Now what was he going to do?
What was he going to do with all those hours at the blackjack table?
What was he going to do with all those hours at his computer analyzing different card combinations?
What was he going to do with all those hours playing hand after hand as both dealer and player? Recording each hand – the count, the imaginary bet, the results. One line per hand, one sheet per shoe. Filling three-inch 3-ring notebook after notebook.
What was he going to do with the hours spent reading everything he could find on blackjack? Ordering books until he had a fair sized library devoted to a single topic, a single game? – A single obsession?
No, he was not a compulsive gambler, although Joan would accuse him of it. What she really resented was that his passion for blackjack was greater than his passion for her. But she was partly correct. He was an addict. She just had the wrong addiction.
He was, and had been ever since graduate school, addicted to work. A workaholic. It just happens that right now gambling was his work. It’s the work, not the gambling, that’s addictive.
Being addicted to work did not destroy his life, it just destroyed his ability to experience it, to love and be loved, to find anything meaningful beyond the current job.
That about destroying his ability to love was not quite true. It just destroyed his ability to show it, to let it be an important part of his life, to enjoy it. Everyone else, no matter how much he loved them, was second to the job. He told himself that it’s because he loved them that he was working so hard. It was all for them. But he knew that was a lie. He was working for himself; they just paid the price. If he was working for the ones he loved, when they were gone the need to work would be gone. But it wasn’t. Loved ones can leave; the obsession with work remained.
Work did not cost him Margaret; it just cost him the ability to make her happy, the ability to enjoy her, the ability to fulfill the promises they made. He substituted promises he made unilaterally and fulfilled them instead.
Sooner or later alcoholics and drug addicts hit bottom. Then they get better or die. Workaholics never hit bottom. Alcoholics and drug addicts hit bottom because they run out of money, dignity and respect – their own and others.
Not so for workaholics. They get paid very well for it. As for dignity and respect, mainstream America admire workaholics much as ghetto youth might admire a drug dealer. And for the same reason: they are financially successful. That’s what counts. Never mind that lives and families are destroyed in the process.
Hard working, driving, industrious, diligent, relentless, tireless – the very cornerstones of the Jewish-Christian ethic, not to mention IBM’s and Xerox’s. Stay at a bar until 2 AM every night and you are a bum. Stay at the office until 2 AM every night and you are a role model. Is there a difference? Probably some, but not as much as you might think.
In at least one way addiction to work is similar to other addictions: it’s an escape. An escape from a world of emotions, joy and pain into a world of things, tasks and accomplishments. Escape from emotional commitment, escape from sharing others’ pain, an escape from his own pain.
One evening he was leaving work at 10 PM. He saw Blake Wilmot, another manager, still in his office.
“Okay Blake, it’s dark now, it’s safe for you to go home.”
“Why should I go home to problems I can’t solve when I can stay here and work on problems I can solve?” Blake replied.
A moment of honesty from a fellow workaholic. Work is an escape from the things he couldn’t control, things he couldn’t even comprehend, things that turned him incompetent, to things he did control, to a place where he was super-competent. A life wasted being productive.
If alcoholics and drug addicts are victims of immediate gratification, workaholics are victims of deferred gratification.
“We’ll have some time together soon; I’ll slow down soon. But right now I have a job to do.”
He tried the “slow down and enjoy life” approach once. It didn’t take. After Xerox eliminated his management position, he decided to take a break from the corporate race. He secured a professorship in the Business School at Canisius College, a small liberal arts school in Buffalo. He loved it. He enjoyed taking the longer academic view of the problems he had handled with immediacy at IBM and Xerox. He enjoyed the classroom. He enjoyed the students. He enjoyed the esoteric discussions with other faculty members. And he was good at it. In the first year he was eligible, he was voted “Outstanding Professor” by the MBA students.
However, he soon discovered that being a college professor was as close to being retired as he ever wanted to be. He started a consulting business and a year later a newsletter publishing business. Soon he was teaching full-time, consulting full-time and running the newsletter business full-time. So much for slowing down. That could wait. Margaret could wait. There would be time for that later. Right now he had to make a success out of all these jobs.
After a few years the consulting and newsletter businesses took so much time and effort that he had to resign his faculty position. In 10 years, the newsletter business grew to where he had half a dozen employees.
He had hired good employees. Soon they were pretty much running the business, and he spent most of his time consulting. He had two major clients. For independent reasons, both projects unexpectedly terminated at the same time. And the pipeline was empty.
Now he found himself going from three full-time jobs, to at most one part-time job. He had resigned the teaching position, the consulting had dried up and the newsletter business was on automatic pilot. This was not a financial problem; with the employees running the show the newsletter business was showing a decent profit, and other investments were doing well. It was a personal crisis. A workaholic without work is like a drunk in an Islamic country.
Contrary to popular impressions, workaholics are not compelled to do a lot of work; they are compelled to spend a lot of time doing it. Many people work hard to become successful. Workaholics work because they are successful and work to justify their success. Success that may have had nothing to do with hard work, just lucky or born into it. Now it’s necessary to show that they deserve that success. They earned it, even if after the fact.
