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MAY 2008 |
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Welcome to the Jungle: Tales From the Wilds of Manhattan “It’s 4:30 A.M.
No matter how much porn roams the Internet at any given moment, nothing is quite as obscene as getting an email from a Manhattan co-worker who’s already at the office at 4:30 A.M. The sender, whom I will henceforth call “4:30 A.M. Man,” later admitted that the email was a joke. Ha Ha. But I interpreted it as a nudge from this co-worker that rather than sleeping or pushing the snooze button a fifth time, I should already be “adding value” at the office at 4:30 A.M. Let me explain a few things right at the outset. I like my life. I own a fabulous apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side that I bought at 1990’s recession prices. I like planning trips to exotic countries (one per year). I like riding my bicycle in Central Park every morning. I have determined, once and for all, that at the age of 52, that I do not need to “add value” at 4:30 A.M. But like all of us, I do need a paycheck, and because I live in New York, where a sandwich and a can of Coke can cost over nine bucks, I need a BIG paycheck. So when the opportunity to work for the New York office of my company arose, I jumped at it. The big New York-size paycheck hasn’t arrived quite yet. But the big New York everything-else did. Like a ton of bricks. The Turnstile Pass The first indication I was working in New York again was on the first day I tried to enter my office building. I began the morning waving genially at the guard, and then walked casually into the building's turnstile. BAM! The turnstile locked, the turnstile bar pushed back and hit me in the groin, and I almost involuntarily became a member of the opposite sex. “Can I see your turnstile pass, sir?” the guard barked. (Note: The guard looked like a relative you would see at a family gathering in a finished basement, eating a bologna sandwich, muttering to himself in a corner.) “Turnstile pass?” I asked, answering in my sweetest, be-nice-to-the-police-officer voice. “You need an electronic turnstile pass to get into the building,” he barked back, in his meanest be-cruel-to-the-new-guy voice. “If you don’t have one, you gotta get a day pass over there at the Frontier Center,” he said, indicating a room on the other side of the ground floor. I followed his index finger. There, through the frosted windowpane of the Frontier Center, I saw a queue of about 500 people, looking like refugees, punching impatiently at their Blackberrys. Ninety minutes later, as I finally walked into my meeting with a paper badge stuck to my lapel, bearing a picture of me squinting into the camera, I announced to 4:30 A.M. Man that I would need to get an electronic turnstile pass to work in the New York office. “I’ll see what I can do,” said 4:30 A.M. Man. Five months later, I finally got my pass. The name of the woman who gave it to me was Loser. The New Job In New York, I was something called a “Proposal Writer.” My responsibility was to write and develop proposals, running anywhere from 50 to 500 pages in length, presenting my firm’s qualifications in marketing another firm’s widgets. This seemed harmless enough until you actually started writing the proposal. “Oh, we don’t want to say anything too new,” said one woman with screw curls like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. “Just re-purpose something we wrote for the XYZ trucking proposal.” “Re-purpose,” you see, is business-speak for “copy” or “lift.” Every proposal contained resumes of the candidates we were proposing to serve a particular client. This was actually the easiest part of the writing assignment, assuming the person’s first language was English. There is nothing quite as challenging as fact-checking a resume for a Mumbai native whose surname is Krap. Hoteling For those who think the word “hoteling” means getting a hotel after a late night at the office, think again. “Hoteling” is business-speak for reserving cube space in any office of a large corporation other than your home office. So, since I had only recently transferred from New Jersey, I didn’t yet have a permanent New York office and would have to “hotel” in a stranger’s office. The hoteling rules seemed simple enough. Rule One: Choose your office on the Internet