An ENTP woman thinks by arguing, out loud, which means a room only ever sees the process and never the product. Organisations store conclusions. Hers got stored as whichever fragment the room happened to keep, once, in 2012, and after that every use of the instrument was more evidence for a position she has never held.
The night the board voted on the fiber build, Odile Tesch stood at the end of the table for twenty minutes and made the best case against it that anybody in this county has ever heard, and then she voted for it, because staff do not vote and she was not asked.
I have the minutes. They say: Ms. Tesch presented engineering estimates and discussed risks.
What she actually did was take the take-rate assumption apart. She said that the feasibility study’s model assumed a sixty-two per cent take rate at year five based on comparable builds in three states that had a population density we do not have. She said that at fifty-one per cent the debt service coverage fails in year six. She said that nobody at the table, including her, could tell the difference between a member who says at a kitchen table that they will subscribe and a member who will write a check every month for twenty years.
Ferrand Kiel, who was the general manager then, asked her what she was recommending.
“I’m not recommending anything. I’m telling you what has to be true.”
We voted seven to two to build. I voted yes and I would vote yes again.
That was 2012. We built. The take rate at year five was fifty-eight per cent and the coverage held because we refinanced in 2017, which was luck and a rate environment. Wolf Ridge has fiber to every meter in three exchanges and won an award for it and Odile Tesch built that network — the design, the make-ready, the grant applications, the two summers she spent riding with the splicing crew because we could not hold one.
And from that night forward, in this county, in this building, on this board, the settled fact about Odile Tesch is that she never believed in fiber.
Odile came to Wolf Ridge in 1998 as a combination technician, which in a small exchange means you climb poles, splice, run the switch, and answer the phone when Marcene is at lunch. She was twenty-four, with a two-year electronics programme behind her and two years at a rural exchange in another state. She is a fast, dry, physically restless woman who does not sit at a table so much as lean on it. She interrupts, apologises, and interrupts again. She laughs at good objections including the ones aimed at her, which people find either delightful or infuriating and almost never anything in between. She has never in twenty-eight years sent an email that took a position on anything.
Wolf Ridge Communications was Wolf Ridge Telephone Cooperative until 2009. Four exchanges, about nine hundred route miles of plant, sixty-one hundred members, a headquarters in Dunmore and a garage in Kelvin. The members own it. Nine directors, elected by district, and the board hires exactly one employee, which is the general manager.
I have owned the hardware store in Dunmore since 1989. Everybody in three exchanges comes through that door eventually, which is most of why I keep getting elected and all of why I hear everything. I have been on this board since 2004 and president since 2015.
There is a sentence about Odile Tesch that has been in circulation here for fourteen years. I said it first. I said it in a hallway, casually, to two other directors, and I did not invent the idea so much as give it a handle.
That’s her hobbyhorse.
Garner Voth is retiring and the search closes in three weeks. We have nine applications. Odile has not applied.
Loyal Skarda has been on this board since 1996 and has a way of ending an item.
“Well, we know where Odile’s going to be on that one.”
Records
Everything in this business is buried and nobody knows exactly where.
There is a set of outside plant records — maps, splice cases, footage counts — that says where the cable is. Those records were made when the plant went in, which in some of our exchanges was 1962, and updated afterward by whoever happened to be there with a pencil, and corrected when somebody dug something up and found out.
So before anybody puts a shovel in the ground you locate. You put a tone on the cable and you walk it with a receiver and you paint the ground orange, and what you are doing, every single time, is checking a record made by somebody who is probably dead against a fact that has not moved.
The record is what somebody wrote down once. That is the nature of a record rather than a failure of record-keeping. Somebody was standing there on one day and wrote a thing down, and then every crew for sixty years worked off it, and nobody ever went back to the original day to ask what that person could actually see.
Odile took me out on a locate in 2016 because I had asked, at a board meeting, why a job in the Amity exchange had gone four days over.
We walked about six hundred feet of ditch line with a receiver. The paint said the cable ran along the fence. The cable ran nine feet inside the field.
I asked how that happens.
“Somebody moved a fence in about 1974 and nobody updated a map,” she said. “Or the map was right and the cable got pulled over when they put the culvert in. Or the man with the pencil was standing where I’m standing and estimated.”
I asked which one it was.
“Doesn’t matter. It’s nine feet inside the field.” She was already walking. “That’s the only fact in this. Everything else is somebody’s opinion from a long time ago that we’ve been treating as a measurement.”
