Under The Collar
As would be expected now that scandal has rocked Kansas City’s largest company, stories are flying around town about Sprint and its (soon-to-be former) CEO, Bill Esrey.
The best story has Esrey staving off lymphatic cancer, a disease that will kill more than 20,000 Americans this year. “The chemotherapy has been successful, and there is no evidence of lymphatic cancer anywhere in my body,” Esrey wrote last week in a letter to Sprint employees.
The worst story has Esrey involved in an unusual tax “shelter” to protect the millions of dollars he’s hauled in while making dubious decisions that have cost thousands of people their jobs. In the same letter, Esrey shifted attention to his accounting firm. “I was assured by Ernst & Young that the investment and tax strategy was perfectly legal [and] was within the rules of the complex IRS code,” he wrote.
But our favorite story comes from Sprint worker lore. It’s a refreshing bit of levity shared with us as we listened to the sad tales of the company’s laid-off employees “Screwed by Sprint,” November 21, 2002). It is a simple story about a man, his boss and a sauna.
One day, a lowly Sprint worker sat in the Sprint campus sauna that’s part of the Sprint campus recreation center that overlooks the Sprint campus courtyard, all within the Sprint campus zip code. In walked the bald, cheekless, vaguely alien-looking William T. Esrey.
After a few silent minutes, Esrey spoketh. It’s hot in here.
The salaried one agreed. Noticing the thermostat on the wall, he mentioned to Esrey that it was 100 degrees Celsius, meaning that the temperature in there was more than 200 degrees Fahrenheit — quite hot indeed, even for a sauna.
Esrey shook his head. No way, he said, sweat beading on his distended skull. Can’t be that hot. Our proletarian stood his ground. He knew his conversions: 100 degrees times nine-fifths plus 32 equals well over 200 degrees. Yeah-huh, he said.
No way, Esrey scowled, with such force that the young scrapper acquiesced and sat quietly for the rest of this unusual encounter.
The next day, our worker ventured back to the Sprint campus sauna. The thermostat had been removed.
