Recently I was laid off from a perfectly good job writing for a financial newsletter at Ruben LLC They laid me off because the economy sucks and there was a revenue shortfall, not because I was some slack worker, so the company started making promises that they would find another job within for me. You see, the company is actually a massive corporation that operates under a complicated web of subsidiary names, all of which provide newsletters on all manner of things that they convince consumers they must have. All of these contain articles written by various industry gurus who push a series of related gadgets and products made by concerns that Ruben has stakes in—and this is something you find out only if you do a whole lot of digging. In this way, the company is more a marketing service than a journalistic enterprise, providing marketing vehicles cleverly disguised as unbiased information sources. Pets, stocks, health, beauty, exercise, the accumulation of wealth, the things people, mostly retired people, the poor cash cows, mistakenly believe stand between them and the great beyond
I had stretched two weeks of severance pay, vacation payout, and personal savings through two months of weird machinations with other parts of Ruben when they finally turned up an opening at a health-related newsletter, specifically alternative health and nutrition.
And that's how I met Lauren St. Germaine.
Honestly, I can't say that Lauren St. Germaine didn't seem like a nice person from the get-go. There was no way I could detect, so soon, something too perfect in her attitude, in the way she dressed, all suited up, flawless makeup that almost achieves that natural look, a haircut that obviously took great pains, care, and styling tools to appear carefree, tousled and pixieish, and a tight kind of smile, but so what?
"It must be so terrible to be laid off," she said, rather absently glancing over my resume. "I see that you've never worked with health content. Are you sure you want to switch into this field?"
I crossed my leg, realizing that there was a run in my stocking, and a white cat hair that the lint roller had missed made drastic contrast with my black skirt. "I think it would be a great career move for me to learn something new," I responded, wishing I could snag just a tiny piece of tape from her desk to remove the not-so-perfect pet hair from my interview attire. "It's too bad what happened to me two floors down, but things generally happen for a reason, you know?"
"Oh, I totally agree." Lauren continued to peruse my resume as I took in her desk. Lots of papers scattered about, but beyond the desk clutter, her office was a very orchestrated environment. Big framed prints on the walls, Matisse, Van Gogh, that sort of thing, like it fit into a mold of what an office space should be. There was a vase bursting with fresh cut flowers (a lovely yet forced touch, as hothouse blossoms always are in the dead of winter), and a giant mug, the kind you get at Starbucks for your giant latte, but the liquid inside looked weak, some herbal infusion. She took a sip.
Silences are no good in interviews, so I said, "You'll see that I also worked for a trade association, so I think that shows my versatility. I had to catch on to a variety of technical concepts there, so I don't see why learning health-related content would be too much of an issue."
"Well, it's not so easy, Jane, but it does look like you're used to lots of hard work and deadlines, and I definitely need an assistant editor with those qualities. I have three newsletters, complete with electronic communications, books, marketing materials, Web changes, discussion boards… It's really too much for one person, and my last assistant, Juliet…" She sighed. "Juliet just couldn't cut it."
"Well, not everybody is for every kind of job," I said. "I'm used to juggling lots of priorities. And I never miss deadlines."
"Everybody from your old department raved about you." She put my resume aside. "Here, I'll show you one of the web sites you'd be working on." She sat very straight in her chair. I noticed the wallpaper on her computer was a photo of a horse grazing in a field, and her cursor was a rose, which she carefully navigated across the screen, typing in a very tentative, ladylike way, not the pounding that was my usual style.
After showing me the web site, Lauren wrapped up the interview with a smile and an abrupt dismissal. "I forgot, I have a meeting in 15 minutes," she said, "but I'll definitely be in touch in the next few days. Let me walk you downstairs."
On the way out, we ran into a sullen looking girl. "Oh Juliet," Lauren sang out, her tone transformed into sticky honey. "This is Jane, she might be taking your place!"