two weeks before you want to occupy it. Rule Two: Leave your office at COB (close of business) in the same condition you found it. Since my cube already looked as if Hurricane Katrina had passed through several times, I didn’t have much of a problem with that one. What did arouse my concern was Rule Number 3: No hanging of pictures or calendars on cube walls. Well, I asked myself, how was I supposed to schedule meetings if I didn’t know what day of the week it was? Rule Number 4 was even more perplexing: Never open a locked desk drawer. Well, I asked again, where was I going to keep my Post-its and red editing pens? These questions were quickly answered by Hoteling Rule Number 5: “For any other question, please call the Help Desk.” When I did, I was told, “Your call will be answered within 29 minutes.” I decided not to go to 4:30 A.M. Man with this one. Auld Lang Syne All this took a bit of mental adjustment. But I figured, what the hey? “Repurposing” other people’s words, editing other people’s resumes...It all sounded like a piece of cake. Until I heard what time they wanted their work completed by. “Um, could we have an executive summary by 8:30 tomorrow morning?” an executive would ask casually at 11:30 p.m. “It can be up to 20 pages long!” Or my personal favorite: “You’re not doing anything Tuesday night, are you?” Tuesday night was New Year’s Eve. Project Widget, and Caren Of course, all this paled in comparison to Project Widget, the biggest effort the company had ever undertaken. It was going to change the face of the company-as-we-knew-it, I was told. Put us “on the map.” And leading the charge on Project Widget was a woman named Caren. I knew Caren from my days in the New Jersey office. She seemed pleasant enough. We had traded cordial hellos in the coffee room. Each morning on my first days in the New York office, she would be very, as they say in business-speak, “empowering.” “Very good,” she said when I would show her a thank-you note I had crafted on behalf of the CEO. “Nicely done.” She would then proceed to ask me about some artsy film or play I had seen over the weekend. I said to myself, well, this is going to work. After a week, though, it seemed as if Caren’s Evil Twin had taken over. I would start submitting copy (or “content” in business-speak) and she would look down at it, purse her lips, get very quiet, and say, “This isn’t right.” I’d answer sweetly, in my be-nice-to-the-sociopath voice, “But Caren, this is the direction you gave me a half hour ago.” “Yes,” replied Catherine, “But now that I see it, it isn’t right. I think we should say, x, y, and w, not w, x and z. And we should use this paragraph,” pointing to something she wrote, “rather than that paragraph,” something I wrote. I stared poker-faced at the “content” sheet, hoping steam wasn’t visibly pouring out of my ears. “Fine,” I said. Twenty-nine versions later, the content was finally “good to go.” Hm. Now I figured out why the turnstile guard seemed to be smirking at me each morning. Moving Forward Project Widget turned out to be as all-consuming as my company had predicted. Each morning at 8, the Project Widget Project Management Team held status meetings. A dozen or so bloodshot employees would cram into a room, and hear Caren yammer on through a long list of “action items” and talk about plans for “moving forward.” Once, 4:30 A.M. Man made the unpardonable mistake of sending out a letter to a certain “Rob,” addressing him as “Bob.” This made Caren apoplectic. “YOU NEED TO THROW YOURSELF ON THE CFO’S MERCY AND BEG FOR FORGIVENESS!” she screamed. Actually, her voice screamed over the speakerphone, as she was “remote” (business-speak for “working from home”). Beg for forgiveness? This was the morning, I believe, that U.S casualties in Iraq had exceeded 3,500 troops. Half a haircut is Better Than None Once, though, one of our early morning meetings was actually cancelled. I took advantage of this opportunity to get a long overdue haircut. But of course I took my Blackberry along. I was in the middle of the haircut when I got a text on my PDA bearing those fatal words: “I’m sorry, but this isn’t just right.” I blanched, and turn to the barber. “Sorry,” I told him, half-shorn. “I have to go to work. Right now. Can I come back later?”
Everyone in the barbershop stared at me as I bolted from my chair for the subway.
