Presence

Apparently How Some Employees See Me

I had something odd happened to me yesterday.  My wife asked me to pick up something at the supermarket on the way home.  I’ve always taken a weird sense of almost pride in not being lost in a supermarket.  I see guys who obviously don’t have a clue about grocery shopping looking baffled by trying to find something.  I’ve tried to overcome this.  This didn’t happen overnight but through years of careful training at the hands of my wife.  Damn it, she’s done it again – I’ve got to get a copy of that husband training handbook she has!  Anyway after calling her on the cell phone to confirm what she had sent me for I was heading towards the cash register when a guy stopped me and asked me if I worked there.  I immediately tried to put on a withering look of complete disdain but only managed to laugh and issue a quick, “No sorry, I’m just heading out.”  He apologized profusely and said it looked like I was in charge.  This caused me to think back on some things other people had said.  We’re in negotiations and one of the union leaders told me that some of the employees are scared to death of me, even though I’ve never raised me voice there (well almost never).  Another friend was a kid when I was a comp counselor in college and she said that I scared the hell out of the kids back then.  I think it comes down to physical size.  I experienced two growth spurts, one in high school and another one in college.  This led me to usually being the biggest guy in any crowd I was hanging out with.  I never even thought about it and friends who know me laugh at the notion that I could be intimidating.  In part of my mis-spent youth I worked as a bar tender in an English Pub in Frankfurt, Germany.  On my day off I was hanging out with some friends at the bar when the owner, my boss, said he needed help.  Another American, about my size, was drunk and getting belligerent with some of the English dart players, all rather small guys.  He asked me to have a word with him.  Being young and dumb, I went over and grabbed the guy’s arm as he was headed towards his target.  All I said was, “Hey no trouble in here, okay?”  He stopped immediately, apologized, and a couple of his friends escorted him out.  As he reached the door he turned around and acted like his friends were holding him back from trying to return to fight with me.  Everyone in the pub knew at that point he was a fraud, a bully who ran when his target wasn’t so easy.  In my life I’ve spent too much time (or not enough) in bars because I’ve always enjoyed the comradery but I’ve only been in a few bar fights and I think it’s because I look a lot more dangerous than I really am.  Size has a quality all its own and I know it helped in my career as an infantry officer.  The Army I joined in 1978 was completely different than the professional organization it became.  It was beset with drug problems and the Soldiers were a really poor lot.  In my first assignment as a lieutenant I actually had to use my size to back down some of the more energetic non-performers.  Once I had to wrestle a drunken para-trooper to the ground and hold him there until the MPs came.  He started beating his face on the street (honest he really did).  He ended up with a whole face of scabbed over cuts for the next week and I never had a problem with any of my troops in that unit again.   I’m not that big a guy but I’ve been fooling people for years as to my dangerous levels.  One of my daughter’s earliest boyfriends nicknamed me Bonecrusher – so it’s not always a bad thing.   Now if I could only figure out a way to intimidate a certain 110 pound Panamanian.  Now all of my friends are laughing.