You Got Nothing Coming

by Jimmy A. Lerner

  "Dwayne, it's two in the morning. I have to be up for work in a few hours."

  "Yeah, well— sorry, buddy. I just wanted to offer a ticket to you first before one of my other buddies grabbed it."

  "I appreciate that, Dwayne, but I spend the weekends with my daughters." Then it struck me that my new phone number had just been activated this afternoon. I hadn't yet given it to anyone except my girls. It wouldn't be listed in directory assistance's database for at least three more days.

  "Dwayne, how did you get my phone number?"

  A long silence. I imagined the Monster was accessing a mental file named Mendacity— probably the entire subdirectory.

  "Uh… got it from information, how else?" The lie came across something like, gofith fromasion, howse?"

  "Good night, Dwayne." I hung up and punched 411. Gave my name and address to the operator. A moment later she came back on the line.

  "Sorry, sir, we have no listing for that name."

  "Well, it's a new listing."

  "As of when, sir?"

  "As of today."

  "Then it won't be in the database for at least three days."

  Sometimes I am so tired of being right about certain things that I make myself sick. Directory assistance operators are overworked, underpaid, and unappreciated by our corporate finance folks, who are forever looking to fire them all and replace them with interactive voice mail.

  "Thank you for your help," I tell the operator.

  "Thank you for choosing…"

  I went into the living room, picked up the receiver, and there was my new number, hastily scribbled in by the installer. I couldn't get back to sleep, so I spent the rest of that night reviewing my viewgraphs and notes for the morning.

  At five in the morning I logged onto AOL to check my e-mails— maybe the girls had sent a message last night. There was the usual spam, nothing from Rachel or Alana, but the last message was from an unfamiliar screen name: GDNAYBR.

  I clicked open the message— sent at 4:52 A.M.

  "Hey, buddy, sorry I woke you. I forget sometimes, having my own business, that you office drones go to work in the morning." This was followed by the little smiley face that is supposed to convey cyberhumor. "Anyway, please accept my apology and let me know if you want to go out for breakfast at Denny's before you go to work." And another smiley face.

  I deleted the message.

  How did he get my screen name?

  * * *

  At 6:30 in the morning I placed a briefcase full of viewgraphs and my proposed "vision statements" on the passenger seat of my trusty Camry wagon. I had wanted an SUV or at least a minivan, but the F.W. showed me an article in one of her consumer magazines disclosing the increased risk of these vehicles flipping or rolling over. We went with the old-fashioned, earth-hugging station wagon.

  I looked forward to my presentation. I had happily suckled at the titty of AT&T— the original Ma Bell— for years, and I was no less devoted to draining the bloated bureaucratic bosom of her California offspring, Baby Bell of the West. Although I didn't want to alarm the phone installer yesterday, it was common knowledge to much of management that our more aggressive (and profitable) sibling Baby Bell of the South was in the final stages of swallowing us up. Our public relations people euphemistically referred to our predaceous sister as a "viable merger candidate."

  This was a merger in the way that democracy is asking six foxes and one chicken to vote on what they want for dinner.

  However, we tried to be good soldiers— at least for a few days. We all parroted this official party line with varying degrees of virtual enthusiasm. Here and there, however, at the water coolers, the cafeteria, the T-word was whispered: takeover. The latest mission of my anxious corporate tribe— Strategic Planning and Market Assessment— was meant to ennoble the imminent staff firings with a Delphic spin designed to comfort shareholders and confound employees. We were already talking about "identifying redundancies and duplicative, non-value-added functions."

  I sensed I was a non-value-added function. It's not a feeling conducive to enhancing one's self-esteem (which is what Bay Area living is all about).

  As Peon Spinmaster, I was selected (not unlike that lamb of old) to dazzle the Board of the West with sparkling scenarios of future synergistic suckling on both titties of the newly "merged" company.

  I placed my suit jacket on top of the briefcase, adjusted the Windsor knot my father had taught me to tie long ago. My father was now retired in Florida after many years of practicing medicine in Brooklyn. His office on 320 Empire Boulevard (just a few shouts from the old Brooklyn Dodgers' Ebbets Field) stubbornly remained open in the midst of an increasingly blighted neighborhood that grew more dangerous every year.

  An old-fashioned "general practitioner," my father made house calls on any day or night of the week. To anywhere. Year after year, as neighborhood businesses boarded up their storefronts and all the professionals fled, my father hung on. All around him the lights were going out. He just kept showing up at his office every day, kept making house calls in the middle of the night. If a patient didn't have the money to pay, that was all right. He could pay when he could.

