Interco Parts Corp. was a career position and I worked there for years while married and going to school at night. The atmosphere was completely different than anywhere I worked. Interco had a 50,000 sq ft warehouse entirely straight up into the air. This was a small company where everyone was highly visible something that I was not accustomed to.

The president was an unusual businessman. He was a likeable chap. You could actually converse with him about the business and make recommendations. Anyone he found that could make accomplishments for him he drew closer to his office. The lines of communication were awful for such a small office. The telephone never rang. If the president gave you a directive and you were able to make things happened, the phone rang constantly. That was exactly what middle-management feared. They feared loosing their jobs because they knew nothing about automobiles or the parts business. When the boss learned that someone lower on the totem pole could make the same accomplishment, he would brush aside his middle management and work directly with those "in the know."

Middle management was all about control. I had learned things in Beck/Arnley that made me an active learner and not a passive recipient of information. I was reading dealer information, copying numbers, querying the database, off to our library to perform vendor research, into the competitor books, out to the warehouse to compare parts, on the telephone speaking with dealers and vendors, rarely just sitting and passively writing. I was constantly trying to figure out how to reduce the number of parts were purchased to eliminate duplication; hence, dust collectors, the number one killer in any warehouse. Inventory that sits on a shelf and never moves is a business killer. It's money being tied up in waste.

Having worked on cars, with the part in front of me and looking at the exploded diagrams, I could get an intuitive feel for what was right and wrong. But it took a great deal of references and research to reduce part numbers: comparing, contrasting, measuring, discussions with consumers and vendors. My middle management could not understand this because the man who was with the company for the past nine years did none of this. Of course he didn't, he didn't work at Beck/Arnley.

My manager was constantly asking me what I was doing and why I was not in my seat. When I explained my actions over and over I got a blank look. When I had to visit a dealer one day, I walked in and asked for petty cash for donuts. "Money for donuts? You can't go there and get information without spending money?" My manager didn't get it. You couldn't go empty handed and milk someone for information with nothing in return.

There were two of us from Beck/Arnley and neither of us or our methods were understood. A few years later, the mid-career person from Beck/Arnley walked in and did the same things we did. My manager asked why, he told her and then it sunk in. This was the way the job is done. All these years, we have been doing it wrong. Therein was the problem: the company had twenty years of scrap metal on its shelves with no way of selling it off other than as scrap metal and at a huge loss.

As I was being controlled, my life was going out of control.