by Susan Wolfe
“If you glance around, you’ll notice that this training room has the capacity for a much larger crowd than the one here today.” He began to walk slowly up and back in the front of the room. “This is not an accident. This room will never again be filled during my tenure. It won’t need to be, as long as each person we do hire contributes fully to this company’s profitability. Some of you will find your workload too heavy, and I encourage you to seek a lighter one somewhere else.” Andrea, the head of R&D, had closed her laptop and was staring into the distance, juggling her pen in an elaborate figure eight motion around the knuckles of her left hand.
“If you do remain at Lumina, as I expect some of you will, then you will quickly find that doing more with less is a habit we all subscribe to, one that will serve our shareholders well and secure your continued employment.
“Now, do any of you have questions for me?” he asked as he simultaneously shook his head from side to side. “No? Then good luck.” He turned to Sally and muttered in what he apparently thought was an inaudible voice, “That guy in the back a stutterer?” They all glanced in the direction of the slight man in the short-sleeved shirt, who blinked rapidly and stared straight ahead. What made him even think of that, when the guy hadn’t said one word?
Sally smiled confidently without turning to look. “Certainly not.”
“Good. Talk to them about grooming, for God’s sake.” He turned abruptly and left the room.
Well. Wasn’t he cuddly.
The temperature in the room seemed to have dropped several degrees, and a couple of the new employees had slunk down in their seats. Trying to hide their bad grooming?
“Isn’t he impressive?” Sally beamed. “Just so . . . down-to-earth and . . . straight-talking, isn’t he?” Bully was more like it, Georgia thought, but Sally Kurtz could hardly say that. Andrea Hancock seemed decidedly less than dazzled. She drummed lightly with two fingers on a faint smile while she waited for the murmurs of timid agreement to subside, then launched into a twenty-minute presentation of Lumina’s software product and left.
As the morning wore on, Georgia learned what it meant to be a company that sells stock to the public. Their next core value was “Passion.”
Passion seemed a peculiar value for a software company, but she supposed they meant something other than Fifty Shades of Grey. Georgia personally had a passion for hanging onto her job, but that wouldn’t be what they had in mind, either. After all, how could they know this job was her one big chance to cheat her fate?
She’d been thinking about cheating her fate quite a lot since her father got hauled off to prison for running his con artist business, exposing the rest of the family to ostracism (by a bunch of sorry rednecks, no less, like being ostracized by a chain gang) and to financial ruin. She’d had her doubts even before he got hauled off. How many times had she told him that she wasn’t ready to enter the so-called family business, that she might want to do something other than what he had carefully trained her for? Of course she could never mention her real reason for wanting out: Making your living by tricking people out of their money, even if you loved it (which her father surely did), even if you were an outright genius at it (which her father surely was), was really just sort of no-account. She wanted to use her talents for something consequential.
But she and her father had both believed she would eventually give in. Her father probably knew as well as she did that it was nearly impossible to achieve escape velocity from the life you were born to, from a father you loved who was counting on you. Her father had just been biding his time, waiting patiently for her to grow up and quit stalling. He probably still was.
But the disaster with that no-account Robbie had changed everything. Her eyes narrowed. She’d never had to summon the fortitude to get in her car and drive away from her father, because he’d left her by going to prison. Suddenly all their lives were shifting, and she’d just decided to shift hers in the right direction. And it was the right direction, even if food was occasionally scarce, even if she was temporarily surrounded by acres of strangers who never spoke to her and wouldn’t notice if she keeled over on a sidewalk and expired. Because now things had shifted again. She ducked her head to conceal a joyful little smile. Now she was seated in this room, experiencing her first day of a bona fide job that gave her a genuine presence in Silicon Valley and a real home for her and Katie-Ann. Her chance for the life she wanted was now.
Hanging on to this job and getting Katie-Ann through high school would be plenty consequential for now. She shifted on her folding chair and ran her thumb down through the condensation on the side of her coffee cup. Continuing to listen with one ear in case her name was called, she considered her finances.
It was important to get Katie-Ann out here by September so she could be in the same place for her last two years. If Georgia continued to live in her car entirely for another six weeks, she could scrape up the first and last month’s rent on a one-bedroom apartment before school started. That wouldn’t be so bad now that she could shower in the company gym, instead of waiting in line for that germy shower at the homeless center.
She’d found a second outfit at Goodwill, and another shirt for her pantsuit, so she would never have to wear anything more than twice a week. Hard to keep her clothes decent with her car for a closet, and the CEO evidently had a bee up his butt about grooming. Did they have an iron at the homeless center? Lousy having no refrigerator, but she was pretty sure they had one here in the kitchen she could use, and four nights a week they served a hot dinner at the church on First Street if she could get there on time. Once she started working late she could do frozen dinners in the microwave on the third floor.
Katie-Ann was working at the WhistleStop to save her bus money. She had $92 already, and was saving $20 a week. The bus fare was $209. Together, they could make this work.
