The Zen Guy

First Day on the job at Kroger

michael — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 00:16:10 +0000

As you’ve come to understand by now, it wasn’t my idea to show up for my first day of work in the Internal Audit Department at Kroger’s corporate headquarters with medically necessitated dilated pupils. It was the plethora of ophthalmologists in Hamburg and Cincinnati. Do you know how difficult it is to focus on things right in front of you with dilated pupils?

Auditors typically had a lot of things in front of them in the early 1990s: adding machine tapes, green accounting ledger paper and color-coded grey, red and blue leaded pencils. Imagine not being able to focus on these things for the first two months of your first job. Did I mention color-coding your tie with your business suit and button down shirt is also critical and taken for granted by sighted auditors?

So when I showed up on my first day at Kroger with dilated pupils you would have thought my new audit manager would have had sympathy for me wearing dark sunglasses that first day in the office making introductions walking from cube to cube. Instead, my eyes couldn’t focus on anything less than 3 feet in front of me, so he had to read me all the details on the new employee forms from human resources. Also, I’d never be able to match face with name because I opted to not use the Braille method and scour their faces with my steroid tainted fingers.

There was something in his voice that told me he wasn’t happy but I couldn’t see the actual expression on his face. There were plenty of jokes about me visiting the coffee houses in the red-light district of Amsterdam and that the pupils were dilated for other reasons.

My first job assignment with Kroger required me to drive my car to Houston, Texas (a 2-3-day drive from Cincinnati) to work in a regional accounting office for four months. My eye doctor presented me with a note so that I could fly instead of drive since I was going to need dilated pupils for eight more weeks.

Let’s just say that I started my first professional job in internal auditing with a bang. Oh wait, this wasn’t my first job in the accounting profession. I had an internship during college, as an Accounts Receivable at Cintas, Inc. Regardless, every new job I ever took in the world of internal auditing always began with an element of intruige.

Flying Blind – Part 2

michael — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 08:06:54 +0000

I was a bit surprised that the youth hostel manager in Bergen assigned me to a bed in the same dorm room as Steve! Before Steve returned to find me shriveled up in a dark corner of the room, two Japanese students in our room wanted to practice their English that afternoon. They asked, ‘Where are you from in big, big America mister?’ I repeatedly said, ‘Ohio’ and they continued to respond with ‘Ohayō gozaimasu’. Later I learned that ‘Ohayo’ meant ‘good morning’ to them, but to press on with the conversation as a blind man wanting peace and quiet I said I was from New York.

Steve was just a tiny bit flabbergasted to see me when he entered the dorm room chatting with an ever-growing Japanese contingent asking about the average number of handguns Americans carry in their briefcase or purse. Steve then made me promise that if I spent 2 days touring the fiords with him that I’d go to Hamburg, collect my things from Frau Claus and take the earliest flight back to America. I agreed and snapped many lovely photos that I was able to enjoy months later when my eyes returned to normal. That’s when I became a believer in the ‘auto-focus’ functionality of my new Canon AE1 camera; just point and click, even a blind man can become a professional photographer.

Mrs. Claus, no relation to Santa though we were dangerously close to the Arctic Circle, was happy to hear my voice when I called her from the Hamburg train station to collect my bags. When she noticed I was squinting in the bright 8 p.m. light in the parking lot I decided to be honest and tell her about the Copenhagen emergency room experiences. Fifteen minutes later I was sitting in her ophthalmologist’s chair with the purple laser light from slit lamps bouncing around my sensitive eyeballs. As three eye doctors read her my prognosis in harsh Germanic tones she began to weep. I’ve learned it’s never a good sign when a stranger weeps upon hearing a description of your medical condition; especially a straight-laced German woman.