Our annual meeting is a chicken dinner at the fairgrounds and we have never once made quorum on member attendance without a door prize, and the door prize since 2003 has been a chest freezer, and there is a man in the Kelvin district who has won it twice and gives it away both times.
We have a pole attachment dispute with the electric co-op that has been running since 1997. I have no idea what it is about. Two general managers have explained it to me.
I read the obituaries in three counties and I can tell you who anybody was related to. My husband finds this morbid. It is the most useful thing about me on this board.
Out Loud
Contrarianism is the wrong word for what Odile does, and devil’s advocacy is the wrong word too, and I used both for years.
Put a proposal in front of her and she is not hearing one thing. She hears the proposal, and simultaneously the three ways it fails, and the two ways some other version of it might be true instead, and none of that is optional and none of it is effortful. It is simply what arrives.
Then she tests them. Does it hold up, what would need to be so, does it account for what we already know. And here is the part that decided her whole working life, and I did not understand it until this spring.
She can only run that test out loud.
The thinking is the saying. There is no private version that happens first and then gets presented. A position, for her, does not exist until the argument has been had, and the argument takes twenty minutes, and the conclusion is the last ninety seconds of it.
Which means a room only ever sees the process. Nobody stays for the end. People come away from twenty minutes of live testing carrying whichever fragment was loudest to them, and what was loudest is almost always the first hard objection, because that is the part that felt like something.
Neel Varma came here out of school in 2021 and spent his first year, by his own account, thinking she disliked him.
He told me about it at the annual meeting.
“She’d shoot down everything I brought her. Everything. And then at the end she’d say, okay, do it.”
I asked what changed.
“Nothing changed. I worked out she wasn’t shooting it down.” He was eating cake off a paper plate. “She was doing it in front of me. I was supposed to be watching.”
Dunn Bracey does the same thing at the same table. Dunn is our chief financial officer and he will argue any side of anything for as long as you will let him, and what gets said about Dunn is that he is a good man to have in a discussion, and he was on the short list for general manager in 2019, and he is on the short list now. What the identical performance gets a man in that room, and why nobody has ever accused him of having a position, is worked out a page over.
Nine directors. Two are women. In twenty-two years on this board I have seen four women on it and I count myself.
Marcene Dietz said a thing to me in the office once, without any weight on it, while we were stuffing ballots.
“You notice we’ve never had a woman in the manager’s chair.”
I said we’d never had a woman apply.
“Right,” Marcene said, and kept stuffing.
2012
I want to describe what happened that night as precisely as I can, because I was there and because I have got it wrong for fourteen years.
Odile did not argue against the build. She argued against the model.
Those are different things and they were different things at the time and everybody in that room could have told you so at eleven o’clock that night. She said the take rate assumption was borrowed from places we do not resemble. She said the debt structure had no room in it. She said, twice, that the build was probably right and the arithmetic under it was not.
I remember the twice. I remember it because it annoyed me — she had already said it once.
What people remember is the thirty seconds where she said that if the take rate came in at fifty-one, this cooperative would be selling itself to a national carrier inside a decade, and she said it in a room containing three directors whose fathers had helped string the original copper.
That is the fragment that got kept.
By the next board meeting the shorthand existed. By the annual meeting in 2013 a member asked me at the chicken dinner whether it was true that our engineer had been against the fiber, and I said something like, well, she had concerns.
Her Hobbyhorse
The hallway was 2014 and I was talking to two other directors about a grant application and one of them said Odile had been picking at the coverage numbers again.
And I said, “That’s her hobbyhorse.”
I did not mean anything by it. It was a way of moving a conversation along in a hallway.
It travelled. Within about a year it was the standard way this board processed anything Odile said, and it has been that way for twelve years, and the mechanism is very simple and completely airtight.
If she raises an objection, that is the hobbyhorse.
If she does not raise an objection, she has decided this one is not worth it, which is also the hobbyhorse.
And if she argues the other side — which she does, constantly, brilliantly, because that is the instrument — then either she is being contrary, or somebody has got to her, or she does not really believe any of it, which is the hobbyhorse with a different hat on.
There is no move available to her that does not confirm it. I have looked for one.
In 2018, at a board dinner, Loyal Skarda said something at the table that four of us laughed at, and I laughed at it too.
Somebody had said Odile was raising questions about the Kelvin expansion, and Loyal said, “Well, she’s an ENTP. What do you want.”
