The Job (10 page)

Eight very scared women filed into the windowless room that CompuWorld uses for meetings. They didn’t sit down. They stood in a semicircle while I perched on the edge of the conference table and essentially did a song and dance to the tune of “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” Kiang-Sanderling, I assured them, was no fly-by-night outfit. They wanted to play ball with the same team. No personnel changes. We’re going to remain one big profitable family-blah, blah, blah.

Then I got to the business about the bonuses-and the conference room’s decibel level suddenly went into the red zone.

“They can’t do that to us, Mr. Allen,” Debbie said.

“Yes, they can,” I said.

“It’s their company now. They can do whatever they want.”

“You think this is fair?” shouted Hildy Hyman, one of the CompuWorld oldtimers-sixty-three, never married, still living with her very geriatic mother in Kew Gardens, and just two years away from her pension.

“Of course it’s not fair, Hildy,” I said.

“But we don’t exactly live in a kind and gentle corporate world anymore. If someone has the cash to take you over, they’re perfectly entitled to do so.”

“Especially if they’re Germans,” Hildy said.

“You should talk to my mother. Burned down her father’s pharmacy in Munich in nineteen thirty-two…”

“Hildy,” I said, “I know what happened to your mother. And it’s terrible…”

“They destroyed my family’s business then. They are destroying our business now.”

“No, they are not. They’re keeping us together, even though they don’t have to. And yeah, I know waiting an extra month for half your bonus is lousy-but at least we’ll be getting the bonus. I mean, they could have told us to take a hike. And, from what I can gather, there’ll be no change in terms of health benefits, IRAs, the works. I really think they’re trying to be honorable about this.”

“Honorable Germans,” Hildy said dismissively.

“That is an oxymoron.”

“What the fuck’s an oxymoron?” Debbie Suarez asked.

By the end of this impromptu meeting, I’d managed to assuage most of my Telesales team’s worst fears-though they were not exactly the happiest collection of campers as they returned to their desks. And who could blame them? A takeover is an invasion. You suddenly find yourself swallowed up by a superpower. They now make life-or-death decisions about your future. All you can hope for is that your new masters don’t turn out to be graduates from the Joseph Stalin School of Management.

As I headed back to my office, I found Debbie loitering with intent in the corridor. She radiated stress.

“Look, Mr. Allen,” she said, pulling me into a side hallway.

“I gotta say something here. I’m still real worried about this bonus thing. I mean, I gotta pay Raul’s tuition by January first. And they also make you pay a one-term deposit, which you don’t get back till your kid graduates or leaves. That’s three terms I gotta pay them: nine thousand bucks. But if I’m only gonna get sixty-seven hundred, how am I gonna make it? And then there’s the heart drugs for my mama, and the money I owe MasterCard, and all the stuff I gotta do for Christmas. I’m not gonna make it….”

“Tell you what I’ll do,” I said.

“Find out the name of the money guy at Raul’s school and I’ll talk to him. Explain what’s going on, schmooze him into letting you pay half the money now, and the other half when the second bonus check arrives at the end of January. It’s Faber Academy, right?”

“Yeah. Real nice Quaker school.”

“Then they shouldn’t be jerks about money.”

“Thanks, Mr. Allen.”

“Piece of advice: It’s new management, not the street. So just get on with your job. Because-trust me-I think it’s all going to work out just fine.”

“I do trust you, Mr. Allen.”

Then God help you-because, personally, I didn’t believe a word I was uttering. But I was willing to say anything reassuring if it maintained calm among the troops.

With Debbie’s fears now eased, it was on to the next personal crisis. Ivan Dolinsky. He was still standing by my window as I entered my office, and seemed so preoccupied that he didn’t hear me until I spoke:

“I thought you were supposed to be up with GBS in Stamford this morning.”

“Meeting’s postponed,” he said, not turning around to look at me.

“Till when?”

“Later.”

“You okay, Ivan?”

He finally turned and faced me. Skin the color of paper. Deep shadows beneath his eyes. A drab navy blue suit with wide lapels, which-thanks to the drastic amount of weight that Ivan had lost-gave him a sort of scarecrow-mormon-missionary look. His nails were nonexistent, his cuticles red and scabbed. Though we spoke almost every day on the phone, he was always on the road, so I hadn’t seen him in over two months. And I had to work hard at hiding how disturbed I was by his appearance. I wondered if he still seeing the grief counselor I’d found for him.

