B
ack at work
, I’m sifting through all the crap that Greg has jammed into my in-box while I was at lunch. Because he hates me so much, Greg often leaves things for me when I’m gone to save him the indignity of actually having to speak with me. This is an arrangement that actually works best for everyone involved, but I still try to make things as difficult for him as possible. I’ve been known to sneak things into the garbage and claim never to have seen them. Nothing too important, just random drafts of brochures or press release copy or things that if never seen again would cause no one any tangible harm. Except Greg, of course.
Dear HR:
I am convinced Tom Violet hides drafts of copy and then denies it. This is not only unprofessional, it also creates a great deal of rework for my team and me and goes against best practices. Not to mention, it is profoundly immature.
Along with Johnny Rockets–induced heartburn/meat sweats, the image of my mom and dad having sex has followed me back from lunch and has managed to thoroughly ruin what’s left of my afternoon. If Brandon was here, he’d ask me if my mom had her own secret piece of ass and I’d be left with no choice but to bludgeon him to death with the oddly heavy stapler I stole last time I was in Greg’s office.
I dial my mother at her school. Helen, the receptionist, tells me that my mother is currently with her AP English students. Perhaps it’s my imagination, but Helen sounds strange, and I wonder if she knows something. I believe this is what mental health professionals call paranoia.
“How have you been, dear?” Helen asks.
I decide not to tell her about the erectile dysfunction, the recent layoffs at my company, how my dad has taken to smoking pot in my extra bedroom, or how my hands smell like French fries even though I’ve washed them three times. “Oh, you know,” I say. “Not too bad.”
A few minutes later, I’m pretending to work when my phone rings. I answer, expecting something horrible to be on the other end, but I’m happy to hear Lyle, our media contact at the
Washington Post
’s business section. “Oh. Hey, Lyle,” I say.
“I wanted to let you know I got the press release you sent over this morning,” he says, friendly, but a little robotic. “Just read it. Solid as always. I’m sending it up to the writers now.”
“Thanks,” I say. “More hard-hitting news from MSW. I’m impressed you could read the entire thing without falling asleep. You must have had Red Bull for lunch.”
Lyle is one of about fifty media contacts I hit up on a biweekly basis with my company’s boring press releases, which I am, unfortunately, charged with writing. Sometimes these press releases are turned into news articles by bored staff writers, and sometimes they simply drift off into the cosmos and disappear from existence. I wrote this most recent release about six hours ago, and I can’t even remember what it’s about. Bullshit, mostly. Whenever bad news is in the air, like a full-fledged economic clusterfuck, for example, our PR guys want us to send out a bunch of upbeat-sounding releases about how great and profitable things are on the Death Star, as if we’re somehow above it all. I’ve never seen Lyle in real life, but we’ve spoken on the phone or via e-mail a hundred million times.
“That’s OK, Mr. Violet. One of these days you’re gonna bring me something big. I can feel it—a front pager.”
“We don’t do big here, Lyle. In fact, I’m not really sure we do anything. How’s that for a lead, ‘Washington D.C., Company Does Nothing’?”
When Lyle is gone and I’ve hung up the phone, I’m faced with the grim prospect of having to do my job and write some more corporate propaganda. Perhaps I should get a glass of water first, or look at my
Simpsons
trivia calendar, or curl up in a little ball under my desk and sleep off my cheeseburger. As I consider each of these options, there’s a brief crack of static, a click, and then a voice, like a ghost. “Tom, are you there, mate?”
I’m startled, and a little confused. The voice is British and serious.
“Tom? You there then, mate?”
It’s the president of MSW himself, Ian Barksdale. I look at the phone on my desk, which, apparently, has speaker capabilities. I really should read the manual one of these days. “Umm, Ian? Mr. Barksdale?”
“You a’ight then, mate?” he says, at least I think this is what he says, because it kind of sounds like one big, long word.
“Yeah. I’m . . . great.”
“Are you busy? Why don’t you pop up to the top floor for a bit of a chat?”
I pause for a second to translate in my head, and then I wonder if perhaps this is a joke. The voice sounds so British that it’s difficult to believe that there’s a part of the world where people really talk like this. “Sure. Now?”
