Chapter 4
A
nd having fulfilling work was one of the reasons I left Salem, Virginia, a little over five years ago.
I was just going through the motions after earning a business management degree from Old Dominion University in Norfolk. I was wasting my life working two jobs in nearby Roanoke, taking extra classes at Virginia Western Community College, and living in my parents’ house—and paying
half
of the house note and utilities because I had two “good” jobs. Mama didn’t work, and my daddy was cutting back on his hours at General Electric to concentrate on a frozen meat company that never panned out. I basically only slept in my parents’ house, but I paid half the bills. I worked as a cashier/“go get it”/stocker at Lowe’s Home Improvement from six until twelve, was off for afternoon classes in art history and communications at Virginia Western, and then rushed to Sir Speedy Printing to run copies and prints until midnight. Though I worked sixty hours a week, I had no benefits and no desire to become an assistant manager or manager-in-training at an overgrown hardware store or a glorified copy center.
I was nothing but a robot chasing paper.
In my spare time, I surfed the Internet for jobs, none of which I was qualified for, but it let me dream. When I read the job description for administrative assistant at MultiCorp, it sounded exciting and exotic, I felt qualified, and I jumped, immediately submitting an online résumé. Somebody must have liked my customer service and somewhat artlike background from that one art history class I took, because they asked me to come to New York and interview.
They hired me on the spot—sort of. “We need to give you a sort of tryout, see how you’ll do under our demanding, fast-paced working conditions,” they said. I asked, “For how long?” They shrugged. “Until we can hire you full-time.”
MultiCorp dragged me four hundred miles north to become a glorified temp.
They put me up in the Murray Hill Inn on East Thirtieth Street in Midtown. I had a double bed but had to share a bathroom with another potential administrative assistant from Chicago, Sylvia something. She didn’t survive the “tryout” because all she wanted to do was shop and go to shows. I had to walk three miles to and from work every day, me, the girl from Virginia, from Third Avenue to Lafayette Street to William Street.
I loved
every
minute of it.
And I even looked up at all the tall buildings like a tourist because the tallest building in Salem is the Roanoke College library, all
four
stories of it. I looked in every store window, hung out in Times Square, and just generally soaked up the neon and the noise.
At the time, MultiCorp was allegedly having “explosive growth” in its workforce. A lot of people had quit MultiCorp when many clients’ advertising revenues fell 10 percent the year before. That’s where the explosive growth was coming from. They were expecting “natural account growth,” which at that time was as slow as watching moss form on a tree. They needed someone like me to be the right-hand gofer and general masochistic suck-up, as it turned out, to the most underhanded advertising account executive in the company.
They “matched me up” with Corrine, who had a reputation for putting her assistants into therapy, and that first day was rough. I couldn’t do anything right. I answered the phone wrong. I dropped some of her calls. I directed some of her calls to the wrong people. I even brought her the wrong food order. I fought with Microsoft Excel all afternoon. However, I stayed not one but
fifty
steps ahead of Corrine the next day and for the rest of that week, kept
her
on track and in her “space” for more than a few hours at a time (she likes to takes long lunches), and was hired full-time only two weeks later.
I should have been more suspicious when they hired me so quickly. Piper, the personnel director, asked me “Are you sure?” at least a dozen times.
I should have gotten the hint.
My mama and daddy were not pleased, but they have never really ever understood me. I was their only child, their “baby,” their “blessing from heaven.” I believed that they wanted to keep me around for as long as they could so that they could continue to stunt my growth and I could keep paying on the house note. They tried to tag-team me by stressing “home” and “not your home,” as in “
this
is your home” and “
that
is not your home.” They loved Salem, where they had lived their entire lives. I don’t fault them for that, but their minds were so closed because of it. I got tired of the same thing day after day, year after year: Olde Salem Days, Salem High School football, and dusty softball tournaments at the Moyer Sports Complex. I didn’t want any of that. When I told them I had a full-time job with benefits in the greatest city in the world and an apartment of my very own in Brooklyn, they begged me to come home immediately. “You belong here, Shari,” Mama said. “All your friends are here,” Daddy said. “You know that sinful city will chew you up and spit you out,” Mama said. “Don’t you love us anymore?” Daddy asked. “Girl, I didn’t raise you to live in no Brooklyn!” Mama shouted.
And yet Brooklyn suits me just fine.
Mama stopped calling me to come home three years ago.
Daddy hasn’t called since last Christmas.
I was always a daddy’s girl.
Do I miss them? Sure. Am I afraid to visit them? No. I just don’t want all the drama they will throw at me. Do I appreciate them?
Oh yes
. They made me what I am today: strong, self-sufficient, determined, and spiritual. One day I hope they’ll understand why I had to leave, but until then, I’m staying. The benefits far outweigh the costs.
And the benefits MultiCorp gives me are outstanding. I get medical benefits I rarely use since I’m so healthy. All that walking, you know. I use my dental benefits religiously to keep my pearly whites pearly. My vision benefits cover my glasses every two years. I don’t wear granny glasses, though. Mine are kind of like librarian’s reading glasses, and they’re the same shade of brown as the color of my skin. MultiCorp even gives me life insurance (my beneficiaries are my parents), LTD (“Long-Term Disability,” which I will earn after a few more years of this “Long-Term Depression”), three weeks of vacation or personal days (which I am accumulating instead of using), a
matching
401k plan (which means I can never
ever
retire), and an IBP—an Itty Bitty Paycheck.
