The Journal of Best Practices

by David Finch

  “I mean, how many Toyota Camrys do you have available on any given day? Five Toyota Camrys? Ten?” The clerk sighed and I heard a flurry of keystrokes on his keyboard.

  “Why do you need a Camry?”

  I don’t know, asshole, why do you breathe air? Would you like it if breathing air was this difficult for you? I didn’t want to be troublesome; he was only following policy, and frankly, I didn’t want to deal with my craziness any more than he did. But there we were. I looked up at my computer monitor, hoping that it might have a convincing answer flashing across it, something to conclude the argument in my favor. I was so frustrated that I wanted to cry. This doesn’t need to be so hard.

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” I said. “I just prefer to drive a Toyota Camry. I know how they steer, I know where the mirror adjustment thing is, I just . . . I need a Toyota Camry.” My heart was beating heavily, and I repeated myself. “I need a Toyota Camry.”

  “Sir, I do apologize. If you’d like me to go ahead and make a reservation we will do the best we can to—”

  “Okay. Please, make the reservation. And note that I want a Toyota Camry, goddammit.”

  I slammed the phone down and my ear tuned into the familiar, stomach-knotting chuckles of the sales guy sitting in the cubicle across from me. “You okay, Finchy?” he asked. He didn’t know that I had Asperger syndrome; he just thought I was a freak. He drove a Toyota Avalon—a Camry for rich people. Fuck him.

  This was how it went with every car rental counter at Standiford that morning, and this was what would go down every time I needed to travel for work. By lunchtime, I had four car reservations set for the date of our arrival: Hertz, Avis, Enterprise, and Thrifty. This was the sort of thing Clint was referring to when he said he needed me to look more managerial. More “normal.”

  Sadly, even with all these idiosyncrasies, I was still a much better employee than I was a husband or father. One doesn’t set out to be a top performer at work by driving his marriage into the ground, necessarily. At least I didn’t. But then, the relationship between an employee and his managers and customers is vastly different from that of a husband and father to his wife and children. My business relationships—my managers, coworkers, and customers—didn’t require a great deal of connection or empathy. The connections I made with these people were superficial, everybody knew it, and we were all fine with it. Managers, for instance, don’t need a buddy, they need an employee. They define clear objectives and provide explicit direction. There is nothing to infer, only goals to achieve. Because I stopped at nothing to achieve goals, managers appreciated me.

  There is also very little guesswork when it comes to a customer’s needs. There is some maneuvering and strategy involved in convincing them to agree to a sales pitch, but once they’re interested in whatever it is you’re selling, they spell out their needs in no uncertain terms: “If you want to sell me a microprocessor, here are the features I need. This is the quantity I need, this is the price I want, this is when I need them, this is the type of support I’m going to require.” I would jot it all down in my notebook, making it impossible not to deliver exactly what they needed. Detailed contracts were signed. It was all black-and-white, no guesswork, impossible to screw up.

  My experience at home was decidedly different. There were no contracts dictating our actions; nothing was black-and-white. Empathy was a requirement. When Kristen, Emily, and Parker needed something, they didn’t want to have to explain it to me. They didn’t want to define clear objectives for me and provide explicit direction for how I needed to support them. They needed me to understand them like a normal husband and father would. They needed me to participate in our relationships, but I couldn’t.

  I never felt particularly proud of my accomplishments at work, probably because on some level I was aware of my shortcomings as a family man. In the time since I had returned from my honeymoon, my job title had gone up several notches. I had become responsible for driving the technology strategies for a handful of large customers. Sitting on my bookshelf were half a dozen corporate-recognition plaques lauding my performance and dedication to the company. But what had I accomplished at home in those five years? I had alienated my wife, my best friend. I had lost her admiration. I had fathered two children but I hadn’t exactly participated in the process of raising them. If I had performed like that at work, I’d have been fired. Yet Kristen still supported me, still loved me. She never left me. And my kids were constantly giving me another chance: “Daddy’s home! Can we play, Daddy?” How had they not earned my loyalty? My dedication? My full participation?