The driving force is not the need for accomplishment; it’s the guilt of idleness. They don’t deserve to have time off. They must work 14 hours a day even if there is no work to be done. They will find a way to make two hours of work take 14. They must show the world how hard-working they are, how they sacrifice their personal lives for work. And they do.
He still spent long days at the office, analyzing figures that didn’t need to be analyzed, figures that had been analyzed until they were frayed on the edges. He could make writing one memo take most of the day. He played hours of Monopoly and FreeCell on his laptop. With the sound turned off it looked like he was working.
One Sunday he had paid all the bills he could pay, prepared all the invoices he could prepare and was FreeCelled out. He decided to drive the 100 miles to the Turning Stone Casino outside Syracuse. Even though it had been open for several years, he had never been there. He had never been to any casino of any kind. Gambling held no attraction for him. By nature and education he was not a gambler. As a statistician, he knew the odds, and as a matter of faith, didn’t believe you could beat the odds, at least not for long – that’s what odds are.
He had always had an affinity for cards. As a youngster, card games were the main form of recreation in his house. He learned to add before going to school by playing “casino,” a card game that requires adding the face values of cards. On the first day he attended school the teacher asked if any of the children could count. Several held up their hands, but she selected him. He said, “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7,8 9,10, Jack, Queen, King.”
On that first visit to Turning Stone he never placed a bet. But when he returned he had something to replace FreeCell. He knew it was possible to win at blackjack by “counting the cards,” but that’s all he knew. He didn’t even know what “counting the cards” meant. He immediately began working on a computer program to analyze the game.
He soon discovered that there was a whole body of literature on blackjack. Some of it read like advanced mathematics textbooks, some like a James Bond adventure and some pure nonsense. His computer analysis didn’t give results any different than the best books, but it allowed him to determine what was sound and what was hype.
He spent six months analyzing and practicing before returning to the Turning Stone. On that trip he played 18 hours and won $563. On the next three trips he won almost $2,000. Blackjack was his new job.
Now, thanks to that tap on his shoulder, he was out of work. Back to re-reanalyzing sales figures, playing FreeCell and surfing the net.
Love@aol
Personals
Women Seeking Men
Ages 40 – 60
Looking for: Male for a casual or serious relationship
Reply to Screen Name: CASEYJOAN1
Location: Westchester County, New York
ALL THE BEST
Me...50s, widow, petite, attractive, blonde hair, dark brown eyes, Ph.D., World traveler, financially secure, spontaneous (the child inside is alive and well!!!)
YOU....50s, intelligent, tall, attractive, witty, playful yet sophisticated, well read, likes golf and cross-country skiing, long country walks, good food and great conversation.
Love@aol
Personals
Women Seeking Men
Ages 40 – 60
Looking for: Male for a casual or serious relationship
Reply to Screen Name: JulieCN101
Location: Toronto, CN
Authentic Man for Romance...and?
Wonderful woman available for long-term relationship with Mr. Wonderful. He would be gentle, loving, handsome, FUN, intelligent. He would read books and love sunsets and fuss over me on birthdays.
I love travel, great restaurants, music, shows in Toronto and NYC, etc. I love animals and kids (just don’t want to raise anymore). I am 52, look like 42, and have a wonderful attitude about life. I like tall men 5’ 10” or taller, non-smokers preferred. Age – somewhere between 45 and 60 with a mandatory young spirit.
He hit the bar for the NEWS Channel. To his surprise, the screen came up Love@aol. He assumed he had hit the wrong bar and closed the window. Again click on NEWS, again Love@aol. A third try, this time very careful to click on NEWS, a third look at Love@aol. Evidently AOL had their wires, or channels, crossed.
Well, he thought, perhaps this would be more interesting than the news. First he tried the “Browse” option. Literally thousands of user-placed personal ads appeared, or at least the title line for thousands of ads. A click on the title line revealed the entire ad. He read a few; most were young (anything under 40 was young to him) and from California. He took another approach – “Search.”
He clicked on “Women seeking men,” “Age: 40-60,” “Location: Rochester, New York.” Forty or so title lines appeared. He read most of the ads. Later AOL would add pictures, but now there was only text. He expected them to be kinky, sadly lonely, or obvious losers. But they weren’t. The ads appeared genuine and honest. People with active lives who found themselves single, usually again, at this stage of life. They were doing what they could to reach out. They were taking a chance, but not too big a one. They were still behind the anonymity of a screen name.
He could relate to these ads – and he didn’t like it. He thought he was unique. No one else had gone through what he had gone through. No one understood. No one could understand. Now he saw a whole community of people, for various reasons, in similar situations. He treasured his uniqueness; his misery didn’t want or need company. He hadn’t shared his feelings with anyone, and didn’t want to share them now. They were his, his alone. He resented having them in common with hundreds of other people. Worse yet, these people were trying to move on. To find some happiness. To move on was to deny the past – this he did not want to do. This he could not do.
He shut down the computer. It was as if the devil had offered him a glimpse of Hell. Expecting to see fire, brimstone, monsters and torture, he saw himself – or people just like him, not knowing it was Hell. “We have seen Hell and it is us!”
