#5: Leaving Ball (Part I)
After 30+ Years, Semiretirement Got Real
About midmorning on Wednesday, March 18, 2020, something happened to me that had never happened in my then 29-year career at Ball Corporation: I was told to leave the office, and work from home.
This was a Big Deal at Ball, for two reasons.
First, the mundane: For literally decades, I had been trying to persuade a succession of Ball HR executives to consider a WFH policy. Back in the late 90s, I even suggested Ball pilot a scheme my wife’s company already had in place, where employees would work a little extra each day and every two weeks would get a Friday off.
Our HR VP at the time, David Westerlund, laughed and replied he knew the HR guy at my wife’s company and said that guy hated the “every other Friday off” policy. David always listened when I had a suggestion. He also always said no. Eventually, I began to refer to David, who I remain friendly with today, as Darth Westerlund.
So being told to WFH at Ball in 2020 would have been astounding on its own if not for the other, more jarring reason: Around the world, people were getting sick from COVID, and more sick people than anyone was comfortable with were dying.
So on March 18, 2020, Ball joined many other companies, schools and governments in sending corporate workers home, as well as office workers in our plants. Our production line workers, who had always been the backbone of Ball, continued to run manufacturing lines as “essential workers.” Masks were required, as was social distancing, frequent handwashing and anything else we were told by disease experts could help protect our people.
For the next 3-4 months or so, almost all of us who were told to WFH did so. At some point that summer, a handful of Ball operations and sales people cautiously began to travel, because they felt they needed to (or because the company needed them to for critical projects). But the vast majority of us continued to work from home until well into 2021 and even then it was a hybrid schedule (3 days a week in the office).
I’ll spare you many fascinating details from that time. Perhaps they will be included in a different column. But the main point would be this: Ball’s employees figured out we could work effectively from home. In fact, Ball enjoyed good years in 2020 and 2021, and when company results began to decline in 2022, it wasn’t due to COVID and WFH (yet another story).
Meanwhile, just a month before I was shockingly sent home to work because of the pandemic, my wife and I had bought a house in Georgia. We first considered moving to Georgia a decade earlier, while visiting my wife’s sister’s family there. We started receiving “homes for sale” emails from Georgia Realtors in 2013, but never felt it was the right time to take action. And in any case, I was many years away from retirement.
In December 2019, for reasons I still can’t explain, I said to my wife, “We should buy that house in Georgia now.” Our timing was impeccable, though we didn’t realize that until later. We made an offer in February 2020, in a normal housing market where we came in below asking price. We even required the owners to make some minor repairs. Our offer was quickly accepted.
The COVID pandemic bloomed in March, and we forged ahead and closed in April (online, with the help of a local family member), nervous that we owned two houses that were 1,400 miles apart in the midst of a global pandemic. Still, we were optimistic about our eventual future in Georgia. Initially, we planned to rent out our Georgia house until I retired.
We “accidentally” sold our Colorado house in November 2020. By then we had decided not to rent the Georgia house, given COVID impacts. We decided to ship most of our stuff to Georgia, keep some of it in Colorado and rent an apartment there, and “vacation” in Georgia and work on our future home while seeing family. At Ball we were still working remotely, so I could plug in from either location.
[How did we “accidentally” sell our home of 18 years? When we reluctantly chose not to rent the Georgia house, we soon felt the pressure of two mortgages. Meanwhile, we read the U.S. housing market was going nuts. In the fall of 2020, we decided to talk to a real estate agent, who predicted a surprisingly high sales price for our Colorado home. We didn’t want to sell, yet, but played a game of “how much would someone have to offer us to sell this house?” We decided to list it for a crazy price even higher than the one the real estate agent had named. We thought we would have a few showings whose feedback would identify what we needed to address over the next few years, no one would meet our exorbitant asking price and we would take it off the market at Thanksgiving. Instead, offers poured in immediately, quickly moving way above our asking price, including one that also waived inspection. Honey, I guess we just sold our house.]
Then, much to my surprise, our 16-year-old daughter changed the rest of our plan. She told us she wanted to move to Georgia for her junior and senior years in high school. So she, and my wife, moved to Georgia.
Over the next two years, my family lived in two different places. Instead of all of us staying in Colorado while our son went to the University of Colorado in Boulder and our daughter completed high school nearby, some of us were in Colorado, while others were in Georgia.
For instance, I spent most of the first six months of 2021 in Georgia alone with our dogs. When my wife and daughter moved to Georgia fulltime midyear, I headed back to Colorado, so I could go into the office more. Soon, I was spending 6-10 weeks in our rented Colorado apartment, then flying to Georgia for a month or more. Then back to Colorado.
It was OK … for a while.
Each time I left Georgia, however, it became more difficult to leave our new life. It was great seeing our son on the weekends in Colorado. Also, he was busy with school, as was I with my Ball leadership role even if it was from my apartment’s kitchen.
Meanwhile, through late 2021 and into 2022, Ball corporate executives had been debating when and how to bring employees back to the office. Ball had named a new CEO in January 2022, Dan Fisher (ironically, the same name as my wife’s late father, who had worked for what had been Ball’s glass operations for 30 years before passing away at age 63 of a sudden heart attack). I had worked with the new CEO almost 10 years earlier, when he was VP of finance in my business, and liked and respected him.
At the same time, my division had named a new president earlier in 2021, Kathleen Pitre – a former communications peer with whom I had a good relationship. I officially became part of her leadership team.
So a few months into 2022, after almost 32 years at Ball, I was conflicted. The distance between Colorado and Georgia seemed to grow each month. And yet it felt like I was about to enter a new stage in my Ball career, working closely with newly minted executive peers who I already knew, and who knew me. I was excited about what we could achieve together.
I had no idea that before the end of the year, none of that would matter.
