My father inspected the driveway every Sunday of my childhood. I have now been the son of that for fifty-one years, which is a different appointment from working for him, and a longer one.
Sunday at four o’clock my time, three o’clock his, the phone goes.
“Wes.”
“Dad.”
“What’s the Honda at.”
“Ninety-one thousand and change.”
“Then you’re due. It’s every seven and you had it done in March.” A pause while he writes nothing down, because he does not write anything down. “The filter on the furnace.”
“Changed it.”
“What size.”
“Sixteen by twenty-five by one.”
“That’s right.” Another pause. “Your mother wants to know if Iris got the thing from the bank.”
That is the call. There are eleven items and they have been the same eleven items since 1994, and if you have been paying attention you noticed that the closest thing to how are you in that transcript is a question about the size of a furnace filter, and that it was asked by a man who already knew the answer.
My sentence about my father has been in service since I was around twenty, and it runs eight words. For my father, the rules are the relationship.
I have said it at family things and at two therapists and, God help me, twice from the front of a room in a professional capacity. I run learning and organizational development for a health system in Denver. Culture work, feedback frameworks, leadership programs. Eleven years. I am very good at it and I have a vocabulary for everything, and I am going to be using that vocabulary in here whether I want to or not, and I would have you watch what happens to it when the story reaches the part that matters.
My father is Emil Novacek. He is seventy-eight. He hired on the railroad in 1968 at twenty years old and retired in 2013 with forty-five years in, twenty-nine of them as a trainmaster, which is the man whose job is to know the operating rules cold and to catch you not following them. He rode with crews unannounced. He wrote up eleven people in forty-five years, each of them correctly, and two of the eleven were friends of his.
He had a cardiac event in 2010 and a second one in 2022. He is seventy-eight, and the call comes at four o’clock, and there are eleven items on it, and I have been in that call since 1994, and in the whole thirty-one years it has been missed exactly once, for fifteen months, and that is what this is about.
June of 2019 was my parents’ fiftieth. There were about eighty people in the backyard on Poplar and I was on the deck taking a call from a vendor, and the kitchen window was open, and my wife Nadia said four letters about my father to my sister Suzy. Kindly. In passing. As an explanation for something he had just done about the chairs.
She got the vocabulary from me. I brought it into that house.
I let it sit for seven years. Seven. I have facilitated sessions on that instrument. I have a deck.
ESTJ Traits: The Sunday Inspection
From 1999, when I bought the house on Cottonwood, until 2013, when I moved to Denver, my father came over on Sunday afternoons and inspected my property.
I am not using that word for effect. He walked it. There were eleven items and they did not vary: the gutters at the northeast corner where the maple drops, the crawlspace vent, the water heater’s date sticker, the expansion tank, the pressure on all four tires and the spare, the smoke detectors, the sump, the meter, the caulk on the south sill, the extension cords, and the tread on whatever I was driving. Forty minutes. He did not accept coffee. He said what was wrong, and if it was small he fixed it while telling me, and if it was not small he told me when it needed to be done by.
Fourteen years. I would put the number of Sundays he missed in that stretch at four, and two of them were the hospital in 2010.
The only time I ever got out in front of him on it was the fall of 2006. I did every one of the eleven the Saturday before and I had the tire gauge sitting on the porch rail where he would see it. He came up the steps, he looked at the gauge, and he went and did all eleven anyway. Then at the truck he said, “Thirty-two front, thirty-five rear. You had them all at thirty-five.”
I said the door sticker said thirty-five.
“On a loaded truck,” he said. “You’re not loaded.”
He does not say he loves anybody. He has never said it to me and I would fall over if he did. My mother says it and he is in the room when she does and he nods, once, the way you would acknowledge a correct reading.
The yard is eight square miles. If you have never seen one, a classification yard is a machine made out of land: they push a train up a small hill called the hump and cut the cars loose one at a time and let gravity roll them down into whatever track they belong in, and something called a retarder squeezes the wheels to slow them, and it makes a sound across that town that everybody in it stops hearing by about age six. Ten thousand cars a day. Two thousand six hundred people worked there when I hired on. When one employer is that size, a town is not a town with a railroad in it. The railroad has a town attached.
ESTJ vs ENTJ: Nineteen Ninety-Eight
There is another person in this story that this family has spent thirty years failing to tell apart from my father, and her name is Carla Wisnieski.
