I have worked nineteen years for a woman who is also my wife’s sister, which means I have seen the version with the door closed and the version at Thanksgiving. The two accounts agree more than you would want.
Second Tuesday of the month, the operations review, and I had eleven slides.
I got through four.
“Kirby. The Bridgeport line.”
“It’s running at eighty-one percent of rated.”
“It ran at eighty-one in March.” She did not look up from the sheet. “What’s the plan.”
“We’ve got Grady on it. Sam’s been out there twice.”
“That’s not a plan, that’s a roster.” She turned the page. “What’s the plan.”
I said we would have one by the fifteenth. She said fine and moved to the next thing, and the whole exchange took about forty seconds, and I have had some version of it, by my count, north of two hundred times since 2007.
My name is Kirby Rexrode. I am fifty-six. I hired on at that mill in 1994 at twenty-four years old as a shift supervisor on nights, I married Lanelle Currence in 1998, and I have been vice-president of operations since 2015 at a salary that goes on the page, because a lot of numbers go on this page and it would be dishonest to leave that one out: three hundred and twenty-six thousand dollars.
Reva Currence is my sister-in-law and my boss. She took the company from her father in 2007, at thirty-nine, and has run it for nineteen years.
Both of those want holding in the same hand for the length of this, because neither one is going to be put down. If she reads this and does not like it, she does not have to do anything dramatic. She reassigns a division. That is the whole apparatus and it does not require a bad afternoon. I have watched it happen to two men and neither of them ever said the word fired out loud, because it was not that, and it was also exactly that.
I have written and rewritten this eleven times since April and every draft has been more generous than the one before it, and I have had to go back and take the generosity out twice, and which direction the remaining bias runs is beyond me.
My sentence about her has been in service at family gatherings, at two industry dinners, and once to a man from a bank, and it runs eight words. With Reva it is ambition all the way down.
The case is not hard to make. She restructured in 2010 and again in 2018. She closed the Beverly mill in 2014, which was her grandfather’s, which is where thirty-one people worked and where I was the manager and where I did the telling. She moved the corporate office to Bridgeport in 2016 and half the family has not forgiven her. In nineteen years I have never once seen that woman look at a finished thing and be finished with it.
In 2016 my wife said four letters about her sister at our kitchen table, the way you would name a blood type. I let it go. Ten years.
Delmar Currence is eighty-four. He founded that company in 1968 and he has not known reliably who I am since about the middle of 2024, and he lives eleven miles from me and forty-two miles from Reva, and there is a decision about him coming in the fall.
ENTJ Traits: What’s the Plan
The phrase, dated as closely as I can date it.
2007, her first week, to Garland Hoover, about a grade yield that had been the same for eleven years and that nobody had told her was a problem because to everybody there it was not a problem, it was the yield.
2011, to me, at four in the morning at a mill fire in Elkins, standing in the parking lot with the building going. Not is everybody out. She had already established that. What’s the plan.
2014, to a room of family shareholders, four times in ninety minutes.
2019, to a customer’s purchasing director, who did not enjoy it.
Second Tuesday of last month, about the Bridgeport line.
And here is what it is like on the receiving end, because everybody outside a company like this hears that phrase and thinks demanding, and demanding is not it.
It is that there is no other question. In nineteen years I have never been asked by that woman how a thing is going, or how I am, or whether anything is hard. Those questions do not exist in her. What exists is the one, and the one is not rhetorical — she genuinely wants the plan, she will use it, and if you bring her a real one she will improve it in about ninety seconds and then you will have a better plan than you brought. Which means the phrase is simultaneously the most useful thing anybody says to me all month and a piece of equipment I have organised twenty years of my working life around not being caught out by.
You dry hardwood on a schedule. Four-quarter red oak green off the saw is something like eighty percent moisture and it has to come down to six or seven, and you cannot do that fast. You run it in a kiln for weeks, and what you are actually controlling is the difference between the dry-bulb and the wet-bulb — how much drier the air is than the wood — and you bring that difference up a little at a time, and the whole art is that the outside of the board wants to give up water faster than the inside can move it out.
Push it and the shell sets hard while the core is still wet, and then the core lets go later and pulls against a shell that will not move, and the wood tears itself apart on the inside along the rays. That is called honeycomb. You cannot see it. The board surfaces clean, it planes clean, it takes finish, it goes on a truck, and it fails four years later in somebody’s living room in Ohio.