I had iritis in my otherwise sparkling baby blue eyes and the diagnosis wasn’t pretty. If Wikepedia has any authority on the subject, Iritis means inflamed irises. The iris is a cute little muscle inside the eye that opens and closes to let the right amount of light in, a bit like automated vertical blinds in a Beverly Hills mansion detecting dusk or sunrise. There is an accumulation of white blood cells in the anterior chamber of the eye that causes cloudy vision and sensitivity to light. Severity is measured on a scale of 1 (low) to 4 (high). I came in at a three in one eye and a four in the other. Usually it occurs in only one eye and typically in people over the age of 70. I, however, was a 26. There was confusion and speculation about the root cause but no answer was easily gleaned from the Nuremburg style-questioning format used by the eye doctors of me that afternoon.

I have Frau and Herr Claus to thank for saving my sight that day. I spent a week isolated in their son’s dark bedroom covered in ‘End Apartheid’ posters with medically dilated pupils and enough steroid-tainted eye drops to make Lance Armstrong nervous.

For whatever reason, I always cut things too close in my life without allowing ample time between activities. I took an earlier than planned flight back to Cincinnati. Why? I was starting my first ‘real’ job in the cubes of corporate America in three days! This job would lay the foundation of my 20-year career in internal auditing. I had originally planned to have a solid 24 hours between the end of the two-month backpacking trip around Europe and starting the new job. Clearly this was not enough time. It seemed especially not prudent since I was flying back to start the job in a state of semi-blindness.

The ophthalmologists in Cincinnati concurred with the Hamburg doctors on a course of steroid treatment unsuitable for anyone in professional sports. Interestingly enough, they also insisted I see an internal medicine doctor to see if the root cause, e.g. tropical German virus, could be identified. Since I was on a tight budget I asked my friend’s mother, a family medicine physician, to run me through a full exam including one uncomfortable X-Ray procedure standing shirtless pressing into the cold polycarbonate screen of the machine. She knew I was adopted. While drawing blood during my physical exam she suggested I consider searching for my biological family to see if there were any medical issues I needed to be aware of. First though, she and the ophthalmologists wanted to focus on clearing up the iritis and so that I could start my first job after college without a pressing medical condition.

Thus ended the two-month backpacking tour of Europe. The tour was actually a ‘gift to self’ for successfully completing twelve months of exclusively accounting classes. I graduated with a degree in Finance a few years earlier but had decided to spend an additional year taking every accounting class my university offered just in order to sit for the CPA exam. In addition to all of those accounting classes I also taught accounting courses to undergraduate students and spent every other waking moment studying for the CPA exam.

Within eight hours of finishing the three-day long CPA exam in Dayton, Ohio I was on the initial flight to Europe for my infamous two-month backpacking holiday. Perhaps the iritis was a not-so-subtle message from my body that such an intensely focused academic program could cause a severe physical reaction requiring medical attention. I vowed at that time to not take undertake further advanced degree educational programs, such as an MBA, as it too may be too taxing for my body’s constitution.

To be honest, I have made exceptions to that rule over the years: taking an out-of-control Italian Greyhound puppy to obedience school, doing a yoga teacher training and studying various types of hands-on Thai massage classes in Chiang Mai. However, I don’t consider the aforementioned educational programs to be on the same level of intensity as studying for the GMAT and then studying for a Masters of Business Administration.

Lessons Learned: Allow adequate time between a post-university backpacking trip. Obtain a high quality medical insurance policy prior to traveling outside of your country of origin. Allow more than twenty-four hours between arriving home to start a new job. Be open to the kindness of strangers. Study well, but don’t overdo it.

Flying Blind – Part 1

michael — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 19:42:23 +0000

Something wasn’t quite right when I peered into the crusty rectangular mirror above our seats that morning in 1991, an hour south of the Hamburg Hopbanhoff. I could only see a cloudy silhouette of my face, as if someone smeared Vaseline on my eyes during the overnight train ride from Heidelburg. My college roommate woke up before me and asked, like any good travel companion, why I wasn’t focusing on him when he was talking. Valid question to be sure. Apparently I was looking at a German passenger sitting next to Steve instead; well, they both had a similar build and black curly hair so I wasn’t too far off the mark. The young German man was traveling with his middle-aged, stiff upper lip mother whom I could intuitively sense had the ability to control any unplanned life situation such as this. They were listening to our conversation trying to sort out my vision issue as diligently as we were, though at the time we didn’t realize they spoke fluent English having lived in Pittsburgh a few years prior.

