The Rebel

Dwight had been upset from the morning. I didn’t ask him what was troubling him. I had to finish some work and wasn’t ready to lose the whole morning. He tells you his stories only twenty times before repeating. I approached the subject with him after lunch. He was waiting for me to ask and exploded, “Do you know what the accounts people have done this time? They are going to deposit our salaries directly in our bank accounts.” I saw nothing wrong in that. “Why do you care? Are you uncomfortable with giving them your bank account number?” Dwight said that he did not have any such problem. He said he always deposited his paycheck personally and did some more routine transactions at the same time “down at the bank next to Ukrop’s.” And he had been doing that all his career.

“You know Dwight? It’s only easier for you now. They have spared you the trip. You can do all that by one phone call. Or even on the PC over the internet if you are brave enough.”

“But I always go there and do it myself. Always. The Tellers know me very well down there.” I tried to find out if that was the motive. “Are there any cute Tellers in that branch of yours?” I asked. “No. They are just good people. In fact one of then went to school with my mom.” I gave up after Dwight repeated for forty minutes that he always went to the branch with his paycheck. Always. Always.

Ever since I moved from San Jose, I found Dwight very interesting – or amusing. Dwight lived all his life within a radius of twenty miles. He graduated from local schools and local university. All his friends and family were in Richmond. He did not even have a long distance calling plan. His routines were well set and he practiced them religiously. So even a small change in his routine was a major disruption. If there was a construction in the Three Chopt Road, the whole organization heard about it. Dwight kept us all entertained for two full weeks on his direct deposit nightmare.

We had an employee by name Radha from India. One day, Dwight was giving her the local history and said that Richmond burned in both the wars. That confused her a bit. She said, “I am not that good in history. But I thought there was no attack on the mainland. Wasn’t Pearl Harbor the only place attacked in the whole war?” That day, we were treated to the “true and authentic” version of the American Civil War. That jogged the Hollywood sponsored history knowledge of Radha and both went down the memory lanes as if those two were Rhett Butler and Scarlet. I think this irritated Sean, a new comer. Dwight informed me later that Sean was a Connecticut Yankee. I didn’t even know that there were such fine classifications. Sean asked Radha if she knew Newton’s third law of American Literature. “To every Gone with the wind, there is an equal and opposite Uncle Tom’s cabin.” Let me just tell you that the rest of the afternoon was very lively. Both of them were telling Radha how evil the other side was.

Two months later, Sean was made Dwight’s manager. Both Sean and Dwight were good workers. But Sean was well known for his new techniques and for keeping up with the market changes. He introduced new procedures and tools in the workplace. I don’t have to tell you how Dwight reacted to all that. Radha called their team “the civil war team”. The team meetings came to be known as “The Manassas Day” or “The Gettysburg Day” depending on who prevailed. Radha said that she was witnessing history as it happened. Her knowledge of the civil war seemed to grow everyday too.

Then came the light bulb joke. I was chatting with Dwight in the break room. Sean walked in and asked me with a mischievous smile, “Do you know how many Virginians it takes to change a light bulb?” I had heard many light bulb jokes but this was new to me. “I don’t know. How many?” That set the stage for Sean and he went, “Three. One to change the bulb and two to talk about how great the old one was!”

Dwight quit that day. Radha called it “the Appomattox Day”. I heard that Dwight was suing the company for harassment. I ran into him after few months in a pub (on second right after Stoney’s statue as Sean would put it). Dwight said he was going to teach history in high school. “The right history”, he said.