The letters had come off a workbook. I will get to that. What I want on the page here is that a set of four letters entered this board’s working vocabulary as a way of not listening to a woman, and I was the president of this board, and I laughed.
Odile was at that dinner. She was three seats down and she heard it and she laughed too, the way you do, and then she got up to help carry plates, which is what she does when a room becomes a thing she cannot argue with.
She Wouldn’t Take It
In 2019 Ferrand retired and we ran a search and hired Garner Voth from a co-op two states away.
Before that, though, there was a smaller thing that mattered more.
The board created a strategic committee — three directors and one staff member — to work through what this cooperative should do about the two adjacent exchanges that a national carrier was letting rot. It was the most important piece of work this board has done in twenty years and it ran for fourteen months.
The staff seat was obvious. It is an engineering and financing question and Odile is the engineer and she had built the only comparable thing anybody had built.
At the meeting where we picked, somebody said her name.
And I said, “She wouldn’t take it. She’s been against the direction since ’12.”
Those are the words I used. I have the minutes and the minutes say following discussion, the CFO was appointed to the staff seat, which is what minutes are for.
Nobody checked. Nobody asked her. I did not ask her, and I saw her three times that month in my own store, and I did not ask her, and the reason I did not ask her is that I already knew, and the reason I already knew is that I had invented it in a hallway in 2014 and then heard it back from other people for five years until it had the density of a fact.
I put her on nothing else either. Between 2014 and 2024 this board created six ad hoc committees and working groups. Odile staffed two of them, both technical, both after the decision had been made.
The committee recommended against expansion. We did not expand. The carrier sold those exchanges to a private equity vehicle in 2021 and the service in them is now the worst in this half of the state, and about nine hundred households there would have been ours.
Garner Voth said something to me at his second board meeting that I have gone back to.
“Your engineer’s the best I’ve worked with.”
I said she was the reason the network exists.
“Is there history there? People go quiet when she talks.”
I said there was a bit of history, and I said it in the tone that closes a subject, and he took the hint, and in seven years he never asked again.
Tovah
She was elected last year out of the Kelvin district. She is thirty-eight, she runs a veterinary practice, she had never been in the building before the orientation, and she does not know anybody’s history with anybody.
At the annual meeting this spring, after the dinner, six or seven of us were in the kitchen at the fairgrounds putting away roasters, and Odile was there because Odile is always there when there is something to carry.
And Tovah said, straight out, with a pan in her hand:
“What do you actually think we should do about Kelvin and Amity?”
I want to put down exactly what happened next, because it took ninety seconds and it has been in my head every day since.
Odile said we should not buy the exchanges and should not build into them, because the plant is unrecoverable and the households are too far apart to carry the debt. Then she said we should offer the private equity owner a wholesale arrangement — our fiber, their retail relationship, their billing — on the eleven miles of their territory that runs along our existing route, because we already have the strands and the marginal cost is a splice and a router card, and it turns a competitor into a customer and it puts fiber under nine hundred people who are not going to get it any other way.
Then she said the reason nobody had done it is that it requires the board to stop thinking of that carrier as the enemy, and that this board has thought of that carrier as the enemy since 1997, and that she did not know how to fix that part.
Somebody asked whether the private equity people would even talk to us.
“They’d talk to anybody. They’re not sentimental. That’s the whole reason it would work.”
Tovah said, “Why doesn’t anybody know this?”
There were six of us in that kitchen and four of them had been on this board longer than she has been alive.
And Odile said, “I’ve said it.”
She had. I went back through a decade of minutes over two evenings, at the counter, after closing. It is in there, in fragments, in the way things are in minutes — Ms. Tesch discussed possible wholesale arrangements — three times in 2016, once in 2019 during the committee’s work, when she was not on the committee and came anyway.
The Workbook
The statewide association runs a director education programme and there is a credential at the end of it and most of us have it. In 2014 the governance module included a session on board and management dynamics, at a hotel in the capital, and there was an instrument.
Nine directors and, because she had staffed the trip and driven the van, Odile.
We each got a workbook. The inside cover carries the sixteen boxes, each with its letters and a few lines under them. The exercise on the second morning was to identify your own and then discuss how you might be heard by somebody in a different box.
The facilitator’s whole point was that we should listen better. I remember her saying it. At the time I thought it a reasonable use of an afternoon.
The workbook is still in a drawer in the boardroom with eight others.
Odile’s page says ENTP.
