by Theresa Alan
With my only pair of nylons torn to shreds, I resorted to an uncomfortable white shirt and blue pants that made me look like a pregnant hippopotamus.
I was twenty minutes late getting to work. I tried to sneak into my office without Eleanore seeing me. I thought I’d made it safely, but just as I was about to step into my office I heard her say, “Our department is hardly so ahead of its deadlines we can stroll in whenever we feel like it. And we’re about to get hit even harder with the Expert account.”
“I . . .” I began to defend myself, but gave up. I didn’t have the energy to fight.
“I think you should count on doing a lot of overtime these next several weeks.”
“Of course.” I only had a wedding to plan, a fiancé to spend time with, and thirty pounds to lose.
Crapcrapcrap!
I turned on my computer and began sorting through the e-mail of coworkers and clients asking how the editing of such and such a report or newsletter was coming and did I remember the deadline was Wednesday?
I looked at my to-do list for the day. If I worked my ass off for ten hours and if Eleanore limited her interruptions to half her normal amount . . . I still couldn’t get anywhere close to being able to meet the deadlines. Rushing didn’t help. If I made a mistake, I was only causing myself more work. I was so stressed I didn’t know where to begin, so I began by doing what was least important: going through my personal e-mail.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Rette,
How was Thanksgiving? Let’s meet in the breakroom at 12:45. I’d suggest going out to lunch, but I don’t even have time to eat the lunch I brought, let alone go out. Much stress. Too much work. Still, want to catch up. OK?
Avery
To: ARose@mckennamarketing. com
From: [email protected]
Dearest Avery, Splendid idea. See you at 12:45.
-R
I worked at a breakneck pace all morning. At quarter to one I waddled to the breakroom, my body bloated with Thanksgiving-blubber. I sat at the table and attempted to hoist my left leg over my right, but my legs were too bulky to actually cross. I balanced my left ankle on my thigh instead. I bit into my apple and watched enviously as Avery unwrapped a sandwich that looked suspiciously like turkey.
“Is that turkey?”
“Tofurky.”
“Is it good?”
“It’s great. Do you want to try it?”
“Good god, no.”
“How was your Thanksgiving?” Avery asked.
“I gained about four hundred pounds because Greg’s family is so unbelievably boring that food was my only source of entertainment. How was yours?”
“It was really fun. Is that all you’re eating? You want some stuffing? Some mashed potatoes? Some apple pie? I have a ton of leftovers.” Avery, that cruel, skinny temptress, took the lids off the Tupperware containers in which all sorts of sinful, fattening foods lurked. She spread the array of cellulite-inducing delights before me.
“No. Thanks. My diet officially began today. I’m ill from eating so much. How was your Thanksgiving?”
“Les from work came over to my mom’s place. We made dinner and had the best time.”
“Les?”
“He works in IT.”
“Yeah, I know him. He helped me get my computer set up. He seems like a really nice guy. So are you two like a thing?”
“Oh no. I’m not attracted to him. Anyway, he has a crush on Jen.”
“Of course he does, what guy doesn’t?”
“No kidding. But it’s been really fun having a guy friend. We talk and talk about everything. We went hiking last Saturday, and we’ve talked on the phone every night for the past week for at least an hour or two. We had so much fun making dinner together Thursday. We just talked and talked; he really made me laugh. Then Friday we went out to a movie and Saturday we went to the art museum in Denver and then went out to dinner and saw a band . . .”
“Are you sure you’re not dating?”
“Yes, I’m sure. That’s what I’m saying. It’s better than dating because there aren’t any of those annoying expectations getting in the way, but we are good friends who are there for each other.”
“Speaking of . . .” I said, indicating with my eyes that Les was behind her.
He limped across the kitchen floor. “Hey,” he said.
Avery turned. “What’s wrong?” she asked him.
“I worked out yesterday. My body went into shock. Most of my muscles had atrophied pretty severely and weren’t at all happy about being dragged back to the land of the living. I can’t tell you how excited I am to go home and soak in a bathtub full of Ben-Gay. But pretty soon my muscles will thank me for this. Or thank you I should say. You’re quite a good influence on me,” he said to Avery as he pulled his lunch from the fridge.
“That’s great, Les,” Avery said.
“I assume you mean that it’s good that I’m working on getting in shape and not that I’m crippled with excruciating pain.”
“Right,” Avery said with a laugh.
“Well, I’ll catch you two later,” Les said, taking his lunch with him back to his desk.
“You know,” Avery said quietly when she was sure he was gone. “I wish I was half as attracted to him as I was to Gideon. But you just can’t force yourself to be attracted to someone. It doesn’t matter anyway. He’s hot for Jen. Like every other man in the world.”
For the rest of the week, I ate lunch at my desk, came in early and stayed late. So much for forty-hour weeks.
I quickly grew sick of cleaning up other people’s mistakes. I didn’t have time to fix my own. Being an editor is like being a goalie. You never get the glory of making the game-winning goal, but you get blamed for everything that gets past you. At least on the field, spectators can see the catches a goalie does make; they have no idea the spectacular saves we editors make.
