The Slacker Chronicles: or How to Succeed in Business Despite Yourself

By Dr. Kevin Whitten

In this hilarious — but true — story, a lazy, unfocused and undisciplined slacker blithers his way to the top of the banking world.
Laugh along as the author shares the many mistakes and detours in his career as he climbs his way to be a captain of commerce.
As part of the journey, he shares his life lessons and insights into the corporate world and its mysterious ways.
Dr. Whitten is a Canadian lawyer with a doctorate in Business Administration. His erratic career path included positions as General Counsel for the Canadian Affiliate of one of New York's largest banks, International Counsel of one of Canada's domestic banks, and Managing Director and Head of a large Caribbean banking group.
The Slacker Chronicles takes a funny and insightful peek into the world of business and its dysfunctional culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Feb 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9781773703909

Dr. Kevin Whitten

Dr. Whitten is a Canadian lawyer with a Doctorate in Business Administration. He has held a number of senior positions in the banking industry including Vice President and General Counsel for Manufacturers Hanover Bank of Canada, International Counsel for The Bank of Nova Scotia, Managing Director of Alexandria Bancorp Limited and Chairman of Whitten Bank & Trust Company Limited.He has seen life from the Chairman's office and he finds it very funny, if not completely dysfunctional.

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 1

This story doesn’t start at the beginning.

I wasn’t born in a log cabin. There was nothing special about how I came into this world or how I was to deal with it.

I know some men are born into greatness, some have greatness thrust upon them and some prove their greatness through their deeds.

Unfortunately, I was none of these.

I didn’t excel at sports or at anything else for that matter. I didn’t appear particularly bright or personable.

For all intent and purposes, I was a very average and nondescript kid.

In fact, I recall my mother telling me once that I didn’t really have any good features but all together they were pleasant.

It was hardly stirring praise and not especially motivating.

It was on the bedrock of this mediocrity that I started to formulate my approach to life which, truth be told, has served me very well.

Simply put, it was to do the bare minimum necessary to get by.

Not really you climb the mountain because it is there sort of thing but it did provide a moral compass of sorts even if it had trouble at times finding north.

I like to think that if I was a professional hockey team, all of my winning games would have been won by one goal.

During my high school years, my scholastic endeavours were of the gentleman C variety and while it never got me within sight or sound of the honour role, it never got me even mildly rebuked as well.

Everyone seemed to take comfort in my boring predictability, especially myself.

I had girlfriends, I drank beer, I drove around and quite frankly, acted out in any manner that my testosterone addled brain would allow.

There was little peer incentive at the time to do otherwise.

In no way was I brave enough to risk being ostracized from the teenage tribe even if I had been sober or courageous enough to do so.

If David wanted to hang a moon out the car window for the one hundredth time or if Pete insisted that I finish the last beer, even if it meant I would be driving the porcelain bus later, that was fine by me and I would laugh as hard and as long as those that seemed to have a clue as to what was really going on.

My brief claim to fame over this period was as a member of a local rock group, the name of which was constantly changing in order for us to get bookings as no one in their right mind hired us twice once they heard us.

Only one of us had a modicum of talent and the rest of us, well, we were quite content to ride along on his coattails.

However despite this or because of it, we did get a number of paying jobs playing parties and small dances. It definitely gave an additional swagger to our teenage strut.

Reminiscent of Spinal Tap, all the money we were paid went straight into renting bigger and more powerful amplifiers. As if by magic we would get more accomplished because of the wall of speakers behind us teetering on the verge of collapse.

Now that I think of it, this could have been why people came to see us, as they were hoping for the inevitable calamity around the corner.

Luckily for us the only thing we murdered was the music.

I guess we would have been called a cover band though most of the songs we did were unrecognizable.

I remember one party that we played at where we had just finished a top 40 cover when this girl came up and requested that we play the very song that we had just played as she hadn’t recognized it.

Effectively, most of our songs would be described as sampling by today’s standards as they were interpretive though not be design but by incompetence.

Anyway, I digress.

High school ended and certain decisions had to be made about the future and my place in it.

You would think that for someone whose greatest decision to that point was to go with the flow that it would be a difficult time.

Nope, anything but.

I embraced what was to be the next stage of my life - University.

Well, not so much embraced as I refused to acknowledge or even contemplate the repercussions of choosing otherwise.

The thought of working made my blood run cold. Not only was I very lazy, I had no identifiable talent whatsoever.

