Even though Elaine’s schedule was pretty predictable, the lower level principles Ari, Michael and Jenny showed up any time between 7:00 AM and 10:00 AM, so the chances of running into someone when I arrived forty-five minutes late was much smaller when I came in through the front entrance. I could usually slip past Elaine’s corner office and also normally manage to dodge Sarah, the very dull supervising Principle who sat right next to her by the door.
Whereas the front of the office was normally empty, the daily chance that someone was lurking in the back of the office, giving me judgey looks and keeping tabs on my hours, was too much to risk.
My least favorite Principal Attorney in the back side of the office, Jenny, was working from home today, thank God. She was newly-promoted into her senior position in the firm and, in this new position of relative power, it seemed that she had decided to practice a passive-aggressive style of communication. For me, this meant that she did not acknowledge me nor did she speak to me until the exact moment that I was A) eating a meal, or B) walking out of the office for the day. At those exact instances, she liked to clear her throat and start the whine-talking: “Um, Louisa?” (Always with the ‘um’).
“Yes, Jenny,” I would reply with varying levels of patience, usually depending on how PMS-ed I was on that particular day.
“Um, do you think you could come into my office for a minute?”
“Oh my God, Jenny, I am pounding an effing burrito and I have sour cream on my face and a bean on my left boob. Do you think you could send me an email?” Ok, I would not say that. But, I would think it really hard and try to burn the message of hatred and bitterness through my eye sockets onto her face, hoping that she would one day get it. Yah, nope.
I would inevitably end up dropping the burrito (depending on how much I had eaten, it might even explode and become impossible to pick back up. I hate that), going into her office, listening to her whiny, ridiculous problem for twenty minutes, offering her the solution which was usually as simple as “click that yellow box,” and purposely wiping the bean off of my boob onto the ground by her chair and leaving it there in protest. I hated Jenny.
In addition to Jenny’s absence on this particular afternoon, Michael was out, and Sarah and Ari were both in meetings, or doing whatever it is that they do in their offices for half the day with the doors shut. Phew.
With Elaine now calmed down, the office was relatively quiet. Although they were busy, the Associates and Analysts were pretty self-contained and rarely needed administrative help, so they really didn’t notice or care that I left for an extra half-hour now and again. I ducked into the elevator and took the quick trip down from the twenty-ninth floor office to the ground level.
Our company, Merit, Inc., was a well-respected marketing and image consulting company which provided some of the region’s largest multi-national corporations with very expensive advice on sensitive public relations issues, like how to appeal to a "green" audience when your true business function is the mass clearing of forests—think glossy TV spots showing a diverse group of people planting saplings in a wildlife reserve, insert company logo. And the companies paid dearly for it: the average hourly price of services from Merit was over $400 per hour, a sizable chunk of which ended up in our consultants' paychecks. Unfortunately, my job was not so lucrative because I was just a lowly Administrative Assistant.
My current position in the legal department opened up because Merit was going through a massively important merger with our main local competitor out of Portland, Oregon: NorCom PR. The recent hit to the economy had devastated the consulting industry (along with most other industries), and regional firms like Merit found themselves getting knocked out of the market by price undercutting by the “big three” global powerhouse PR firms: Williams Ackerman Douglas, Freewood Consulting and Guy Farner. Our board of directors, desperate to remain employed, quickly realized that the only way to survive was a frantic strategy that involved joining forces with the competition and then “consolidating and downsizing” the two workforces (read: pay cuts and layoffs) to maintain competitiveness in the marketplace. So this was where I found myself, a minor player at the heart of the global struggle to ride out the recession and somehow make ends meet.
