Risk tolerance

the things I like doing that scare the poop out of you--and why

Guys,

Welcome to the group chat, “These are the Mikes I know I know”. Since we’ve reconnected, some of you have asked me, “Auxie, why Human Resources? How did you, with the pottiest of mouths and most vulgar of humors, end up doing Human Resources?” Driving home from a new client last week, it occurred to me: I have a pretty high tolerance for risk.

You knew that already from the travel I did that you would never dream of doing. Mikkel, I gave you a metric ton of shit about how your exotic travel was following your girlfriend to Goa, a place that whites denuded of danger in the 60s and then invented trance. Those two weeks we all spent on the East Coast of Taiwan, surfing and being mystified by the menus in the night market? The worst things that happened were we ate too much Subway out of convenience and I got poison ivy from sightseeing in a canyon. Remember, CM, eating makguksu before you left Korea and you were agonizing about what anti-malarial to take for your trip to the mountains of Thailand—Thailand, the Disneyland of the world, if you ask me, so easy is it to explore—and I called you a pussy in front of your mom? She agreed with me, too.

Mikes I know I know, when it comes to danger, you’re all pussies. How many of the Former World’s Most Dangerous Cities did you visit in your travels? I count five: Capetown, Johannesburg, Medellín, Bogotá and Caracas. Many of them still rank regularly on the list of the Top 50 Most Dangerous Cities in the World, based on homicide rates. I traveled solo, sans a Mike like you. I didn’t choose those places because of the danger, but when I weighed the pros and cons, I didn’t give the increased likelihood of violence as much weight as you did. But then I was raised testing the value of my life.

My stepdaughter, Maggie, gets frustrated sometimes when she tries to complain to me about our expectations for her. “Are you going to tell me another story about how Danny Ekster almost killed you?” It’s true; I have a certain class of stories that begin, “Let me tell you about this one time my dad almost killed me.”

You’re all knowledgeable about geography. My natal city shares a border with a city ranked on the current list of World’s Most Dangerous. Many Mexican border towns do. Danny Ekster, though, got the taste of the rutted roads and empty beaches of Baja, surf breaks where solitude could be had. And once you’re out of the towns and cities, there’s not a lot a law enforcement. There’s not a lot of anything. You could crack a beer behind the wheel and enjoy a long drive with a malt beverage with few fears of repercussions. The laws that had to be obeyed were physics, not legal codes.

Maybe it was the beers or his belief that it is a father’s job to toughen his kids rather than to protect them, but there wasn’t a lot of softening of his Baja pursuits when he brought my sister and I along. The trip would always take at least eight hours of driving. We would see at least three wrecks on the way and there would be a crisis regarding our route—the safer road would have a bridge washed out or a town’s gas station was shut down and we would have to make a choice: the route we had planned or a different, less reliable route? One place had two ways in: a circuitous route around the foot of a coastal mountain range, with long miles backtracking north above bluffs overlooking the Pacific; or a rancher’s pass through those mountains, scraped into the rocky slopes that he called the “Road through Hell”. As a shortcut, it shaved two hours off the drive time. Some trips, there were reports that the shortcut was washed away and he’d tell us we’d have to go the long way. Other trips, we’d be offered a choice. Sometimes, we willingly chose the Road through Hell.

The journeys were a lot more comfortable for my sister; as the oldest, she got shotgun unless she had a friend. I was relegated to the covered cab of my dad’s four-cylinder Toyota Truck. I forget that none of you, Mikes I know I know, are Truck Guys, and if in middle age you’ve developed an appreciation for cars, it is for their fuel efficiency and value retention as an asset.

Art by Nick Vargas

To clarify: my father drove hundreds of miles on roads notorious for lethal conditions in a truck smaller and lighter than your modern sedans with one of his kids bouncing around without a seatbelt in the back. With mostly luck, we didn’t die.

I’ve lost the plot, as my South African friends would chide. On these trips, Danny Ekster primed me to have low expectations of safety. And then there were the actual near-death experiences, of which I am so fond of telling people.

Let’s recap: when I was six, there was the time that he took my sister and I on a Zodiac raft in head-high swells with no outboard motor and the raft flipped on us, no one wearing life jackets. I was trapped under the raft rather than sucked out to sea. I remember the roar and the noise and bubbles and then I remember being out of my body, watching from the shore a towheaded child wailing, splayed out upon the bottom of a raft being pulled in from sea by two adults and two teenagers.

At seven, there was the time we returned home from a spot that the only route in was the firm sandy beach at low tide—the other side was hundreds of square miles of sand dunes. We timed our exit poorly, the tide coming in quickly and liquefying the driving surface. The Toyota Truck become stuck—it couldn’t have been self-rescued without a winch and fixed surface—water soon swirled in the wheel wells and up to the axles. Amazingly, six Mexicans with shovels appeared from the dunes and dug us out, Danny repaying them with the only hard currency he would spare, a six-pack of beers.