The next day he apprehensively clicked on the NEWS Channel. The latest crisis in the Middle East, the shenanigans of a boy president and Congress’ self-righteous reactions filled the screen. No glimpse of Hell. Apparently AOL had uncrossed their channels.
Was he relieved? No, he was disappointed. Those ads had hung in his mind all night. Did he have something to learn? If his feelings weren’t that unique maybe they weren’t that valuable. Perhaps he didn’t need to hang on to them like family heirlooms.
He couldn’t stay in his state of suspended emotional animation forever, could he? But time alone wasn’t going to get him out of it. It had been three years. It hadn’t seemed like three years and he knew another three years wouldn’t seem like three years either. “Time heals all wounds.” Bull Shit! Time does nothing, it just passes. What does time mean when every day is just like the last? It’s repetition, not medication.
Those ads showed that time heals only if you do something with it. Nothing was going to change until he made it change. He knew he had to be more like those people in the ads, he had to take a chance; he had to change the mix. But not yet. He wasn’t ready yet. He hadn’t figured the odds yet. He needed those ads to complete the equation.
So he was disappointed when AOL didn’t take him there on its own accord. Of course, he could have gone directly to Love@aol. But he wasn’t ready for anything that overt. It was okay to get there by accident, by some strange AOL error, but not intentionally. Not by power of his own will.
After a week he figured AOL’s fix of their channel crosser was permanent. One accident per customer was all he could expect. This time he was prepared. He searched on cities between 100 and 400 miles away. He omitted Rochester and Buffalo. He knew and was known by too many people in those cities. He didn’t want to suddenly discover that he was corresponding with his ex-secretary, or an old boss’ ex-wife. He wasn’t sure why this mattered, but it did. If he was going to break from the past he didn’t want to unexpectedly be pulled back. He might have been afraid he would find someone who knew Margaret.
One page per city. One line per ad. He recorded the title line, screen name, age, any describers (height, weight, hair color…) and what had attracted him to the ad, in neat columns. A Ph.D., someone who shared his passion for college basketball and liked casinos, some because they appeared articulate and interesting. He read several hundred ads and recorded about 20. He printed those of interest and clipped them to the city cover sheet. That was enough work for one night.
He spent the next day composing a generic response.
Your ad in the AOL personals was very appealing. I would like to know more.
It went on for another 500 words. He was later to find that was considerably more than the average response. He picked the top five ads from the lists he had generated the night before, sent his emails and waited. One responded that night, two others in the next few weeks and he never heard from the other two.
From: CASEYJOAN1
Subj: Re: ALL THE BEST
To: NewsletterSteve
Steve,
Thank you for your informative reply to my personal ad. I will supply details for you. I am a widow of nearly two years and now feel it is right to get on with my life.
I am 5’2” tall, blonde with dark eyes and not to be too immodest, can be considered attractive.
I have a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering and ran a lab at Dupont for many years. When my husband (also an engineer) became ill I left my job and established a private consulting practice. This allowed me more flexibility to be with him.
You sound VERY interesting. Let’s continue this conversation. If you would like to talk voice to voice my phone number is .....
Joan
He developed an email/telephone relationship with Joan as well as other women. Each night he would select a city, search the ads, and sent off several copies of his generic reply. In a week or so, he would be corresponding with several more women. The response rate was a fairly consistent 60%. About half of those developed into serious correspondences with daily emails passing back and forth. Send out 10 replies, get three email partners. That was the formula.
Joan was the first woman he arranged to meet. He had a business meeting in New York City and would drive to Westchester County afterwards. He had not had a “date” with anyone other than Margaret in over 40 years. Now he was corresponding over the Internet and telephone with more than a dozen women, had a date planned and had lists of ads still to be answered. In the next six months he would date over 30 different women, eight of them intimately. That was probably five times as many women as he had dated in his entire life up until then, and exactly eight times as many as he had slept with.
It’s a cliché, but as he prepared for these rendezvous, he experienced multiple emotions. Certainly anticipation; he looked forward to the new experience. He had no idea what to expect. Would these women be what he expected? Would he be what they expected? Did he even know what he expected?
But anticipation definitely took a backseat to apprehension. As far as dating went he was still 16 years old. No, worse than that. He had never been part of the dating scene. He had no experience, no matter how outdated, to fall back on. He had no idea what he was doing. This was an alien world for him.
Guilt was also part of the mix. Was he being unfaithful to Margaret? He knew that relationship was over. It had ended three years ago. For him it ended reluctantly, and certainly not on the terms he wanted. But, he was not in denial; it was over.
True, he still wore his wedding ring. Margaret was not wearing hers. He had it. She had given it to him – not in anger, anger passes – but calmly saying, “Here, you better keep this.” And he did.
He still came home from the office after midnight most nights, but now he didn’t make the phone call at six to tell her he was hung up at the office and to go ahead and start dinner without him. Or the second call even later, telling her he would be a few more hours, not to wait up. It didn’t matter to her anymore.
He had never been unfaithful to her and, no, he wasn’t now. That didn’t matter to her anymore either.
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