Dead End Job (2 page)

“Whew! Dodged that bullet,” I typed to Martin, but by then it was too late. I had lost him. I detected a dance beat coming from his cubicle and could tell he was listening to vintage Madonna. I could also hear him sing-whispering the words to “Like a Prayer.” I knew now that he wouldn’t get back to me for at least twenty minutes.

My friend Amanda hadn’t IM-ed me for a few minutes, but my sister Elin was still persistently ping-ing me about her late period. I counted six new messages explaining how she had “taken two tests, and one was negative but the other one had the slightest line where the positive should be,” Google-ed this result, was unsatisfied with the web search, and finally decided to take a picture of both tests and send them to my email account so I could give her my (very uneducated and unqualified) judgment on the issue.
Ugh
. I rolled my eyes and closed out the conversation with her by telling her to “go get a stupid blood test and stop obsessing over this” and that I would video-call her via Skype later, so I could see and talk to my one-year-old niece, Emily.

“Fine, poop on you,” was the response I got back from her. We both knew that she was just putting off the inevitable, which was fine with me. I didn’t really know if I could act as her support system and therapist through another nine months—her last pregnancy was a rough one, and she carried on like a bi-polar water buffalo with hemorrhoids (side note—she actually did get a hemorrhoid, which she named “Hemmy” and once tried to show me through the Skype camera).

My computer's clock said it was ten minutes until two, so I got out of my desk chair as quietly as possible to go on my afternoon coffee run. Most days I just popped down to the lobby to caffeinate myself at the coffee cart, but today I was leaving my office to go shopping in downtown Seattle. I needed to pick some things up, so I had strategically carried one of my largest purses today. This way, I could stuff my daily purchase into it before I re-entered the office and then shove the entire bloated purse and bag combo into my locker.

I know it seemed a little pathetic, but this was one of my only daily happinesses. Well, this, reading gossip sites, and streaming TV online. A few months ago, I had quietly watched the entire five seasons of an old HBO series while at work. I know that probably sounds crazy, but this
was
corporate America.  Normally, my actual job only took me fifteen hours a week to complete, even though I was a full-time employee.

I think my current workload had a lot to do with the elderly woman whom I’d replaced. After decades of service to Merit, she had finally retired, and by the time she was ready to leave she must have been the least productive, least efficient admin in history. My fellow employees were amazed at the speed with which I could accomplish the day-to-day tasks that took her hours upon hours. I kept telling them that I could take on more work, but they still didn’t believe me. This lady must have had them fooled, because when people asked me for help with basic tasks, there was a disclaimer like this: “Louisa, I know you’re extremely busy but could you possibly help me with this database?” Sometimes I rebuffed them, insisting that I could easily take on whatever project they might have in mind, but other times, when I felt like slacking off, I just gave up and played along, responding with something like this: “Oh, I
might
be able to fit this in after lunch today, or tomorrow morning, if I get done with my reporting.” Insert long sigh here. Thank you very much to my college drama professor.

Today, I made the decision to leave the office the back way, avoiding Elaine and Mark, (still on meltdown patrol). Our cubicles were set up in a large U-shape around the outer edge of our office, around an upscale reception area with white marble floors, a client waiting area which featured modern-looking couches and chairs and a cappuccino maker, a clear glass refrigerator stocked with mineral water, freshly-cut and professionally-arranged seasonal blooms, and an enormous state-of-the-art flat screen TV blaring 24-hour cable news. From there the clients were ushered into one of the many comfortably-equipped conference or boardrooms in the front of the office with posh views of the city’s waterfront. The company currently had 3½ floors in our sky-rise, although that number had fluctuated over the past couple of years as the economy tanked, rebounded, then tanked again. Because we had reception on our floor, there were two entrances into the office: one was in the front, where our receptionist buzzed people in, and the other was through the back, which required an office-issued pass to access. Because Elaine was the regional head in our business group, she and Mark sat over by the front entrance on the nicer, west-facing corner of the building that also had a view of Seattle’s Elliot Bay. Most of the lower-ranking principles and consultants sat in the offices between Elaine and the east side of the building, with the Associates, Analysts and Administrative Assistants scattered throughout the cubes in between. 