When Corrine isn’t here, I usually float among the other account execs, but their assistants don’t like me hanging around them at all. They think I’m trying to steal their bosses. I would never do that. Though I know that Corrine is the devil’s stepsister, I would never leave her for another executive. Better the devil’s stepsister you know, right? I’ve also heard rumors that the other administrative assistants don’t want me to rub off on them. All of them have their MBAs already, and none of them want to
be
me after they work here for five years. Whatever.
So, what do I do all day when Corrine
is
here? First of all, I
own
Corrine’s calendar. She can’t fart, tinkle, or burp if it’s not on the calendar. MS Outlook and I are one. I have trained Corrine to obey MS Outlook. Until lunchtime. I can’t control her then because her stomach has a mind of its own. I also own Corrine’s travel schedule. She travels nowhere without me, except that she, um, travels
everywhere
without me. What I mean to say is that Corrine could
go
nowhere without my expert planning and itineraries that are accurate to within five minutes. I order her plane tickets (“first-class window seats only, Shari dear”) and book “four-star or better
or else
” hotels, but I don’t have to set up rental cars anymore because she expects car services or limousines to drive her everywhere. I also do her expense reports, and I have to be more and more creative every time I do them. Corrine has never seen a spreadsheet or a purchase order, nor does she know what they are for. She buys things or spends the company’s money in shady ways, I creatively write the POs and the spreadsheets, Ted in accounting rubber-stamps them with a wink, and the MultiCorp universe continues to spin wildly into debt, I mean, into space.
I read all her e-mails and answer most of them as quickly as she does. She types the letter
K
in reply to nearly all of them. That’s it. Just
K
. And she’s a Harvard graduate. I’m not allowed to read the e-mails from Tom “Terrific,” her LTD (long, tall Dexter), who has yet to commit to her, and who happens to be (shock and awe!) white. And in the twenty-first century, no less. Corrine acts as if this is an earth-shattering thing. It isn’t, especially in New York City. It wasn’t even that earth-shattering in Virginia since Bryan is also white, though he sometimes tries to act black—and my daddy probably still doesn’t like either version of Bryan. I know I didn’t mention Bryan’s color before. It’s no big deal. I’ve been knowing Bryan since we were in middle school, and like I said, he’s more of a friend than anything else.
But what irks me most about Corrine and Tom is what she once told me: “If I want to make it to the next level in my career, I
have
to have a white man on my arm. You need a white man on your arm, too, Shari.”
She actually said that to me out loud and in complete sincerity. I didn’t want to remind her that she worked for Mr. Dunn, a black Hispanic who started the company from scratch, nor did I share with her that my “one and only male friend”—wow, that is so depressing—is also white. I don’t tell Corrine my business because, as the phrase “my business” implies,
my
business is
my
business.
Nevertheless, I do happy dances for Tom all the time, even though I’ve never met the man and there are, eerily, no pictures of Tom in Corrine’s “space.” You’d think she’d have at least one picture of him somewhere after five years of dating. Maybe she’s afraid of what folks at MultiCorp might think, I don’t know. But no pictures after five years of dating? That’s odd. I hope Tom never loses his mind and commits what has to be an unforgivable sin by marrying Corrine-cula. Unless, of course, he can tame her in some way... .
Nah. That only happens in the movies or in really old English plays.
Not everything I do is as glamorous as keeping Corrine’s schedule. I also do freakishly long, dull, and boring spreadsheets. Excel and I do not get along. Too many columns. Too many straight lines. Too many freaking formulas, and I always forget to type the stupid equals sign at the top. I also get to deal with our current clients when Corrine would rather go out to eat or leave early for the day. Most of our clients are understanding and easy to pacify, but some days they light up my phones all day asking questions about future changes and tweaks that I don’t have the answers for. I’m worried that some of our clients will eventually take their business to another agency, and I just know that Corrine will blame me. I’m the dog she kicks.
I also have to clean up her presentations so they sound intelligent, elegant, and feasible. Most of what she gives me is insane, cheesy, and impossible. Each time she gives me her version of a PowerPoint, I want to nod, make my little
O,
and let her go make a fool of herself in the conference room. She’d get laughed out of there for sure, because I am the PowerPoint Queen, and as long as she has had
my
script and graphics, she hasn’t gone wrong.
But only if they don’t ask her any questions about her (our) proposals and pitches. She’s pretty evasive during Q&A and often calls me for help. One time she even texted me right from the meeting
while
she was being grilled by the client. I don’t know why they don’t let me sit behind her during those meetings. She’ll sit on my knee, and I’ll be her ventriloquist. That’s what it all amounts to anyway.
In between photocopying, faxing, mailing, filing, getting her Toffee Nut Lattes, and, well, generally doing
her
job, I handle all incoming telephone calls. I’m supposed to screen out the unwanted and the desperate, and I usually do a pretty good job without ticking them off. “Hold all calls,” Corrine sometimes says, “but put Philip Golden Fat Cow of Make Me Rich So I Can Afford Thousand-Dollar Shoes through right away”—and I do, eyes rolling. “Only the upty-ups,” she tells me on other days, and only the
higher
(and I mean that word in all its negative definitions) MultiCorp executives get through to her. “Only Tom Terrific,” she says, and, well, I sometimes whisper to him a long time before putting him through to her.
Tom and I have been talking to each other for five years, and I consider him to be a good friend. Tom has a very sexy voice and is so easy to talk to. He’s kind of rough, not too refined, and I imagine he wears hiking boots while he travels. Tom travels a lot because he works for Harrison Hersey and Boulder, “the agency God Himself would use if the Almighty ever needed a bigger market share,” Corrine once told me. Harrison Hersey and Boulder has offices in many of the places I’ve always wanted to visit: London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Sao Paulo, and Paris.