Page 158 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

Epilogue

When Al Magnus finally passed away, and my obligation to remain
silent ended, I decided to assemble my notes and recollections into
the story of my adventures in his service. I had counted on his
prominence triggering the appearance of obituaries in local news
sources, and I collected them all. I could then, I suppose, extract
enough of his history to create a dossier resembling those he had
provided me for each of the crackpots he was financing. I did not
learn anything of significance concerning his early life; as he had told
me, he scuffled until he found a new use for his father’s invention.
Concerning his final years as the king of deep-fried junk food there
was something of more than passing interest to me, however.
Once in charge of building a burgeoning enterprise, he had
insisted on appointing his department heads himself, without
engaging any high-powered executive search agency. That was
considered an eccentricity in financial circles, but Magnus was not the
first successful entrepreneur with odd habits, and it did not drive
away investors or clients. I immediately thought of his computerized
job-applicant program, the Personnelyzer. None of the obituary
writers seemed aware of its existence: Magnus had indeed kept it
hidden.
Then I realized that he had never considered himself a
psychoceramic, despite his idiosyncratic way of matching people to
positions. Perhaps it was because he never had to put it to any test
but his own; in essence, he had done for himself what no one had
done for his father, and what I had done for eleven others: finance
the actualization of an outside-the-mainstream theory. But the
outcome, his own test of fire, was never made public: he was his own
judge of its validity and efficacy. And there he came to grief, for the
proof is not simply in the pudding; the pudding has to be tasted by
several people, to eliminate bias, particularly the bias of self-
confirmation.
For the sad fact is that his theory was wrong—it failed in my case,
and it was disastrous for the Hog Wild corporation. When the
auditors came in to look at the company’s books after Magnus died
in harness, it was discovered that six of his top people had been
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