I have run a kiln. I know that schedule the way I know my own driveway.
ENTJ Behavior: The Kitchen on Files Creek Road
The nineteenth of March this year Reva drove down from Bridgeport and the two of us sat with her father for about two hours.
She has been down eleven times since January and I have the count because I keep it, which is its own item and I am aware of it. I go three or four times a week. It is eleven miles for me and forty-two for her and I have used that arithmetic in my head more often than I have used it out loud.
It was a bad afternoon. He was pleasant the whole time and he asked me four times whether I had gotten the culvert in, which is a culvert I put in for him in 2011. He called Reva by her mother’s name twice and did not appear to notice either time.
We got in her car afterward and sat in that driveway and she had the phone in her hand and she was scrolling, and she said:
“All right. What’s the plan.”
I said there wasn’t one.
“There’s the place in Buckhannon, there’s the one out toward Weston, I’ve got the assessments, and I want to know what we’re aiming at. Six months. Twelve.”
“Reva. There’s not a plan. This is what it is now.”
She stopped scrolling. “There’s a decision to make.”
“There’s decisions. That’s not the same thing.” And I said something about how there was not a version of this that ended anywhere she wanted it to end, and that the whole of it from here was just going to be Tuesdays.
She sat there. The length of it matters, and I have gone back over it: somewhere between eight and fifteen seconds, and in nineteen years I had never seen more than about two.
Then she said, “I’ll look at the Buckhannon one again,” and started the car.
I took 219 home instead of the interstate, past the closed mill, which I do maybe twice a year and had not done since Christmas.
ENTJ vs ESTJ: Most of a Year
Ask anybody in Randolph County who shut that mill and you get two names, and the second one is Garland Hoover.
Garland is sixty-six and was vice-president of manufacturing for thirty years and he buys and resells estate lots at Saturday auctions all over three counties, and has since 1988, and clears maybe eleven thousand dollars a year on it and does it for reasons he has never once articulated to me.
He fought her about Beverly for eleven months. May of 2013 to April of 2014. Three formal memos and I would guess forty conversations, and what I believed at the time — and I will get to what I still believe — was that he was protecting his own manufacturing numbers, because that mill was making money.
That is the part outsiders never get. Beverly was profitable in 2013. Not enormously. It cleared about four hundred thousand on twenty-two million.
Reva’s case for closing it was not a case. She could not produce one that anybody in that room wanted, and I sat in most of those rooms. What she had was a position about where flooring was going — that solid strip was going to be taken apart by engineered and then by vinyl plank, that it would happen faster than the industry believed, and that the capital we would need to be somewhere else by 2020 had to come out of somewhere by 2015. She said all of that in 2013 and she had been saying it since 2009 and she never once had a number that proved it, because you cannot have a number for a thing that has not happened.
She was right. That belongs flat on the page. Solid strip flooring in this country is a fraction of what it was, three of the four regional competitors we had in 2013 no longer exist, and the company that pays me does about two hundred and ten million dollars a year now in engineered cores, industrial components, and kiln-dried export lumber, and none of those existed in our building in 2009.
What Garland did, when he lost, was run that closure better than anybody in this state could have run it. He had the notice period, the severance schedule, the order you tell people in, the equipment auction, and the two weeks of transition, and all of it came off a standard he built out of watching a closure go wrong in 1998 and another one in 2003. Eleven weeks of severance when the law required none. He personally placed nine of the thirty-one.
The two of them come at the world with one instrument between them and neither is waiting on the room to agree. What each of them points it at is where they come apart. Garland’s runs at the standard: what the rule is here, what the precedent was, what went wrong the last time somebody did this. Reva’s runs at the picture — where does the whole of this end up, and what has to be true between here and there.
Put Garland in the chair and Beverly runs four more years and we go down with the other three, because a profitable mill violates no standard he has and he would have optimised it until it stopped. Put Reva on the closure and she gets the notice timing wrong and it costs the company money and it costs thirty-one people their dignity in the same week, because she does not carry the precedent and she genuinely does not know what order you tell people in.
ENTJ Strengths and Weaknesses: February 2014
The strength is that she was right, at scale, for seventeen years, off nothing.