At twenty-eight, being Louisa Hallstrom the Exceedingly Unmotivated Administrative Assistant was not part of the “five-year plan” I devised after graduating from a small and very expensive private college which I attended on an academic scholarship a few years back. I doubted that becoming an Exceedingly Unmotivated Administrative Assistant was really in anyone’s five-year plan, but with the economy being what it was, I was trying to be grateful that I even had a job. The only reason I had been hired at Merit was because a friend of a friend gave me a reference a year ago when I was sitting at home, on unemployment, steadily eating away at a Costco-sized block of cheese and watching What Not to Wear reruns. While being stuck at Merit was better than that, it paled in comparison to what I’d had before.
A few years back, during the housing bubble, I had been working as a junior broker at a large investment firm in California. I had busted my ass to get all of the appropriate licenses, pass all of the right tests, and to not to make any trading errors on the five or six hours of sleep I got nightly before showing up to work at 6:00 AM every day. At that point I was making over $80,000 a year, living one block off of the ocean in Orange County, and was engaged. When the dust finally settled my firm had been eaten up by a mega-bank and I found myself unemployed. Within a month of losing my job, my selfish prick of an ex-fiancé had cheated on me in the bed we shared with an unattractive girl with a lisp. Thankfully, I had not yet sent out the invitations, but everything else for the wedding had either been fully paid-for or carried a big deposit—from my own account—including the dress. Because cheating fell on the list of things I would absolutely not tolerate (along with stinky people, pee on toilet seats, country music), I immediately flew my mother down to California, cleaned out the house of every stick of furniture, and shoved it into a U-Haul for the twenty-hour drive from hell up the coast to Seattle, where I was born and raised. All I had left from that time in my life was a bunch of furniture that the ex and I had purchased together for our home, thousands of dollars’ worth of clothes that were two sizes too small for me, and my dog Winston. I took the job at Merit immediately upon receiving an offer, not because it would further my career, but for the simple reason that I desperately needed the decent salary and good benefits.
Things were especially bad lately because we were at the tail-end of the biggest merger in Merit’s eighty-five-year history. Over the last several quarters, the company's share price had sharply tanked, and the overall concern in the firm was either a nasty bankruptcy where we would certainly be forced to lay off many of our employees, or a hostile takeover by a different competitor with the same (or worse) result. Because I worked in the legal department, everyone in my group had been on edge for the past six months, frantically checking and double-checking that all of the agreements, disclosures, financial statements and shareholder information was listed correctly, conducting due diligence on all information that would, or ever could, be public, and generally freaking the fuck out.
I left the office quietly and walked the four blocks down to the H&M on Sixth Avenue and Pine Street. I found and purchased a black lined wool dress without trying it on, size ten. Because the dress only cost me fifteen dollars, I also picked up a new gold pleather clutch and some gold hoop earrings that were guaranteed to turn my earlobes green within thirty minutes. I was definitely not above giving myself green earlobes in exchange for three dollar earrings. Nice work, I thought to myself. I was in and out in less than ten minutes, and the total for the purchase was less than thirty dollars.
Today’s shopping expedition was serving a very specific purpose—I had a date that night. I had a profile up on a few dating sites and had been on several awkward dates with various types of men. Unfortunately for me, none of them had come even close
to the fantastic first date that is required to create a relationship. I had had a few flings, and even dated an ex of mine for a month or two when I had gotten back from California, but so far nothing had stuck. I was hoping that tonight’s date would be somewhat decent. If not, at least I would get a meal and a couple of glasses of wine out of it.
When I got back to the office about thirty-five minutes later, everything seemed to still be under control. My co-workers were quietly typing at their desks, and the office would have been calm if Elaine wasn’t on the phone, her office door wide open, yakking voluminously to someone about remodeling a bathroom. Everyone at the office knew that Elaine’s only daughter was due to give birth to her first child in two months in Manhattan, and besides the merger, this was Elaine’s main source of stress. Being a total control freak, Elaine was putting up the money for her daughter's expensive downtown apartment, and now, apparently, for an extensive re-model, including all new furniture, every piece of which Elaine was painstakingly hand-picking.