Juliet could have been a supermodel with her olive skin and her long, brown, professionally highlighted hair twisted into a loose, pretty braid down her back, but her sour demeanor chilled the lobby. She raised one hand in a limp greeting and didn't crack a smile. Lauren's smile never faded as Juliet got on the elevator and disappeared behind its smartly shutting doors. "What is Juliet leaving to do?" I asked.
"She's going to pursue an opportunity in her own field," Lauren said. "She's a dietician, not a journalist. It's better this way."
It certainly looked like Juliet was the problem in the scenario. Judging by Lauren's smile and her pleasant demeanor, Juliet's nasty attitude and inability to even feign politeness seemed to tell the whole story. I have to admit, I thought that with competition like that, this was going to be cake.
My first taste of Lauren's personality came like a flash and read like a fluke. I had lined up another interview, but they were slow about getting back to me as they hammered out the details and in the meanwhile, Lauren made me an offer. Her job came with a slight pay cut, which remotely pissed me off, so I wanted to hear what the other guys wanted to say.
So, when Lauren couriered over the offer letter, I called her. "Hi Lauren, I'm going to need a few days to think this over," I said.
"What do you mean? What's there to think over?"
I froze. Having been just scraping by for two months, it had made perfect sense to do what was right for me two seconds before dialing the phone, but suddenly, faced with her confrontational tone, it didn't seem so clear.
"Well, I need to know, Jane," Lauren continued, her tone sharp. "I'm busy and I really need the help. And just remember, I made an offer first."
"I'll let you know by tomorrow," I said, a concession that surprised me.
"Oh good," she said brightly, adding, "I don't mean to sound harsh, but I really need to know."
"All right." Hanging up, I felt stung by her attitude and tone, but I gathered my natural empathy… it did sound like I was jerking her chain, she did make the offer first. It's amazing all the ways one justifies ill behavior in someone else…
When you're unemployed and your back's against the wall, everybody's got their own opinion of what you should do about the situation. Some people are right, and some people are wrong, the problem is choosing your own adventure (if you want to take the job, go to page 2…), even with your own voices hammering at the back of your head.
My roommate Katie had been holding her feelings in for a long time when she said, "I hate that company. I wish you didn't have to go back there."
With the classifieds on my lap (I mean it, I'm not kidding!) and a highlighter between my fingers, which really wasn't getting much use in circling dream jobs, or even "good enough" gigs, I responded, "Well, I know, but there's nothing else out there."
She picked up one of the cats and started combing him, saying, "Well, I mean, look at what they did. They laid you off and then made you wait two months while they got their shit together. First the managing editor positions, they stalled, and found somebody else who was perfect for those. Then they said maybe they'd have you freelance for some new newsletter, but then that kind of faded away. Now this, and then she has all this 'tude because you need some time to think it over. I mean, what is that?"
"I know," I said, "but I don't know what else to do. There's nothing out there, and I'm running out of money."
"I know, " Katie sighed, "but just be careful. I think they suck."
"Suck is becoming a relative term," I answered, crumpling up the want ads into a cat toy and tossing it on the floor. "All of my networking contacts are unemployed too, the want ads are empty, and not having money truly sucks."
My friend Joel, counseling me from San Francisco via phone, had a different perspective. "Take the job Lauren offered you," he said. "You need work, and she's willing to have you start right away. That other job might fall through. Plus, Lauren will be grateful that you had loyalty to her."
I was worn out, to the very core, worn out worrying about money, stewing over the possibility that somehow both jobs could fall through and I'd be left holding a bag full of nothing except maybe some Mad Dog 20/20 and a cat under my threadbare coat to keep my cardboard box warm. I convinced myself learning something new was a great career move. I told myself that I could get over all the ways Lauren and the company had already insulted me. Insults didn't matter, paychecks did. The economy was in the shitter, and I wasn't ready to relocate to the gutter. I took Lauren's job.
And so I entered the world of obsessive mindfulness, a cornucopia of flax seed, high fiber, and healthy fats, a buffet of walnuts, coconut, soy, B6, B12, and coenzyme Q10, and a whole chorus of the anal people who torment themselves daily over these things.