I have worked for four people in this industry and none of the other three could have done what she did in 2013, and I include her father, who built the place and who by 2005 was making decisions off what had worked in 1988. She saw it in 2009. I have asked her twice how and gotten, both times, a sentence that was not an answer.
And the cost of an instrument like that is that it produces a picture and not a case, and if you cannot make a case you have to spend people instead of persuading them, and she spent thirty-one in Beverly and about nine more across the two restructures, and she has never in my hearing described any of that as a cost. It went in the model. It netted positive. It did net positive.
Now the parking lot.
I knew from the fourteenth of May, 2013. I was in the room. I was in every room after that, and I went back to Beverly on a Wednesday and ate lunch in that break room the way I had eaten lunch in it since 2006, and I did that for nine months.
Deward Phares was forty-one and had been on the green chain and then the ripsaw for eleven years. That February he was closing on a house out 219, and on the sixth, a Thursday, he caught me at my truck at about four-fifteen with the sun already off the ridge, and said, “Kirb. We solid?”
I said, “We’re solid.”
I had settled that driving in that morning, and I have not said so to anybody in twelve years. It was not a reflex and it was not kindness. If it got out early the good people would go first and I would be running that mill for four months with whoever was left, and I would be judged on those four months by a woman who does not grade on circumstances.
He closed on the house on the eleventh. The announcement was the second of June.
He is at the co-op in Buckhannon now and we speak when we see each other and he has never brought it up. Eleven of the thirty-one got rehired. Deward was not one of the eleven, and I was on the committee that made that list.
ENTJ Careers: The Acres
I have been promoted three times since that mill closed.
That is not an accusation of anybody, it is an accounting. I ran the closure and I was moved to corporate in September of 2014 and I have been vice-president of operations since 2015, and the difference between what I made in Beverly and what I make now runs about a hundred and eighty-five thousand a year, and I have taken every dollar of it.
In May, at the executive committee, there was a question about whether my division absorbs the Bridgeport secondary line or whether it goes under Ardis Wimer.
I understood by then what I had watched in that driveway. So I did not present it as a problem with options. I presented it as a condition — a set of facts about equipment ages and a labor market in Harrison County, with no next step in it and nothing to decide toward. She had no move. She sat with it for a minute and said we would leave it where it is for now, and we left it where it is, and that is worth somewhere between forty and sixty thousand dollars a year to me depending on how the incentive plan runs.
I did that on purpose, with information I got from a woman standing in her father’s driveway.
How a company prices that kind of foresight, and what an entire career of the answer shows up as on a balance sheet by fifty-eight, belongs to whoever drafts the compensation committee’s report. I have sat on that committee four years. And one set of habits does not get the same name from a room depending on who walked in carrying it: I have heard four men in this industry use four different words about Reva Currence, and I have heard all four of them call Garland Hoover disciplined.
In 2015 she bought the Beverly ground out of the company. Eleven acres, personally, at appraisal, seventy-one thousand dollars. There is a fuel and a boiler-ash question on that parcel that has never been characterized, which makes it a liability and not an asset, and she has paid the taxes for eleven years and turned down two offers and done nothing with it. I asked her in 2019. She said it’s an asset.
ENTJ Relationships and Compatibility: Married to the Sister
My wife is four years younger than Reva and has spent fifty-four years being told what the plan is.
Being related to one of these works as follows. You are never neglected and you are never asked. She knows what everybody in that family is doing and she has an opinion about all of it and the opinion is usually correct and it arrives as a recommendation with a date attached. When our daughter was applying to schools in 2019, Reva had a spreadsheet before we did, and it was better than ours, and Josie went where the spreadsheet said and it was right.
And you cannot bring her anything that does not have a next step. That is the whole architecture, and nineteen years went by before I saw it. Lanelle’s miscarriage in 2003 — Reva sent a check and a name of somebody in Morgantown, and Lanelle has not fully forgiven her for twenty-three years, and Reva does not know that, and if she did know it she would want to know what the plan was to fix it.
Whether a marriage gets a different instrument than a payroll does, and what nineteen years of it looks like from inside a house rather than across a conference table, is an account only somebody who lived there can give. Reva’s marriage broke up in 2011 and I have never met the man. And a family and a company put a permanently forward-aimed person to entirely different uses.
