No Good Deed
S.E. Schaible
Every organization I’ve been a part of, from Cub Scouts to high school clubs and sports teams, to my college fraternity and every job or partnership I’ve held since, revealed a tangible 80/20 rule that repeats itself in perpetuity. 20% of the nudniks you work with predictably sow 80% of the headaches and drama, requiring wasted time to extinguish fires that exist solely in their worlds. My friend Mark Berzins cleverly catalogued unacceptable boyfriend candidates for his daughters in his clever book Most Guys AreLosers: Abusive Guy, The Player, The Fighter, The Cheater and more. I’ve quietly assembled a general “people to avoid” list over the years, including The Complainer, The Bootlicker, The Phony, The Passive-Aggressive, The Over-Reactor and the ironically comedic Thinks They’re Smarter Because They Went to Law School – among many others. It is important to keep score and recognize the signs of your own list when hiring, dating, befriending or otherwise deciding who you allow to occupy some of your hours.
At the start of my sophomore year in college, when the dormitory airwaves were saturated with the music of Culture Club, Men at Work, and Naked Eyes, a junior brother approached me and suggested that I run for social chairman of the Chi Phi house. My father had also been a Chi Phi in the late 1950s and had been the social chairman for most of his tenure – right up to the day when a weasel of a chapter president rolled him to the administration for tapping a couple kegs on a random weeknight. What began as a few brothers and some female companions from nearby Cedar Crest College and St. Luke’s Nursing School gradually expanded into a full-blown party. By participating in the fiesta, the duplicitous president – let’s call him Brooks Von Douche – gave tacit approval for the shindig. Brooks had designs on attending an Ivy League law school, meaning if he were implicated in something as unsavory as a Wednesday kegger infraction, that could have jeopardized his chances of being accepted. Charlie Schaible – Slim to his better friends – was the perfect fall guy. My father was tossed from Lafayette College within hours of the treacherous meeting between Brooks and the Deans, earning Brooks the lifelong label of CYA Practitioner – he who pushes others under the bus to cover his ass.
I had no concerns about balancing a checkbook or managing an annual social budget of $36,000 – a respectable sum in the early 1980s – so I accepted the nomination. 24 hours later the votes were tallied, and a new slate of officers was announced. Bob Malley, my predecessor, handed me a ratty checkbook, the padlock key to the barroom sound system cage, a few open invoices and the grubby business card of one Thomas Bubba – aka Mr. B. – the affable Old Milwaukee distributor representative for college hill who always smelled like barber shop talc. “Don’t lose that,” said Bob about the business card. There was no binder of information, not even a change of signature form for the bank account. (By comparison, the pristine Chi Phi archives of term papers, midterm and final exams went back decades, searchable by class code and the professor’s last name, rivaling the Dewey Decimal System.) Bob coached me about the one unforgiveable sin as social chairman: running out of beer. “If a brother wants a cold beer at 6:00am on the Sunday of fall break weekend, even if nobody else is around, he better be able to pour one.” Later that week Mr. B. put me through a crash course of the fundamental reasons why beer would pour incorrectly and how to diagnose and fix issues on the fly.
I learned much about people and their habits during these years as social chairman – or “Social Czar,” as Patrick Beck called me. I quickly learned that if I ordered 17 kegs (more than 260 gallons) for a Wednesday pub night, it was possible that we could run out of beer before midnight – so I always added a couple extras. As a failsafe I needed a network of other campus social chairmen from whom to borrow kegs in a pinch, requiring me to operate outside the tribal cocoon into which fraternities wrapped newly initiated teenage boys. When parents mailed the social dues to their sons instead of directly to me, many of them would deplete the balance by ordering Domino’s Pizza or buying weed or tickets to see Bruce Springsteen. A few such episodes required working with the treasurer to send parents notice that their son would have his meal plan cut off after a certain date unless the social dues were brought current. It was a last resort, but it was effective. Holding this position provided insight into what kind of husbands, managers, parents or supervisors my peers would become. I continued to catalogue personalities as people showed who they were. Some characteristics good; many of them, not so much.
By the time I graduated the culmination of all these human data points yielded a grand lesson, the Big Kahuna: No Good Deed Goes Unpunished. It is a cliché because it is so obviously true, the realization that someone was always going to be unhappy and gripe about something you did, the thankless nature of taking on any leadership role. Several friends agreed that an annual theme party with the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority had lost its luster, so I reached out to their social chair, and we met in February to discuss a different theme for our annual May event. We agreed to contact friends at other party schools, compare notes and come up with something fresh and fun. Two days later the social chair for Pi Phi called me. “Hey, I just heard you aren’t doing Buccaneer Brawl with Kappa this year. We’d love to host that with you, and I have some fun ideas for the preparty,” she said. I couldn’t believe how easy it was.
