The Peripatetic Philosopher shares:

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.

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