This Could Hurt

by Jillian Medoff

  “We can do our own countdown.” Rosa raised her hands. “Come on, together now—Ten, nine, eight . . .” But no one was in the mood, so the numbers were muttered, resentfully, under their breath. “Seven . . . six . . . five . . .”

  8

  ROSALITA GUERRERO, CHIEF OF HUMAN RESOURCES, EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT

  JANUARY 2010

  Rosa was churning. This executive committee was a waste of time, energy, and resources. How many “mission-critical” lunches had she endured over the years? And how many of them had actually accomplished anything? Right now, it seemed like her entire career had been one long fifty-year meeting focused on a single theme: profits were imperative, people were expendable.

  “We’ve been over this,” she snapped, cutting off Charles Mayfield (EVP Finance). No one interrupted Charles, but life was too goddamn short. “To build a world-class research firm, you can’t keep cutting staff. You do the opposite: recruit top talent with competitive salaries.”

  Charles lifted his turkey wrap and took a bite. From this angle, he looked like a jowly reptile unhinging its jaw. A narrow, skinny twist with a jutting Adam’s apple, Charles was a man of enormous appetites. Rosa once saw him polish off six doughnuts in six bites, like a magic trick. He reminded her of her brother Nando, another man with an interior hole he could not fill up. Knowing this, she felt a twinge of compassion for Charles, even though he, like her brother, was selfish, egomaniacal, and mean-spirited.

  “We’re not hiring more staff,” said Landry Eliot, Charles’s chubby sidekick (EVP R&D).

  “No way,” Heather Gilmore (EVP Legal) chimed in. Heather, another skinny twist and the only other woman on the committee, had forged her career by echoing any man seated to her right. “If anything,” Heather added now, “we should be picking off senior staff. Most of them are overpaid, anyway.”

  Landry cracked a smile. “Twenty-two, twenty-two, twenty-two, Rosa,” he added, referring to the practice of hiring twenty-two-year-olds to work twenty-two hours a day for twenty-two grand a year.

  “Then we’re all out of a job.” Rosa scanned the room. “No one here is under forty.”

  “It was a joke, Rosa,” Landry said. “Where’s your sense of humor?”

  “That was funny,” Heather said, like a puppet.

  Rosa ignored them. “People are burned out,” she told Rutherford, who sat across the table, where she couldn’t nudge him. “We can’t cut any deeper.” As head of HR, it was her duty to advocate for employees—the actual people doing the actual work—although this way of thinking was anachronistic. No one at this level cared about the work; these people hadn’t done any real work in years. To the executive committee, staff was merely a number that moved from one side of the ledger to the other. In fact, if they could find a way to run Ellery without employees—just get rid of them for good—they’d jump all over it.

  The meeting dragged on for another thirty minutes, thirty-five, forty. Points were argued, tabled until next month, then revisited. They turned to slide 50 and then 51 and then jumped back to 10. Landry asked for clarification on footnote 7. Heather agreed: How could they vote without context?

  Exhausted and fed up, Rosa sipped her Diet Coke. At her age, too much liquid meant too many trips to the ladies’ room, but she needed the caffeine. Lately, the churning continued long after she got home, so she slept poorly. She had her niece Ariana on her mind, along with her own team. She was still short a number two, a payroll clerk, and an operations guy to replace Peter. She was hungry, and wouldn’t mind another turkey wrap, even though the first one had too much . . . too much . . . she couldn’t think of the word. Too much white shit. Rosa was trying to remember what the white shit was called when she noticed Charles eyeballing her and snapped to attention.

  “Interesting.” Charles smiled. Rather, his lips turned up, but there was no light in his eyes.

  He was moving in for the kill, Rosa could feel it. “What’s interesting?” she asked.

  “You pushing for more staff.” He crushed his bag of SunChips—pulverized it—and shook the crumbs into his mouth. “Why should we hire more people”—he continued to chew—“when you can’t manage the ones you already have?” Charles was calling her out publicly for Peter Dreyfus’s misdeeds; questioning her judgment in front of her peers. He muttered something under his breath, something that sounded like “old lady.”

