The Buck Stops Here

At the time of this incident, Advanced Equipment had been my client for about five years. My service to the company was to make sure that everything related to their data processing equipment was in a state of increasing effectiveness. I was very close to the senior partner, Irv Eskin. We would often sit in his office and chat at length, sometimes about our common tasks, sometimes simply about our lives, our hopes for them, and our opinions of those we dealt with. These chats were part of the process which brought us together. The other part was of course working together to make Irv and his associates and their equipment an effective business machine. We were very fond of each other. An example of Irv's fondness for me came one afternoon when we were chatting about my wife and myself and our effort to find a house. Suddenly he asked, "Are you in need of financial help?" This of course astounded me. I answered no, but with profuse thanks, saying that we were OK for the money. It was like that between us.

Irv had a partner and with this partner had a somewhat uneasy relationship. It was like this. He had gone into business, long before I had met him, with a man named Aaron Yochelson. Their business was in Washington, DC, and was about weighing equipment. Irv was an engineer, having been educated at Rensselaer Polytechnic in marine engineering during the Second World War. Aaron I'm not too sure of, but I think his area may have been sales. This business led them into warehouse equipment and eventually Advanced Equipment came into being. AEC had great expertise in creating, maintaining, and expanding warehousing facilities. Irv was the foundation of that expertise.

Aaron retired about two years after I had come to serve AEC, and his son, Jerry, already chief of sales at AEC, took his place as Irv's junior partner.

Irv despised sales people, convinced that most of them were liars and thieves. I disagree with that, although such a fate is certainly an occupational hazard in sales work. But the salesman creates the relationship between the one who needs and the one who has products or skills. In my view of the world, salesmen are in a very real sense the creators of modern societies. Irv's real beef with his own sales people, including Jerry, was that they were constantly promising things which were impossible. This of course created problems, and it was usually Irv who had to deal with the problems.

Jerry and I were more friends than colleagues. When I did work at the AEC office, I would often eat lunch with Jerry. We both loved Chinese food and would order it in. I kept a pair of chopsticks in my car mainly for this purpose. I favored Chinese-style chopsticks while Jerry favored the Japanese lacquered style. I can't remember much of what we talked about except that after Jerry's father retired we would talk about him concerning, among other things, his interest in programming a computer he had at home. I had an affection for the old man, and I offered to help him learn programming but he died of a heart attack before anything could come of my offer.

A year or so after Jerry became Irv's partner, he decided that AEC needed a catalog to bring in more business. The catalog would show off the equipment AEC supplied and would be mailed to existing and potential customers. The mailing would of course require a mail list and this part of the project was to lead to a coolness between Jerry and myself. To create the mail list Jerry decided he would do the data entry work on a PC separate from the machine the company used. He also decided that he would supervise the work himself and have the company secretary do the data entry. I was to have no part in it. This was fine with me since I had not chosen the software for the project. All was well until I got a call one afternoon from the secretary. She was having a problem, and Jerry was not available to help her. Since I did not have access to the machine using my own terminal, I had to help her over the telephone, something I hadn't done for a couple of years. Somewhere in the back and forth between us she did something which deleted the mailing list.

"Not to worry," I told her. "You've got a backup I'm sure, and you can restore from that."

"Backup? What's that?" she replied.

"Oh, I'm sure Jerry's been making them," I answered quickly to cover my astonishment as well as my fear that in fact Jerry had not been making backups of the woman's work.

Sure enough, there was no backup. Incredibly, I got an angry call from Jerry the next day. "Why did you tell her to delete my data!" he fumed.

"Well, let's not settle this over the phone," I answered. "How about if I come in tomorrow, and we discuss it in detail?"

Jerry agreed, still fuming.

I then thought about the matter. My reasoning ran like this. I had consented to help the secretary. I had the choice to say that I was unable to do it since I had no knowledge of the system she was using. Worse, I had never talked to the girl, much less worked with her. Yet I had started fumbling with the problem. I concluded that I had indeed made a mistake and was responsible for the loss of the data. There was however the matter of the backup. At the meeting I could simply listen to Jerry's fuming, ask why he had not been making backups, and wiggle out of taking the blame. But his failure to see to the backups did not at all eliminate the fact of my blunder. With this meditation in mind, I went next day to the meeting.

Jerry, Irv, and myself were the only ones in the room. Jerry opened the meeting with an exasperated description of the money and hours he had spent building the database. I let him talk. When he had finished, I said only, "Jerry, this is not the first mistake I've made in my work, and I doubt it will be the last one. And the next mistake I make may indeed be in my work for Advanced Equipment. That fact you must balance against the help I have given your company and decide whether you want to continue our relationship."

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Irv's hand go up over his mouth and his shoulders shake slightly. I knew him well enough to know that he was laughing.

On Jerry's face was a look of both fury and astonishment.

"I think I should leave," I then said, "and let the two of you discuss the situation." With this I left the room, feeling very good about myself and thinking of a plaque that once hung on a wall in the Oval Office. The wall was in back of Harry Truman's desk. It read, "The Buck Stops Here." Only the very brave can live life like that. As I drove home that afternoon I felt I was one of them.

I'm not sure what my fate would have been if Jerry had been running Advanced Equipment. But he wasn't running it. Irv was.