And lots of red pen. There was nothing organic about that.
Lauren started my first assignment off with a bang by editing the hell out of it. She picked on everything from story angle to structure to words she just didn't like, but assured me with that it was good, I was still learning what the content was all about. My met deadlines were demolished by the hours she pored over the pages, like a monk isolated in some remote mountain abbey, far removed from small details like "business" and "deadlines" and "human contact," with all the time in the world to obsess, obsess, obsess, obsess... The paper ran bloody with her efforts, and the company didn't even recycle.
At first, I told myself it was just a matter of finding what she liked, of adjusting to her style. I'd dealt with many people before, from the entirely easygoing to those oozing with mad, mad hubris, and I usually adjusted well enough. But as time wore on, I began to catch on. As she told me to learn the doctors' voices and write using them, it became clear that these weren't the doctors' voices at all, they were all the voices that she had created, and I had to climb into her head to get them perfect.
I began to get suspicious after she told me to rework a piece using old content—she told me to take it as is when possible, to save time and effort as it was a lower priority piece. She knocked out a paragraph entirely during a meeting with me, saying, "It's been two months, you really should have a better handle on Dr. Benson's voice by now, and he would never say this." A look of disappointment etched on her face, she sipped her herbal infusion daintily and popped supplements with her fanatical zeal. Later, I realized that that was one of the paragraphs I had pulled from the old content, her own. Not his voice my ass, I thought.
In contrast, I got along fine with the doctors we worked with and received plenty of accolades from them. The e-letters I wrote all got great numbers of web traffic and the links I came up with interested people. One of my e-letters got an e-mail ovation from the marketing department, and while Lauren had actually done some of her surgery on it, it was one I felt was largely my own, complete with compelling headline. This was something that Lauren never commented on.
Gradually, I noticed that she was never on time with any assignment. Mired in whatever she was doing, wielding her red pen and leaving a sanguine trail like a manic surgeon, she was always late. Nothing I did to help did anything to change that, and meeting the deadlines she set for me without fail, even building in extra time, did nothing to make anything any more on time, because she needed to burn the midnight oil for her pondersome editing of my work.
As I pounded away at my deadlines, Lauren was always poised, ready, driven to dissect, to disagree. In her perfect suits, with her lipstick perfectly lined, her dark hair perfectly highlighted with burgundy streaks that were perfectly in fashion. She frowned if I was late to work, but it was fine if she missed a half-day to get her horse shoed. She didn't trust me with much, but she certainly trusted me enough to pick up her slack.
I represented both of us at a meeting of the web marketing crew. "Where's Lauren?" asked John, the marketing heavyweight for our newsletter and product line. He always had a twinkle in his eye and a way with sharp comments—I suspected that he had it in for Lauren and was just biding his time to find his smooth avenue to domination.
"She was talking to Joan about something," I responded. "It looked important. Maybe something about PR for Dr. Benson's radio show. Don't worry, I'll give her a full recap and take the handouts to her."
"Oh, I'll bet it's important," John said with a smile. "Bet she and Joan are discussing their next pilates class." His assistant's face lit up with a subtle smile but I saw a flicker of something else roll across her features.
After the meeting, I entered Lauren's office and handed her the handouts. "Oh!" she said, looking up from the newspaper, holding a half-eaten apple, "I forgot the meeting, didn't I?"
"I told John I saw you talking to Joan," I answered.
"Oh, I wasn't even talking to Joan about anything important," Lauren shrugged. "Oh well."
"I'll e-mail you a recap of my notes from the meeting," I said, eyes transfixed on the newspaper draped across her desk, blanketing all the papers and clutter.
"Oh good, thanks," she answered, already absent, popping supplements and directing her attention back to a riveting movie review.