  Rosa wasn’t paranoid. She and Charles had never cared for each other, for no particular reason. And so what if she was an older lady? She ran rings around everyone here, especially Charles. Look at him, Mr. Big Shot. Pissed off at her for interrupting him at the beginning of the meeting, the man had bided his time for almost an hour, waiting to pounce.

  “We’re cutting another six percent,” he said with the resolve of a judge striking a gavel.

  Rosa saw red. Pain shot through her temple. Fifteen years before, Rutherford and Charles had begged her, begged her, to come to Ellery. “We can’t build this business without you,” they said. She knew this was true, so despite her newlywed status and Howard’s entreaties to downshift, Rosa accepted their offer. Her assignment was to elevate the HR function from expense-driven administrator to strategic partner, and make Ellery the best of the best; basically, to replicate her success at Sony. In bull markets, this meant recruiting high-performing talent, investing in top rewards, and offering opportunities for growth. In downturns, when research—like marketing, like advertising—was the first line slashed, this meant layoffs, cutbacks, and triaging staff. In both cases, as HR chief, Rosa became one of Ellery’s most powerful leaders; she was certainly the most experienced, having survived two energy crises, three recessions, Black Monday, the S&L debacle, the dot-com and housing bubbles, and last year, subprime mortgages. But now, after many years and many, many wins, they were telling her, their esteemed colleague, to sit down and shut up.

  Anticipating her next move, Charles used his smug silence as bait.

  Rosa was worked up, which was a mistake. In business, she knew, a marked lack of concern is a more effective negotiating tactic. Tip your hand, lose your leverage, that’s what her own mentor used to say. Stay calm, she warned herself. “Chuck.” She said his name with disgust, looking not at Charles but Rutherford. She said it a second time, and Rutherford flinched. “Chuck, for God’s sake; clean yourself up. You have mayonnaise all over your face.”

  Mayonnaise! Funny how words always pop up when you stop searching for them.

  THAT NIGHT, ROSA soaked in the tub, poring over her favorite celebrities. A glass of merlot paired with People was how she sloughed off the workday grit. Oscar nominations hadn’t been announced yet, but her money was on The Hurt Locker, Sandy Bullock, and George Clooney. She’d loved Up in the Air, although the downsizing scenes had cut a bit too close.

  She tried to call Marcy, but no one answered. Rosa rarely saw her sister and brother, who had both left the Bronx years back and moved up to Rochester. Frankly, she liked her nieces and nephews more than her siblings, but the kids were grown now, with kids of their own, so she didn’t see much of them either anymore. Still, she was a proud aunt and prouder great-aunt. She scattered all their photos on her shelves and hung their artwork—collages, finger paintings, watercolors—on her walls.

  At sixty-four, Rosa was the eldest sibling, Marcy the youngest. Between them were six years and two brothers, one obnoxious, the other dead. Rosa headed up the family—the privilege and curse of being the firstborn and the favorite of their mother, Anita. “Don’t depend on a man,” Anita used to tell her. “Be a person first, then get married.” Unlike Rosa, Marcy was pregnant at sixteen, divorced at twenty—the privilege and curse of being Anita’s baby. But not unlike most girls in their old neighborhood.

  Grunting, Rosa shifted her weight. In retrospect, she should’ve sprung for the oversize tub, the one with the jets. Although it seemed too fancy at the time, now she felt large and ungainly in this tight space. Rosa was not fat, but as she moved into middle age, her
stocky frame, heavy bosom, and round belly became first a nuisance, then a health risk. Two months before, when her beloved St. Johns started to hang wrong, she agreed to try Weight Watchers with Leo. She also began walking to the office twice a week—an hour-long trek and excellent exercise. At the moment, her biggest issue was those few extra pounds; her reflux, cataracts, and tension headaches were manageable. However, three months after Howard died, she did have a TIA, a mini stroke-like attack, and that was scary, mostly because she’d had no idea what was happening. It started as a throbbing headache, so she’d taken two Advil and hoped it would pass. But her fingers tingled with pins and needles and then stiffened so tightly she couldn’t bend them. She thought it was muscle spasms until her phone rang and instead of saying “Hello,” she blurted out gibberish. Her neurologist said the TIA, while frightening, was largely a warning, that in fact she was lucky. “You’re at risk for a stroke, Rosa,” Dr. Brady told her. “So let’s take precautions.”