  At work, we were constantly being lectured on the concept of disruptive innovation: breaking the status quo and improving your business by introducing new ideas, new technologies, new ways of doing things. With my Journal of Best Practices, I had disrupted five stagnant years of marital status quo. The result? I was finally starting to question what was really important to me. I was on a mission to define my true priorities. I was examining myself rather carefully, and sometimes quite literally—staring at my reflection in the window behind Clint’s desk, for instance, as he rambled on about my career path—and I wasn’t always proud of what I was seeing.

  My performance review was almost over, and I was starting to get antsy. I wanted to go back to my desk and make my hotel reservation for our trip to Louisville, and I knew I had to call the hotel before four o’clock because that was when I was most likely to speak with Jennifer, the only person at the front desk who willingly broke her back accommodating my requests. (“Okay, Mr. Finch, we have you all set for one night, arriving on the nineteenth . . . I’ve indicated that you will be arriving in a Toyota Camry, which, again, makes no difference to us . . . Got you a standard room, king-size bed, nonsmoking, foam pillows, two wake-up calls, and we’ll put you as far away from other guests as possible. Will you be needing anything else, Mr. Finch?”)

  Clint leaned back in his chair. “Let’s review your stakeholder map,” he said. “Put it up.”

  Ah, the stakeholder map. Of course. “Ta-da,” I said, securing a piece of paper to Clint’s wall with some rather expensive pushpins I’d ordered for the occasion. (You gotta love office supplies.) “Feast your eyes on that, bitch.”

  Laughing, Clint waved me off. “Move, idiot, I can’t see it. Nice pushpins.”

  If I had any lingering doubt about who in my life deserved the very best from me, this tedious exercise was about to eliminate it. A frantic-looking spreadsheet arranged by customer name, in descending order of their commercial (read: personal) worth, the stakeholder map clearly defined on whom I needed to focus my time and energy. It captured the key people in my career who could help me to grow my business. The people who would use me, and the people whom I would use. The stakeholders. This map, we had been told by a department head, was the single most important tool of a successful businessman. (Prior to the stakeholder map, we had learned the single most important tool of a successful businessman was a well-defined strategy, and the month before that, the single most important tool was some sort of pyramid-shaped thing that I never fully understood.)

  The stakeholder map included customers’ names, titles, strategic programs to which they were linked, and the status of my relationships with them, measured as Adversarial, Poor, Neutral, Good, or Proponent. A column for general notes about the customer was also included, which I used for such comments as Three kids—two in college; wife’s name is Deborah; laughs too hard at racial humor. Most of the guys in my department left that column empty. Actually, looking back, most of them didn’t even bother to complete a stakeholder map, and those who did certainly didn’t hang it above their desks as we’d all been instructed to do. But I did. With outrageously expensive pushpins, no less—Business-Man was such an overachiever.

  Most of the relationships on my map had been marked as either Good or Proponent. To me, this was a clear and depressing reminder of how I had defined my priorities in life. I brought my A-game for the peo
ple on that list because I had to—if I didn’t deliver for them, my career would suffer. Unlike my wife and children, my professional stakeholders only got to see me at my best—they only knew Business-Man. I stayed up nights preparing technology presentations for those people. I traveled to places like Louisville for those people. I sat alone in my hotel room, taping Kleenex to anything I might have to touch—the remote control, the doorknob, the light switches—while they ate dinner at home with their families.

  Clint, however, was over the moon about my stakeholder map: “Dave, this looks great. You’re really making inroads at these accounts.” He was about to review the map one stakeholder at a time when his cell phone rang and he excused himself. As he exited, he didn’t say, “Let’s take a break,” or “Meet me back here in a few.” He said, “Hang on.”

  So I waited.