The other half, which took me longer. Not one person in that family has ever given her anything. Not once. Everybody brings her problems, because a problem is a thing she can take, and nobody has ever brought her an ordinary afternoon, because there is no receptacle for one. My wife’s whole account of her sister is built out of thirty years of watching a woman receive nothing, and Lanelle would not put it that way and would not thank me for putting it that way.
Garland said the truest thing anybody has said about her, to me, in his truck in 2014, after the second memo: “She’s not trying to get anywhere. She’s already there and she’s just waiting on the rest of us.”
ENTJ Under Stress: The Week and a Half After the Vote
In November of 2021 the family shareholders voted eleven to nine against the Randolph County expansion, and two of the nine against were her aunt and my wife.
I would have told you before that week that Reva Currence had no personal register at all. Nineteen years and I had never seen her take one thing personally.
What happened at that table when the count came back was that she said something to Lanelle about 1994 — about a thing Lanelle did at twenty-two — and it was raw and it was old and it bore no relation to a vote about a building, and it came out of her in a voice I have never heard that woman use before or since. Her aunt got up and left the room. It lasted maybe twenty seconds and it was the worst thing I have ever watched in a business setting.
Lanelle told me in the car going home that she had known that sentence was in there for twenty-seven years and had never once thought it would come out in a room with fourteen people in it.
Nine days. She did not come in. She sent four emails in nine days, all correct and brief, and on the tenth day she was at the eight o’clock and ran it and never mentioned any of it, and has not mentioned it since, and I do not believe she has apologized to my wife and I know she has not apologized to her aunt.
What I understand about it now: everything that woman values sits behind a wall with a forward-facing door, and the only way anything comes out of there is as a plan. Take the door away. Set her down where the thing that hurt is already over and no next step exists, and the wall goes, and what comes out is twenty years old and unfiltered and aimed at whoever is nearest.
And I will put one thing down flat, because I spent those nine days telling my wife it would settle. It settled. Had it not — the same woman still gone in the third month, sleep gone, the old material still surfacing unprompted with nothing in the present holding it up — that stops being a temperament, and no in-law gets at it and no page does either. That goes to a doctor. That goes to a counselor with a license. Raising it early has no downside, and I have already been on the wrong side of that arithmetic once.
What Is the ENTJ Personality Type: Honeycomb
The argument was the eighth of April. It was about Buckhannon and about who drives down there and how often, and it ended with her saying she would handle it and hanging up on me, which she has done twice in nineteen years. The national count lands just under two in a hundred; among women, nine in a thousand.
At eleven that night I sat down and put into a search bar the four letters my wife had said at a kitchen table in 2016.
E — the machinery faces out and it does not idle. She is not managing a room. She is operating on a system and the people in the room are in the system.
N — and it is aimed past everything present. What she gets is not the mill in 2013, it is the market in 2020, whole, off almost nothing, and it does not come with steps because it did not arrive as steps. Which is exactly why she cannot make a case and has to spend people instead.
T — and what settles a matter is whether the thing works. Not who is standing in it. She does not experience leaving that out as a choice any more than I experience leaving out the weather in Peru.
J — and it closes. Beverly closed in 2013 in her head and the eleven months after that were, from where she sat, other people catching up.
Those four sit in a fixed order of allotment. On this one the outward machinery and the forward picture draw nearly the whole of it; the physical present comes third, which is why she is better on a mill floor than in a boardroom; and the last is where a person’s own valuation lives, and hers has a single door in it and the door only opens forward.
Numbers, since one is doing work here. This is the rarest of the sixteen or close to it — somewhere under two in a hundred, and among women it runs under one. One woman in a hundred and ten, in a hardwood mill in West Virginia, in 2007, at thirty-nine, following her father. Any figure you meet that disagrees, check how it got gathered before repeating it: almost all of those tables were built out of people who chased the thing down on their own time, or who filled a seat their employer had bought in advance, which surveys volunteering and not a population.
The spec-sheet version of what this is worth. The four measures underneath do hold over the only window anybody has run: read a person, read them again a month later, and the scores land about where they were — and I have sat through enough vendor presentations to know that nobody prints the repeat rate on the deck. It goes thin at the final move, where four measures get turned into sixteen named kinds of person. Somebody selected sixteen. No calculation produces them. I treat it the way I treat a supplier’s spec sheet, which tells you where to go look and does not tell you what you have got.