  Slow down, be careful, take it easy. Lately Rosa heard this more often than she liked. After today’s meeting, Rutherford took her aside, reminded her to ignore Charles. She braced herself, waiting for him to add, “It’s just a job,” but Rutherford knew better. “The guy’s an asshole” was all he said. Of course Charles was an asshole, but he wasn’t wrong about Peter, who’d been Rosa’s make-it-go-away guy from her first days at Ellery. Peter was hardworking, dependable, and utterly loyal. In the end, though, he screwed up. True, only the executive committee and the board knew what had really happened; everyone else was given the cover story about the hotel bill. Still, how could Rosa have missed it? Was it stress? Too much on her mind? At the moment, her head was pounding; so was her neck and jaw. This worried her because she knew it was job-related tension. But what should she do instead? Retire? Knit? Become a throwaway person? Rosa didn’t just like to work, she needed to work. She’d said this once to her sister, Marcy, who balked. “Bullshit, Rosalita. You need to worry. You need to feel important. You should let things go, enjoy life more.”

  “What if I said that about Ariana?” Rosa had retorted. Marcy constantly fretted over her eldest daughter, who couldn’t hold down a job. “What if I said ‘Let her go, live your life’?”

  “It’s not the same. Ariana is my child. You’re obsessing about your employees.”

  “I know it’s not the same,” Rosa said, like always, but she was miffed. “I know.”

  9

  Employees stole. Rosa often forgot this, inclined as she was to see the best in people, but they did—and how. If it wasn’t Post-it notes and pens, it was tissues and Sweet’N Low, coffee cups and toilet paper; it was toner cartridges and printer paper, whiteboard markers and erasers. She once heard about a kid who worked in IT at an Internet start-up. Supposedly, he rolled ten ergonomic chairs, each stacked with a few boxes’ worth of new iMacs, down the elevator, across the lobby, and out of a Brooklyn office building. A single chair cost a thousand bucks, and this kid rolled ten of them into a waiting van, at high noon, with the security guards offering to help. “Oh, that’s okay,” he’d said politely. “I’ve got it.” Maybe this was just another HR legend, but Rosa believed it. She could picture it, too: skinny boy in an oversize hoodie, thousands of dollars in unrecoverable assets, insurance paying only ten cents on the dollar because the guards were contractors, not building employees.

  Employees stole, even the good ones.

  The next day, Rosa was in her office. Squinting at her computer, she crafted an e-mail, speaking aloud as she typed. “No, Kenny, you cannot work from home next Friday. You worked from home last Friday.” She shook her head, dismayed by Kenny’s audacity. The kid was so bright, but he was channeling his gifts in the wrong direction. If he gave to the business as much as he took, he could be her finest employee—and he was still in his thirties! The first time she met him, Rosa had been on the fence, but he followed up their interview with a handwritten note on monogrammed stationery. Who wouldn’t be persuaded by such lovely manners? And despite his ego, Rosa happened to like Kenny, or at least, the man she believed he could someday be. And let’s be honest: Kenny Verville wasn’t such a risk. He came with big ideas but a lousy track record, so he flew in like a bird—cheap, cheap, cheap. Recently, though, he’d started to play her for a fool, and this aggravated her. “As you know, I do not believe in, quote, working from home, unquote. Period. Return—Enter, rather. Enter.” Even after three years, he pretended not to know she wanted him in the office, at his desk. Workers should work where they work. Was this so much to ask?

