The Solver

Of the 5,176,349 –estimated- questions I am asked/decisions I am expected to make each and every day, I think I can maybe answer confidently 3… tops. It’s not that I am indecisive, far from it, actually I am the guy you love to stand behind at Starbucks because my order is memorized and the instructions clear with the correct change out and at the ready. No, my inability to arrive to satisfactory conclusions is due largely to the fact that I am in a leadership role without being a natural born leader.

Whenever I am pulled away from a project I am working on to answer a question that should have been deflected due to either its’ preposterous nature (such as asking if we serve a food that doesn’t exist. Re: Alaskan Crawfish) or one in which the answer is inherent in the question itself (“Does our CD player play laser discs?”) my blood pressure spikes a little. By mid morning my diastolic has hit such a fever pitch I try to refocus the energy into thoughts that kill.

A big part of what I do is preparing food that will be sold at a casual dining café. In the course of my duties I have found that any douche bag can sprinkle Ms. Dash on a steak and call it ‘seasoned’. But if you are the kind of douche bag that actually takes the time to grind toasted peppercorns in a mortar and pestle in order to release the natural oils that allow whatever spice blend its added to cling to brisket more completely during the curing process, then you are a douche bag that takes barbecue seriously. I am just such a douche bag. So it is common practice for me to layout the proper ingredients and utensils that I will need, cue up a playlist, crack my knuckles and bow before my honored prey. I then enter a trance in which my eyes glass over and the world becomes a neat series of ordered steps that when followed with care and precision produces end products any red blooded carnivore can truly be proud of. Anything that breaks me from my reverie is sure to be met with at best mild annoyance and at worst something hot and/or sharp thrown with deadly accuracy.

Homicidal misanthropy may not be the best quality for someone in a role of a decision maker, yet it’s the position I have somehow Forrest Gumpped my way into. This sitcom set up has inspired me to explore the nature of authority and its fickle mistress, responsibility.

The first thing that came to mind is just how haphazardly fate seems to assign authority. Sometimes the one with the biggest hat is the best qualified, sometimes they inherited the hat, and sometimes they are wearing it only because it looks like they should. This scatter plot of causality is on full display and in living color all around us. I once worked for a guy that I thought was incapable of communicating in any method save the mind numbingly inefficient tongue of execu-speak. Even at fifteen, I found myself imagining the Rube Goldberg –esq bureaucratic apparatus that would intentionally put this person in a position of authority. Roughly at the same time we had another supervisor who was confident in his decisions and arrived to them quickly then communicated them concisely – a natural born leader. It wasn’t until years later that I was able to tell that miniboss B actually arrived to a shitload of erroneous conclusions and was simply putting on a show. As a consequence, he remained in the lowly position, impressing only high school summer help. I also found out that Execu-speak went through a vigorous training system that required years of dedication and his method of management left such an impact on me that I find myself emulating some of the same style 1.5 decades later.

So the second thing that came to my mind is the fact that I am a very poor judge of who should be wearing hats.