Revenge of the Cube Dweller (2 page)

I fish a flash drive out of my purse and plug it into the USB port on Marla’s desktop. In less than five minutes, I transfer about six or seven folders from Marla’s shared drive and restricted access folders. I don’t know what they contain, but they are labeled, LEAR, ENV, and other acronyms I can decipher at a later time. I make a quick sweep of Baldwin’s office, but his desk is locked, and I cannot find his password list as easily as Marla’s.

Baldwin’s office could double for a museum with all the sports memorabilia he has displayed. A signed Joe Montana Kansas City Chiefs jersey is mounted next to a baby blue George Brett one from the Royals, which in turn is hanging next to a yellow Wilt Chamberlain jersey from the Lakers. Another seven or eight jerseys hang next to those three. Photographs of Baldwin with various athletic stars blanket the other wall and eclipse the beautiful imported walnut paneling underneath. I envision a Welsh nobleman rolling over in his grave.

Baldwin’s desk is not Louis XV like the sideboard; instead, it’s a massive, manly, walnut monstrosity that is clearly expensive but not attractive, in my opinion. Not that it matters, since all the smaller sports paraphernalia crowds the surface area around his computer.

Autographed basketballs encapsulated in Plexiglas cubes from forty years’ worth of University of Kansas teams consume his entire bookshelf and spill over to the credenza behind his desk. Smaller transparent cubes with autographed baseballs and footballs are stacked on top of the basketballs, and the couple of framed photos of what look like Baldwin’s wife, children, and grandchildren are perched like afterthoughts atop the
mementos. To me, this reeks of hoarding on a higher economic scale than old newspapers and garbage.

In one of the corners stands a commercial-sized elliptical machine and weight rack, and next to them is a door that leads to a lovely private bath with a shower and sauna. There is an adjoining closet that I poke my head into that has some emergency suits, shirts, ties, shoes, and some drawers presumably for underwear and socks.

I can’t resist and slide the medicine cabinet door open, revealing only some Lipitor and an expired bottle of Tylenol. No hidden drug problem for this guy—no condoms or Viagra in case he wants to get frisky with Marla; only a well-worn Bible lying on a small table by the toilet. As I leave, I wonder exactly which verse would be appropriate inspiration for a bowel movement.

I glance at my watch again, mouthing a silent expletive as I gather my belongings and head back to the elevator. Once in the lobby, I realize that I need a card to get through the Plexiglas security gate, so I press the help button on my side of the partition and wait once again for Keith. In my younger days I could have climbed over the gate easily, but I am fifty-two now, and I don’t think I can do it at this stage of the game. “Get what you needed?” Keith asks as he swipes his card, allowing me to pass through.

“Yeah, thanks.”

“Well, you have a happy Easter, ma’am,” Keith says, smiles, and walks over to the main exit with me, strutting to the rhythm of some horrific urban diatribe.

“You too,” I say and I wave back as I cross the street over to the employee garage.

Sitting in my car, I reflect on what I just did. My boss in Internal
Audit had asked me to test building security, but as with most of my endeavors I have let my enthusiastic curiosity get the better of me and crossed a line that could get me fired. And all I have to show for it is a USB drive full of files with acronyms I don’t understand—at least, not yet.

M
y name is Tanzie Lewis and I am an internal auditor for the Bishop Group.

When I first snagged my job interview, I did a little research that gave me some background info on the company and on the Bishop brothers. The Bishop Group, the ninth-largest private company in the United States in 2010, was founded by two brothers, Baldwin and Bennet Bishop, whose shrewd business know-how turned a sizable inheritance into a world-class fortune. Both boys had been standouts on the University of Kansas basketball team and had donated the funds to build and name the Bishop Basketball Pavilion on the KU campus in the early ’90s.