As for deciding on a profession that would aim me like a guided missile through school, professional development and the acquisition of relevant experience, the idea was patently ridiculous. I was a guy who had trouble picking his socks in the morning.

Now university, if done right, allowed me another 3 years of blissful irresponsibility under the thin veneer of societal acceptance as I was pursuing intellectual endeavours - snicker, snicker.

Luckily greater minds than mine had appreciated my predicament and had over time developed the Arts programs.

These soft sciences of sociology, political science, anthropology, etc. allowed a student to lose themself in the irrelevant, the obscure and the impractical for a good 3 - 4 years and come out, none the wiser for the experience.

Though to be fair, it awarded you with a piece of paper that certified that you had a Bachelor of Arts in a discipline that left most people perplexed and slightly uncomfortable.

Sadly it was accomplished at a monetary cost that left your eyes watering in conjunction with a serious facial tick.

So, when faced with a choice between doing something practical and financially rewarding as opposed to laying low for a couple of years and accumulating student debt at a rate that outpaced the fiscal shenanigans of a former Soviet Republic, you can see that it really was no choice.

My slacker philosophy had once again steered me straight.

And as it turned out, university life was pretty okay.

It wasn’t amazing and it wasn’t hard or stressful. True to form, I did the bare minimum and skated through.

I dated a lot, got dumped and dumped others as well.

Looking back, I feel bad for those unfortunate women that got involved with me though probably not half as much as they do about getting in a relationship with me.

Like all things, I approached my blossoming romances in the same half-assed manner, never really committing or developing the emotional passion necessary to sustain a relationship or to even get it to the next level.

But hey, I had fun. All things considered, it was fine.

This was my life for those 3 years, err, well actually 4 as I took a year off in between years 2 and 3 to hitch hike around Western Europe and North Africa.

Now this was a great time.

I smoked some dope, drank some beer, visited places I couldn’t pronounce and generally let life flow over me which wasn’t too difficult as I was horizontal most of the time. Also, did I mention I smoked some dope?

I chased girls with accents that I could barely understand and even caught a few though the intent of such phrases as bugger off seems to translate universally despite the language they are spoken in.

Looking back, I now recognize that this may have been one of the most defining moments of my young and clueless life to that point.

However, as I did with most things back then, I gave it no real thought and when I ran out of money, I returned home.

My family seemed relieved to see me and in no real order of importance were happy that I was back, that I did not have any noticeable STD’s and that I had not developed a heroin habit.

I remember thinking at the time that if they had set the bar for me any lower, I would have tripped over it.

I soon settled back into my former university life though with extra self confidence as my travels had taught me how to say beer in 8 languages. This was not an unappreciated skill set among my peers at the time.

And while the abject poverty got a little tedious, getting out of bed at noon had its upside.

However, like warm sand squeezed through desperate fingers, the months and years passed until graduation reared its ugly head.

Though to be honest, I had to take another two additional credits which I had previously dropped due to a completely and utterly unrealistic 10:00 am time slot 3 times a week. Honestly, what were these people thinking?

As I said, I skated by.

Looking back, I now realize that my philosophy, while serving me well, was still in its formative stages. I hadn’t tested it in the harsh reality of the working life, of earning a living, and of getting by on my own.

I suspected that my shallow and trite philosophical underpinnings which I could recite with great enthusiasm in the campus pub, would soon be rubbed smooth by the abrasive realities of life.

Boy, was I wrong.

It didn’t take long for those around me to grow tired of my listless ways and lack of ambition. The fact that I had just finished university held little sway.

It seemed that the thin veneer of social acceptability that going to university had provided me was now kaput. There was no get out of jail card on this one.

My passionate and highly reasoned arguments establishing the need for more time to digest the enormity of the knowledge imparted to me through the higher educational process fell on deaf ears and was openly mocked as was my argument that I needed 4 years to do a 3 year degree in order to complete my victory lap.

What can you do?

Savages, the complete lot of them.

So, it was with no small amount of trepidation that I turned my attention to the employment market or in my case, the crap shoot as I affectionally referred to it.

Let’s face it, I had no real experience even though I embellished my resume so that grass cutting became landscape designer and security guard became law enforcement professional.

However there is only so much lipstick you can put on a pig and I wasn’t that confident that my Political Science degree could pick up the slack.

For me to call myself a political scientist was so absurd as to be patently ridiculous.

I had once done a 25 page paper on the Slovak question and I was over half way through it before I even bothered to find a map that showed me where Czechoslovakia, as it was then known, was.