This came as quite the relief for our group of employees. We knew that when Elaine was on the phone terrorizing the contractor, she was occupied and couldn’t terrorize us about the merger—for the moment.
After stashing the goods in my locker, I sat back down at my desk unnoticed. I scanned my emails for anything urgent and didn’t find anything worth my attention, so I picked back up with my text conversations, burning up the rest of the afternoon until I could leave for the day.
“Dude! There you are. Did you hear what happened?” The IM was from Maya, my favorite and most gossip-y Legal Associate.
“Jesus, what now?” I typed back, expecting a report on Elaine’s spazz attack.
“You know Leila Carson at NorCom Portland? She motherfucking DIED last night! She didn’t show up at work this morning and her cleaning lady found her in her bathtub sometime this afternoon.”
“Holy burning ballsack. Serious????” Whoa. That was not at all what I was expecting to hear. Leila was the head of legal for NorCom PR, the competitor in Portland that Merit was trying to merge with. Elaine and the rest of our team had worked constantly with her over the past few months trying to get everything ready for the big announcement.
“Yeah. Messed up, right? I guess they are saying it was an accident. Maybe she got drunk and fell down in the shower. Remember that meeting in April when she drank 2 bottles of wine by herself?”
Maya had a point there. It was pretty obvious to everyone that Leila liked to, er, “let off steam” after work. I didn’t really know Leila, my only interaction with her being some emails to Elaine that she’d copied me on and the occasional conference call, but the news was sad and shocking nonetheless.
“That is some seriously crazy ass news. Who is taking over as point person on the merger? Wasn’t she Elaine’s direct liaison at NorCom?”
“I don’t know. Maybe that Bob guy. This is fucking nuts. I’ll let you know if I hear anything.”
“Thanks. I am totally sneaking out right now. I have a date tonite. Cover for me.”
“K, have fun. Use a condom : )”
Maya signed off. It was exactly ten minutes until four, so I got up, grabbed my purse, and sneaked out of the office toward home.
Chapter 2: Stinky Cheese Towels
I lived in Greenlake, a weird neighborhood in the northern part of Seattle. There was an actual lake, which was beautiful, but the main draw of the area was the three-mile running and biking path surrounding it. To the east of the lake was a plethora of organic sandwich shops, biking supply stores and yoga studios, as well as a Subway, Starbucks, several wine bars and a World Wrapps among premium Seattle real estate. Despite these distractions, there were always at least 100 people running around the lake. Even in January. In Seattle. The few attempts I had made to run around Greenlake had been pathetic to say the least, and I quit after a group of moms with jogging strollers lapped my sorry, air-sucking, purple face while they laughed and gossiped. My current experience with the lake boiled down to either driving by it or sitting and eating the scones and donuts from the bakery across from the kids’ wading pool. This was my new thing: giving up easily when confronted by adversity. I found that it suited the dream-crushing nature of my life better than the pointless optimism of my early twenties, which had slowly been chipped away with each new and recent disappointment, until I’d abandoned it almost completely. These days what I had left of my optimism was housed in a tiny, cramped basement apartment somewhere in my mind, only to be let out to delude me after the occasional 3+ glasses of wine, or when singing loudly to anything from Mariah Carey’s 1993 album Musicbox. Alone. Most of the time it was securely locked up and chained in the depths of my personality, hanging out with my other popular delusions, like becoming a professional dancer or running away with Prince Harry to a tropical island where I will swim in the ocean every day and be a size two forever without dieting.
In stark contrast to the fancy area on the east side of the lake, directly to the west of the lake was Highway 99, the old interstate that wound through downtown Seattle and led north. This charming part of the city, also known as the “drug and prostitution watch area” (literally, there are signs. In my opinion they should say: “Avoid the crazed hookers” or “Don’t buy crack from that one shady guy with the concealed shank”). This scary place was only three blocks away from Greenlake, practically adjacent to the kiddie-pool play area and the multi-million dollar mansions.