“No time like the present. Cheers.” There’s another click, and then he’s gone.
I didn’t even know he was in town. No one knows when Ian is in town. He’s the president of five other loosely affiliated companies and he seems to be nowhere and everywhere at once. He’s like Keyser Söze. My first instinct is to flee, to walk down to the parking garage and simply start driving toward Canada. After all, has anyone in the history of corporate America ever randomly been called into the president’s office and had it turn out well?
Tom Violet, you handsome bastard, you’re doing such a good job. Here’s one thousand dollars and the keys to one of the company Land Rovers. Carry on then.
But before I can do anything beyond staring at my no-longer-talking phone, the temperature in my office drops and I hear James Earl Jones’s heavy mechanical breathing. Greg is standing in the doorway. “Was that Ian?” he asks. This gives credence to my longstanding theory that Greg is monitoring my office, and I make a mental note to alert HR. He’s holding an armful of manila folders against his green tie, which, disturbingly, is populated with little sailboats. It’s like someone called a casting agency and requested an actor to play the part someone to annoy me.
But I smile hard, because that’s, for some reason, what I do. “Hi, Greg!”
“What’s Ian Barksdale doing calling
you
?”
“Believe it or not, we’re actually going boating this weekend. He invited Anna and me on his yacht. He probably just wants to go over some things. If you want, I can see if there’s room for you.” We hold each other’s eyes for a moment as he tries to crush my windpipe with his mind. Normally, irritating Greg makes me enjoy being alive, but it’s all trumped by this quiet, sinking feeling in my stomach.
When he turns his back on me and leaves, I find myself for the very first time actually wishing that he’d come back. I’d tease him about his tie, make thinly veiled
Star Wars
references, and together we could delay whatever it is that’s about to happen to me.
Before I leave, I write Katie a quick e-mail.
In the event of my death, I bequeath you the half bag of M&M’s in my bottom drawer and my three-hole punch. Don’t let the bastards drag you down.
Tom
As if operating metaphorically, the senior executives occupy the very top floor of the building, and getting to them is a physical ordeal. It requires an elevator ride, obviously, but also an impromptu walking tour of the entire North American headquarters. Most of my days are spent looking at or avoiding the same twenty or twenty-five people in Marketing and PR, but as I venture out of my cocoon, I’m always amazed at how many freaking people actually work in this horrible place.
I step off the elevator and enter a code to get into a side door. This code is changed by HR seemingly at random, and so I have to punch in a bunch of old codes until I finally get it right. There’s another Cubeland—another dreadful little cluster of workstations like some township in South Africa—and then I’m walking through Accounting. The Accounting guys are all tie guys and they look at me suspiciously, as if perhaps I’ve come to steal their BlackBerrys. Next, I’m in Customer Service, which is made up of people who appear to be no older than nineteen. Those not bopping their heads to iPods are wearing headsets and talking to customers all over the world. Although it’s the middle of the week, most of them are wearing jeans. There’s a banner on the wall that reads: O
UR
C
USTOMERS
C
AN
H
EAR
Y
OU
S
MILING!
I pass through a mini-kitchen with a vending machine, a sink, and a laminated poster demonstrating how to aid a choking victim. Then I’m in the Legal Department, which consists of three pasty, sad-looking lawyers. As far as I know, their only responsibilities are overseeing layoffs and reading from a handbook during the occasional Sexual Harassment Workshop.
Did anyone ever imagine that this is where they’d end up, working for a company that none of us can even describe without every other person in the room passing out onto the floor from hyper-boredom? When I was in college I had this sweet old sociology professor with a long beard who insisted that capitalism is an almost entirely imaginary thing. According to him, there are only a handful of jobs that actually fuel the American economy and the rest are wholly orchestrated boondoggles designed to keep people in offices all day or in malls buying shit on weekends and not rioting in the streets. I used to think he was just a pinko academic nut job, but a few years in corporate America have left me reconsidering his theory. Hundreds of us work here—our families depend on it. And yet, none of us is doing a thing to make the world even a little better.