Carla hired on as a clerk in 1972 and retired in 2010 as a general superintendent, and everything anybody in my family has ever said about her is a thing they have also said about him: hard, cold, all about the book, no give in her.
In April of 1998 a switchman named Duane Kroeger got hurt on the east end during a shove move. Badly. He kept the leg and he has not worked since.
My father ran the reconstruction. He walked that end with a tape and he interviewed nine people and inside of about six days he had exactly what happened, which involved a radio call, a car length, and a man who had done the same thing correctly four thousand times. He had the rule. He had the precedent. He had the last time it happened in that yard, which was 1983, and he had the date and the name and did not need to look either one up. His finding ended a foreman’s career, and it stands, because it is the one that is correct.
He did not enjoy it. I was twenty-three and working there and I watched him not enjoy it for about four months. He also did not hesitate for one second, and when the union pushed he went through them like a man reading a menu.
Carla looked at the same accident and did something else entirely. She did not care very much about Duane Kroeger’s April, and that belongs in here, because it is the least attractive true thing in this section. What she saw was the arrangement — how that end got worked, why a shove that long existed at all, what the lighting was, why the radio protocol had a seam in it. And she spent three years and a great deal of other people’s goodwill rebuilding how the east end was worked, against everybody, and it has not happened again since 2001, and she got promoted twice on it.
They run the same outward machinery and neither one of them will be moved one inch by how anybody feels about it. What the machinery is aimed at is not the same. My father’s is aimed at the standard: what is the rule, what is the record, does this instance conform. Carla’s is aimed at the configuration: what will this arrangement produce next, and what has to be torn out.
Put my father on Carla’s three years and it fails in the first eight months. He improves against a standard that already exists — he does not generate a new arrangement, and he will not spend a person to get to one, and that project cost about six people something. Put Carla on the 1998 finding and it is thinner and later and a foreman gets fired anyway, less accurately, and nobody from the company is at Duane Kroeger’s mother’s funeral in 2004, which is where I first learned that my father goes to those.
Carla has been to sixty-one national parks. All of them, in order, since 2011, in a Tacoma with a rooftop tent, alone, and she keeps a list, and when I asked her about it at a retirement thing she said, “Sixty-three total, so I’ve got two,” and changed the subject.
ESTJ Under Stress: The Two Weeks After He Retired
He retired on a Friday in September of 2013 and my mother called me on the following Thursday.
What she described was a man who had gotten up at four-fifteen for forty-five years and had nowhere to apply himself. And what he did was apply himself to the house, which sounds fine and was not.
He rewired two outlets that did not need rewiring. He pulled every item out of the garage and laid it on the driveway on a tarp and reorganized it by category over three days, in the rain on the second day, and would not stop. He took my mother’s car to two different shops for the same noise and neither shop could hear it. And he started going back through things — not sentimentally. He got out the personnel stuff and went through eleven write-ups he had issued between 1986 and 2009 and re-read them, and he told my mother he had been wrong about one of them in 1991 and he named the man and the date.
He had not been wrong about that one. My mother went and looked it up. The write-up was correct.
That is what happens to a man like that when the structure comes off. The machinery does not shut down, it just has nothing to work on, so it turns and starts auditing the only material left, which is his own record, and there is nothing coming back the other way to tell him he was right, which is what the world used to do for him every working day for forty-five years.
My mother’s exact words on the phone were that he was fine, and then she described the tarp, and then she was quiet for a while.
I flew out. I was useless. I have a certificate that says I am qualified to facilitate difficult conversations, and I sat in that garage for two days handing a seventy-five-year-old man sockets and asking him questions I had learned in a hotel ballroom in Scottsdale, and he answered every one of them accurately and briefly and went on sorting. What actually fixed it was that the shortline at Hershey needed somebody two days a week to look at their operating practices, and my mother called somebody, and by the middle of October he had a badge again.
And I am going to say the plain thing, because I wrote the policy on this for an employer and then failed to apply it in my own family for a fortnight. Two weeks of that is two weeks of that. If it does not come back — a man still up at four-fifteen with nothing to do in month three, the sleeping never returning, the auditing come unhooked from the record entirely — a son on an airplane cannot reach it, and nothing I have set down here can either. It goes to a physician. It goes to somebody carrying a counseling license. I have yet to see harm done by raising it a month early.