I lived kind of in-between these two areas, in one of those tall, skinny townhouses with the tiny, fenced-in, fake-grass yards in front. At one time, probably around 2006, this townhouse was probably worth close to three-quarters of a million dollars. I would guess that the poor sucker that bought the thing was now out roughly 50% of his original buy-price. I rented from a property manager who was also working for the owner in an unsuccessful attempt to sell the townhouses. There were six of them smooshed together in a sad skinny row, and three of them were on the market and had been for at least the past year. It didn’t really surprise me that no one was lining up to buy: they were in that cheesy, slapped-together-as-quickly-as-possible building style that completely ruins the look of any respectable neighborhood. The siding was actually aluminum—the wavy kind that you would see in a mechanic’s garage or some depressing chemical dump yard as a fence—but the builder, in a weak and misguided attempt to make it look acceptable, had painted it the worst available shade of bright green, then basically glued it in panels over the dark plastic “wood” that the homes were shellacked with. In the future, when the housing bubble becomes part of our national history, townhouses like mine will be preserved by the historical society as cautionary tales as a warning to future generations.
To add to the misery of my living situation, I had a roommate. I hated having a roommate; it was so college-y and embarrassing, but my current reality was that I just couldn’t afford to live by myself. Her name was Kathy, and she was a short, troll-ish woman who had been a fellow student in my International Economics program. Our average class size was only fifteen or so, which meant that in addition to a great education the students were either blessed with extremely wealthy parents or graduated with debt up to their eyeballs and a twenty-year repayment plan. Kathy was one of the former types of students, and because she didn’t have to work for a living, last year she moved back to Seattle on a whim after four years in her home state of Colorado. This move happened just when I was having my “life crisis” and leaving Orange County with all of my worldly belongings packed into a U-Haul. So of course, we found each other through Facebook. While Facebook told me a lot about what she had been up to since college, it didn’t tell me that she had, in the years we’d been apart, become a complete and total slob.
Kathy grew up with very wealthy, workaholic parents, and always had nannies and, apparently, housecleaners. She did not know how to take care of herself in the real world at all. I remember distinctly the moment when I figured this out: a couple of weeks after we moved in,
she dropped a glass jar of spaghetti sauce on the kitchen floor and stood staring at it for several minutes, visibly upset. Then she started to make whimpering noises. It was the most pathetic thing I’d ever seen. Her entire being froze and she stood there staring at the mess with absolutely no idea what to do next. Finally, sighing, I jumped in, grabbed the broom and mop and took care of the mess.
Additionally, while Kathy and I had been renting the place together for a little over a year, as far as I could tell she had yet to wash her sheets or towels. I knew for a fact that when we moved in, her bath towels had been ivory, and now they were a dim grey color, and the smell wafting from them reminded me of aged Parmesan. Occasionally, I would sneak into her bathroom and pour a capful of bleach into her toilet to kill off some of the mold. I did this for two reasons: one, because I couldn't stop myself, and two, because when people walked into my house as guests, I didn’t want them greeted by a moldy, poo-smelling potty and some dingy towels covered in pubes. I don’t know, I just didn’t think it sent the right message, especially if that visitor was one of my dates.
Other than her hygiene, Kathy was an OK roommate. She had lots of friends, and she even tried to get me to do the “roommates/best friends” thing. She gave up after a couple of months of asking me to do things like go to a water-conservation-themed drinking night at the Zoo Tavern with a bunch of nerdy strangers, eventually accepting that I was generally too depressed to be social most of the time. Also, because financially she was fully supported by her parents, she was never late on the bills. She spent most of her time editing a new magazine with her group of hipster friends. From what I could gather from her ramblings, the content the magazine fit along the lines of the super-liberal-Seattle-anti-government-keep-your-hands-off-my-fetus-let’s-grow-some-medicinal-marijuana-and-save-Africa-while-doing-yoga-poses theme.
Dead End Job Page 2