After the break they divided into small groups and competed to prepare the best “elevator pitch” for the company’s software, which meant describing the software in the time it took to ride up in an elevator with a sales prospect. That actually seemed useful, and soon Georgia’s team had the following pitch: Our mission-critical, data mining software retrieves information from a company’s database—or the Web!—according to search queries; analyzes the data for trends; organizes the results into presentation-ready reports; and distributes those reports throughout the enterprise. They were debating whether to keep the semicolons when Sally called out, “Georgia Griffin? I need to speak to you, please.”
About what?? Had they found out from the background check that her father was a con artist? Had the cops followed her here to harass her for sleeping in her car? Or had she just flunked grooming? She avoided the glances of her teammates and headed over to Sally, who absent-mindedly touched a scar just above her eyebrow as she introduced Georgia to Ken Madigan’s secretary, Maggie.
Maggie looked friendly enough. She was wearing swingy white plastic earrings and a bright print dress. “I’m really embarrassed, but one of our lawyers flew to Boston today, and he needs somebody to witness an interview over the phone right now. We’re so short-handed from this hiring freeze that you’re the only person I can find.”
This had nothing to do with her. Her shoulders dropped about three inches with relief.
“Do you mind terribly if we head upstairs for a few minutes?” Maggie continued. “I’ll get you back down here just as soon as possible.”
“No problem,” Georgia responded, trotting happily down the corridor beside her. “I’ll just remain disoriented for now.”
Maggie showed Georgia into a little, windowless room with dirty maroon walls. “Zack’s here on the speakerphone. Zack? I have Georgia Griffin.”
“Hi, Georgia,” came a rich, deep voice through the speakerphone. “Thanks for agreeing to help out.” Get a load of that voice. She imagined a tall man, thirties maybe, curly black hair, lean shoulders inside a well-fitted suit. Not that she was remotely interested after that lowdown skunk
Deke. “I’m in the Boston office today to interview one of our sales reps regarding a sexual harassment case. The employee says the manager of the office, Buck Gibbons, is making homophobic remarks. If that’s true, then it violates Massachusetts law and our Code of Ethics.”
“And our company values,” Georgia added.
“I’m sorry, what was that?” Zack called through the phone.
“You know. ‘We treat each other with fairness, dignity and respect?’”
There was a short silence.
“Georgia’s in orientation today,” Maggie explained brightly.
“Oh, right,” Zack said. “So, the first step is to interview the person who complained and get his story, but he’s afraid the manager will retaliate against him for complaining. He also thinks the Human Resources person is biased because she’s scared to death of the manager. Which frankly she might be. So, will you be our witness? The guy’s standing outside in the corridor right now.”
“Love to,” Georgia said, grinning as she accepted a pen from Maggie. Her fire alarm fantasy had come true. Out of that sorry orientation, smack into her real job.
Three hours later Georgia was still next to the speakerphone in the little, windowless room, waiting to hear Zack’s fifth and last face-to-face interview. Maggie had brought her a ham and cheese sandwich twice as thick as the ones they offered at the homeless center, and a few tiny crumbs dotted the pitted surface of the laminated conference table between the empty plate and her mouth. She’d drunk so much coffee her kidneys ached.
The sales rep who had complained was Andrew. He said his regional manager, Buck, consistently called people “faggots” and “queers” and “girly-men” when they didn’t sell enough software. Two weeks ago Andrew had failed to close a deal by quarter-end, and Buck yelled that he was “a fucking homo” right out in the open office. Andrew was gay, but hadn’t disclosed that to people at work. He wasn’t sure who had overheard Buck that day, but he gave the names of four other sales reps who had either been the butt of similar remarks or had witnessed them.
Zack interviewed those four next. The first was named Jack. No, Buck had never called Jack a faggot, and Jack had no reason to think Buck was homophobic. Buck definitely got a little excited at times, but he was a good manager and the team performed well. Jack really had no complaints.
The second witness, Bill, might have heard Buck call somebody a “girly-man,” but that was no big deal. He didn’t think there was a homophobic atmosphere in the office, although maybe it was a little bit macho. If they were finished he’d like to get back to a deal he was trying to close.
The third witness, the only female sales rep, explained with irritation that the office atmosphere was just fine, and anyway who cared? What sales reps cared about was whether they were selling software and meeting quota. Anybody who had time to complain about office atmosphere probably wasn’t doing their job.
The only interesting thing about these three interviews was that they utterly contradicted everything Andrew had told them. Why would Andrew make that stuff up and give specific names if there was nothing to it? Georgia wanted to ask Zack what he thought, but she could never be sure he was alone in the room there in Boston. Now they were waiting for Ben, the final sales rep.