Based on their appearance now as older men, it always strikes me as a little odd that the Bishops were once so athletic. Yes, they are both tall—six foot four or so—with Bennet being
slightly taller than Baldwin. However, their narrow shoulders and wide hips make them unusually shaped for men in general and male athletes in particular. They are pear shaped, like the Country Bear Jamboree characters I once saw at Disneyland. There clearly is a dominant gene in play; with such a distinctive silhouette, you can easily spot a Bishop family member anywhere in the company.

Bennet is the Chief Executive Officer and Baldwin the Chief Operating Officer. The division seems to work well, and from what I had read, there is little to no rivalry or tension between the brothers. They think alike on most matters, and share a common passion for amassing an empire that will wield significant conservative influence for generations to come.

Bishop Group is diversified and includes agriculture, textiles, and maritime segments, but the largest and most profitable is their midstream oil and gas operation. Midstream represents the activity sandwiched between drilling for oil and selling the gas you put in a car. It includes pipelines that move the product from the wells to the refineries, big tanks that store the oil until there is room in the pipeline, and gas-processing plants that extract liquids such as the propane used in the family barbeque. It is not glamorous, but it can be hugely profitable.

My ex-husband Winston’s company was in upstream, or exploration and production—the sexy part of the “bidness,” as insiders refer to it. Upstream attracts gamblers, risk takers who go big and make huge fortunes off a gusher or go broke on a dry hole. Sometime in the early ’90s the major oil companies shed their midstream assets because their returns were far less than the upstream and downstream activity could generate. This was when the Bishop boys entered the midstream business, buying
whatever they could. The unglamorous but steady returns played perfectly into their Middle American sensibilities, just like marrying the girl from church rather than following in J. Howard Marshall’s footsteps with Anna Nicole Smith.

Since Bishop is a privately held company, having an internal audit function is not a requirement like it is for companies traded on the New York Stock Exchange. But rumor had it that Bennet and Baldwin Bishop wanted to demonstrate a proactive approach to corporate governance, which is why in 2010 they tapped my boss, Hal Webber, to put an Internal Audit department together.

Water cooler gossip gave me the lowdown on Hal’s history when I first settled in at Bishop. Back in the late ’70s, he had been a second-string lineman for the University of Oklahoma football team and an honors graduate in the challenging field of mechanical engineering. He was the total package, as they say, and he’d had his pick of opportunities when he graduated. Hal married his college sweetheart and built up his career working in various operations arms of the Oklahoma energy industry.

If he had not pursued a career at Bishop, Hal could have easily succeeded in politics. He remembers names and emits a friendly, backslapping aura that makes him beloved in the organization. Everyone I’ve been in contact with at Bishop seems to think of Hal as a great guy. As far as heartland Tea Party values are concerned, Hal is as good as it gets. He goes to church every Sunday with his wife, Nancy, at the South Tulsa Baptist church, volunteers with the pro-life society of Oklahoma, and carries a concealed weapon in case he needs to intervene in a mass shooting or robbery.

Hal prides himself on staying in top physical form and has to
special order his shirts to accommodate a neck bigger than the trunks of the scrub oaks lining the Arkansas River. From the looks of it, Hal deals with his receding hairline by shaving his head completely and sporting one of those ’90s style goatees to compensate for his lack of treetop foliage. Bishop has a business casual dress code, but Hal always wears a suit and tie with an OU pin on his jacket lapel to project an image of importance consistent with his high regard for himself.

Hal is great with people and numbers, so when he was given authority over the gas-processing division in the late ’90s, there had been little doubt he could handle the responsibility. He brought in tons of business and was considered a key contributor to Bishop’s growing dominance in the midstream arena. But although Hal brought in producers, he was inexperienced in contract negotiations and did not fully understand the complexities of gas profitability dynamics. Unfortunately, this critical flaw allowed sharper cookies in the world of gas marketing to include clauses that protected, at Bishop’s expense, their interests in cases of commodity price downturns.