“Guess you heard the news.” I said.

He nodded and turned back toward the window.

“When I sent you that e-mail last night, I really didn’t know what was going on. And I didn’t want you to be worrying all-” Ivan had started to cry. Softly at first-a strangled sob which he fought to control, yet which quickly escalated. I kicked my office door shut, quickly lowered the blinds on the glass-fronted wall that looked out on the Telesales cubicles, and eased Ivan into my chair. I grabbed the phone and told Lily at the switchboard to hold all calls. Then I sat down opposite Ivan and waited until his crying jag ended.

“Tell me,” I said.

He stared down at the desk and said, “I just lost the GBS account.”

It was like a right to the jaw. I flinched. And Ivan saw me flinch.

“I’m sorry, I’m really sorry, you don’t know how sorry…”

His voice started to get shaky again. I tried to sound very sedate, very composed.

“What exactly happened?”

“How should I know? The past two, three months I’ve been building a relationship with this Ted Peterson guy in their media sales department, we shake hands yesterday on this six-page insert for April, I’m heading north to Stamford on 1-95 this morning, paperwork in my bag for Peterson to sign, somewhere near Rye he calls me: “Listen, sorry, but we’ve changed marketing strategies for late winter. So, no sale right now.” Nearly ran my car off the road.”

“And that was it?”

“

“Course it wasn’t it, Ned. I mean, it’s my balls on the chopping block here. I’ve invested three months romancing the cocksucker, WE HAD FUCKING CLOSED YESTERDAY … so do you really, really think I was just gonna go, “Oh, hey, that’s kind of disappointing … but into every life a little rain must fall?”

” He was yelling. I held both hands up.

“Ivan. Chill. I am not angry.” (Lie.) “I am not upset.” (Bigger lie.) “I just need to know the facts.”

“Sorry, sorry… I’m really adrift here, Ned. It’s just, like, with what’s been going on, this bad news was …”

“I hear you.” And I did. His kid. His marriage. His professional worth. Loss. Loss. And more loss. But though one side of my brain was sympathizing with his fragile state, the other sector was sending out red alert signals. Because, with the GBS multipage insert suddenly gone, there were now six empty pages in the April issue (due to go to press this Friday). And six blank pages meant $210,000 in lost advertising revenue. Talk about handing our heads to Kiang-Sanderling on a platter. If they were looking for a way to ease a bunch of us out, this would give them the perfect excuse.

“What price was GBS paying for the multipage insert?” I asked.

“One-eighty-nine. The standard ten percent discount.”

“Did he give you any hint about a possible budget squeeze? Or maybe one of the competition edging us out?”

“Ned, like I told you, he just said ‘no dice’ and hung up. I tried to call him back, I don’t know, five, six times in the next hour. Driving back into the city, I must’ve called him every ten miles. The asshole was always ‘in a meeting.”” “Okay, look, it’s a setback…”

“It’s a fucking car crash, Ned. You know it, I know it….”

I put a finger to my lips.

“It’s a situation. And we’ve got to deal with it-but in a way that won’t have everyone in the company talking. Word gets out about this, and the situation turns into a critical situation-something we definitely don’t want with new management looking over our shoulder. So the thing to do at the moment is examine our options here. You got anything else on the go?”

“I don’t know… NMI was talking about a possible double-page spread for their Powerplan Desktop series in May.”

“Can you talk them into jumping forward a month?”

“Worth a shot.”

“Then do it now. Offer ‘em twenty percent off, and tell ‘em that the four-color bleeds are on the house. Meanwhile, I’m sure we can get the Telesales girls to cover the other four pages.”

“It’s gonna look like crap, though-a lot of shitty eighth-of-a-pagers in a prime location. And everyone’s going to know it was my space..

..”

“Ivan, the bottom line here is: If the pages are paid for, everybody’s happy.”

“It won’t happen again, Ned. You’ve got my word….”

“It’s a bad hand, Ivan. The jerk dealt from the bottom of the deck. Don’t blame yourself.”

“Easier said-” “You still going for your sessions with the counselor… what’s-her-name?”

“Dr. Goldfarb. I stopped two weeks ago.”

“She no good?”

