In my agency, it didn’t matter if you were dumb as a rock, and you got the promotion by sleeping with your boss. As long as you had your promotion every two years, you were well on your way to corporate success.
Sleeping with Bonnie was not an option, since she’s a woman—and not a pretty one, if you ask me. So I decided to take the long road for that promotion: working hard.
I extra-busted my ass for years, trying to convince them that I deserved the title of creative director, but my efforts had not paid off. The funny part is that I already had the job—what I was missing was the title. I’d been doing two jobs for the last three years. When the last director left, they gave me her work responsibilities, but I continued doing mine as a senior copywriter. So I was supervising a whole team of copywriters—like me—but I also had to write the ads, just like they did.
When the other creatives wrote their copy, they gave it to me. I reviewed it, corrected it, approved it, and then I passed it on to Bonnie. But the absurd part of the whole arrangement was that when I wrote the copy for an ad, I, technically, had to submit it to myself first—for review, correction, and approval—before I showed it to Bonnie. Does that make any sense? I don’t think so. But that’s how big companies operate nowadays: they squeeze you for as many years as they can, “to see if you are prepared for that promotion,” and then—once you’ve proved that you can do it—they go and hire someone else. The craziest part is that, since you are the one who knows how to do it, they then expect you to train your new boss. Pretty fucked up, huh?
But there was no point in entertaining those negative thoughts that morning, since I was convinced that that wasn’t going to happen to me. I was determined to get that promotion, so for the last thirty-six months I had missed every meaningful family gathering—important birthdays, major surgeries, and Christian holidays (which is a mortal sin in Cuban families). I made my career my number-one priority. I was basically living in the office.
When they asked for a volunteer, I always raised my hand. When they asked for two ideas, I delivered twenty. I laughed out loud at my boss’s bad jokes and asked about the health of dogs and cats that I didn’t give a rat’s ass about. I have felt guilty about taking vacation time, and I have actually canceled anticipated trips because Bonnie forgot that she approved my days off. I ate my lunch at my desk every day, carried a BlackBerry everywhere I went—including the bathroom—because it’s a fact that Bonnie would call or e-mail me the moment I briefly removed my butt from my chair. Just to give you an idea of how committed I was to my job, let me tell you that my doctor and my dentist mailed me notes wondering if I was dead, because all my checkups were long overdue.
I became so dedicated that I was that person who went to work sick. If I was scolded for spreading the virus and I stayed home to recover, then I was scolded for “getting sick too often.” I mastered the art of showing up sick at the office and breathing as little as possible, to keep my germs to myself.
Determined as I was to move up, I patiently listened to every stupid idea that came from Bonnie’s mouth. I heard her dumbest comments with respect and reverence. I even allowed her to walk all over me—something she seemed to particularly enjoy—just to prove to her that I was there to support her and not to threaten her. I always made her look good, gave her credit when she didn’t deserve it, and allowed her to present my work as if it were hers. I did it all to fulfill a simple dream: if I got the position as creative director, I could use that to get a decent job in a different company, and free myself from Bonnie.
To give myself courage through this ordeal, I created a mantra that I repeated to myself over and over, every time I clashed with her: “Hard work will set you free.” After a year of saying that every day, I read somewhere that this same phrase was the slogan of the Nazi concentration camps, so I decided to switch to “one day at a time.” I was a prisoner in Bonnie’s camp, but it couldn’t last forever.
How can I describe Bonnie? She’s skinny, wiry, with black—dyed—hair, reddish skin, and no lips. Physically, she is the Joan Collins-at-sixty type. She’s the kind of person who, if you are entering a building and you hold the door for her, will walk right through without saying thank you. She won’t even look at you, because she believes that God created all human beings to serve her. As a matter of fact, I’ve never heard her utter the words “please” or “thank you.” She’s the kind of guest who would wear white to a wedding and chew gum in a funeral. She just couldn’t care less. But enough of her for now. Let’s continue.
That particular morning in April was lovely. Spring was in the air, and I remember rushing to work wearing my navy-blue suit. I had the exact same suit in four colors (when I find something that somehow fits me, I always buy a few of them, ’cause I never know when I’ll find something that actually looks half decent on me again). Anyway, I was wearing the blue suit, and I noticed that it felt a little tight. I started wondering—in a vague attempt to cover up for the possibility that maybe I had gained some weight—if the dry cleaners had shrunk my clothes.
As I walked up Fifth Avenue toward Fifty-ninth Street, I tried to calculate how many calories I was burning with this short but brisk walk. The streets of midtown Manhattan can be a nightmare when you’re a fat chick at rush hour. I wanted to run but I was in high heels. I could not wear sneakers to work, because a creative director would never fall to that temptation. Moving through the sea of people felt like speed-walking an obstacle course. To top it off, while I had to hurry to make it to work at a decent time, I couldn’t walk too fast or I’d end up all sweaty.
I walked into my office building and smiled at the security guard, who—once again—ignored me. Let me just point out that smiling and flirting are two very different things, and flirting with this guy was not in my agenda because:
a) I don’t particularly like him.
b) I’ve noticed that he’s missing a few front teeth.
c) It’s not like he even bothers to make eye contact with me, and eye contact is essential for flirting.