After the crash in 2008, natural gas prices plummeted the following year, resulting not only in tens of millions of dollars’ worth of losses but also the exposure of the disadvantageous contract terms that had been written under Hal’s watch. It is not uncommon in the world of business to have seemingly brilliant careers derailed when incompetence surfaces during an economic hiccup. Ruthless as they supposedly are, however, even the Bishop brothers did not have the heart to fire Hal. As in the case of many chief auditors before him, the job was created as a way to administer palatable punishment.

It seems Hal is still beloved in the organization, but it’s also
clear the executive team no longer considers him an integral player. Hal copes with his demotion by inflating the status of his new position as Bishop’s Vice President of Internal Audit as one of the most important jobs in the company. He brags to anyone who will listen that he was handpicked to oversee this critical function and assemble the new crack team. Still, it is clear to those who pay attention that he doesn’t participate in the Monday morning executive sessions with Bennet and Baldwin, and his corner office on twenty-nine has been replaced by a much smaller one on six. Gone are his administrative assistant, Southern Hills golf membership, and access to the private plane fleet.

I used to be married to an oil and gas executive in Houston, and I have a deep understanding of the male ego and all the sad little things that men do to dissipate the sting of failure in the world of office politics. While Winston’s failures were few and far between, I had a ringside seat to the real pain he felt because of his occasional business setbacks. I witnessed heavy drinking and sometimes found out that he’d had his wounds licked by some harlot, until he was able to gather himself, spin the story, and figure out a way to correct the career setback. Hal was no Winston, but the result was the same: In the end, he did everything he could to convince people that his demotion was actually a career advancement, a needed change, or a really exciting opportunity to broaden skills.

Hal probably thought about early retirement, but most likely his portfolio had tanked with the stock market crash and he just couldn’t afford it. Besides, Hal would not be a quitter. No, he strikes me as the type of guy who would make hash browns out of horseshit, put his best smile on, and redeem himself in the eyes of the Bishop illuminati.

Hal told me how, after consulting with his new peers among the energy companies in Tulsa, he began putting this department together. He hired two managers: Moe, an operational auditor from a small midstream company in Kansas, and Frank, fresh out of Boyd and Associates, a second-tier CPA firm in Tulsa. I don’t believe the chosen two are considered top talent, which is usually obtained from risk consulting firms or one of the larger companies in Oklahoma.

Certainly Bishop is an attractive place to work in Tulsa, and Hal could have easily had his pick from a very experienced pool of candidates from some of the companies shedding personnel during the economic belt-tightening going on then. Knowing Hal though, he probably could not bring himself to hire people who would make him look stupid by knowing more than he did. At that time, he was probably still red-assed about his fall from grace and wanted to make sure that some young whippersnapper didn’t take what little he had left by outshining him at a meeting with the big boys.

Hal hired me as a staff auditor in December 2009 to do the many necessary grunt tasks below the ego grade of my three superiors—Hal, Moe, and Frank. I graduated with honors from UC Berkeley with a degree in accounting and moved to Houston shortly afterward for purely economic reasons. In 1981 an oil boom was in full force, and outside of Anchorage, Alaska, Houston was paying the highest salaries in the nation for accountants. I figured I would work for a year, make some money, and then head back home to San Francisco. One year turned into two and then nine, and soon I was an oil and gas specialist pretty well chained to the energy industry.

I married an oil executive who allowed me to ditch my career
and focus on more personal interests. Giving up my job was not difficult. Accounting, particularly in the public accounting firms, is intense stress within a bubble of mind-numbing tedium. I walked away grateful and happy, until I was “out-placed” by my husband in favor of a younger and thinner version of myself twenty years later. Before that I never thought I would utter the word “debit” or “credit” unless it was followed by “card.”

The fresh start of Tulsa seemed like a good idea at the time; it is still within the energy corridor, but out of Texas and far away from the sting of rejection and the humiliation of having been discarded. Of course I’d known that entering the workforce again after such a long break wouldn’t be a picnic.