Writing Prompt: He was tired of being dismissed.

Happy Monday everyone. Let’s just jump in and see where the prompt takes us. Fifteen minutes on the timer and off we go.

Huh. Not sure where this is going but it could kick off something fun.

Monday, August 17^th: He was tired of being dismissed.

He was tired of being dismissed.  How many suggestions had he offered?  How many solutions to the current problem?  He took a deep breath and tried to swallow back his own annoyance.  He knew why they weren’t listening.  He knew why his ideas were dismissed.

At first he thought it was because he wasn’t really family.  He married in and therefore was not one of the core.  Never mind that he was the only one with any experience running this sort of company, he wasn’t an Allen by blood. He was just a Thomas who married an Allen.

‘And soon not even that,’ he thought.  Earlier in the month he received definitive proof that Jennifer was cheating on him.  He had contacted his lawyer to begin proceedings and spent the bulk of his time since disentangling himself from Jennifer in all the little legal ways that mattered more to him than anyone else.  Soon he wouldn’t even be associated with the Allens.  However, the papers wouldn’t arrive until this afternoon and there was this one last board meeting to get through.

While he knew not being bon an Allen would be a large measure of why his ideas and comments were dismissed, he knew the bulk of the reasons he was dismissed involved the ideas themselves.  The Allens were in a pickle.  The current situation isn’t one where they could hunker down or glide past and hope it would resolve itself.  Fixing it would require actual work.

They would have to do something.

Doing things was not the Allens strong suit and hadn’t been for five generations.  Certainly, six generations back an Allen had done something.  He built an empire and shored it up well enough that the succeeding five generations that followed had to do little to maintain it.  They lived off the company and the profits of their shares.  They lived off their trust funds but had no practical idea of how the company ran.

They looked down on the people who ran it from Ceos all the way down to the mail room.  They saw no difference between the various people who worked for them.  They were all the help who did the grunt work. They kept things ticking over and if they couldn’t keep things ticking over the Allens replaced them.  Unfortunately, that plan wasn’t working because each person they put into management positions came up against the same problems.  Problems the Allens had no desire to address.

As he sat there in the last meeting, watching the exasperated sighs, the rolled eyes and the tilting away of the heads that followed his suggestions, he wondered if it was actually doing something or having to think about the business that they didn’t like.  He knew from life with Jennifer that she simply thought of it as ‘the business’  she had no concept of it’s inner workings.  If asked he doubted she would be able to tell anyone in a coherent fashion what it was the family business actually did. 

‘Or to pick one of the things they did,’ he thought.  The company was multifaceted, which was how it managed to survive so long.  They diversified and no matter what happened to affect one branch, the other branches were able to pull it through.  They were able to shift focus when needed. Or they had been. 

Prior to this generation there had always been an Allen paying attention and managing the shift. They worked with those running the day-to-day activities with the company.  Even if they didn’t work in the office, they understood the business and were at least paying attention.  He remembered his father-in-law and his concerns that no one younger than him was planning to step up.  This generation wanted to think of the company as just the place where money came from and nothing more. And it was killing the business.