What Color Is Your Parachute?

This is the title of a best-selling job search guide that was popular when I started my working career in the 1970s. I read it at the time and never found it especially helpful, though I had already decided, after a cursory look at the help-wanted section of the paper, that computers were the field to enter (and I managed to get in after almost getting a PhD in English, clearly an illustration of the wisdom of my choice).

I thought of the title in the context of what I would call an "oh, bleep moment" over the OCSP. This is because, for people who were remotely capable in the computer field, jobs were easy to find, and that in turn meant that jobs were easy to quit. The people I knew and respected would come to "oh, bleep moments" and realize they were facing organizational dysfunction such that the option of updating a resume and getting a new job was more attractive than (say) putting up with the new boss who'd been promoted because she was sleeping with a vice president.

The "oh, bleep moment" was the sudden recognition of what was happening in a particular case, coupled with cascading deductions that, although the new boss and the VP were not likely to last long themselves, the ensuing chaos would not likely fix the underlying problem, and the chances that the situation would improve at Sasquatch Bank were nil. Thus the rhetorical question about the parachute.

Anyhow, concerning the "oh, bleep moment" over the OCSP, I'll get into that later. What Color Is Your Parachute? was an overrated book by Richard Bolles, a former Episcopal priest, which makes it tangential to the topics here. I've always put Bolles in the same category as another overrated Episcopalian, M Scott Peck, who wrote pop bestsellers at about the same time.

But in looking him up for this post, I discovered that he'd passed away just this last April, at the age of 90, and his obituaries, though sketchy, offered intriguing tidbits of further information.

Mr. Bolles had been a clergyman for 18 years when a combination of budget problems and philosophical differences with superiors led to the elimination of his job and his dismissal in 1968 as a pastor at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, the flagship church of the Episcopal Diocese of California.

What? He was a pastor at Grace Cathedral in the 1960s with James Pike? Did Pike hire him (or did the dean at Pike's urging)? Other details suggest he was an adherent of the Paul Moore Jr faction of Episcopalianism, so quite possibly. Pike was eased out as Bishop of California in 1966, so the fact that Bolles was pushed out a year or two later is intriguing.

Does anyone have more information on Bolles's TEC career, especially his time at Grace Cathedral? I'll get to the oh, bleep moment tomorrow.

UPDATE: My regular correspondent sent me this link on controversy arising from Bolles's fourth marriage in 2004. TEC Bishop of California Swing, hardly a conservative, objected to a fourth marriage for Bolles, who was still in holy orders at the time, though he had not served as a priest since his 1968 dismissal. It still sounds like Bolles was a member of the very liberal wing of TEC.