She heard a muffled voice and then a door closed. She picked up her pen as Zack explained the purpose of the meeting and offered the standard assurance: “I will keep anything you tell me confidential to the extent I can, but it’s possible that in order to complete the investigation I’ll need to reveal what you’ve told me. If that happens, the company will protect you from retaliation. Okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, great. In the year and a half you’ve been working out of this office, have you noticed anything about the atmosphere that makes you uncomfortable?”
“No. Like what?” More of the same, evidently. Georgia sighed. This little, windowless room was getting stuffy.
“Do people talk to each other in a way that seems disrespectful or inappropriate?”
“No, not really.”
“Have you ever heard anyone making homophobic remarks in the office?”
“I don’t think so. Like what?”
“Have you ever heard anybody call someone a ‘faggot’ or a ‘queer’?”
“No, I haven’t heard that.”
“How about ‘girly-man’?”
“Is this about Buck Gibbons?”
“Why do you ask? Have you heard Buck Gibbons call somebody a ‘girly-man’?”
“Not sure if I have or not. It’s definitely the kind of thing he would say, though.”
“I see. And do you think the way Buck talks to people makes them uncomfortable?”
“Can’t really say if it does or not. Tell you what he does that makes me uncomfortable.”
“What’s that?”
“He flips me.” Georgia frowned at the phone. ‘Flips.’ What did that mean?
“I’m sorry?” Zack said.
“He flips me. You know, like this.” He apparently was demonstrating.
“Ben, could you be more specific? Are you saying that Buck Gibbons touches you in some way that makes you uncomfortable?”
“Yeah, he flips my nuts, man. I don’t like it at all.”
Georgia’s hand flew to her mouth. Had she gasped out loud? Very unprofessional. She heard nothing on the phone for several seconds.
“Okay, Ben, from what you just told me, Buck Gibbons has put his hand under your . . . genitals, and flipped them up. Is that right?”
“That’s right.”
“Has he done this more than once?”
Ben paused. “Five times.” She remembered she should be taking notes and resumed scribbling.
“Five times in the office? Were there witnesses?”
“Four times in the office, once in a restaurant. And yeah, there were witnesses.”
“Did you ever ask him to stop?”
“Yeah, I told him. Not the first time, because I was like, you know, a little bit not believing it had really happened. But the second time was in front of a couple of other guys, and I followed him back to his office and asked him not to do it anymore.”
“And what did he say?”
“He just laughed and tried to flip me again. Then he did it to me again the very next night, only that time was in a restaurant in front of my girlfriend. I felt like he was getting even because I asked him to stop. So now I just try to keep away from him.”
“Have you ever seen him do this to anyone else?”
“No.”
“And you never went to Human Resources about it?”
“It’s really kind of embarrassing, you know, and I thought I could just keep away from him. But he did it to me again last night, and now you’re here today and it seems kind of relevant to what you’re talking about . . .”
“Absolutely. I’m glad you told me. Now if you don’t mind, I’d like to talk through the different times this has happened, and see who else was there who could corroborate it.”
Ben gave Zack three names of people to talk to, including the Bill who’d just finished assuring them the office atmosphere was fine.
“Okay, Ben, is there anything else that Buck or anybody else does around here that you think I should know about?”
“No. That’s it.”
“Fine. Now, I’m going to investigate this, and if I confirm it we have to get him to stop.”
“I want him to stop. I just don’t want to lose my job.”
“You won’t lose your job. You have the right not to be retaliated against, and I’m going to make sure we enforce that right.”
There was a brief silence. “Okay.”
“You know, I’ve never heard anything quite like this.”
“Pretty weird, isn’t it?”
“Very weird. Thank you, Ben. We’ll be in . . . I’ll get back to you.”
Georgia heard footsteps and then the door closed again. “Georgia?” Zack called quietly i
nto the phone. “You still there?”
“Right here,” she assured him, leaning toward the speakerphone. “I fainted a while, but now I’m getting my color back.”
“Can you believe this? Listen, I need to talk to Ken right away. Can you let Maggie know? Then you should probably go back to your orientation. We’ll have plenty of time to talk about this later, especially if it turns out to be true.”
“Well, if it’s not true,” Georgia said slowly, “how interesting does that make Ben?”
“Point taken. Hang onto your notes, okay? And welcome to Lumina Software.”
Genital grabbing. Dignity and respect. Hard to reconcile those, really, Georgia thought as she followed Maggie back downstairs. Be fun to see how it played out. Look at that, 4:30. Less than an hour of orientation to go.
Sally was just finishing a discussion of the core value “Leadership.” She’d recorded their thoughts on the flip chart.
“Fantastic,” she said with her soft smile. “I can see that this group is already on the path to understanding and living the values. Now let’s see how your answers compare to the Leadership Team’s.” She punched the key and the new employees watched the list appear:
Every one of us is a leader.
We set the right example.
We expect and help each person to make a difference.
Georgia read the last sentence twice. Why should something so obvious even need to be said? That ornery CEO could rest assured, Georgia Griffin fully intended to make a difference.