At their insistence we deboarded the train in Hamburg instead of continuing on to Copenhagen en route to see the fiords of Norway. Truth be told, we were already considering a day’s break from the rosey pink colored, fiber-laden industrial strength toilet paper used in German second-class train cars. Everyone thought that if I got a good night sleep my eyes would be better the next day.

All of us went for a refreshing swim in front of their lakeside house. I whole-heartedly do not recommend lake swimming for anyone experiencing vision problems, particularly in the evening. I only dropped my fork twice on the floor, but after a wonderful dinner at their home, they suggested we leave any excess luggage at their house that we wouldn’t need on our next Norway adventure, specifically the swimsuits, snorkeling gear, towel and suntan lotion used in Samos, Greece the week prior. We could stop at their house on the way back to pick it up and visit with them a second time.

Once in Copenhagen Steve took me to the emergency room after we checked into the youth hostel because he didn’t feel safe traveling with someone who walked blindly into the street in front of on-coming traffic. I still swear the walk light was green. The doctor gave me medicine for pink eye and said to come back in two days if it wasn’t better. If Steve knew that we were in a city park’s bicycle lane when he told me to lie on my back and put the medicated salve in my eyes he never admitted it. We moved into the grass after more than a few bicycle bells frantically dinged in our direction. We were from Cincinnati, while it still retained a gummy residue of Germanic culture like beer and bratwurst during Oktoberfest in the Park, it definitely didn’t have bicycle paths.

The Copenhagen emergency room doctor’s next anecdote was antihistamine drops because the conjunctivitis medicine wasn’t doing the trick. Steve insisted I turn around and fly back to the U.S. to get medical care. I promised him I would do that. However, I was bound and determined to see these fiords. The day after he took a train to Oslo I took a train in that direction as well. Surely the medicine would kick in at any time and I’d no longer feel like I was living inside of a clear polyvinyl chloride beach ball.

I spent the night in the luxurious ‘Royal Christiana Hotel’; it was the only hotel sign I could read when I stepped out of the station, the flashing white neon helped. I couldn’t visibly appreciate a lot of the furnishings at the four-star hotel. Instead, I ran my fingers over a lot of the finishes in my room like Helen Keller on holiday. The marble bathtub, high threadcount bed sheets and fluffy down comforter were tactile heaven after community bathrooms and grayish-brown sleeping sacks at youth hostels. After spending a two-week budget allotment for one night at this palatial hotel, I decided to head for the youth hostel in Bergen where I could catch a boat to tour the magical fiords, streams and green pristine mountains spilling into the sea.

To Be Continued

I’m Writing A Book – ‘Tales of an Adopted Road Warrior’

michael — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 19:35:05 +0000

According to my editor, unlike most wannabe authors I have no problem generating material. I like to tell stories based on true things that happened in my life. Last week I met a former co-worker from Coinstar when I was at a conference in Las Vegas. She introduced me to her husband and told him, ‘Michael tells stories, we’re buying him whatever he wants to drink and he’s going to start telling us stories and he’ll start with the time the U.S. Customs office thought he was smuggling drugs. Sit down Michael, what can we get you to drink?’

So far I have 79,000 words and a book only needs about 52,000 to be published. Whenever I read my draft of the ‘table of contents’ I think, ‘Oh wait, I need to write about XYZ before sending the manuscript off’. It just keeps flowing. My editor is reeling me in and we’re finalizing the theme.