At eight, there was the time he borrowed a friend’s quad, who I remember explicitly giving the instructions that he had to be careful on any steep sections because it was a manual transmission (do any of you Mikes know how to drive a manual?) and would stall. Driving in the sand dunes, we came upon what I thought was too steep a section and pleaded with him not to go. Halfway up the hill, he tried to downshift but, as warned, the engine stalled and the quad’s front end lifted, tumbling us over, then onto us, then taking us down the hill. I nursed a sprain wrist for weeks and distrust for my father to this day.

Yes, he almost killed me, but the key here is “almost”. He taught me how to assess the risks for myself, and that the higher the perceived likelihood of death the more rewarding life would be on the other side of the gamble. Other people’s tolerances and constraints weren’t mine and often weren’t very accurate to the real dangers. Just because you shouldn’t do it—maybe it was even illegal—it might be fun. And the social capital of a good story might be worth the potential loss of life.

I hear you shaking your head at me, thinking, “Yes, Auxie, we remember that you being raised by an oblivious drunk with poor impulse control is one of the reasons why you traveled to all those places we wouldn’t have dared to go. But what does this have to do with your career in Human Resources?”

Well, it’s addicting, that rush of adrenaline, especially when the stakes are as high as your life. The only other way to get it is gambling. I’m not attracted to gambling with my money; I’m not attracted to the possibilities that large sums of money bring. I hate losing generally (that’s why I never joined your Game Nights), but the loss of my freedom from having too much debt terrifies me.

But gambling with other people’s money? Sign me up.

And that’s what I do in Human Resources: I gamble with other people’s money. A company comes to me with situations and desired outcomes and they ask me what I think its going to cost them if they run afoul of the laws and regulations. And I assess the risk, the regulations and case law, but more importantly, the protected categories of the individuals involved, the emotional temperament, their individual volatility. I tell them what they could lose if they get caught (sued) doing it the way that they want. And then I tell them what I assess is the likelihood of that.

It’s not all dirty stuff in my career—I have educated employees about their rights and when applicable, government programs to assist them in certain cases, like unemployment, food stamps, and disability, and I feel of service when I am in the role of social worker—but that’s not why I keep choosing this role. I have some standards: no client has asked me if they could do anything that I find is immoral—animal smuggling, human trafficking, slavery, forcible rape and murder; and I don’t tolerate businesses who are explicitly discriminatory, though unwinding “disparate impact” is usually why I stay.

And I stay because the people I work for are like me. They have found themselves at odds with other people’s tolerance for risk, or that their desire for freedom and to do what they want outweighs the security of a regular paycheck obtained by selling five days out of seven, every 50 to 52 weeks. They see themselves as the embodiment of the American dream: Entrepreneurs. They’ve built these companies that have provided jobs to mostly good people and so they see themselves as mostly good people. They just need some guidance. To know, really, what the stakes are.

Assessing the legal risk isn’t difficult; the judicial system in America is quite literally stacked against the individual. But, my god, the time of preparing to defend a case, the arduous process of collecting documentation, of going through mediation, of preparing to be deposed and then being deposed, and then to actually go to trial (or in most cases, arbitration)—it’s quite a collection of hurdles for both sides to go through. It’s only the most motivated people who will put a company through this, and they, like me, are usually not motivated by prospective financial gains but strong, negative emotions.

This is where I excel in my role, assessing the emotional tenor of the alleged grievance as well as how attractive an attorney might perceive an aggrieved employee. That is what I apprise my clients of. You didn’t really do anything wrong, I might say, in the eyes of the law, but this person is really pissed. They expected, based on your stated values, how other people have been treated in your organization, and their cumulative lifetime experience of trading labor for money, that you would have acted differently.

It’s been me, too, whose acted as the Agent of the Company. Guys, that is when I’ve really felt the adrenaline pumping, that familiar feeling of bumping down a washed-out road going too fast without a seat belt. This may be the most surprising thing to learn about me, based on what you know of my personality: I am surprisingly adept at keeping my cool. I’ve made it an art, I think. I let the aggrieved rage at the unfairness and I listen calmly and label their affect to show that I understand what they are feeling. But as the Agent of the Company, I calmly resume that we will not be doing what they want us to do and engineer the end of the conversation.

Afterwards, at home, after the buzz of control and victory has left my arms and legs, I sip some whisky and contemplate if I should use these powers to dismantle the systems that enable Corporations to shield selfish assholes from their callousness.

But you know me, Guys, Mikes I know that I know, I’ve always been comfortable with contradictions, with being different.

Your sister in risk,

XX