I kept expecting Eleanore to come by and give me a pat on the back. Eleanore did finally stop by my office, but not for back-patting. She pointed out a few mistakes I’d made editing a sixteen-page industry newsletter so tiny and insignificant that only a particularly anal editor would notice them. I apologized and promised that things would get better. For all the hours of overtime I’d worked and all the stress and frustration, the only thing Eleanore had to say was, “Yes, I’m sure it will get better. Things can only get better.”
She never said anything good about my work, and she reveled in finding my mistakes. When she found an error of mine, she gleefully ran to report it to me.
“My dictionary says this word should have a hyphen but I see you didn’t add a hyphen.” A satanic grin lurked beneath the surface of her expression. She wanted it to seem as though she were simply casually imparting information, but I could see that secretly she loved catching my mistakes.
I returned to my desk with my lunch to see a stack of reports I’d edited that Eleanore had eviscerated with a patchwork of sticky notes with bitchy comments like, “Have you ever heard of the A.P. Style Guide?” because I’d forgotten to write out the number nine. She could have just circled the numeral nine, which was the editorial mark that meant “write out.” But no, she had to write “Have you ever heard of the A.P. Style Guide?” and draw a menacing arrow to my mistake in a thick red pen that made me think of the lines surgeons draw before they cut open a patient to remove a cancerous organ.
Somehow, when she managed me by sticky note, it decimated my self-esteem even more than when she told me about my many flaws in person. Every morning when I arrived to find my errors in black and white and bleeding red pen, my self-esteem was trampled. Eleanore was constantly doing a clog dance on my ego, turning my insides into bruised mulch.
The thing was, I was catching the vast majority of the errors. There was no such thing as an editor who caught every mistake the first time around. That was why documents were run by a few different editors a number of tim
es. Having Eleanore constantly point out my errors made me wonder if editing was yet another thing I had no talent for. The thought that I could fail at this career too filled me with dread.
AVERY
The Power of the Few
Our graphic designer had come up with three logos, and we were testing them out on consumers, asking them which ones they preferred. One logo had a mortarboard on top of the e in Expert and spectacles that made up the middle line of the e. It was the corniest logo I’d ever seen. Another had a swoosh symbol encircling the Expert Appliance in a karma-wrecking shade of green. The last just had the words Expert Appliance in a shiny white and gray. The last one was classy, up-to-date, and offered the high-tech association we were going for. It was clearly the best choice, but everyone in the focus groups was choosing this boring swoosh thing or the bespectacled professorial one that looked like an owl on a kids’ TV show who taught children how to subtract two from three or to determine how many licks it took to get to the center of a Tootsie-Pop.
I was getting unreasonably irritated. It wasn’t the consumers’ fault I was way behind and working overtime, knowing that we were coming up with an inferior product. These people were giving up their time, answering questions over the phone and in focus groups; I should be thanking them for their help.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
It’s terrifying how many decisions a handful of people make. Focus groups can be blamed for many of the stupid movie titles, insipid endings, and inane taglines that we’re subjected to day in and day out.
Think about it: Are the people who have the time to go to focus groups and are lonely enough to answer phone surveys representative of the rest of us? Are these the people we want in charge of deciding what media get shoved down our throats? Are these the people we want making major business decisions for the largest corporations in America?
Stop the insanity!
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Focus groups are the juries of popular cultures, and they are rarely a jury of our peers.
Your e-mail made me laugh, which I appreciate—I really needed some levity in my life right now. My brother found out his ex is dating another man. This is the lowest I’ve seen him yet. I guess the finality of their relationship is finally setting in.
I’ve been reading this book that is supposed to help you help your loved ones get through difficult times. The book said that getting over a death is the hardest thing to deal with, and the second hardest thing is the death of a marriage. But I wonder if that’s right. With divorce, no one bakes casseroles or sends sympathy cards. When someone dies, there’s usually no one to blame. When you get divorced, you review your failings day after day, trying to figure out exactly where you went wrong.
Art was so kind and considerate. It was so nice to see a guy who really cared about his family.
Was he as wonderful in real life as he was online?
Maybe it was time I met him so I could find out for sure. We would meet in a public place of course, just in case he really was a psychopath. A restaurant. A nice one. He’d have gotten there a couple minutes before me. I’d enter the restaurant and see a good-looking man sitting at the bar. He’d turn and look right at me. My heart would race but I would tell myself that there was no way I could get that lucky. He would smile. “Are you by any chance . . .” he would begin. “Avery,” I’d finish. For a moment, I’d feel a little awkward, a little shy, but then he’d tell a joke, and we would start talking and laughing and wouldn’t stop through the entire six-course meal or through the after-dinner drink at the bar. We wouldn’t stop talking until we got on the dance floor. Then, my body, which had been hibernating for the last two years, would come alive again. His fingers grazing my arms would send shivers down my body. I would tremble with anticipation.