I’ll start posting snippets of the manuscript on The Zen Guy as I go through this process. I’d love to turn on “Comments” for the blog to hear feedback but if I turn that functionality on I get more than 25 spam comments from spam robots a day and I don’t have the time to deal with those.

Please laugh or cry at your leisure.

Michael

Close Encounters with Senators Rockefeller and Byrd

michael — Sat, 24 Nov 2012 06:53:08 +0000

The day Jay Rockefeller walked into the jewelry store where I worked during high school I was on a ladder taking Christmas decorations down. More specifically he came in to pick up a watch he’d been given for Christmas that needed to have links added. If Jay didn’t have custom tailored suits made, he would definitely need to shop at the Big & Tall section of Men’s Warehouse; many more links in the metal watch were in order.

He was the Governor of West Virginia at that time and I was a sixteen-year-old boy taking down boughs of pine branches hanging from the top of the seven-foot tall display cases. Obviously the Vietnamese watch repairman was not ready for him to walk into the store to claim his watch so soon after the holidays either.

Politicians are typically not found of silence and within a few minutes he asked if I knew any of his children. I had fantasies of dating one of them but this probably wasn’t the time to mention that. Noting that it was a slow process to move the ladder every few feet he volunteered to help. Together we had the Christmas decorations down in about five awkward minutes.

The jewelry store’s door had been propped open by a deliveryman unloading at the curb. We were both startled when a black starling flew in the store and started banging into the chandeliers. The watch repairman came out with Jay’s wristwatch and saw the bird’s path of destruction. While I was filling out the sales receipt for our larger-than-life customer he brought his Vietnamese slingshot out of the back room and nailed the bird on the first shot and tossed it into the garbage can with a thump. After an uncomfortable silence Mr. Rockefeller asked if I wanted to participate as an ‘extra’ in the T.V. commercials for his second run at being governor.

A few months later I was at Coonskin State Park and we were being filmed while loading our plates at a staged picnic buffet full of Kentucky Fried Chicken. He was on one side of the picnic table with several of us on the other side making small talk so the camera could see our lips moving. We had to shoot that scene several times because he was focused on talking while giving us eye contact and not looking at his plate. Whenever his fried chicken slid off of his flimsy paper plate into the baked beans or coleslaw someone yelled ‘cut’ and we started at the beginning of the buffet.

The American Legion sponsors a summer camp known as Boy’s State for two students in each high school to learn about politics between junior and senior year. My high school principal recommended me to the American Legian after he received a recommendation letter from Governor Rockefeller’s office. After one month of studying politics and setting up our Boy’s State government, Rockefeller came to speak at our commencement exercise. Our Calhoun County regiment had to march with hundreds of other students in front of his observer platform. As we turned to salute him I noticed a small smile on the governor’s face. That smile may have been from recognition. It could also have been because the rest of my company was marching on a LEFT-RIGHT-LEFT-RIGHT-LEFT command. I had unfortunately managed to start the march with my right foot instead of my left.

Several years after graduating from college I went back to my parent’s small company in West Virginia to computerize the estimating and accounting functions and market their cabinets to industrial clients like DuPont and Union Carbide. Our company was invited to take a marketing (lobbying) bus trip to Washington D.C. with the W.V. Chamber of Commerce that included a reception at Senator Rockefeller’s home and a behind the scenes tour of the Senate.

As our bus eased past the security gates and cameras up to his woodland mansion in the hills of suburbia D.C. at Rock Creek Park we were greeted by a row of men in tuxedos wearing white gloves and holding silver trays of champagne and cigars. Entering the vestibule-like foyer there were gigantic oil paintings of male ancestors flanking either side. Perhaps one was Uncle Nelson Rockefeller and the other the founder of his family’s Standard Oil Company and/or John D. Rockefeller. These reminded me of the paintings in Marriott Hotel lobbies of the two Marriot brothers or perhaps the aristocracy in the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Most men were standing outside the house smoking the cigars so he and I had a few minutes in the luxurious parlor. I was ill equipped to discuss anything of substance related to West Virginia politics so I asked him where his favorite travel destination was. He said his family traveled a lot when he was a teenager and he enjoyed riding elephants in Cambodia and taking a camel caravan through a desert in Africa if I remember correctly. At his body size, one can only assume horseback riding was not an option but Asian or African wildlife could be a more appropriate size for recreational riding. Better him than me based on my luck with horses as noted in a prior blog post.