More Fidgeting on Widget That wasn’t the last time I interrupted personal business to attend to Project Widget. Every afternoon, I would check my email on my PDA in the middle of a gym workout, sneaking it into a toiletries bag, which I then opened behind a locked stall in the men’s room. If I heard from Caren, I’d say ta-ta to the Elliptical Runner and head back to the office. Once, I gave up courtside seats to the U.S. Open because I was sure I would be called to change a document over Labor Day weekend. This is a time of year in Manhattan, as my British friend points out, when the only people in New York City and not in the Hamptons are “losers.” Hmmm. I thought. Was it really too late to return to the New Jersey office? Ah, But When They Stop Calling You! There’s only one thing worse than being emailed at 4:30 A.M., called to work on New Year’s Eve, or being plucked out of a barber’s chair. And that is the moment when they stop calling you. (I have heard this syndrome is common among abused spouses, who suddenly find themselves feeling neglected when their one-and-only stops carrying a riding crop and beating them senselessly.) I reached this vacuum of communication toward the end of Project Widget. Apparently, Caren had gotten to the end of her rope with me and in a panic, had turned to another writer. (A very nice man who can swirl around business-speak as deftly as a sommelier at Le Tour D’Argent can swirl and spit a 1971 Cos D’Estournel.) I suddenly learned what it meant to be spit out. Once the emails at 4:30 A.M. stop, they stop from 9 to 5 too. So do the voice-mails. And any kind of in-person communication, especially from “Friends of Caren.” The Devil, I’ve observed, may wear Prada, but she works on Project Widget. It suddenly hits you. You’ve been vaporized. You’re through. You’re not wanted any more. As I rode my bicycle over the George Washington Bridge on Labor Day weekend, instead of answering emails at 4:30 A.M., I sadly gazed out at the Hudson River, paused, and looked long and hard over the side of the bridge. “No,” I told myself, “Jumping from the bridge is just not right.” Yeah, So? Some of you who have worked in New York may read this story, shrug, and say, “That’s show biz.” You’d be right. Then you’d add, “And, he’s been working full-time for over 30 years, 25 of them in advertising, for Pete’s sake. Isn’t he used to this by now?” My friend C would cluck his tongue and say unsympathetically, “Someone’s having a pity party.” Then he would do an imitation of comedian Margaret Cho’s imitating her immigrant Korean mother, “Don’t…be…big…baby!” Noted. But getting past the age of 50 does entitle you to take a “macro look” at your life. For that, I cue former First Lady Barbara Bush, who once told a commencement audience, “You don’t look back at your life and regret how many meetings you missed.” For once in my life, I agree with a member of the Bush family. Is it really a badge of honor to say that you’ve worked 218 hours a week, as my colleagues are wont to boast, even though a week technically has only 168 hours? Will someone want to talk to you at a party about your having to work on Good Friday? Or will they empty their glass quickly, look around, and say, “Oops, I think there’s a fire here. Gotta go.” Epilogue Well, as of this writing, the fate of Project Widget still hangs in the balance. But I am back on the project, more or less. And lo and behold, the emails are reappearing, the phones are ringing, and the voice-mails are back as well. So life is back to as normal as it’s ever going to get. Soon Project Widget will be over. Caren will go back to terrorizing her minions in New Jersey, 4:30 A.M. Man will start leaving the office at 4:30 p.m., and me? Well, I have become…resolved. I am resolved to the fact that if I lose my turnstile pass, I will suck it up and beg Ms. Loser for a new pass. After all, if the security pass to a widget company gets lost, the terrorists win! I am resolved to the fact that I will continue to ride my bicycle no matter how many “this just isn’t rights” I get from psychotic executives. And now I also have…perspective. This past summer, taking a mental margarita from Project Widget, I attended a production of Midsummer Night’s Dream in Central Park. There is, you may recall, a play within a play, in which an amateur theater group is about to stage a truly dreadful production. Bottom, one of the actors in the play-within-the-play, instructs the amateur playwright to write an opening monologue and address certain points. Another actor chimes in, and says, “yes, and can you add this, that, and the other thing? “ A third actor wants to add something that totally destroys any coherence to the monologue. When the play-within-a-play is performed in the last act of Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, the scribe comes on stage and delivers a monologue that is sheer gobbledy-gook. Everybody in the audience laughs. But I just smile.
And wonder if it’d be any better if he wrote it at 4:30 A.M.
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