ESTJ Strengths and Weaknesses: The Driveway
The strength is that the standard is real and it holds and other people’s lives sit on it.
Nine people testified in 1998 and it is my father’s reconstruction that anybody consults, and Duane Kroeger’s settlement depended on that reconstruction holding up, and it held up. I have watched that man refuse to sign things. I have watched him tell a general manager no in a hallway in front of four people and then go back to what he was doing. In forty-five years nobody ever once suggested he could be moved, and in a place where men get hurt, that is not a personality trait, that is infrastructure.
And it comes home with him. There is not a smoke detector in my mother’s house older than nine years. My sister’s furnace was condemned in 2004 by a man who had no standing to condemn anything and she replaced it, and the inspector who came for the permit told her whoever red-tagged it was right. When my daughter was born I brought her home in a seat my father had already installed and checked twice, and I resented it, and it was installed correctly, and the two facts have never once been in the same room in my head until this paragraph.
And the other side is the same instrument pointed at people who never agreed to be inside the system.
October of 2011. My sister had asked me for help with our parents’ money, because 2010 had cost them and my father would not discuss it, and I said no. Then I said why. I said they had made their choices for forty years and that this was the arithmetic of those choices, and Suzy told him.
He came over on a Sunday, the fifth Sunday I think, and he did not do the inspection. He stood at the end of my driveway on Cottonwood and he said one sentence, which was, “You could have come to me.”
And I gave him about four minutes.
I am going to set down exactly what that was, because leaving it out would make this a pamphlet about me. I had been in the job eighteen months. I had the language then and it was new and it was extremely sharp and I had, I am fairly certain, assembled part of it in advance in the shower, and I used it on a seventy-three-year-old man who does not own any of it. I told him he had never had a relationship with anybody in his life, he had a compliance function. I told him the reason he was a trainmaster for twenty-seven years running and had never taken the road-foreman job was that he was too rigid to be anything else and everybody at that yard knew it.
He listened to all of it. He did not interrupt, which of course he did not, because interrupting is not procedure.
Then he said, “All right.” And he got in the truck and backed out, and he stopped at the end of the driveway the way he always did to look at the gutters, and then he went.
I went inside and told my wife at the time that I had finally said it. That is the word I used. Finally. I felt, and I want this on the page in the present tense because that is where it happened, extremely good.
I did not speak to my father for fifteen months.
ESTJ Relationships and Compatibility: Whoever Was Wrong Comes to the Door
There is a rule in that family and it is not written down and everybody knows it, and it is this: whoever was wrong comes to the door.
Not calls. Comes. My father taught it to us with the way he handled it in 1989 with his own brother, and he taught it the way he teaches everything, which is by doing it once in front of you and never mentioning it.
I was wrong. I knew it by about the third month. And I did not go, and it was the vocabulary that let me not go — I had words like boundary and pattern, and a professional frame in which my not going was itself a healthy act, and I could not have run that argument in 2001, because the equipment did not exist in me yet.
There is a version of this where I say the frame was wrong. It was not wrong. Every one of those concepts is sound and I still teach them and I would defend the reading in any room. What I did was take a set of instruments built for people who are being harmed and use them on a man who was standing in my driveway asking me to come to him, and the instruments do not have anything in them that can tell the difference, and I did not supply the difference myself, because supplying it would have cost me the fifteen months of being right.
Here is the shape of being loved by one of them. Nothing is ever said. Everything is done, and it is done to a standard, and it is done on a schedule, and the schedule is the message and there is no second message coming. The tires get checked. The furnace filter gets asked after. And you can stand inside that for fifty-one years and starve, and the food was there the whole time, and it was in a form you had decided did not count.
Fifty-seven years of it from inside that kitchen, rather than from four hundred miles off, is my mother’s testimony. She has never given it and I will not give it for her. And an identical standard gets used one way by a household and another way entirely by a company.
ESTJ Behavior: What Iris Remembers
My daughter Iris is twenty-two. She was seven in 2011 and she was at my house every other week that year and the year after.
June, this year, I was driving her back to Fort Collins and she was going through the glove box the way she has since she was five and she found the tire gauge my father gave me in 1999, and she laughed and said, “Grandpa.”