  Forty-five minutes later, Clint had yet to return. Okay, this is insane. I peeked outside his office door and saw no one, so I walked over to his computer, curious to read the comments he was putting in my performance review. (This was unprofessional on my part, but then I was certain I could have leveraged a case for abusive treatment once I hit the forty-minute mark.) In a section titled “Performance Factors,” Clint had been asked to indicate areas in which I’d exhibited significant strengths, as well as any areas needing development. There were only two areas in which he felt I needed development—organization (probably because he’d ridden in my car) and working more closely with third parties—but he had indicated six major strengths. The first three were creativity, achievement of objectives, and quality of work. No surprises there. The next three strengths—adaptability, communication, and autonomy—seemed a bit ironic. I scrolled down and saw my overall score: Very Good. By definition, this score meant that I had “exceeded objectives in several areas and required only occasional supervision.”

  I didn’t appreciate the real irony of Clint’s assessment until I looked at my stakeholder map and considered how I might have scored had Kristen conducted a similar evaluation at home. What score would I have received for adaptability? The review form defined this as “being open to change with new circumstances.” Going with the flow. We had just begun to work on my openness to change at home, and I was still learning how to adjust to this new mind-set. Meanwhile, at work, I presented myself as nothing if not adaptable. “Sure, I’ll take a new position on the marketing team.” “Of course I can stay until midnight tonight. Whatever it takes.” “Certainly, Clint, I’ll travel to customers every week. Anything else?” At home, Kristen asked me to help fold laundry and my head almost exploded. I guessed that I would receive Needs Development for that one.

  How about autonomy and initiative? Clint seemed to think that I was bursting with it, but Kristen would have offered a different opinion. “Initiative? Please. How is me having to remind you to turn off the television and play with the kids initiative? I’ll put you down for a Needs Development,” I imagined her saying.

  Achievement of objectives would have gotten me a high mark with Kristen, until I scrolled down farther and read the definition, which included the phrase “gets things done efficiently and in a timely manner.” I thought of the Christmas decorations drooping from our eaves. I thought of the countless times Kristen and I had been late for an engagement and she’d found me standing in my boxers in front of the mirror making faces.

  I started feeling overwhelmingly disappointed in myself, but then I read the definition of “quality of work,” on which I knew Kristen would have scored me as highly as possible: “employee strives to do the right things right and seeks continuous improvement.” There was hope. I thought about what Kristen and I were accomplishing with my Journal of Best Practices. I realized that if I had successfully redefined something as huge as my version of an ideal marriage, then I could certainly redefine my priorities with respect to work and family life. My greatest contribution to my family wouldn’t have to be financial if I shifted my priorities. I could actually focus on being a worthy husband and father—not developing a character to play the part, but becoming the real thing—and I could let my professional life accommodate that.

  I looked at my stakeholder map, at the rows upon rows of people who couldn’t care less about me, who just needed a warm body who would cater to their needs—the people who got my best hours every week. The people who always got to see me smile and hear me laugh. The people who had come to rely on me to make their lives easier. And I had one thought: Fuck you people. No offense.

  I was in a much better mood when Clint finally returned to his office, although I was more anxious than ever to get home.

  “Dude, are you still in here?” he asked, looking surprised.

  “Well, yeah! You said to wait.”

  “Idiot, that was like an hour ago!” He erupted in hysterical laughter. “What the hell’s the matter with you? Dave, next time I tell you to hang on, if it’s longer than five minutes, just leave!” He caught his breath and asked me again what was wrong with me.

  “I didn’t want to be insubordinate.” I should probably tell him that I have Asperger syndrome and I take commands literally, but nah. Nobody needs to know.

  We proceeded with the remainder of my review. I couldn’t pay attention, of course, but I didn’t really have to. I’d read the scores on my evaluation. I understood that the tone of our meeting was congratulatory. I understood what I needed to do, and finally, I understood who my real stakeholders were. Clint is right, I thought. Things are going well, but there’s a lot of work yet to be done.

