It was May 2, 1983 and yours truly fancied himself as an up and coming young executive with a fortune 100 company. Life was good, traveling around the country on the Company dime, and meeting with other young executives who were spending their company's money as freely as me.
Yes, we were all in the employ of "Big Oil", and money was no object as long as we could come to an agreement about developing the next major oil field.
My job at the time was to negotiate multi-million dollar joint ventures with other companies; pretty heady stuff for a young lad from rural Kansas. But, I had gone to the "right" school, hit the industry at the "right" time, and was told that I had the "right" stuff.....Who was I to argue.
Little did I know that the date, May 2, 1983, would be just the first of many events that were to "shake my world".
Earlier that year our company had been shaken up by a couple of hostile takeover attempts led by the infamous T. Boone Pickens, and like most companies at the time, management elected to pay a huge sum of money to make him "go away". A practice that came to be known as paying "greenmail".....a not so subtle reference to paying blackmail money to have a hostage released. The trouble with playing the game was that it made a company even more vulnerable to the next takeover.....and so it was with us.
Suddenly, we were no longer in control of our own destiny, and our futures were shaky at best. Employees began to abandon ship and search for solid ground as our new management asserted its influence. Being the eternal optimist, I stayed on to perform the same job with the new company, and thus, made that fateful trip to California.
I landed at the airport and caught a cab to the hotel where I checked into my ground-level room. I had no more than sat down on the bed when it was apparent I was no longer in Kansas. My first thought was that I had activated one of those old coin-operated vibrating beds, then, I saw the lamp swaying back and forth and watched as the mirror rattled on the wall. What the heck? Earthquake! A totally new experience for me.
The little town of Coalinga was the epicenter of a 6.2 earthquake, and I wasn't all that far away. Geez, where I was from tornadoes might blow everything away, but the dad gum earth stayed put!
Like I said, that experience was just the beginning of many challenges for me. Our new owners began to systematically dismantle their acquisition, and it soon became a very unpleasant place to work. I lasted until 1989 before parting company with "Big Oil" forever.
Last week Miss Elizabeth and I were sitting on the sofa watching television when the house began to rumble and shake.....Hey, I've felt this before, but we're in Kansas where the earth is rock solid....right? I guess not, as we've experienced another trembler since then.
My only hope is that this earthquake doesn't set off a similar sequence of events that led to the demise of a fine company back in my youth.....I think I'm much too old to start over now, but really, what do I know?
No comments:
Post a Comment