Mr. Right

(The following story is a fiction.)

Mr. Right was an accountant. He worked for the financial department of a company and started to work at 7 a.m. everyday. He had a wife and two children.

One day, Ms. Water, one of his subordinates, came to his office to ask if she might submit a report to a client. She emailed it to him a few days earlier for his review. The report calculated a client’s revenue using a certain method. He asked why she had chosen the method. She answered that it would reduce the client's costs. He then asked if the method had been approved by the company. She couldn't answer it. She said that she would find a relevant company policy and come back. Thirty minutes later, she came back and said that the company had approved it five years earlier. She asked him if she could now send the report to the client. He asked if she had confirmed that the method had never been argued before court. She looked down and he started reading another document. She knew that when Mr. Right started to read, he was done talking. One hour later, when she returned to his office for another explanation, she found he was meeting with someone. It was 9 p.m. Ms. Water left a message that she would come at 10 a.m. on the following day.

In the morning of the following day, after listening to her explanation supporting that the method had never been a legal issue, he asked her then if it was mathematically correct. She was a junior staff member and had majored in French literature. She said that she had found it unnecessary, because it had been used at least for the last three years according to her predecessor. He was about to open his mouth, but closed it and started reading another document. Ms. Water rushed out of his office with tears in her eyes. She had done twenty-hour overtime previous week for the report. "I should have done it myself," Mr. Right murmured to himself. He verified mathematical correctness of the method in one hour due to his after-work self-study of mathematics for the last five years. Why didn't people use their time after work more to study even though they knew that their intelligence was too low to fulfill their work duties? He murmured again.

After finishing up Ms. Water's report, he took one of the documents on his desk. It was about a layoff of more than one third of the entire workplace scheduled for early following year and used an effectiveness measurement model. The model was based on sales and non-sales related indicators and other data, the accuracy of which he was uncertain. He had a reason to be cautious. One month earlier, he had found that data in an analysis report had been ten years old and it had been only two hours before the start of the board meeting in which the report had been supposed to be presented. This experience had given him an important lesson, “Never trust anybody when it comes to data. Data never lie. If they are wrong, it's not their fault but a fault of the person who uses."

Annual salary data in the lay-off plan were easy to verify. A set of wage data used for another report last year were still in his computer. A length of service and the salary range code also presented no problems. The weighting factor, which was calculated based on employees’ academic grades, three-year average sales, and sales and cost forecasts per employee, however, made him uneasy. He knew that these forecasts, in particular, sales forecast per employee, would interest the president. The data were sourced from an analysis done two years earlier by someone who was now working for a competitor, but did not use any public data on sales, wages, inflation rates issued by industrial or government bodies. It was dawn when he finished gathering all the necessary data and verifying their reliability. He emailed the report to the president with a note that he would like to explain it in person from 11:30 a.m. on the following morning. The thirty minutes between 11:30 and 12:00 was the only available slot in the president's schedule for the following 24 hours.

After two hours sleep, he came back to office at 10:00 a.m. and as soon as he sat at his desk turned on his computer to check if a reply from the president had come, but in vain. He called the president's secretary but was told that he was not available. "This is strange," Mr. Right thought. Such a thing had never happened before. The lay-off could cause a serious financial issue. Something more serious that had prevented him from even replying to him must have occurred. And at that time, a report which had lied on the desk for the previous three days entered his view.

It was a three-year budget under two scenarios that compared numbers before and after the lay-off. He knew Mr. Wind, the preparer of the plan, well, because he had hired him. Mr. Wind was not a certified accountant, but it was like he had been born to be an accountant. He came to office at 7:00 everyday and worked on weekends. He now was more knowledgeable about the company's financial and accounting matters than anyone but Mr. Right. His reports were clear, specific, precise and accurate. Mr. Right almost forwarded the report to the president with his approval, but stopped. He had recently felt uneasy about forwarding Mr. Wind’s emails without giving him credit for his quality output. He stared into space for a few seconds. But he resumed to hit the keyboard writing that “I reviewed Mr. Wind's report and found no problem. If you have any questions, please let me know” and pressed the submit button. He was his supervisor, not his parent or friend. Emotions must be controlled.

It was nearly 11 a.m., but neither response from the president nor callback from his secretary had come. He directed his attention to the then last remaining report, the first draft of termination policies and procedures. This had come three days earlier and its deadline was the following day. It wasn't like him to keep a report unread, even one page, for three days. He had known when seeing the preparer's name that he would have no clue about what was written in it. Ms. Plain was a PhD in psychology, specializing in dynamics of feelings in the workplace. She had joined the company about one year earlier and conducted a survey nine months earlier. The survey questions required respondents to enter free-form answers and her report, mostly written in texts, including these questions and answers to them, were incomprehensible to him. How could these non-quantified texts be interpreted scientifically? The report was over 100 page. But he made it a rule to read any reports word by word from the beginning through the end no matter how long they were.

It was almost 5 p.m. when he finished reading it. Although he usually wrote his comments while reviewing, he couldn't do so for it, as he had no quantified criteria to analyze such information. The report started with a compilation of responses, such that “I worked hard. I came to office almost at 7 a.m. and left office after 10 p.m. almost everyday. Why does someone working so hard like me has to be sacked?”; “The business environment changed due to a policy change in the government’s trade policy. It was not my fault.”; and “I have three kids and elderly parents…”

She classified all the answers into ten categories based on the degree of self-confidence and assertiveness and listed examples of attitudes and scripts for each category to prevent unnecessary provocations and antagonizations. She recommended the use of such phrases as “thank you,” “we appreciate your hard work,” “your contribution was significant,” "it was a difficult decision for the company, but..." She also recommended that when uttering these phrases, the speaker be calm, but not smile. Reading a report, like this, which didn't give any concrete information was a torture for him. It was beyond his imagination to imagine how these procedures would work or help the company reduce cost. But it was the president who had decided to hire her and get all her reports to go through Mr. Right. He commented that “I reviewed it and found no problem, although the subject matter was out of my area of expertise. As an accountant, I found no issues and therefore am forwarding it to you...”

It was about 6 p.m. He had to attend two meetings starting at 6:30 p.m. and 7:15 p.m. In addition, he had received three new reports while reading Ms. Plain's report and they needed to be dealt with as soon as possible. He went home at 3 a.m. in the morning. Everything had taken longer than he had expected.

On the following morning, Mr. Right came to office at 8 a.m. He had slept for only a few hours for the last couple of days. When entering the office, he found his computer gone. He had been so tired previous night that he had forgotten putting it in a drawer. It was until he reached for his cellphone to ask for a replacement computer that he realized that it was too early to expect someone to be in the office. A new company policy had been implemented previous year to prohibit IT staff from working before 9:30 a.m. He had often referred to it as one of his most successful cost adjustment schemes. It had reduced IT overtime costs by more than 30%. He always told other employees that people should not be afraid of changes, but should adapt themselves to them for further improvement.

He felt a little chilly and turned around when noticing the president standing behind him. “Good morning, sir.” “Good morning, Mr. Right.” “You're very early. Has something happened, sir?” He started to regret to not have called him before leaving the office previous night and was afraid if he might be angry about it. The president entered Mr. Right’s office without answering the question. “It was a very difficult decision. You have contributed significantly to the company. We all appreciate it. Thank you very much, but…...” The president was so calm, quiet and even peaceful, but did not smile at all.