When I was growing up, my father, Kenneth Jett, worked in several public arenas. He worked for the U.S. Postal Service, the Nixon administration’s Model Cities program and for the City of Richmond, California, Finance Department as an accountant. Since I am and have always been an early riser like my father, I would watch him sharpen his pencils and do multiple calculations on an adding machine while I ate my breakfast, which he prepared for me, before I would go off to catch the bus for school. He would enter various numbers into a spreadsheet and when looking at a finished product would say to himself, “Uh huh, just what I thought.” To this day, when I go and visit my family in California, my father and I are up by 6 a.m. solving all the problems of the world.
When he retired, one of the city council people relayed a commonly known fact about my father: that if your requisition for payment was even one penny off from the bill, he would place it in an interoffice envelope with a nice little note to you to “do over.” I used to love visiting my father’s office, which was located in the corner of the department, because he always had some piece of mediocre art that I had done as a child on display and little cartoons that he clipped out of the newspaper, or copies of cartoons, on his door to indicate little messages to people that he worked around. My favorite one was a cartoon of a man at a desk on the phone scheduling a meeting with someone where he says, “Oh, Thursday not good for you, how about never!”
From all of the observations and lessons I learned from my father’s work habits, one that he has emphasized to me from the moment I started my first job at age 15 was “document everything!” This meant that in your work life, you never know what you will have to recall, possibly under difficult circumstances, and it will save you a lot of trouble if you already have documentation from that event or of that conversation.
And he really emphasized the importance of documenting conversations regardless of if it is someone who is your manager, someone you are managing, or your peer, because so much of our work life is unpredictable. Similarly, he would recount a story about the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall who stated when asked his opinion about Clarence Thomas, “You have to look at someone’s record because they can bite you, Black or white.” Now I don’t know when or even if Justice Thurgood Marshall really said this, but it is something my Dad told me, and it makes perfect sense if you look at Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ record.
So when I watched the circumstances unfolding that led up to the seventh former FBI Director James Comey testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee, I recognized his behavior as a “lifer” public servant, because he had documented every word of his impromptu solitary meeting with President Donald Trump. At that time, the FBI director was hit with what many women and people-of-color face in their daily work life when someone, usually in a position of power, has determined that they must find a way to “put them in their place,” or in FBI Director Comeys’ case, give a loyalty or trust test.
No one reading this column should think that I felt sorry for James Comey. After all, I am fully versed in the history of FBI relations with African-Americans. All I am stating is that I recognized that there is one thing that I admired about him because of the lessons I learned from my father, which is document everything just to CYA, and if you don’t know what that means, ask someone. On the other hand, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions also offered an example of what can happen if you are faced with tough questions from a brilliant Congressperson such as Kamala Harris and you have no documentation. You will appear incompetent.