Along with power, Lauren had cronies. I don't know if she wasn't picked to be on the cheerleading squad in high school or what, but she and her female friends recreated that. Instead of pompoms and gymnastics, it was all about mastheads and oneupsmanship, but the latter was subtle, lingering deep between the lines. These women were all the editorial directors of their own respective newsletters. They reminded me of the types who would stab each other in the back if it meant gaining the homecoming queen crown. This was one uneasy coven, and I was glad that I wasn't "cool," "pretty," or "powerful" enough to join.
Lauren was never too busy to go and talk to these women for hours on end, about clothes, makeup, hair, diet. I would be writing, editing, researching, footnoting, and banging away on my keyboard, trying to build a wall of thought against the loud clatter of the conversational equivalent of white noise, barraged by the sound of home economics, the gossip of the girls locker room, the giggles over the silly things their husbands did or said. None of it scratched the surface of anything, and it certainly had nothing to do with their newsletters.
This all got worse when they moved me from an office to a cubicle in the middle of the department, ringed on all sides by offices. It had high walls, but that was small consolation considering that everyone chose to have their conversations right outside of it.
At first, the director of the department had assured of his plans to have three offices fabricated into five to increase the office space. But when the budget ran out, he and Lauren both ended up having offices as big as my bedroom in my apartment. These mammoth offices created a lot of talk and jealousy, even amongst Lauren's pals. The only difference was, I wasn't jealous, I was scared of what it meant. It was the prospect of smaller office space versus no office space.
When I protested the move, Lauren responded, "Well, what can you expect? The editorial directors all get their own offices, they have to. I mean, poor Courtney, she's an editorial director and she didn't even get a window!"
Yeah, I thought, that's really going to suck for poor Courtney, but at least she has a door. Courtney didn't use that door often enough, though. For a short while, maybe a week, Courtney was leaving at six instead of four, using the computer and phone to plan her upcoming wedding (and not to research great gizmos that extend your beloved pet's life), squealing over wedding dresses and arguing endlessly with caterers. She would blast her CD player loud enough for me to hear, as she tunelessly sang, over and over and over, "Sure plays a mean pinball!"
As time went on, my depression somehow metabolized into a desperation to get through to Lauren, to relate to her on some human level -- it seemed like there had to be somebody decent in there, somebody who wanted to be kind. Somehow I thought that admitting to vulnerability might be a more effective tack than telling her to fuck off, and honestly, I was feeling super vulnerable.
"Lauren, it's been a very hard year for me," I said one day, as we sat in her office. She was eating a trail mix made of nuts, dried cranberries and dates, and raisins, one maddening piece at a time, another bleeding page a limp casualty in her hand. "One of my friends was killed in a car accident. A week later I got laid off from my job and waited two months for this one. Things are more expensive. I'm not married and there's no one to take care of me but me. I don't sleep well at night. I am trying really hard to always give you what you want, but sometimes I feel like that's an impossible task. And I'm really depressed over all of these things."
She looked at me with a smile. "Well, I hope you make it through," she said.
The cubicle walls were closing in when Lauren gave me a memo that said she would proceed to "grade" my assignments to see if I was a good fit with the company and with my position. Any grade under a "B" at the end of a six-week period, averaged using my next four assignments, was not going to be good enough.
"You know what grades I'm going to get, don't you?" I asked Katie one night. We had a couple decks of tarot cards, but we didn't need them for this. "Big, fat, red C's."
"She's a C," Katie said, then laughed.
I had to laugh myself. "Yeah, she is!" I sobered up fast. "All of these assignments have really steep deadlines, and they're back to back… she's set me up to fail, Katie. And I haven't made any allies in that department. All the winged monkeys are on her side."
"So what are you going to do about it?"
I shrugged. "I've been trying to contact this woman I know in human resources, but she's always busy. I want to tell her I know what my grades are going to be."
"I'll tell you what you're going to do," Katie said, pulling through as she always did with her hard-ass optimism. "You're going to do the assignments, and you're going to kick ass. You've always been able to pull stuff like this off, you'll do it again."
Katie was right. My tattered fighting spirit struggled back; it had been born and was honed in the world of start-ups and small staffs and their uphill battles. I convinced myself I could fight this.