My cube was situated right in the middle of the cluster. Elaine put me there so I could be far enough away from the front side of the office to help the principles in the back of the office, but close enough to her so that she could keep an eye on me and scream my name across the office when she needed my help. Because my cube was the farthest away from the windows, and inward facing, I had twice requested to move to another empty desk, and had that request twice rejected by Elaine. The central location of my cube meant that when I entered the building, I could choose whose offices I wanted to walk past without seeming too obvious. This could be dicey, because it seemed that whenever I passed someone’s office, that person suddenly realized that they desperately and immediately needed my help with whatever project they were working on. For this reason I usually opted to come in through the front entrance in the morning, since Elaine and Mark normally didn’t come in until after 9:00 AM. These days although I was expected at the office from seven-thirty until four, I usually showed up sometime right around 8:00 AM (OK, eight-thirty).

Even though Elaine’s schedule was pretty predictable, the lower level principles Ari, Michael and Jenny showed up any time between 7:00 AM and 10:00 AM, so the chances of running into someone when I arrived forty-five minutes late was much smaller when I came in through the front entrance. I could usually slip past Elaine’s corner office and also normally manage to dodge Sarah, the very dull supervising Principle who sat right next to her by the door.

Whereas the front of the office was normally empty, the daily chance that someone was lurking in the back of the office, giving me judgey looks and keeping tabs on my hours, was too much to risk.

My least favorite Principal Attorney in the back side of the office, Jenny, was working from home today, thank God. She was newly-promoted into her senior position in the firm and, in this new position of relative power, it seemed that she had decided to practice a passive-aggressive style of communication. For me, this meant that she did not acknowledge me nor did she speak to me until the exact moment that I was A) eating a meal, or B) walking out of the office for the day. At those exact instances, she liked to clear her throat and start the whine-talking: “Um, Louisa?” (Always with the ‘um’).

“Yes, Jenny,” I would reply with varying levels of patience, usually depending on how PMS-ed I was on that particular day.

“Um, do you think you could come into my office for a minute?”

“Oh my God, Jenny, I am pounding an effing burrito and I have sour cream on my face and a bean on my left boob. Do you think you could send me an email?” Ok, I would not say that. But, I would think it really hard and try to burn the message of hatred and bitterness through my eye sockets onto her face, hoping that she would one day get it. Yah, nope.

I would inevitably end up dropping the burrito (depending on how much I had eaten, it might even explode and become impossible to pick back up. I hate that), going into her office, listening to her whiny, ridiculous problem for twenty minutes, offering her the solution which was usually as simple as “click that yellow box,” and purposely wiping the bean off of my boob onto the ground by her chair and leaving it there in protest. I hated Jenny.

In addition to Jenny’s absence on this particular afternoon, Michael was out, and Sarah and Ari were both in meetings, or doing whatever it is that they do in their offices for half the day with the doors shut. Phew.

With Elaine now calmed down, the office was relatively quiet. Although they were busy, the Associates and Analysts were pretty self-contained and rarely needed administrative help, so they really didn’t notice or care that I left for an extra half-hour now and again. I ducked into the elevator and took the quick trip down from the twenty-ninth floor office to the ground level.

Our company, Merit, Inc., was a well-respected marketing and image consulting company which provided some of the region’s largest multi-national corporations with very expensive advice on sensitive public relations issues, like how to appeal to a "green" audience when your true business function is the mass clearing of forests—think glossy TV spots showing a diverse group of people planting saplings in a wildlife reserve, insert company logo. And the companies paid dearly for it: the average hourly price of services from Merit was over $400 per hour, a sizable chunk of which ended up in our consultants' paychecks. Unfortunately, my job was not so lucrative because I was just a lowly Administrative Assistant.

