Professor Rossi’s Third Word

Professor Rossi was a tiny gray man with a yellowy salt and pepper moustache. To me he looked just like the mayor of a little Italian town in an old Word War II movie or a TV series like McHale’s Navy. Why not just give him a black bowler hat, an organ grinder and a monkey? Then there was his ashtray. Professor Rossi carried his own oversized one wherever he went. Back then you could smoke in a college classroom. I didn’t smoke, but I remember disposable cardboard ashtrays with aluminum surfaces that students used when they didn’t have a soda can or a drink cup. I think old Professor Rossi liked to hear his pipe tapping against the dark green glass of the receptacle as he frequently emptied spent ashes. I liked the way the afternoon sunlight made it glow when he half sat against the windowsill during Management 101.

It might sound like I didn’t learn much in his class. But that would be false.

It’s true I learned very little, but the fault there is mostly mine. I wasn’t management material. And I knew it. But I had recently switched my major from History. When I told my advisor, he seemed sad. He tried to get me to switch to English and even set up a meeting with the department chair, another pipe smoker. That one wanted to sign me up for a special English seminar or symposium – or whatever – but it kind of intimidated me. It also scared me that the long, compound complex sentences he could string together with absolutely no “ums”, “ahs”, pauses, or any false starts were always completely grammatically correct. In the end I didn’t see how an English major would do any better than a History major when it came to getting a job. Did they want me to become a teacher?

So I switched to Public Administration, which was listed as an interdepartmental major in the course catalog, because it had the best mixture of liberal arts and business classes. A compromise. I started off with it by taking one class on the Peloponnesian Wars, but I also took two Management classes, Finance and Accounting. Partly, I wanted to just get this kind of stuff out of the way. Partly I was hoping it might help change me into a more serious, practical person.

It didn’t. But it was a broadening experience nevertheless. For one thing, I learned that business majors were a much more diverse group than I had imagined. I especially remember a 35-year-old divorcee who befriended me in the Management class that wasn’t Professor Russo’s. When she was married, she had been a dental technician, but now she was preparing for an MBA. The first time she took me to her apartment, she asked me if I had ever heard of Iron Butterfly. I hadn’t. “That means you’ve never heard ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’!” She was right, but when she played it for me I could tell she thought the song was pretty funny. I was glad she told me the title really meant “In a Garden of Eden” because I never would have figured that out for myself. I didn’t mind Iron Butterfly because even she didn’t take it seriously. She was very serious about quiche, though. And that’s something that really did get to me.

I later learned that quiche could actually be ok. If you put lots of salt and pepper on it and close your eyes, you can kind of pretend it’s like scrambled eggs, sort of. But it’s not salt and pepper reminding me of Professor Rossi’s moustache. It’s all that slimy stuff in her quiche that reminds me of the tiny professor’s most important lesson.

Cauliflower?

There was a guy in Management 101 I called Biff. His real name was Tom Murphy, a lantern jawed, tow headed bully on the Hockey Team whose father ran the Firemen’s Union in Holyoke. I wouldn’t have liked him even if he hadn’t tried to strangle me. That was mostly my fault too, I guess. I shouldn’t have put on a red and blue tie over my black T-shirt and gone strolling through Hines Hall one night. It was just that I had done the same thing a few weeks earlier, and a girl with a six-pack and no roommate invited me in. She was a little fatty, but there I was again, wearing my tie, strolling through every floor but hers. Unfortunately, the hockey team was having a party on one of them, and that was where Biff nearly strangled me. After a brief, misguided, exchange of words about my tie, he grabbed it and nearly pulled me off the ground so that my face was right into his. Both my father and grandfather, two full blooded Sicilians, always told me never to show fear to an Irishman, but I remember feeling somewhat fortunate that my predicament made it impossible for me to look too defiant; I could tell that Biff was pretty drunk. Before I could decide what to do, Sean Connolly intervened. Sean Connolly was a guy who used to make fun of me a lot, but not in much of a mean way so I had no real opinion about him until then. First, Sean grabbed my tie and pulled in the opposite direction from Biff’s, relieving the pressure around my gullet and allowing my heels to touch the ground again, all the while sweet talking Biff into letting me live. Then, when Biff released me and started to turn away, Sean grabbed him by the forelock, snapping his head back and dropped him to the floor. “Better get out of here fast!” was his suggestion before he dramatically thrust one knee into Biff’s chest. When I got back to my room, I couldn’t undo the knot. I had to cut the tie off with scissors.