I said something about the eleven items.
And she said, “He still had the truck then. That blue one.”
I said he traded that in 2014.
“No, I mean when he used to come and not come in,” she said. “When you two weren’t talking. Sundays. Mom would say don’t say anything to your dad.”
I said, “He didn’t come.”
“He came,” she said. “He was in the driveway. He did the gutters and he’d go around the side. I watched him from my window.” She was still going through the glove box. “One time he did the sump. He had the hose out.”
I said, “Iris, that was fifteen months.”
“I know,” she said. “It was every week.”
I drove her to her apartment and helped her carry two bags up and drove back down I-25 and got home at about nine.
At about nine-twenty I called Lois Prokopec, who is eighty-four and has lived across from that house since 1978, and I asked her — carefully, in the voice I use for exit interviews — whether she happened to recall a blue F-150 parked on Cottonwood on Sunday afternoons in 2012.
She said, “Oh, sure. Emil. Every week. I always wondered why he didn’t go in.”
I thanked her for her time.
I did not call my father that night and I did not call him the night after.
What Is the ESTJ Personality Type: The Slide I Have Been Using Since 2016
I have a deck. Nationwide it runs just under nine in a hundred; among men, better than one in nine.
Slide four is the caveat slide and I have been using it since 2016 and I can say it without looking: These four scales measure something real and they replicate — retest the same person four weeks out and the four scale scores hold their place. The four-letter code does not hold with them: a third of people come back with at least one letter moved. The move after that has never been established by anybody: four scales turning into sixteen named kinds of person. Nobody has shown their work on the sixteen. Use it to ask a second question, never to make a decision about a human being. Two hundred rooms, that slide.
And then whoever is skeptical asks about the numbers, and I say the other canned thing: Treat any percentage you meet as unaudited. Most of those tables came off people who went hunting for a questionnaire, or who sat in a room a company had already paid for, and a sample that recruits itself is a description of recruiting. This one runs somewhere near nine in a hundred, men ahead of women, which for whatever it is worth matches every yard office I ever stood in.
I have been saying all of that, correctly, for ten years, to strangers, about their coworkers.
I read about my own father in July.
E — all of the equipment points outward. There is no interior in there that he is declining to hand you. What there is, is a world with conditions in it, and he goes at the conditions.
S — and it is aimed at the actual and the already-happened. The 1983 date. The eleven items. Not what a thing signifies. What it is, and what it was the last time.
T — and the test is whether it conforms. Not who is hurt by it conforming, which is why 1998 ended a man’s career and why the man is still owed a correct finding and got one.
J — and it closes. A thing is settled or it is outstanding, and outstanding items have a due date, and my father has never in his life had an item he could not name.
Under the four letters the parts are graded by how much of the man was issued to each, and here the outward machinery draws nearly the whole grant, the record it works from takes most of the rest, and the part where a person’s private valuation gets converted into a sentence somebody else can hear has almost nothing in it. Not a small amount. Almost nothing.
That is not a figure of speech, and please do not soften it. There is no channel. It is not that he chooses paperwork over speech. Speech, for what he was doing in that driveway on those Sundays, does not exist as an available option, and the alternative he had — the gutters, the sump, the hose out on a Sunday in February — is not a poor substitute for the thing. In his equipment it is the thing.
I have been telling people for thirty years that for my father the rules are the relationship, and I have been saying it as an accusation, and it is just true. I had the sentence right the entire time. I had no idea what it said.
ESTJ Careers: Trainmaster
He was offered road foreman of engines twice, in 1996 and 2001, and turned it down twice, and I have believed since 2001 that Carla blocked it. Carla told me at that same retirement thing that she was in the room for the second one and that he said no in about nine seconds.
Twenty-nine years in one job. In an organization that measures a career by how far up you got, my father found the altitude at which the work was still the work and then refused to leave it, and every person who ever tried to reward him tried to do it by taking it away.
The job itself is worth describing, because people hear manager and picture an office. A trainmaster is out in it. He is out on the ground at two o’clock on a February morning with a lantern watching a crew do a job they have done nine hundred times, and the whole point of him is that on the nine hundred and first somebody takes a shortcut and he is standing there. There is a thing called an efficiency test, which is exactly what it sounds like: you go out and you watch, unannounced, and you find out whether the rule is being followed when nobody thinks anybody is looking. My father conducted, by the company’s own count, something over eleven thousand of them.
