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.
“I can bring you on, but only at an entry-level,” Hal told me at the end of our interview, “until you prove yourself. Look, Tanzie,” Hal nodded sympathetically, “I understand how difficult it must be for a girl like you having to go back to work after so many years. My Nancy used to work the cash register at the Kmart before we got married. She’s so friendly, you know. Everyone just loved her. I’m not sure what she’d do if something happened to me and she had to go back to work.”
He placed a fatherly hand on my shoulder as he escorted me from his office.
I wasn’t sure which was more shocking: Hal’s complete disregard for human resources protocol or his comparison of me, a former financial consultant, to a cashier.
Based on that interview, I’m quite certain that Hal has no idea who he’s hired. Under the pleading smile of a desperate, middle-aged woman content with scanning documents and fixin
g paper jams is the soul of a competitor. My plan is to remain patient and build a reputation for diligence, and I know the opportunities will eventually materialize.
If all goes as planned, in five years, I’ll have a corner office somewhere at Bishop. I am smart and driven and have nothing to do other than work, which is a clear recipe for success. Today’s audit, with the productive gumshoeing I did around the executive office, is proof that I am capable of going the extra mile to bring in results. Moe and Frank don’t stand a chance against me—and neither will be smart enough to realize this before it’s too late.
After finagling my way into the Bishop building, I arrive back at my condo at 8:45 a.m. On the way home I picked up a pack of Virginia Slims. Cigarettes are cheaper in Tulsa than in Houston and cheaper still when purchased from one of the Indian smoke shops that can sell them at reduced state tax rates. Typically, I smoke two cigarettes a day: one with my morning coffee and the second with an evening glass of white wine.
This is a secret I keep from just about everyone since there are such strong negative opinions about smokers. The Bishop building is smoke-free. For me to smoke at the office would be career suicide. Except for coffee drinking, the Bishop management team could pass for Mormon: no drinking, smoking, swearing, or skirt chasing. Winston’s company was exactly the opposite; yet another example of the difference between upstream and midstream.
I pour a cup of coffee from the coffeemaker I’d set to brew at eight thirty, grab my portable landline, and open the sliding glass door to my tiny balcony that overlooks Utica Square, an upscale shopping center anchored by the smallest Saks Fifth Avenue in the United States. I didn’t have my cigarette this morning because I left pretty early to get downtown. I light one up, take the first drag, and place it on the crystal ashtray I keep on a small table by my patio chair.
The view from my balcony is charming, with expanses of tulips and pansies bordering the empty parking lots. There is not a single person at the square this morning, only the bronze statues of children and a wooden chainsaw carving of a Victorian woman. All the real people are probably at church. Tulsa is religious, and Bishop is even more so. I have seen mostly white Christians, and devout ones at that, in the corridors of my workplace. During my six-month tenure, I have been invited no fewer than eleven times to join a fellow employee for a church service. Everyone knows I am new to Tulsa, which means I’m fresh meat for any congregation. It never crosses anyone’s mind that I might not go to church.
I don’t. I’m an alumna of the Catholic Church and parochial schools, and I’ve already heard enough Kyrie Eleison for a lifetime. My response to these invitations has always been the same. “That is so nice, but I am attending services with my new neighbor at”—I make something up to say here—“but I will let you know if I feel like venturing out.” This is a pretty easy out because there are more churches in Tulsa than I have ever seen anywhere before.
My thoughts are shaken loose by the telephone ringing, and I pick it up and say, “Hello, Lucy.”
My sister Lucy, while not a card-carrying eco-terrorist, is surely a sympathizer, and at first she was horrified that I was working for Bishop. It is well known that Bennet and Baldwin Bishop fund conservative think tanks determined to undermine the social progress made in the past fifty years. Furthermore, Bishop is infamous among environmentalists for being one of the worst polluters and is the target of many a Sierra Club exposé. But Lucy is a bleeding heart in all respects and understands that a fifty-year-old woman who’s been out of the workforce for twenty years doesn’t have many options and needs health insurance, if nothing else. I believe she was sad that I hadn’t elected to take her up on her offer to move to her farm and live in the vintage airstream trailer she keeps for visitors, but even the biggest extremist can give way to rationalization when her sister is involved.
Lucy is extraordinarily well organized and schedules her calls like appointments. Every Sunday at 9:00 a.m. Tulsa time, I hear “Call from Lucy” announced by the caller ID. I refresh my coffee cup and hunker down for another episode of the latest adventures of Lucy O’Leary, organic farmer and sheep herder, and silently thank God I live in relative comfort, spared from castration duty or hand weeding acres of organic heirloom wheat.