Close to Buckingham Palace now, there’s a series of noticeable differences as the quality of my surroundings improves. The carpet is thicker, there are no coffee stains, and the walls are free of Dilbert calendars and hotel-room artwork. Cubelands have become offices and the air is cooler, less close and choking. I peek into the offices of our executive vice presidents. Each of them is hunched over a desk, working, stressed, MSNBC on their televisions, doom everywhere.
Nearly out of breath, I land at the desk of a woman named Lauren, Ian Barksdale’s executive coordinator. She’s a good-looking forty-year-old with dark, horn-rimmed glasses. “Hi, Tom,” she says, smiling efficiently. “It’ll be just a second.”
I study Lauren’s smooth, angular face, analyzing her tone. A few minutes ago, Ian called her and said that I was on my way and that
something
was about to happen.
Lauren, love, Tom Violet is on his way up. Poor bloke is getting sacked. Call Security and have them ready the Taser guns.
“Long time no see,” I say, going for the charming version of Tom Violet. “How are things on the top floor?”
Back before she was plucked from the trenches and brought up here to assist the royals, she worked downstairs and we were friendly. She’d gotten married about the same time I did, and we compared honeymoon stories. Her ring finger is bare now, though, and rumors are that things ended badly—as if there’s any other way. “I’m surviving,” she says. “He’s on a call with London. You can have a seat over there.”
“What?” I say. “Where’s the love? Come on, you can tell me. I’m getting a company car right, and a big raise?”
Lauren looks at me, tired and unreadable. “I’m just an assistant, remember?”
“Hey, don’t say that. You’re an executive coordinator. Own it.”
I sit down in a nice leather chair beside Ian’s closed door and take a breath, slowing things down a little. I’m probably nervous, and that’s why my heart has become an object that I can actually feel working. But I think more than that I’m . . . exhilarated? There’s a lot of sameness here, in this hole of a company, heavy, crushing sameness, and so when something that
isn’t
the same happens, it’s exciting. An admin gets a boob job. An executive gets fired for something vague. The Pepsi machine gets replaced with a Coke machine. In a matter of moments, I will likely be fired along with thousands and thousands of other poor saps around the country, given a cardboard box and an hour or so to gather my shit. I’ll have no job—certainly no prospects for a new job—and my family and I will be burning IKEA bookshelves for warmth come winter. But, for the love of God, it will all be very exciting.
Lauren’s phone beeps and then a disembodied Ian is talking again. “Lauren, could you send Tom in please?”
I rise and straighten the wrinkles on the front of my khakis with the palms of my hands. “You don’t happen to have a tie back there, do you, Lauren?”
To her credit, Lauren pretends to search for one among the efficient clutter atop her desk before shrugging.
“Well then,” I say. “God save the Queen.”
When I open the door, Ian’s back is to me, but he greets me anyway. “Hello, mate.” He spins around in his chair, stopping as his shoulders become exactly square with mine. I know nothing about suits, but his is fantastic. By comparison, in my stupid khakis and button-up shirt from the Gap, I’m the homeless guy down the street waving his fist at traffic. The other VIPs have
one
TV in their offices, but Ian has three. He lives in London, but he owns apartments and houses all over the Northeast, including one in Cleveland Park near the D.C. Zoo. Last year, a link to the
London Times
went around the office with a story about how he’d purchased an entire Formula 1 racing team.
With one remote, he turns all three TVs down. Obama is on two of them, giving two different speeches to two different groups of people. “Are you Americans going to actually elect him, do you think?” he asks. Because he’s British, everything he says sounds effortless, poetic, and condescending, like someone who really doesn’t care one way or the other.
I’ve never been a spokesperson for my people before, so I think before talking. “Yes we can,” I say.
By sheer force of habit, I scan the large bookcase over Ian’s shoulder. Among the business texts are a number of real books—a few leather-bound Shakespeares, some hotshot Brit writers, and a copy of my dad’s most famous novel,
The Bridge That Wasn’t There
.
He rolls backwards, lacing his fingers behind his head. He’s maybe fifty-five, but his skin is tan and flawless, save for two serious creases on his forehead. “I’ll get to it straightaway then, if you don’t mind.”