Eleven write-ups out of eleven thousand tests. I did that arithmetic for the first time in July, at fifty-one years old, and it is not the number I had been carrying.
How a company prices that, and what forty-five years of its answer leaves on a pension statement, belongs to whoever writes the salary bands. I write salary bands now, which is a sentence I would like to withdraw. And two people can carry an identical standard into the same room and be told two different things about it.
ESTJ Cognitive Functions: Where the Standard Comes From
First comes the outward machinery, and there is not much else in the man. The framework’s ledger reads extraverted thinking first, introverted sensing second, extraverted intuition third, introverted feeling last, and my father would approve of it being a ledger.
It does not deliberate about whether to engage. It engages. A gutter with maple seed in it is a condition, and a condition is a thing you correct, and there is no intervening step where he decides whether it is his business. That is why the inspection is not an insult, though I took it as one for fourteen years. It is the only relationship to a house he has.
The second part is the record, and it is why he had 1983 without looking anything up. He carries a dated, specific archive of how things have actually gone, and the standard is not an abstraction. He derives it from that archive, item by item, and when he tells you seven thousand miles it is because he has watched what happens to people at nine.
This is the part I had most badly wrong, and I had it wrong in a way that is close to insulting. I thought the rules were borrowed — that he had picked up a rulebook and adopted it because it relieved him of having to decide anything. It is the reverse. Almost every standard that man enforces he built himself out of something he watched happen to somebody, and he can produce the case for each one with a year attached, and the reason he will not negotiate about the crawlspace vent is that in 1986 he stood in a basement in this town with a family that had lost everything in it.
There is a third part in there that produces alternatives, and he distrusts it on principle. Twice in my hearing my father has said “or we could” and both times he talked himself out of it inside a minute. That is also, I think, both road-foreman jobs.
And the fourth is the private valuation, and there is nothing wrong with it. He has one. It is not damaged and it is not shallow and it is not absent. There is simply no equipment attached to it that turns it into language, and there never was, and at seventy-eight none is going to arrive.
In the footlocker in that garage there is the rulebook he was issued in 1968, and page sixty-one has been torn out of it. A man who wrote up eleven people in forty-five years. I found it in 2015 and I asked him and he said he didn’t remember, and I have asked twice more since and gotten the same four words, and I do not think he is lying.
ESTJ Personal Growth: Four O’Clock
The growth literature for this type reduces to flexibility and emotional expression. I have written some of it. I would like to formally withdraw my contribution.
The only growth I can document belongs to me, and it is one Wednesday long.
In January of 2013 I drove to my parents’ house on a Wednesday and knocked on the door, which is the rule, and my father opened it and said, “Wes.” And I said I had been wrong in the driveway. And he said, “All right.” And my mother made coffee and we watched about forty minutes of a bowl game and I left at nine and neither of us has referred to any of it since, and the following Sunday at four o’clock the phone rang and he asked me what the Honda was at.
That is the whole of what that man can do and it was available the entire fifteen months and it needed one person to walk up one set of steps.
I did not know about the Sundays then. I know now, and here is where I actually stand, at fifty-one, undressed: I am angry. He was forty feet from my kitchen table sixty-five times and he would not knock, because the rule is that the one who was wrong comes to the door, and the wrong one was me, and he would sooner have stood in that driveway in February with a hose than break a standard he taught me himself. Both of us lost fifteen months to it. He would do it again.
He is seventy-eight. There is no version of this in which he says any of it out loud, and I have spent eleven years and an entire professional identity on the proposition that the right words unlock people, and in this one instance that has to go down on the ground and stay there.
What I have instead is a schedule. Which is, I am aware, precisely what I have been complaining about since I was twenty, and I would ask anybody reading this to notice how long it took a man with three certifications in interpersonal effectiveness to arrive at the position his father held in 1994.
Sunday I called him at ten of four, which has never happened.
“Wes.”
“What’s the Buick at.”
There were about two seconds. Then he said, “Forty-one two.”
“Then you’re due.”
“I’ve got it Thursday,” he said. “The filter.”
“Sixteen by twenty-five.”
“That’s right.”
The people in these essays are composites drawn from long observation. The theory is not.