaling in boilers, corrosion in condensate lines, scaling in condensers of air
conditioners, microbial growth in cooling towers and papermaking applications,
and water clarification in waste treatment plants. Devlin had no training in Polychem’s
proprietary chemicals. He was sent out
with these marginal accounts to fail, and he knew it.
The first call on his own was the most nervous moment of
his life. He was talking so fast the
words made no sense to him or his contact.
The gentlemen, in white bib overalls with a lined face that matched the
blue lines of his jeans, listened with amusement. “We’re a customer,” the maintenance engineer
of the small chemical plant said when Devlin ran out of breath. “We use you.
You don’t have to sell us.”
Devlin dropped his test kit to the floor, and hung his
head.
“Son, are you all right?” the man said. “You look wiped out. Better sit down.” Devlin did.
“Now tell me about it.”
What’s to tell? He
wanted to cry. “You’re my first call,”
he hesitated, “ever.”
“Well, well, well, so that’s it?” The engineer took out a pack of cigarettes
offered one to Devlin, who shook his head vigorously, the customer pumped the
pack against his arm until one fell out, lit it, and then sat down.
“You’re a good looking boy with an honest face, do you
know that?” Devlin nodded. “There’s a sincerity about you if you catch
my meaning.” Devlin nodded again. “What I’m trying to say, son, is it’s all
right to be nervous. We’re all nervous
in our first job. This is your first
job?”
“No, I was a bench chemist, and before that I was on
active duty in the Navy for two years after college.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-four.”
“You look as if you could still be in high school.”
Devlin laughed.
“I’m married with a son and a daughter.”
“My, my, college graduate, too?”
“Yes sir, chemical engineering.”
“Now that’s impressive, not to say having two children
isn’t. I have two myself, never been to
college, but anyway,” he said stomping out his spent cigarette on the floor,
“what do you have for me?”
Devlin would find over the next six weeks a collection of
phrases that would pour out of the mouths of his contacts that could be reduced
to about a dozen, and one of them was “what do you have for me?” It was not a commitment, not an exploration,
not a conversation stimulus, but a way to dispatch politely but
persuasively.
Devlin found himself repeating the phrase to the
astonishment of the engineer. “Well, I
imagine that is why you are here, isn’t it?”
For some reason, Devlin didn’t answer but let the “isn’t
it” hang out there. He didn’t know why
he did, but his hesitation drew a broad smile.
“I see you have your test kits and want to see if we’re keeping our
controls on the boilers up to snuff.”
“Yes sir,” Devlin said, “I’d like to check your systems,
but first tell me how this plant operates, where you apply the chemicals at
what dosages, and then I’d like to know how things are working or aren’t as the
case may be. I’d like you to guide me
through all your systems.”
If the purpose of a system is what it does, the role of
the worker is pride and ownership of what he does. Devlin had touched this nerve without knowing
it. He had paid the engineer a
complement by honoring him by respecting his work, and then transferred the
power of the exchange or the meeting from him to the engineer, becoming the
engineer’s student. Any wall that might
have existed was dissolved. They were
partners as teller and listener.
After touring the plant and then tracing the lines of the
boiler system, Devlin showed the engineer the schematic he had
constructed. As the engineer told him
the chemicals he was using, and the dosages, he took out his manual and
calculated the dosages against the cryptic algorithms. “You are over feeding your scale prevention
chemicals,” he said, “that is why you have such high readings. I see you are slug feeding these
chemicals.” The engineer nodded. “It would be best to use a positive
displacement pump that regulates the feed at a constant rate.”
“That makes sense.
How much does such a pump cost?”
Devlin shrugged.
“I don’t know but I can find out.”
“Would you?”
“Yes,” he added, “when you inspect your boilers at
shutdown, have you noticed any problems?”
“Well, as a matter of fact, we have. We’re controlling scaling in the boiler but
experiencing some severe pitting. We’ve
had to replace a number of tubes.”
Devlin took out a brochure. “Pitting in boilers is caused by
oxidation. We have a treatment for that
with the active ingredient sodium sulfite.
It combines with the oxygen to form sodium sulfate and goes out with
your boiler blowdown.”
“Is that a fact?”
“Yes, and there is a test for the SO3 dosage.”
It was that beginning that found Devlin rising from a
Polychem liability to a senior manager to an international corporate executive
in five years. Customers were his
teachers, his confidantes, and his friends.
They trusted him and he preserved that trust with passion. It was a marriage of partners. He knew the technology but was all thumbs
when it came to mechanical skills while they were rich in such skills and made
his programs work by following his instructions. He became the golden boy in Polychem’s
Industrial Division, and now was expected to continue his magic, magic no one
quite understood, in South Africa.
*
* *
No comments:
Post a Comment