  For my father the practice of medicine— being a doctor— was a privilege. A sacred trust. Despite graduating from college summa cum laude, he was turned down by every single medical school in the United States that he applied to. A few of the more forthright schools expressed regret but explained that they had already filled their "Jewish quota" for the year. He once showed me some of the rejection letters he kept in a file.

  The letters were all dated 1942.

  Undeterred, my father went to medical school in Montreal. He became fluent in French. He returned to Brooklyn to open his own practice.

  And he never forgot the letters or the thinking behind them.

  He stubbornly refused to join the "white flight" to Long Island or Westchester County. He and my mother were liberals before the term became a pejorative. Liberals of the activist variety, particularly my mother, whose father (my grandfather George) had left newly Bolshevik Russia as a young man and taken with him a lifelong admiration for Lenin and communism. My mother's commitments went beyond the membership in SANE or the subscriptions to I. F. Stone's Weekly newsletter, the New Republic, and later, that radical new upstart, Ramparts magazine.

  My mother marched with Martin Luther King and was there whenever Dr. Benjamin Spock rallied the faithful (usually with Peter, Paul and Mary inspiring the crowd) against war and injustice. She organized interracial neighborhood action committees, and our house became an informal headquarters for left-wing causes.

  She recovered from her disappointment over Adlai Stevenson's loss to Ike in time to become an enthusiastic volunteer for Eugene McCarthy and then George McGovern. (I don't recall her ever supporting a politician that actually won an election.)

  Even when my father's office was burglarized three times in five months, he still refused to relocate. "The people in this neighborhood have a right to medical care beyond the hospital emergency room."

  It took a couple of neighborhood junkies in search of narcotics to change his mind. They broke into the office one afternoon when my father was out on a house call. They stabbed his nurse, Judy, before fleeing with the drugs.

  Judy recovered but the practice did not. My father had seen enough. He closed the office and a few months later was in Florida with my mother. He quickly became busier than ever, finding new challenges in local government and environmental issues.

  My father, a nonobservant Jew, whom I don't recall ever attending synagogue, liked to say that "a man can preach a better sermon with his life than with his lips."

  I looked in the Camry's rearview mirror and fixed the Windsor knot the way my father had shown me.

  The Monster was in the mirror.

  Maybe thirty yards distant, he was busy scooping up the morning newspaper that had just been deposited on the front doormat of a town house across the street. The Monster had o
n yesterday's jungle warfare costume, perfect for suburban newspaper pilferage.

  I managed to accelerate down Maple Street before Dwayne could intercept me with whatever morning demons were dancing inside the safari hat. In five minutes I was at my— the F.W.'s— house to pick up the girls for school. Since my commute to work was only a few minutes, I was glad I would get to continue the long-standing routine of taking the girls to school in the morning. I liked the idea of seeing them both every day. The F.W. had already left for her job in San Francisco when I pulled up to the house.

  The girls acted like my arrival was routine, carrying on in the backseat with their usual spirited insults.

  "You're so lame, Rachel— you're such an idiot!"

  "Daaad, Alana called me an idiot."

  "Because she is! She's trying to—"

  "Girls, please, I'm trying to drive here. Can you please kill each other after you're out of the car?"

  "But, Da-ad!"

  "But nothing. Hey, did you know that a pig's butt is made of pork?"

  "Dad, that's so stupid."

  "Now you know how you both sound. Listen, just try to get along for five minutes."

  "Whatever."

  At the board meeting I showed my viewgraphs full of little bubbles and arrows and converging markets. A team of hit men consultants flown in from Boston facilitated the meeting to ensure we had a "rich interaction relative to structural opportunities and value-adds in the new empowered Corporate Culture."

  Usually I resonate to this type of talk. Except when it might culminate in my department's destruction and scattering to the winds of leveraged opportunity. Mergers are tricky— one empty suit's "value" is another's "redundancy."

  I left the boardroom wondering how things had moved so fast. I hoped I would get a chance to liberate my personalized stapler and some other supplies before my desk was designated as ground zero for the "repositioning of duplicative management layers." After almost twenty years a man gets attached to his three-hole puncher and (fake) brass business card holder.

  Wives come and go. Children grow up, get married, and leave. Love fades. But Corporate Culture is forever.

  Until it changes.

