The Last Year, Part 6

Ok, Now it gets interesting. 

1985-1990 Distribution Consultant

This was a major turning point in my working life. Rather than a local gut trying to make a mark in a distribution center, I was now a corporate distribution consultant. My new boss, Wade Lukas, recruited me from Safeway Seattle Division and pulled out the stops to entice me to move to California. It worked. 

For the first few months, I was a member of a medium department. Maybe about 12 other folks at the same level as me. Than the corporate take over, leveraged buy out, whatever you call it, the Safeway that was a large public company was taken over by wall street people. Right away, those financial people decided to sell of whole divisions, and distribution centers. My department at Oakland was chopped from that dozen to about 2, myself, Chuck Finley and the manager.

One of the duties now on our plate was to assist in shutting down those operations. That wasn’t fun. Chuck did most of that as they had me cranking out new applications for the trucking people to use on their PC’s. I turned out a lot.

I traveled quite a bit (Mom says during this time, she lived in Vallejo, I just visited). The job was to advise the local DC managers and transportation, and maintenance people on how to better do the job. It was advise as the DC’s stayed independent (for the most part), answering to the local division managers. But while not in their chain of command, our advice was thoughtful and pretty much universally respected.

While on this part of my career, I golfed, or at least pretended to. The Safeway upper ups were golf fanatics, so I pretended to golf. Sometimes just a 3 or 4 at the little course near the Oakland airport, on occasion, at a good size tournament. I bought lots of the cheapest golf balls I could find.

On one such conference, I flew to Phoenix to a very nice golf resort. Upper Ups loved golf resorts for ‘meetings. When the 4 worker bees were setting up, we heard about the earthquake in the bay area. That was an anxious time for us, as it was near impossible to call back to the bay area to see if you guys were ok. We took over an hour with all of us calling over and over before one of us got through. All of our families were fine. During this time, we recognized a long time before the news people that the viaduct road leading to our offices, and the airport had collapsed. We knew it, from the aerial pictures, but were amazed that it took so long for the news people to recognize that as the worst potential for people losing life or being seriously injured. Yeah, that was my drive to and from work or the airport. Pretty chilling.

Eventually, and really not that long in the scheme of things, I decided to abandon that corporate life and move all of us back to Washington.