But, in any case, I smiled at him. I smiled at this idiot every morning, simply because it is my philosophy that if you see someone regularly it makes sense to at least acknowledge him with a smile. It’s called “being polite.” But the son of a bitch—who clearly doesn’t have any social graces—just looked at the horizon as if the Titanic were passing by with Kate Winslet riding topless at the bow of it.
I took a deep breath, decided not to let him bother me, and rushed to the elevators. The doors to one were about to close, so I ran a few steps while yelling, “Hold it!”
Big mistake.
I found myself faced with a crowded elevator that barely had room for one more person, and definitely not a woman of my size. Since they held the elevator for me, I felt obliged to squeeze in. I landed next to a skinny old lady who smelled like an ashtray. As I sucked in my stomach in an effort to occupy less space, and held my breath to avoid the stench of cigarette butts, my worst nightmare occurred: the overweight alarm went off.
I know it’s silly to allow something like this to humiliate me, especially since it’s not like I’m an elephant and the alarm sounds even when I ride alone. But while one side of my brain knew that the elevator was already packed, and—for all I knew—even a squirrel could have triggered the alarm, the other side of my brain reminded me of a big, fat fact: my weight.
“Somebody’s gonna have to step out or we’re not going anywhere,” said the skinny old smoker, giving me a nasty look.
She was ugly, but she was right. I stepped out graciously, and turned around—embarrassed but smiling. For a brief second, I wondered if I smiled too much.
“Bon voyage!” I said to them as the elevator’s doors closed. Nobody answered, and nobody smiled back. Okay, not a happy moment, but I’m a strong girl, and it takes way more than that to ruin my day.
Once I had stepped into the next available elevator and pushed the button, I closed my eyes and tried to invest the ten seconds that it
takes to go up to the twentieth floor in visualizing something positive that could make me forget the elevator incident and restore my natural glow. I took a deep breath and reminded myself of how much I used to love coming to work, just a few years ago. The agency had beautiful offices on Fifty-ninth Street. With its floor-to-ceiling windows and its ultra-modern furniture, it looked like corporate heaven. Most of the space was open, with cute little cubicles spread out throughout the floor, but a few executives were given closed offices overlooking Central Park. That was my dream: having a big, windowed office overlooking the park. This dream kept me going despite the fact that working for Bonnie made my corporate heaven feel more like Alcatraz. As if I worked at a grisly jail that happened to be furnished by Knoll.
As I finally made it to the twentieth floor, I checked my watch and saw that I was half an hour late. I had worked past midnight the night before, so I hoped that there would be a little leniency regarding punctuality—or lack thereof—on Bonnie’s part.
“Are you serious? Are you from L.A.? ’Cause I hear a Southern twang,” I overheard as I walked by the reception desk. Deborah—our new receptionist—was being cornered by two jerks from Marketing. They were your typical young and bratty Ivy Leaguers, who are always preying on interns and executive assistants.
Deborah is the perfect example of the kind of woman I’d love to hate, but can’t. She’s skinny, blonde, petite, and sweet as hell. I almost feel guilty when I envy her.
“Hi, B!” she said.
“Hi, Debs!” I answered.
The marketing morons gave me an up-and-down look—no surprise—that expressed very little sympathy for “a woman of size,” as I sometimes call myself. I smiled at them with no reciprocation on their part—of course—and that’s when the next humiliation took place.
“Hey! You dropped your ID,” one told me.
Yes, I had dropped my ID at their feet. For a second I thought they were actually going to pick it up for me, but of course they didn’t. They looked at the card, they looked at me, and then they turned away, back to Deborah, to continue their mating rituals. Why waste any chivalry with a fat chick when sweet, skinny Deborah was sitting there, trapped behind her desk? So down I went to pick up my ID card.
First it was the ripping sound, then the relief of expanding flesh, then the cold air in my ass, and, finally, the shame. My pants split open right in front of them.
I couldn’t see their expression, but I could picture their sneer very clearly. I came back up and pulled down the back of my jacket to cover the damage.
“B? Are you okay?” Deborah asked.
“Of course I’m okay,” I lied.
“I have a sewing kit here somewhere…” Deborah offered while looking through her drawers.
“Don’t worry! It’s nothing!” I graciously declined, since I had my own supply at my desk. But then I made the mistake of trying to justify the accident to her, and to the morons: “I sent this suit to the cleaners and I think they must have washed it instead of dry-cleaning it, because…” Before I could finish the sentence, they turned back to Deborah. I took another deep breath and walked into the office. Luckily, my jacket partially covered the rip, so I walked slowly, taking short steps to try to make it less noticeable. But as soon as I got to my desk, ready to look for my sewing kit, Mary Pringle—Bonnie’s secretary—popped her head above the partition of my cubicle.
“Hey, B! Bonnie wants to see you immediately.”
By the tone of Mary’s voice I knew that I was going to be yelled at. And I would have to endure it with my ass exposed—so to speak.