“She was great. Really helpful. But the company health plan only covered a year… .”

“I’ll make a few phone calls to Blue Cross, see what I can do.”

“Thanks. I owe you.”

He stood up, rubbing his eyes with his sleeve.

“You sure you’re gonna be okay?” I asked.

“Not if I keep blowing it….”

“You’ve been doing fine, Ivan,” I lied.

“Like I said: It’s a bum deal, not Armageddon. Now go close NMI. And remember: You’re good at this.”

He nodded and headed out the door. As soon as it closed behind him, I put my head in my hands. Shit. Shit. Shit. This was Armageddon. My Armagedon. Unless … Rule Number One in a crisis: Be systematic. Explore every option for burrowing your way out of the dead end into which you’ve been dropped. I picked up the phone and called Joel Schmidt, CompuWorld’s production manager. When I asked him if I could have a couple of extra days’ grace on the GBS copy, he went ballistic.

“You nuts, Ned? Ten minutes ago some German ice maiden walks into the office, introduces herself as Utte something, says she’s the production supervisor for all Kiang-Sanderling titles, and wants to know everything about the way we work. She also said she knew the magazine was going to bed on Friday-which, according to her calculations, was four days behind schedule. Which, in turn, was costing the company, blah, blah, blah. Get the picture?”

“Kind of a chilly customer?”

“Chilly? This babe was without heat. And I can already tell that she s determined to supervise me into the ground. So there is absolutely no way I can cut you any slack. Final ad copy Friday, or it’s your cojones.”

So much for buying myself some more time. I picked up the Phone and called Ted Peterson’s office at GBS. His secretary was a real charmer. As soon as she heard the name CompuWorld, she informed me that Mr. Peterson was in a meeting and would probably remain in said meeting for the next five years. Or, at least, that’s the sort of brush-off vibe I was getting from her.

“If I could just have five minutes of his time.”

“He doesn’t have five minutes today, Mr. Allen,” she said crisply.

“Everyone has five minutes.”

“I will tell him you called. I can do no more.” And she hung up.

Ted Peterson. I’d met him last year at one of Getz-Braun’s big sales shows. Your typical corporate stain. Age thirty-two and determined to snag that executive vice presidency by the time birthday number thirty-five rolls around. A real play-to-win type.

“I heard you’re a helluva tennis player,” he said at a cocktail party thrown by Brighton Technology Inc. (“Data storaging you can trust.”) “I played a little in college. But now… I’m just a serious amateur.”

“What school you play for?”

“U. Maine, Presque Isle.”

I could see his lips twitching into a little smile.

“Don’t think we ever played you.”

“Where’d you go?”

“Princeton.”

Having won that point, the conversation somehow drifted on to the subject of our all-time favorite players.

“Stefan Edberg, hands down,” I said.

“A gentleman on the court-but with a real deadly sting. And you?”

“Ivan Lendl. The living embodiment of ruthless efficiency.”

No doubt Peterson thought he was being ruthlessly efficient when he dumped Ivan overboard… even though the bastard surely knew all about Ivan’s ongoing series of tragedies. I love a Samaritan.

The five lights on my phone were flashing madly. I hit the speakerphone

“A few messages, Lily?” I asked.

“You must have two dozen messages here, Mr. Allen.”

“Great. Give me the big ones.”

“All the outside sales reps. The media sales guys from AdTel, Icom, InfoCom, Microcom… It’s a really long list.”

Worse and worse. The word about the takeover had evidently spread through the industry like cancer-and every major CompuWorld advertiser had phoned in, obviously to find out if we were still in business.

“Would you mind e-mailing me the entire list of calls, Lily?”

“No problem, Mr. Allen. Oh-one last thing-your wife called, said she’d heard the news. She wanted to talk to you right away.”

“Is she holding right now?”

“No-you got Mr. Maduro on line one, Mr. Sirio on line two, Mr. Bluehorn on line three…”

All my main guys in the field. All understandably worried about whether they still had a job.

“I’ll talk to Sirio. Tell the others I’ll call them right back.”

“You got it, Mr. Allen. One last thing: Should I start looking in the want ads?”

“Put it this way, Lily: I’m not worried.”

“I hear ya, Mr. Allen.”

I punched button two on my phone.

“Yo, Phil,” I said.

“Sorry to keep you dangling like that.”