The next thing I knew a Panhellenic Council meeting was abruptly called, with grievances and accusations of foul play – a shit storm between the two largest sororities on campus. I learned that many sisters at Kappa assumed I had executed a bait-and-switch with the party. The fraternity payphone rang and it was my good friend Mary Stengel, who had recently been elected president of Kappa. “We need to meet for a chat,” she said. We sat in the snack bar, and she proceeded to unpack the unintended consequences of my apparent naivete. Kappa field hockey players scowled from a neighboring booth. I gave Mary the rundown of the discussions and timing and she was kind and empathetic, a total pro. I know she did what she could to diffuse the angry mob; she had my back. A motion was presented that would have barred me from attending future Kappa formals, making me persona non grata, but Mary wasn’t about to allow something so petty to be gaveled into the official record. I walked back to the fraternity hearing my father’s voice from an earlier time when I had made an unpopular choice: “If you don’t piss off a few people, you’re doing something wrong.” This was his way of saying you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs. I wasn’t worried about the Kappas – that would blow over soon enough. Mary and I both knew this was not about me; it was about a decade of rancor between the two sororities that competed for the same freshman girls every fall. That night at a brothers meeting, I was excoriated by a handful of brothers who had Kappa girlfriends, who believed in the five-alarm version of the story. I decided to just take my lumps and let them beat me down for a few minutes, so they could faithfully report back to their better halves that they put me through the wringer. I sipped a beer and I stated for the record that it was all a misunderstanding.
That spring I received a catalog from one of the Greek swag vendors and decided that shot glasses with the Chi Phi logo would be a nice memento for Bottle Night. Exactly as it sounds, Bottle Night was a “family” bonding affair every April where you would split a 750ml bottle of booze with your pledge father (and sometimes your grandfather, if still on campus). At the end of the session, each family would jot down drunken ramblings on a scrap of paper, sign and roll up the message into the bottle – to be hung among hundreds of others in the barroom dating back to before my father’s era. With a renewed focus on better communication habits, I presented the shot glass idea at the next chapter meeting. By the reaction of one of the seniors, you might have thought I pulled down my pants and urinated on the floor of the sacred brother’s room. “Excuse me but, that’s not who we are. Chi Phi doesn’t print lame t-shirts for every little event. This isn’t FIJI. We aren’t KDR. I vote no fucking way. Next topic.”
I had already polled half the brothers – some three dozen guys – who thought the shot glasses were a good idea and were on board with the cost. I knew glassware would outlast any promotional t-shirt or plastic beer cup, and I have mine to this day – as do many of the brothers. I ended up writing orders for 53 shot glasses, and the salesperson informed me there was a discount for 60 pieces. I rounded up, wrote the check, and they arrived a week before the event. Within hours, several brothers who hadn’t preordered came to my room to ask if I had any extra shot glasses, and I was happy to sell them one. Then it happened: The grumpy senior who had bashed me a month earlier sheepishly knocked on my door late one evening. “Hey, man. I was just wondering, I think I heard – did you by chance order any extra shot glasses?” he asked, chewing a pinch of Skoal and clutching a fistful of dollar bills. I smiled and said he was in luck and selling him a shot glass was more validating than any words he might have said. He didn’t owe me an apology; he just owed me five bucks.
After several semesters on the job, I needed to focus on bringing up my grades and decided it was time to hand over the social reins to a younger brother. My friend Z wouldn’t hear of it and proposed the idea of the two of us serving as social co-chairmen. He surprised me going after it hard, promising to split all the work down the middle, which – to nobody’s surprise – never panned out. Maybe he had no idea how much time I spent on the tasks; It’s possible that I had made it look easy. This one vignette is representative of a long semester of the co-chair experiment: Exasperated pledges found me during a crowded party and announced that the taps were foaming at the upper bar. I was sorting out an issue with the music, which had overheated and tripped a fuse right in the middle of Born on theBayou by Creedence. “Find brother Z,” I said.
“We did. He said to go find you.”
“What was he doing?”
“He was talking to some girl at the lower bar.”
This same fraternity brother once veered an overloaded station wagon packed with skis and luggage cruising at highway speed into the breakdown lane of I-70 near St. Louis on a road trip back from Colorado during freshman year, just minutes after taking the wheel for his shift. He claimed that his contact lens was torn, and he couldn’t see at night. Several years later we learned that abruptly locking the brakes in the gravel and sliding to a frightening stop was simply stagecraft, a ruse perpetrated by a guy who wanted to nap the remaining 15 hours. At a summer gathering at the New Jersey shore, brother Z confessed he simply didn’t want to take a turn driving. He just wasn’t in the mood. He laughed like a baboon when he made his big reveal. Those of us who were in the car and recalled the adrenaline dump out on the highway shared glances and raised eyebrows.
It is important to cultivate a sixth sense of the people you don’t wish to hire, or marry, or otherwise trust, but it is equally vital to keep track of the best people you encounter. Seek out The Brilliant, The Natural Leader, The Team Player. Gravitate toward The Mentors, The Nurturers. The Best of the Best. People like my friend Mary.
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