There are a few things that I resent about my college education. I hate the fact that some theoretical classes should have been practical, and some practical classes should have been theoretical. I’m also angry at the high cost of the tuition—and its ensuing student loan, which I’m still paying. But the one thing that pisses me off more than anything else is that nobody taught me how to survive the office politics of a corporation.
Let’s face it, most people go to college so they can eventually find a decent corporate job that’ll give them money, status, business-class seats on a plane, and a cute box of presentation cards engraved with an intimidating logo. Most lawyers, journalists, engineers, and accountants end up working for large companies where they become one more bolt—or one more screw—in a long conveyor belt. Our destiny is to endlessly climb the proverbial corporate ladder. But once I got my first corporate job, I realized that no one in college had taught me how to survive in a snake pit, and that—I hate to tell you—should have been my number-one skill.
In school, nobody explains to you that you’ll automatically be blacklisted if you happen to exchange more than a “good morning” with the boss of your boss. If you’re caught in the act, your manager will assume that you’re befriending the bigger guy to step all over him and take his job. In school, nobody warns you that you should spend only half of your time working, and the other half telling everyone what you’re doing; otherwise nobody will know what you’ve done, or—worse—somebody else will take credit for it.
Nobody told me that in a big company it’s better to be feared than to be loved. Nobody taught me that people who invest their time in staking their territory do better than people who work their asses off. Yes, there are so many useful things that I could have learned in school that nobody taught me. If I went back to college I would demand courses like:
• How to work for a boss who doesn’t know how to use a computer.
• How to work for an alcoholic boss who shows up at noon, changes everything you’ve written, and then, around 9 p.m., changes it back to the way it was originally.
• How to work with someone who’s not your boss anymore but keeps bossing you around as if he still was.
And last, but not least:
• How to work for a plain bitch on wheels.
Naturally, this brings me back to none other than Bonnie.
Bonnie is what I call the classic corporate nightmare. She’s in her late fifties, never married, uptight, controlling, and ambitious. She has a sweet tooth for bureaucracy, no talent whatsoever, and an incredible ability to navigate the corporate waters in order to gather power. Bonnie is evil, tyrannical, insecure, and envious. What’s not to love?
Bonnie came from a VP position in another agency, where—I heard—she did a lousy job, and everybody hated her. My friend Irene always says, “Executives just keep falling upward, no matter what,” meaning that, no matter how bad they screwed up in their last job, they’ll go from vice-president here to senior vice-president there. That was Bonnie’s case.
According to Lynn from Operations, Bonnie started as the assistant of some big-agency VP years ago, and since she had access to all his papers and e-mails, she blackmailed him for some sexual peccadillo, making him turn her into a director. Rumor has it that she always walked through the offices with a manila envelope that contained the evidence, and if her former boss didn’t do what she wanted, she would pull the tip of the compromising documents out of the envelope, just to “motivate” him. That’s how her career was jump-started.
So, the moment I got the message from Mary that Bonnie wanted to see me immediately, I picked up my five pounds of tampon-usage research—carefully organized in color-coordinated folders—and headed toward her windowed office with the faint hope that she would be impressed with my work. I had gathered every recent marketing study on the behavior of menstruating women for Bonnie. I know, it sounds farfetched, but the agency was pursuing a big account with a British company that was trying to market a new brand of tampons called UK Charms. They wanted to position them as “the new cool tampons” for the youngest demographic, so, instead of the traditional discreet white packaging, they came in the brightest and loudest wrappers you can imagine. With their little red strings and their colorful applicators, the UK Charms looked a lot like firecrackers. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone lighted one up by mistake on the Fourth of July.
As I rushed into Bonnie’s office, ready to present myself as the dynamic senior copywriter that I am—a team player who’s perfectly qualified for the available position of creative director—I tripped on Bonnie’s fake Persian carpet, dropping the results of my research all over her floor.
Bonnie—who was having her usual poppy-seed-bagel-with-cream-cheese breakfast with Christine from Business Affairs—looked at me with open disdain. I felt her condescending eyes on the back of my head as I got down on my knees to pick up the papers while avoiding further ripping of my pants. There I was, literally on my knees with my butt exposed, in front of the woman I hated the most in the whole world. Could it get any worse? I stood up and faced her with my now messed-up stash of paperwork and notes.
“You’re late again,” she said.
“I stayed really late last night doing all this research…”
She looked at me as if staying at the office past midnight was nothing less than my daily duty. So I felt compelled to add a few more details—fictitious, of course.
“…and I had to stay home a little later because the water pipe of my upstairs neighbor broke, and it flooded my bathroom…”
She kept looking at me with a “So?” expression, so I kept lying.
“…and I had to stay to open the door for the super, because I couldn’t leave the keys with the other neighbors. See, they went to Cancún for their anniversary…”
At this point, I had to acknowledge that my story had more holes than a block of Swiss cheese. Even I wasn’t buying it. Bonnie cut me off.
“We start working at nine a.m. This is the second time you arrived late this month. This cannot happen again.”
“It will not happen again,” I said, repentant, as if I were apologizing for murdering her nonexistent husband. Scrambling to find a way to interrupt the emotional flogging session, I tried to change subjects.
B as in Beauty Page 2