One of the assignments consisted of conducting an interview with a person who had been described to me as "difficult," and who consistently failed to return my phone calls and e-mails until John, marketing genius that he was, finally intervened on my behalf. So I got the interview done and simultaneously worked on an electronic newsletter that was due at the same time.
When I turned in the electronic newsletter, Lauren once again hacked it, and after many hours of deliberation she gave it a grade of a B-/C+, and then said, nonchalantly, "Oh, I should have given you these research materials to use before you started. Please rework it." As she said this, she ate microwave popcorn out of the bag, daintily, one fluffy kernel at a time in a maddeningly slow fashion, which was damn weird since she was always munching on granola or licorice bark or twigs gathered under a full moon, trying to eat nothing but foods that you can eat with a spoon, whatever the latest craze in diet was.
I was too tired and busy to argue, as the assignment was now overdue. I stayed till 9:30 that night finishing that draft, simultaneously working on getting drafts of the print newsletter approved so it could go into layout the next day. The other piece, however, came off without a hitch, despite the fact that I had viewed it as an outright sabotage. My difficult interviewee loved the piece. "I couldn't have done a better job myself!" she gushed in an e-mail, which I forwarded to Lauren and cc'ed her boss, finally, too late, driven to save my own ass with a paper trail. One evening, after my coworkers trickled out between three and five, I did some investigating on my computer---and found a folder of old e-mails that were there for me to use for reference materials. What they also showed me was that Juliet had stayed approximately five months, and Lauren's communications with her had taken a definite downward spiral.
"When you're an editorial director…"
"What you would have learned if you went to J school…"
"This is unacceptable, because…"
I was in my fifth month.
So, the interview piece was my ace in the hole, I thought when I turned it in. I even had a difficult interviewee who had gushed over it. It was an A, easy.
Lauren handed it back to me with an air of triumph. I looked at the grade. C+.
"I need to talk to you about this, in your office," I said. She nodded, her face a stiff mask; she obviously knew damn well where this was going -- straight down Confrontation Boulevard. Yeah, babe, I thought, as I followed her tall, lanky figure move across the room, no more passive aggressive, it's time for down and dirty, truth will out. No more dancing around the issue under a full moon. I was so angry I didn't even shut the door. "Lauren, this isn't a C. Not even close. It's an A."
"I don't agree. I had changes." The door may have been open, but she was bricked up for sure, shut, closed. Her long, thin white fingers thumped slowly, rhythmically on her desk, beating out a meter for our stand-off.
"You had three small changes, they weren't even substantive changes," I argued. Judging by the look on her face, she was quite happy to remain on her side of the desk, just in case I leapt at her like the non-J-schooled heathen monster that I was. "Lauren, I can't read your mind. I won't know what words you want, I won't always know what angle you want me to pursue. I take the assignment, and I do it. If you want me to change it so you like it, I will. But mind reading is not in my job description. Maybe my prose isn't always exactly what you want, but you have to admit, I do my work as expected, and I always get assignments to you on time."
Of course I said it on purpose. She visibly flinched. "I would rather you not make your deadlines and hand me more perfect copy," she said, her words sharp and brandished.
"Most of your responses are subjective," I said, my mind a dark sky, a funnel cloud. " No one, Lauren, no one is ever going to always know what you want. And hell, no one is ever going to perfect, either. So I'm not interested in playing this game with you anymore."
"You're overreacting, you still have a chance of having a B or better by the end of all these assignments."
"I think it's clear I will never get a B or better from you," I snapped. "I think it's clear that I don't fit in here, as you said in that memo."
"I don't know about that. If you try really hard," she said, and I detected a faint wheedling tone to her voice. I knew the workload she had given me had left her with exactly two small assignments of her own over the coming month, leaving plenty of time to read the Lifestyle section of the newspaper when she wasn't grading my work. If I left, she couldn't handle it alone, and for a split second, her pride and hubris receded just enough to reveal fear.