My current position in the legal department opened up because Merit was going through a massively important merger with our main local competitor out of Portland, Oregon: NorCom PR. The recent hit to the economy had devastated the consulting industry (along with most other industries), and regional firms like Merit found themselves getting knocked out of the market by price undercutting by the “big three” global powerhouse PR firms: Williams Ackerman Douglas, Freewood Consulting and Guy Farner. Our board of directors, desperate to remain employed, quickly realized that the only way to survive was a frantic strategy that involved joining forces with the competition and then “consolidating and downsizing” the two workforces (read: pay cuts and layoffs) to maintain competitiveness in the marketplace. So this was where I found myself, a minor player at the heart of the global struggle to ride out the recession and somehow make ends meet.

At twenty-eight, being Louisa Hallstrom the Exceedingly Unmotivated Administrative Assistant was not part of the “five-year plan” I devised after graduating from a small and very expensive private college which I attended on an academic scholarship a few years back. I doubted that becoming an Exceedingly Unmotivated Administrative Assistant was really in anyone’s five-year plan, but with the economy being what it was, I was trying to be grateful that I even had a job. The only reason I had been hired at Merit was because a friend of a friend gave me a reference a year ago when I was sitting at home, on unemployment, steadily eating away at a Costco-sized block of cheese and watching
What Not to Wear
reruns. While being stuck at Merit was better than that, it paled in comparison to what I’d had before.

A few years back, during the housing bubble, I had been working as a junior broker at a large investment firm in California. I had busted my ass to get all of the appropriate licenses, pass all of the right tests, and to not to make any trading errors on the five or six hours of sleep I got nightly before showing up to work at 6:00 AM every day. At that point I was making over $80,000 a year, living one block off of the ocean in Orange County, and was engaged. When the dust finally settled my firm had been eaten up by a mega-bank and I found myself unemployed. Within a month of losing my job, my selfish prick of an ex-fiancé had cheated on me in the bed we shared with an unattractive girl with a lisp. Thankfully, I had not yet sent out the invitations, but everything else for the wedding had either been fully paid-for or carried a big deposit—from my own account—including the dress. Because cheating fell on the list of things I would absolutely not tolerate (along with stinky people, pee on toilet seats, country music), I immediately flew my mother down to California, cleaned out the house of every stick of furniture, and shoved it into a U-Haul for the twenty-hour drive from hell up the coast to Seattle, where I was born and raised. All I had left from that time in my life was a bunch of furniture that the ex and I had purchased together for our home, thousands of dollars’ worth of clothes that were two sizes too small for me, and my dog Winston. I took the job at Merit immediately upon receiving an offer, not because it would further my career, but for the simple reason that I desperately needed the decent salary and good benefits.

Things were especially bad lately because we were at the tail-end of the biggest merger in Merit’s eighty-five-year history. Over the last several quarters, the company's share price had sharply tanked, and the overall concern in the firm was either a nasty bankruptcy where we would certainly be forced to lay off many of our employees, or a hostile takeover by a different competitor with the same (or worse) result. Because I worked in the legal department, everyone in my group had been on edge for the past six months, frantically checking and double-checking that all of the agreements, disclosures, financial statements and shareholder information was listed correctly, conducting due diligence on all information that would, or ever could, be public, and generally freaking the fuck out.

I left the office quietly and walked the four blocks down to the H&M on Sixth Avenue and Pine Street. I found and purchased a black lined wool dress without trying it on, size ten. Because the dress only cost me fifteen dollars, I also picked up a new gold pleather clutch and some gold hoop earrings that were guaranteed to turn my earlobes green within thirty minutes. I was definitely not above giving myself green earlobes in exchange for three dollar earrings.
Nice work
, I thought to myself. I was in and out in less than ten minutes, and the total for the purchase was less than thirty dollars.