We would have lazy Sundays of slow sex and long, giggly conversations. We’d eat bagels and drink coffee and read the New York Times and rent videos and fall asleep on the couch, entwined in each other’s arms.
I had to start dating soon—I was becoming too stuck in my ways. If it went on much longer, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to make room for someone else in my life. I’d gotten a little too used to living alone. It was getting hard to imagine sharing my life with someone. But since Art and Les had come into my life, I remembered that, despite all the work relationships were, there was a lot I’d been missing out on. Art reminded me how nice it was to have romance and excitement in my life, and Les provided friendship and support. In many ways, Les played the role of the boyfriend without the sex and expectations. It was so nice to have someone in my life, someone to review the day’s events with each night.
After work, Les and I went to our first swing dancing lesson. For the first half hour, the instructor reviewed the basic steps with us, then she spent the next half hour teaching us a couple of trickier steps and a dip. Les was a better dancer than I would have thought. For all his awkwardness in real life, his slumped posture and uneven gait, on the dance floor he had a gentle but self-assured lead. A couple of times I misunderstood his lead and stepped the wrong way. When Les and I tried to correct ourselves, we careened into another couple.
“Sorry, sorry,” I gushed to the couple.
“No problem,” the woman smiled.
“I think we’re just about ready to go pro,” Les whispered to me. “We can call ourselves Twinkle Toes and the Foot Smasher.”
“Which one am I?”
“Twinkle Toes, of course.”
“I don’t know, I think you’re a better dancer than you think you are.”
“You’re too kind.”
I had been so ferociously independent for so long, I’d forgotten how amazing it was to be close to someone, to have his warm hand on my back and his laughter in my ear.
After class, Les asked if I wanted to get a drink.
“Sure, but just one. I need to get some sleep. Work’s been crazy.”
We walked to a nearby bar. I ordered a Chardonnay, and Les ordered a beer. We sat in a dimly lit corner in the back of the bar, at a sticky wood table.
“How are things going at work?” I asked.
He rolled his eyes. “We’re about a month behind on the Expert Web site.”
“You’re joking. Why so much?”
“Mark is just not a good manager.”
“Is he a good programmer?”
“Oh god no, he’s awful.”
“Well how did he get promoted to manager then?”
Les shrugged. “His timing was right. He came to the company when the IT department was in its fledgling stages. They needed a manager, and he was there. He knows how to throw jargon-y terms around, and he sounds so confident in himself that if you don’t know anything about technology, he can be convincing. Morgan loves him.”
“Mark can be charming,” I said.
“I guess. It’s kind of funny though, because all of us who work for him know how full of it he is. He says the most ignorant things. Sometimes it’s hard not to laugh. He’ll say something that makes no sense. It would take more time and more money to do it his way, and the end result will be an inferior, unstable product, and if Rich or I or someone . . .”
“Who’s Rich?”
“Another programmer. Really smart guy. Anyway, we’ll suggest a better way to do it, and Mark will get really pissed and argue even harder for his stupid idea. I’m not very good at kissing up, but you’d think I could at least keep my mouth shut, but I just can’t bear to see things done in such a completely moronic way. He’s been making me do tech support stuff. It’s ridiculous to have a programmer doing tech support, but it’s his way of putting me in my place.”
“Why is it ridiculous?”
“I’ve got a very specialized knowledge. I make a lot more money than a tech support person does. It’s just not a good distribution of resources. I mean I can do it, but it makes more sense for me to be doing something tha
t’s going to make the company money.”
“Mark sounds like such a power freak. He sounds like Sharon. She was a week late giving me the approval on the dishwasher research questions—and by the way, I wrote them and she didn’t change a single word, she just kept them on her desk for three weeks collecting dust—and then yesterday she yelled at me for being behind. She sees absolutely no correlation with her holding up the questions for a week and our being exactly a week behind. And she’s so snippy about it, you know? It immediately gets me on the defensive. Oh, and then, today she asked me to get this report up onto the intranet. I sent it to IT the second after she asked me to. I even cc’d her so she’d know I sent it. So a few hours later, she forwards me a message from Morgan and cc’s him on it, asking me accusingly why the report isn’t online yet. So I hit REPLY ALL and added Mark’s name to the list and asked Mark if he knew when the file I sent him would go online. I wanted to write, ‘the file I sent to you the very second Sharon asked me to.’ It was so obvious that Morgan had asked Sharon a few days ago to take it online and she was trying to blame the delay on me. Oh and that Mary from marketing is such a liar. She was supposed to send me this file three weeks ago. When I reminded her, it was obvious from her expression that she’d forgotten. Which is fine, why can’t she just say, ‘Oops, sorry, I forgot’? But no, she claims she did send it but it must have gotten lost in e-mail. But strangely, she doesn’t have a copy of what she sent. Whatever. . . . Why are you laughing?”
“Let’s try not talking about work for a few minutes.”
I took a sip of my wine. “That was fun tonight, wasn’t it?” I said.
“It was a blast. It’s been awhile since I’ve been on the dance floor.”