To finally get to the point of all this, I’d like to think that I’d still remember Professor’s Rossi’s last lesson even if Biff hadn’t been part of the target. But, then again, how could I really know that?

It all came about because (surprise) Biff hadn’t even read the case study he was trying to spout about. Professor Rossi dropped his pipe into the darkened ashtray and held up one arm, sternly gesturing Biff to stop. Two tobacco stained fingers were extended into a crooked pointer, a very papal gesture. It was, after all, the year of 3 popes.

“I’d like to tell you all something about business,” he said. And then he wrote three words on the blackboard spelled just like this: “Sh__t”, “Shinola”, and “B__Sh__t.”

“Can any of you,” he said, glaring at Biff, “tell me the difference between these three things?”

“Isn’t Shinola shoe polish?” some damn fool, probably me, ventured.

“That’s right! It’s not this, “ he said, pointing to the first word “Sh__t” with the stem of his pipe. “ This,” he said, pointing to the second word, “is also brown, but shiny. Very shiny. Doesn’t smell bad. Put it on right, it looks impressive. Covers up a lot of scuffs and defects. Shiny! Makes you look like a million bucks! But it doesn’t really help grow anything except maybe your reputation. Your image!”

“But this,” he said pointing again to the first word. “This is dirty stinking stuff. It’s good fertilizer, but you kind of want to stay away from it if you can. But you can’t. It’s the work that has to get done. It’s the homework,” he said with another glance at Biff – who didn’t care.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong. You got to have Shinola. Most people don’t want to know too much about the real brown stuff. But they will “ooh’ and ‘ah’ about a shiny surface. They might even touch that, hoping some of it will rub off on them.”

I was afraid he would break the pipe stem that he was rapping so hard against the second word on the blackboard.

“Every business has to have customers, and what sells them is the polish. You think they want to see you sweat? That’s only if you’re a rock star. A real dazzling, shiny star! And then,” he said slyly, “watching you sweat starts to be part Shinola too!”

“You need both of these!” he said, tapping back and forth between the first and second words. “One without the other is probably not going to make it. It doesn’t matter what kind of business you’re in; you need both.”

He was really going now.

“They each require a different type of work. A different type of effort! Some people are better with one. Some people are much, much better with the other. You got to work with both kinds of people. But you know what’s important?”

None of us knew.

“It’s important to know the difference,” he said, justifiably very disgusted with all of us. “Because if you don’t know the difference, you know what you are condemned to get? Can any of you figure that out?

At least I could do that, and I probably piped up.

“That’s right,” he said, tapping on the third word. “That’s right. And it is so easy to confuse the first two, and consequently you get this! But the trouble is, THIS is always flying around for all kinds of other reasons anyway. And it gets all over you. It gets all over everybody! And it gets all over everything, and before you know it NOBODY can tell Shit from Shinola.”

Professor Rossi rarely talked in complete sentences, but he had never sworn before. He was also not the kind of professor whose students might applaud one of his lectures, not that AIC was that kind of school anyway. Still, it was the kind of lesson that seems to make a lot of sense even when you know you can’t fully understand it.

Like I said, I am not management material. But I know what seems important and what is just frippery. And when it comes to working with other people, I have a good sense of what makes a system work and what runs a system down. I also know that sometimes you have to take something perfectly workable and try to put a gleaming polish on it, while sometimes you just have to put the best shine you can on a rotten, bad, stinking situation.

Some people might think that I am not too sensitive to issues of group morale or the personal touches that make interactions comfortable. It’s true I don’t like to waste time or be distracted. I also think fakery should be done with high style or not at all.

But Professor Rossi was on to something. If it’s not serious, productive work and it’s not necessary polish or presentation, it’s probably the third word. Now sometimes you have to ignore it, just to see through it a little, and sometimes it might go away on its own. But when the same old “B__Sh__t” happens year in and year out, and systems are falling apart, then morale and personal pleasantries might need to take a back seat. But what do I know? I’m not management material.

Anyway Professor Rossi retired right after that semester. Unreliable sources indicated he was forced to - for being senile. I refused to believe that, but I do know that he was way past 65 at the time. Another memory is him actually drawing a picture of a steamship on the blackboard to illustrate his point that management and labor were “always in the same boat.”

Looking around, I was relieved that no one else thought this was as ridiculous as I did. I would have hated to laugh at the old geezer.