His backyard was reminiscent of a state park. There was more than a slight angle to the yard that sloped greatly toward a distant creek. Here I was talking to him again and he asked if there was anything he wanted me to do for him. I politely suggested that we switch places so that I was on the uphill side of the yard and he on the downhill side. Other lobbyists were really grilling him a bit harder than me. Two years after my visit to his home, he hosted Bill & Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy to lay the groundwork for the initial health care reform package.

He said that was a reasonable request so we switched places. Then said ‘I meet a lot of people but something tells me we met years ago’. I replied that in high school I worked at Galperin’s Jewelry Store. He said, ‘I was only there one time and I helped someone take Christmas decorations down and then someone killed a bird with a slingshot’. I said, ‘Yes Senator, that was me’. I mentioned we were in a few of his commercials together with KFC sliding off the plate. He said, ‘Am I correct in also assuming that you went to Boy’s State’? We both burst out laughing.

The next day our W.V. Chamber of Commerce delegation patiently waited in the antechamber to Senator Robert Byrd’s office for an extended period of time. Presumably the untouched buffet table of snacks and drinks would be consumed after the Senator’s arrival. Breaking all protocol I snagged a blueberry muffin and stood near a closed door in the corner to keep my blood sugar from plummeting any further. I have no idea how Senator Byrd entered the room unseen. Regardless, he stood next to me and started shaking my hand before I knew what was happening. It didn’t take long for our country’s main Parliamentarian to realize he was smashing the muffin into my palm. He quickly faced his hovering staff and they started wiping his hands off with a readily available towel. May the longest serving Congressman in U.S. history rest in peace.

Never Use Your Paypal Account in Myanmar

michael — Sat, 24 Nov 2012 06:19:21 +0000

As you can see below I was turned over to the Department of Treasury for traveling in Myanmar. My accounts have been unfrozen now but this resulted in several banks blocking all of my credit card, ATM transactions, Auto Bill Pay assignments and ability to receive money from Paypal during the 3 weeks there.

Very inconvenient! Don’t ever access your own financial websites if traveling in Myanmar. This was corrected after scanning them copies of utility bills and a drivers license and I was out of Myanmar.

Letter from Paypal:

Hello The Zen Guy,

To keep our customers secure we regularly screen activity in the PayPal
system. During a recent screening, we identified activity that may be in
violation of United States regulations administered by the Department of
the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).

We’re committed to meeting OFAC’s regulations. One regulation is to ensure
that our customers are compliant with applicable laws and regulations,
including those set forth by OFAC, in their use of PayPal.

In addition, you will be unable to access your account from Myanmar. Please
contact PayPal at ofacappeal@paypal.com once you have left Myanmr in order
to restore your PayPal account.

To ensure that your account activity and transactions comply with current
regulations, please provide the following information:

• Documents to confirm that you reside at the address registered on your
PayPal account. In place of a utility bill, we’ll accept a copy of a mobile
phone bill or any other official document that confirms you live at the
address listed on your PayPal account. The document provided must be dated
within 90 days of this request.
• A government-issued photo ID

Please go to our Resolution Centre to provide this information. To find the
Resolution Centre, log in to your account and click ‘Resolution Centre’
near the top of the page. Click ‘Resolve’ under the Action column and
follow the instructions.

We’ll close your account if we notice any further violations.

We thank you for your prompt attention to this matter and apologise for any
inconvenience.

Yours sincerely,
PayPal

PayPal (Europe) S.à r.l. et Cie, S.C.A.
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