  Chapter 9

  Take notes.

  Idrove home from work after my performance review thinking about my relationship with Kristen, my usual drive-time topic. I couldn’t shake the spirit of personal assessment, and as a result I was evaluating our relationship through a different, more analytical lens.

  It had been eleven months since my diagnosis—eleven months since I’d embarked on this quest to become a better husband. When we first started all this, I presumed that by the one-year mark I would have been cured of all my problematic Asperger’s symptoms. I figured by that time Kristen and I would be the iconic happy couple doing the sorts of things that nauseate real people: eating ice cream from each other’s cones, for instance, or ice-skating beneath the stars in a crowded rink surrounded by high-rises and Christmas lights. Our weekend in Chicago, perfect as it had been, had changed all that for me. I was willing to part with the romantic icons, but there was a sort of fulfillment—namely, the sort of fulfillment that might compel two people to actually go ice-skating or to share ice cream—that we hadn’t quite achieved, and I wasn’t willing to let go of it.

  Kristen had gone so far as to explain why I was a perfect match for her, but once again I felt as though I hadn’t yet transformed myself into the husband I wanted to be. I wasn’t perfect enough. This notion sprang forth during my performance review earlier in the day and took my mind hostage. There’s nothing like a corporate employee evaluation process to snuff out any feelings of romance or joie de vivre. Then again, there’s nothing like an employee evaluation to help you see yourself as others see you—including the parts of you they try their hardest not to look at. Those are the things that are sometimes best left ignored, but I didn’t know that. I didn’t want to be perfect-ish for Kristen. I wanted to be perfect. The only question was how I might get there.

  Sitting at a red light behind a sleek, black Mercedes, I finally made the connection. My company invested a great deal of time and resources into developing procedures that would ensure that all employees performed at their highest potential. Goals were established, and most important, things like project milestones and employee performance were tracked and reviewed at regular intervals. It was hard not to be successful when every step you took was measured, analyzed, and discussed. Why not approach my personal reconstruction project with the same fervor? I felt my eyes light up. Brilliant! I reached into my glove box and removed an expired vehicle registration card, and acro
ss the back of it I wrote PERFORMANCE REVIEWS. Identify strengths, weaknesses. Set goals, track progress. “This is going to be great!” I declared aloud to no one, drumming my hands excitedly against the steering wheel.

  That evening, I joined Kristen in our master bathroom, eager to get her on board with my new plan. She was sitting on the edge of our bathtub doing something to the bottom of her foot with a rock. Scrubbing, it seemed.

  “Need something?” she asked without looking up.

  I shut the door behind me, stepped over the towel she had spread out on the floor, and parked myself against the sink.

  “Today I figured out how we can change our lives for the better and I want to talk to you about it,” I said, using my Business-Man voice.

  “What, are you enlisting me in a pyramid scheme? You can drop the voice, by the way.”

  “No, this is about me becoming a better husband,” I said in my normal register.

  Kristen paused a moment, glancing at the bathroom door as though she were contemplating a quick exit. She sighed. “Go ahead,” she said, resuming her scrubbing.

  I began by telling her about my employee evaluation earlier in the day and that I couldn’t help but wonder how she might have scored me as a husband had we conducted a similar evaluation at home.

  “And what did you decide?” she asked.

  “Well, I think I would do all right if we evaluated my performance as a husband since last March. But just all right.” She didn’t say anything. “That’s not good enough. I want a perfect score.”

  Kristen set down the stone and wiped her foot with the towel.

  “Dave, we’ve been over this. You’re fine. You’re a great husband. I couldn’t be happier. Pass me that lotion, please. The one you’re sitting on.”

  Handing Kristen her bottle of peppermint-plum foot lotion, I couldn’t help but feel patronized. I couldn’t tell if I was reading her correctly, but she seemed a tad dismissive.