I wasn’t sure that this attention to detail would stand me in good staid in the business world.

It was at this juncture that I decided to follow the path of least resistance - an electron in the current of life so to speak.

As the feeble minded have been doing for eons, I asked for career advice from those older and wiser than me.

Trust me, this didn’t diminish the advice pool by an iota.

And the advice was freely given and given and given - it flowed like Niagara Falls with the same chance of drying up or stopping. And here I was in my little barrel of expectations ready to go for it.

So, based on the recommendations of those stuck in their dead end jobs, those living in the past and/or in the bottle, those having affairs or with a gambling addiction, I decided to take the plunge.

While it may seem out of character, not that I had much at the time, I applied to a number of large banks for their management training programs.

What made me believe that I was management material is just beyond my understanding now. However at the time I needed a job and the banks churned through new hires like cannon fodder.

I guess on a practical level, if I even thought like that, was the idea that I could develop a good foundation in the fundamentals of business as well as learn to appreciate the mechanics of how it all worked, at least in theory if not in practise.

Needless to say, I was looking to be the tail of a lion, not the head of a mouse.

You have to understand that banks were quite different creatures at that time as it was still a couple of financial crises ago.

Happily, they were like great bloated whales where hopes and aspirations went to die.

Unsatisfactory staff weren’t fired back then but were transferred to stationary supplies, forms review and other obscure departments in the bowels of the main bank tower wherein they took on a ghastly pall and were studiously avoided by those still working above ground.

What you had to do to be labelled as unsatisfactory truly boggles my mind as the vast majority of the employees didn’t really do anything but push paper, keep their heads down and steal stationary supplies.

You really had to put your heart into your incompetence which oddly enough probably also would ensure your promotion in the ranks as you would definitely stand out for showing some initiative even if it was of a negative sort.

Now that I think about it, quantum theory could have had some application here as a fourth dimension might prove helpful in truly comprehending the hiring and employment practices of a major bank.

It kind of reminded me of a logic class that I took at university.

The course itself was completely incomprehensible and the cherry on the cake was that it was taught by a graduate student whose accent was so thick you could cut it with a knife.

Anyway, the lessons were incredibly convoluted and usually involved theorems to the effect that if A equals B and C is greater than a refrigerator, what colour is Bob’s underwear.

The answer would fill up 5 blackboards and would leave the students that really cared and who had a legitimate desire to learn sobbing uncontrollably by the second board.

At the other end of the learning spectrum where I existed, it was like water off a duck’s back to me. I didn’t have a clue and for once, my ignorance stood me in good staid as I refused to sweat the small stuff (or anything else for that matter that I didn’t understand), which as you can appreciate was a huge unexplored territory.

I wish I could take the credit for this but I can’t in good conscious though I believe the fellow that was the focus of this particular class was a kindred spirit in the less is better doctrine.

On this particular day, the teaching assistant posted one of these stupid questions and proceeded to work through four blackboards on an answer which was totally unverifiable to any us because we didn’t have a clue but before he could finish, he threw us a curve, the sly bugger.

He pointed to the fellow beside me and asked him for the answer.

Why he broke with tradition I have no idea but I suspect that it was principally to engage the class through some desperate quest for meaning in his teaching as over half of us were openly reading the newspaper or perhaps it was to show his grasp of the Socratic Method in some misplaced attempt to show intellectual empathy.

Anyway, we all stared transfixed as the student pondered his options and with the tension becoming more palpable by the moment, he finally breaks the mood by stating pie r squared.

It was quite simply a brilliant response if not entirely wrong. As he sat back down, he turned to me and said I knew I should have taken Chinese instead.

I still laugh about it to this day. I think he went on to dabble in gas and oil stock promotions but I can’t swear by it.

Anyway, it seems I have digressed again.

It’s a problem I have. Get over it.

So back to those poor souls in the sub-basement of the bank towers.

In modern parlance, these employees became part of the living dead with no career advancement or any small hope of any way out.

These ghostly waifs would take the same subways and buses as everyone else but once they stepped through the bank building to start work in the morning, their existence was wiped clean from the staff collective. The Borg never had it so good.

Over time, they reconciled themselves to their fate and they compensated by taking long lunches over a few beers discussing bank politics and by making snide and hurtful observations about the others above ground which were surprisingly accurate and insightful.

Human resources, commonly referred to as human inventory control, was tasked with the