  * * *

  In the wake of the board meeting our trusty Rumor Control Center went to work, triggering a feeding frenzy focused on the contemplated corpses in the executive offices. Pagers chirped and vibrated, phones trilled, and laptops lured the idle with the promise of delicious e-gossip, the more savage the better. My own voice mail box announced, "You have seventy-three new… and nineteen saved messages."

  Old friends and even new enemies dropped by my cube (six square feet larger than any FNGs) to exchange information and paranoid speculations about the projected Baby Bell body count.

  "Hey, Jimmy— did you hear about Don Lee, the quality veep?"

  "Not yet, Paul. Why?"

  "He's fucking history!"

  Chirp! I return the page.

  "Yeah, Barry, what are you hearing?"

  "I hear Joe Stankus in H.R. is history. What does Rumor Control say? You're on headquarters staff."

  "We're hearing Stankus will elect to leave to pursue outside opportunities."

  "Yeah, I hear he's talking about becoming an entrepreneur. The moron can't even spell it."

  Chirp, beep, briiiiing!

  "This is Lerner, Strategy and Planning."

  "Jimmy, it's Rick. I hear they're relocating headquarters staff to San Antonio."

  "Nah— we're hearing they're just going to outsource the entire department to our crack consultant firm from Boston."

  "Hmm… actually that might make some sense."

  And on and on.

  All week we massed like lemmings by the fax machine, bloated résumés in hand. We scrutinized the fractional fluctuations in the stocks of Baby Bells West and South. The closing prices on a secretly designated date would affect the golden and silver parachutes. Possibly my bronze one.

  Chirp! Rick's home number appears on my display.

  "Jimbo, they're talking about a 20 percent premium for Baby West. What are you guys hearing?"

  "Rumor Control says 16 percent plus a juicy cash-benefit buyout package for us peons." I was excited. A few of my oldest friends in marketing had just formed ("launched") a dot-com start-up in San Francisco and were urging me to join them. This was a chance for me to jump ship with a bunch of cash, stock, and health benefits and finally do some challenging and interesting work.

  The timing was perfect. After many years as a workaholic, a model cubicle slave and kiss-ass extraordinaire, I was drained, bankrupt— emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually. In the last year, actually the last few months, I had completely burned out. I had lost all desire and ability to focus on phone company business.

  And I knew it hadn't gone unnoticed. I just couldn't get myself to care.

  Dr. Shekelman regarded my lack of energy at work and my inability to concentrate as "just part of the depression." The pills would take care of it. Eventually.

  My buddy Rick (who, nearing forty, recently started spelling his name "Ric") was happily shouting over the phone at me.

  "All right! Sixteen percent! That would be just too fucking much! What are they doing with the geeks over in R&D?"

  "Forty percent cuts— clear out your desk today and get an 'accelerated incentive payout.' Like one thousand bucks for each day you leave before the deadline."

  "No fucking way, Jimbo!"

  "Way, Rick— the elevators on their wing are jammed with future dot-com gazillionaires, plastic pen protectors stuffed with credit union checks for twenty grand."

  "Those fucking lobs can find the elevators?"

  "Sad but true. Who knows, next week we may be calling them Mister Lobs."

  We were having the time of our lives! Cushioned by 401(k)s that had skyrocketed in the "irrational exuberance" of the nineties or vested stock options or just the expected cash-benefit buyouts, we were corporate rats scurrying about the carpeted corridors, drunk on rumor and chaos. The sheer pleasure of watching some of the empty suits drown in panic outweighed the hypothetical pain of our own diaspora.

  We were survivors, dwellers forever in the cracks of the vast organizational chart. Disperse us, downsize us, squash us, transfer us, and we will reassemble someday, somewhere, to once again build new layers of redundancy, waste, and glaring irrelevance.

  At a certain point in my musings I made a worried note in my corporate-financed leather Day-Timer:

  Appt with Dr. Shekelman re adjusting Prozac.

  Shekelman had recently increased (once again) the dosage to "help smooth out some of the rough edges of divorce."

  The pills made me a tad excited.

  * * *

  After an exhilarating afternoon of tapping into Rumor Control's bottomless reservoir of misinformation, I left Cube World behind at 3 P.M. to go pick up the girls for their dental appointment. The F.W. didn't get back from San Francisco (the City, as Danvillites called it, and not fondly) until about six, so I made sure the girls (and sometimes two or three of their friends) adhered to their hectic postschool schedules.