Under the letters there is a paragraph about being quick and liking an argument, which reads like a paragraph out of a waiting-room magazine, and which is exactly what lets a board of nine take the letters and drop everything under them. The rest is at the back, in a section the facilitator did not cover, where the association’s material explains that the letters are shorthand for a rank order: whichever habit does the pulling, the one it feeds into, and the pair sitting so far back that reaching them is a decision and a slow one. The order for her case is worked out where this type gets an entry to itself, from the sixteen the workbook was printing off.
The one doing the pulling is the arrival of what else could be the case. Not one thing at a time. Put a proposal down and the versions that are not on the table are present as well, all at once, unsent-for.
The second is the test of whether any of them stands up. And the thing this board never grasped is that for her the test has to happen in the air. She cannot run it quietly and then walk in with a clean position, because the position is manufactured by the running. What we watched, every time, for twenty-eight years, was somebody’s private workshop, and we treated it as a public statement, and we stored the loudest piece of it.
An organisation does not store processes. It stores conclusions. So a person whose thinking is a process performed out loud gets stored as whatever fragment the room happened to hold on to — once — and then the fragment is what she is, and every further use of the instrument is more evidence for it.
The two at the back are the two that could have got her out.
The first is a live read of a table and what it is doing with what it hears: the ability to notice, while it is happening, that a table full of people has stopped following the argument and started forming an impression of the arguer. She does not have that. She has never had it. She would keep going for six more minutes after the room had left.
The second is a reachable account of what she has said before — the thing that would have let her put it flatly in 2019: I have proposed the wholesale arrangement three times and it is in the minutes. She does not carry that. She was surprised, in that kitchen, when Tovah asked. The thought that the answer was not general knowledge had not crossed her mind.
The plain part, and it is mine to say because I put the label on her. If a record attributes to you a position you did not take, the correction is a motion, and asking for minutes to be corrected at the next meeting is an ordinary piece of business that almost nobody ever uses, and it is the only thing that changes what the organisation will remember. And if you are being left off work on the strength of a preference you never stated, put your actual position in writing to whoever assigns the work, once, briefly, and keep the copy — because the alternative is that somebody in a hallway supplies it for you. That is not a conversation about anybody’s temperament, and the people for it are whoever assigns your work, then the organisation’s complaints channel, then a lawyer.
The association’s own material says the instrument is a self-understanding aid that should not be used to characterise a person’s views or capabilities, and that when the same people answer it four weeks afterward, close to a third turn up in a different box.
Loyal Skarda has been on this board for thirty years and has never taken a position on anything that anybody could name. Nobody has ever needed a handle for Loyal.
Three Weeks
The search closes in three weeks and Odile Tesch has not applied.
I asked Marcene Dietz in the office, carefully, whether Odile had said anything about it.
Marcene said she had asked her, and that Odile had said she’d think about it, and that when Marcene pushed, Odile said, “They know what they think of me.”
Two things went over on me after the fairgrounds.
That night in 2012, first. I have told the story of it for fourteen years as the night our engineer argued against the fiber and lost and then went and built it anyway, which I have offered as evidence of her professionalism. What she did that night was tell nine people, twice and in plain language, which assumptions their decision was resting on, and one of the things that had to be true turned out not to be, and we were saved by a refinancing in a rate environment nobody predicted. Being against the build had nothing to do with it. She was the only person at that table doing the job.
Then the hallway in 2014. Three words. I have carried them as a bit of shorthand and they were a bit of shorthand, and a bit of shorthand said by the president of a board is not a bit of shorthand, it is a record, and it is exactly the sort of record this business runs on: what somebody wrote down once, on a day, from where they were standing, and then everybody dug off it for a decade.
What the workbook left out. She is bad with money in a way that everybody in Dunmore knows about and nobody says; she has stood for the school board three times and lost three times, and I heard it from a poll worker; and she is the only person who came to my husband’s funeral in 2020 and stayed to do the dishes, and said nothing to me the whole time, and I have never worked out whether that was tact or whether she simply had nothing to say and would not manufacture it.
The application form is two pages. It asks for a résumé and a statement of interest, and one of the nine applicants is Dunn Bracey, and two of them are people Garner has quietly encouraged, and none of that is improper and all of it is how these things go.
I have Marcene’s number and I have Odile’s number, and I have had both of them for thirty years, and words are not the difficulty. The difficulty is that saying them requires me to account for fourteen years.
The people in these essays are composites drawn from long observation. The theory is not.