And all of it is written about an average. Somewhere in there is a spot where the description lets go of you, and that spot is the one line anywhere in the document with your name on it, and it is worth more of an evening than everything that fits.
Here is what I got out of a search bar at eleven o’clock on the eighth of April, and it is not the flattering version.
It was never ambition. Ambition wants something it does not have. That woman has not wanted anything since about 2009, because in 2009 she saw the whole of it and everything after has been the schedule. Nineteen years of what’s the plan was never a person pushing. It was a person seventeen years ahead of the room asking, over and over, in the only interrogative she owns, whether the rest of us have started yet.
And the schedule is a kiln schedule. She has been drying this company down as fast as it will come, and it came, and the surface is perfect — two hundred and ten million dollars, four competitors gone — and I have a fair idea of where the internal checks are and so does Deward Phares and so does the ground at Beverly.
ENTJ Cognitive Functions: Where the Picture Came From
First is the outward machinery, and very little of that woman is anything else. It does not ask whether a thing is her business. A yield that has held for eleven years is a condition, and conditions get worked, and she was three days into the job when she did it to Garland. The paper order is extraverted thinking, introverted intuition, extraverted sensing, introverted feeling, first to last, and the kiln yard is a fair diagram of it.
The second part is the picture, and it is what I have had wrong since 2007, and getting it wrong is what produced the sentence I have been saying at dinners since about 2010.
It comes whole and it comes early and it will not decompose. She cannot show her work because there is no work to show — there is a convergence, and it is right at a rate that has embarrassed everybody in this company including me, and it is unprovable at the moment it matters, which is the only moment it is worth anything. In 2009 she had nothing but the picture. In 2020 she had a market that had done what she said. In between she had to move a company on nothing but her own certainty, and the only currency available for that is other people’s careers, and she spent it.
The third part is the present and she has more of it than people credit. She is better in a mill than in a boardroom. She can run a floor. In 2011 at that fire she had the crew accounted for before the second truck was there.
And the fourth is where she keeps whatever she actually cares about, and it is neither empty nor shallow, and it has one door and the door faces forward. A plan is the only thing that comes out of it. Which is why a check and a phone number in Morgantown in 2003 was, from inside her, the whole of what she had. And why an eighty-four-year-old man who asks about a culvert four times in two hours is a thing she has no instrument for at all.
I still think Garland was protecting his numbers in 2013. He told me in 2019 it was that he had never in his life closed a line that was making money and could not find the standard for it. I have thought about that a good deal and I have not moved.
ENTJ Personal Growth: What It Paid
Published advice on growth for this one reduces to listening and slowing down, and I would pay money to watch somebody hand my sister-in-law a page instructing her to slow down.
The one piece of growth in this account I will put my name to is an afternoon long, and it belongs to her.
On the nineteenth of March, in a driveway on Files Creek Road, that woman sat for somewhere between eight and fifteen seconds in a situation with no next step in it, and did not manufacture one, and did not leave. Thirty-two years of knowing that woman and I had never seen it. She is capable of it. What it took was her own father, a bad afternoon, and somebody willing to say out loud that there was not going to be a plan, and twenty-eight years in that family and I had never once been the one who said it.
She has been to Buckhannon three times since. I have not asked her what it is going to cost her.
I am going to state the rest of it plainly, because if I dress it up now none of the above holds. I said we’re solid to a man in that lot on the sixth of February, 2014, and he bought a house on the eleventh, and I made that call for a reason that had my name on it and not his. I took three promotions off the back of a closure I ran. In May I used a thing I learned watching my sister-in-law fail in a driveway to move about fifty thousand dollars a year onto my own line. I know what all of it paid. I have never once written down what it cost, because there is no line for that, and I have been on the committee that decides where the lines go.
She called on Sunday about the fall.
“I’ve got Buckhannon on the twenty-second, they’ll take him the first of October. Aunt Deb can do Wednesdays. What’s the plan for the house.”
I told her: Garland’s boy will get the roof done before the ground freezes, we list it in the spring, and I will keep the culvert open until then.
“All right,” she said. “Good.”
Then she went quiet for a second. Then: “Does he. When you go down there. Is he all right.”
The people in these essays are composites drawn from long observation. The theory is not.