later the message will get through. No matter what kind of upbringing someone has had, as long as you know the kind of behavior that is acceptable, sooner or later that fact is going to get across. It may take a little longer to communicate it to someone from a seriously disadvantaged background who doesn’t know any better, but eventually you’ll make your point.”
A good personnel officer knows there are times when you don’t know exactly how to respond. When those times come—and they come to the best of us—the best thing is to remain silent.
Roy ate an M&M.
“I have to admit I was getting pretty downhearted at the amount of time that had gone by with no apparent result,” said Laura. “And to be fair, it wasn’t just Ed, all of the team had an attitude that was not the easiest thing for someone from a different background to accept. But then one day it was the funniest thing. They just seemed to change overnight. I don’t know what brought about the change, but I presume it was just that the time had come. They realized somebody was going to have to change, and since I had demonstrated in no uncertain terms that it was not going to be I, they accepted that it was just going to have to be they.”
“And you can’t pinpoint some specific incident that might have triggered the improvement?” said Roy. Through no fault of her own, Laura was not in a position to see the larger picture. Whatever it was that the team had responded to seemed to have had that effect on everyone in the company. You can’t work in personnel without becoming something of a cynic, and Roy doubted that the ladylike comportment of their secretary had had such dramatic and far-reaching consequences.
“No, not really,” said Laura. “Although I remember they had all had appointments with a gentleman from a temporary agency who was investigating their requirements. It may be that he may have said something in passing which gave them that little additional insight into their behavior.”
This was the first that Roy had heard that the representative from the agency had talked to all the men on the team individually. This was highly unusual, and it would have really been more appropriate to clear it with personnel, but Roy couldn’t fault the agency. It had delivered some really first-class employees, girls Roy would have been happy to have offered a place on the team with no ifs, ands, or buts.
“Well, I’ll leave you in peace,” said Roy. “Keep up the good work!” Roy knew the value of an encouraging word even if some people didn’t.
He was no closer to the heart of the mystery than he had been when he started out. But that there was a mystery was something he didn’t doubt for one second. Something was afoot. The question was, what might that something be?
Roy was determined to leave no stone unturned until he got to the bottom of it.
Roy took the rest of the blue M&M’s to Reception.
At his size, he had to plan ahead. It was no good suddenly making the discovery that he urgently needed to go to the bathroom, since there was no way he could get to the bathroom in a hurry. So he decided to stop off on his way back to his office as a precautionary measure.
Roy sat on the disabled toilet, a prey to uncertainty. What was going on? There were no clues to speak of. What if the trail had gone cold?
He shook his head and sighed. He really should try to cut down. Three jumbo bags of peanut M&M’s per day just wasn’t healthy. Moderation in all things—that should be our watchword.
The thing was, though, that he had cut back at one point. He’d gotten down to one bag a day and he’d stuck to that religiously for a month. But by the end of the month he’d had to concede defeat. Because the problem was, it had impacted negatively on his performance. The human mind is a strange animal, no two alike, and for some reason the activity of going through the different colors of M&M was essential if his mind was to function at its best. And the job was such that a single bag just wasn’t adequate to see you through the manifold challenges that you were apt to meet in the course of a day. He had heard smokers make the same observation. Smoking