“You bought a gun?” I ask. “You are the last person I would ever think of as owning a gun. Do you even know how to shoot one?”
“Well not a real gun, a paintball gun,” Lucy replies. “I lost three lambs this week to those coyotes.”
“Paintball?”
“I don’t want to kill them, just to discourage them, get them to realize preying on my lambs comes with a blast of purple or yellow paint. I really think that over time this will curb their behavior.”
“And just how long do you think it will take for the coyotes to make that connection? Are there clinical studies on behavior modification of coyotes? What if it backfires, Lucy? What if they actually think it’s fashionable to have purple and yellow fur? Then what?”
“Ha ha ha, smartass! Want to borrow my gun and tag a Bishop brother or two? Perhaps we can modify their behavior,” Lucy says.
“Oh, speaking of which,” I say and tell her about getting onto the executive floor this morning.
“Too bad I didn’t know this before. I might have asked you to drop off some Sierra Club literature.”
“Anyway, his secretary leaves her passwords practically out in plain sight, so I downloaded some files.”
Lucy immediately gets more serious. “What kind of files? What’s in them?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I say, nervous about her sudden interest. “I just got carried away. You know how I am. And besides, that’s not the point. The point is that there is this perception that Bishop security is impenetrable, and I proved it’s fairly easy to breach. They need to know that they have some pretty big holes that need to be filled.”
“Oh, before I forget,” Lucy says, changing the subject, “I spoke with Honey last night. Little Lulu got into NYU Tisch School of the Arts! Can you believe it? Broadway bound!” Lulu, our niece, is the youngest daughter of my third sister Bumby. Honey, our eldest sister, the one who keeps us all connected, is a Catholic nun, and Bumby is the single mother of three daughters. Her husband Shamus was killed in a car wreck ten years ago.
“The tuition’s upwards of $50,000 a year and NYU offers a little aid, but not much. Bumby wants to know if you can help with tuition like you did for the others.”
“Yikes! Lucy. Does it make sense to drop a quarter of a million bucks on an education that could relegate her to waiting tables for the rest of her life?” I am stalling here, pondering the dismal returns I’m making on my portfolio these days. “I thought she wanted to be a nurse like her sisters.”
“She’s always wanted to act, she just didn’t think she’d get in anywhere like NYU. This is a huge opportunity, Tanzie. They’re very selective.”
Winston and I had no children of our own and gladly helped the nieces and nephews pay for their education. Now that Winston has become my wasband, I am fairly certain he will not continue to fund the O’Leary scholarship program. Still, it will not hurt to ask; that kind of money can probably be found under a seat cushion in his home, considering his outrageous executive salary. Plus, he has always adored Lulu and Bumby.
The idea of getting in touch with Winston, however, makes me wince. Maybe I can do it without bothering him. Fifty thousand a year will put a big dent in my portfolio, but I’m not going to be a grunt forever. In a couple of years, I might be making well over six figures a year. I’m not going to let my adorable Lulu turn down a chance like this.
“Of course I will,” I finally say. “Tell her not to worry. We can figure something out. Find out from Bumby when she needs the money, okay?”
“Okay, I will.”
In our family, we often communicate indirectly, particularly when favors are asked. That way, the requester will not be humiliated if the request is denied. I don’t know if this is a Euro
pean thing or just an O’Leary thing, but that’s how our business is taken care of. Lucy and I end our call with our family’s traditional Greek Easter greeting that we’ve repeated every Easter since childhood.
“Christos Anesti,” Lucy says.
“Alithos Anesti,” I reply as I hang up.
After my chat, I type up my notes from the morning’s security review and go back over them in preparation for the next day’s staff meeting. I smile and nod. This is my ticket. The simple request to validate base-level building security, thanks to me, has revealed breaches so profound that if the wrong people decided to take advantage of them, they could potentially bring down the company. The competitor in me cannot wait to see Moe and Frank react when I deliver my report. This is first-class work and perhaps the vehicle to move me out from under Moe and Frank altogether and into an office beside them.
CHAPTER THREE
I take extra time getting ready this morning in preparation for the big meeting, applying root touchup to the hint of gray emerging from where my hair parts and selecting the perfect outfit. The expensive black knit St. John suit is a good choice because it screams money, power, and good taste. Most important, though, the stretchy material enables the wearer to look great anywhere within a four-size range.
“Hi there, girlie, you’re lookin’ pretty today.” It’s just before 9:00 a.m. Monday morning. I have been at my desk a full two hours before Hal gets to work. With a “World’s Best Dad” coffee mug in one hand and his briefcase in the other, he leans against my cube opening and waits for me to turn around and reciprocate the greeting.
Revenge of the Cube Dweller Page 2