"No, you've already made the decision," I answered, standing up. "I'm going home now."
"Are you going to want to finish out this issue of the newsletter?" she asked, her tone now deliberately sweet and infuriatingly nonchalant, having made a quick recovery from that moment of weakness.
"I don't know, I'm going to have to sleep on it," I responded. I walked out, faintly mortified that that scene had occurred with the door open. Someone told me later that it was unprofessional to berate a subordinate with the door open. That was an empty victory. It had long since ceased to matter.
The scene occurred on a Friday, so I went over the weekend to pack up my desk. Just as my resume said, I'm a researcher, so I collected materials—the memo she had given me, the work I had done, the offensive grades—and cleaned out my e-mail inbox while printing out each and every e-mail on my behalf. I went home and outlined everything that had transpired in writing, and first thing Monday morning, I went to human resources, with all these materials plus a letter of resignation effective immediately due to what I considered hostile work conditions. My friend in human resources, wearing her obligatory pin bearing the company logo, also wore a look of shock and dread that she tried to cover with a mask of empathy. "Can I ask you to reconsider? I think it would be better for you to tell Lauren yourself."
"I'm done with Lauren," I answered, standing up. "I've wasted too much time on her already." It was a long walk, passing colleagues I knew, others I didn't, as I winded down halls, stepped on the elevator, and finally made my way to the outside world, breathing a sigh of relief, knowing I would never set foot inside the building again. The sun was shining, the sky was blue, and the birds sang a joyous tune that sounded a whole lot like freedom, and I never looked back.
So here I am, on what would appear to be an indefinite vacation. No plans, no red pens, just blue skies. For a time, a week or two, my friends treated me like some kind of folk heroine—for basically orchestrating the whole take-this-job-and-shove-it routine that probably everyone fantasizes about at least once in their lives, if not a hundred times, but never actually acts out. It was indeed like something out of a movie, I'll admit to that, except in the movies, you never see that maybe a week later, everybody goes back about their business and forgets your heroics. So, where does that leave you? Basking by the pool, stewing in your own juices, is one answer.
I mean, when the dust settles, there you are, penniless, buying scratch-off lottery tickets and smashing your piggy bank for groceries (and maybe, just a bit, to hear the gratifying noise it makes when you're home by yourself during the day). Or trying to run a scam when you use the Victoria's Secret gift certificate your Aunt Betty gave you to buy a $10 bra so you'll get $40 cash back to use on something else, like a bill, which doesn't happen now, and you're forced to buy more bras, which is good, because if you lose weight from starving, you'll need them when your cup size shrinks, unless you're a lucky girl with some natural perk. When the bill collectors call, will they care that you are a hard worker who had an utter flaming bitch for a boss? Believe me, I tried to tell anyone who would listen, there for a while, around the same time I was still fantasizing about making voodoo dolls. Fantasized about things I could do to exact my revenge, like pulling the Godfather routine on her horse, or kidnapping her dogs and—dear God, no!—feeding them the incorrect food.
Meanwhile, I left that place with stress-related rashes and ten pounds skinnier because according to Lauren's fanatical gospel of whole foods, just about everything is bad for you. Trans fats, processed foods, red meat, farmed meat, anything non-organic, ANYTHING FROM THE MIDDLE OF THE GROCERY STORE, for God's sake, all bad for you. Pasta—bad, very bad. Even peas, because they're starchy, after all.
And so, my thoughts drift, much as the smell of SPF drifts across the summer breeze, my eyes tight shut against the sun, as I sweat out the toxins, most of which are in my head. I can afford another month or so of recovery, I think, listening to children splash, cheering bees on to go find their karmic destiny—hopefully to embed their revenge, all a matter of genetics and predestination, in some evil bitch's ass. Flipping onto my stomach to give my back some rays, I peel open a bag of cookies, reveling in the chocolate, preservatives, Keebler elves peddling their transfats; and they are absolutely delicious. And free with a purchase of equivalent or higher value.