  Rosa believed in face time, in relationships built across desks, in the elevators, and over tuna fish sandwiches—relationships that couldn’t happen if you never left your house. She believed in equality and fair play, and to work remotely was to be disadvantaged because you weren’t in her line of sight. Nor did Rosa agree with studies claiming that work/life balance benefited the organization. Work/life balance benefited the employee. Period. No organization benefited from people making calls from the dentist’s chair. Sometimes Kenny sent her links to these studies, but she deleted them. Most of these so-called studies were written by freelancers, so of course they advocated for flextime. Did he think she was that naive? Besides, Kenny was out of the office too much as it was, and her money was on him looking for another job. She feared he was just like other young people who expected a quick return on a meager investment. These kids demanded work/life balance, fancy titles, six-figure salaries—Oh, by the way, I’m headed to Nepal to build huts for poor people, so I need a month off starting next week—and if they didn’t get what they wanted the minute they asked, they put down their tools and walked off the job. These kids didn’t realize that a career was a living, breathing entity. It required forethought and care, especially when first taking root. A career needed time to flourish; it had to be nurtured so that it gave back and a new generation could rise up and take over. This was how businesses cycled, how economies thrived, how civilizations endured. You wouldn’t raise a child part-time, would you? You wouldn’t expect him to grow up without discipline and direction, with no thought given to his education and character. Why would you expect that of your life’s work?

  “No,” Rosa repeated, annoyed now. “No. No. No.”

  She typed quickly. When she was a teenager, her mother had forced her to take a secretarial course. “You want to scrub floors for a living?” Anita had asked, as if her mother knew from cleaning houses. Anita managed the books for a law firm near Penn Station—she barely scrubbed her own floor. But she was right about Katie Gibbs. Rosalita still typed 120 words a minute, rarely making a single error. Years before, to entertain her nieces and nephews, she used to tell them to shut off the lights and stand behind her while she typed: Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party. The quick brown fox jumps over the sleeping dog. My name is Rosalita Luz Esperanza Guerrero and I am the smartest person you will ever meet. Now get me some cake. The kids laughed but did as she asked, all five sprinting toward the kitchen, fighting over whose turn it was to hold the plate.

  “What do I care?” Rosa decided, drafting a second e-mail to Kenny. “Work from home. Work from the dentist’s chair. Just give me my salary projections.” She hit send (“Send,” she said) and then swiveled around to face the papers piled on her desk. “Leo!” she shouted. “Could you come in here?” She waited a beat. “Please.”

  Her phone rang. It was Leo. “I’m on the other line, Rosa. Give me two minutes.”

  Employees stole time, too. Once it was only a few drunken lunches, but now with the Internet, they gossiped and shopped, read the newspaper, even watched TV, all while at their desks. How many times had she spotted Facebook on Kenny’s computer screen? Or seen Lucy trolling bargain shoe sites? Did they think she didn’t know? Normally, this would make Rosa furious. But not anymore. Now that one of her own employees had accepted kickbacks on her watch, what did she care if Lucy bought a pair of discount loafers at ten thirty on a Tuesday mor
ning?

  Rosa was still stumped about Peter. She thought she knew each of her managers inside out, but in fact she was as oblivious as the security guard who stood on the street, watching some kid wheel a conga line of chairs into a van. “How did I miss it, Howard?” she asked aloud. “Peter and I were so close.” He was one of her favorites, too. When she arrived at Ellery, Peter had immediately programmed her keycard, hooked up her computer, and had someone draft a company-wide memo announcing her arrival. Back then these simple tasks could have taken weeks, but he understood she was an executive and treated her accordingly. In return, Rosa showed him respect, and over the years, he became the perfect consigliere. Together, they elevated HR from a ragtag bunch of clueless clerks into a team of professionals. Leo and Lucy helped, Rob too in his own way. But Peter she could trust with the jobs no one else wanted, the real heavy lifting. When she needed two hundred copies before dawn, or someone to fly to Atlanta and back the same day, she asked, and boom, he did it. Which is why, when he showed such initiative by replacing their longtime custodial service with the newer, sleeker Spring Cleaners and saved Ellery fifty grand in the process, Rosa knew he deserved another promotion. That was two months earlier, in November, and the timing was perfect. Recently, she and Rutherford had been debating the idea of her focusing on strategy and giving the day-to-day to someone else. Peter, she decided, would make an ideal number two, and she told him so over dinner at Mia Dona, right before Thanksgiving. “We’re restructuring again,” she’d blurted out. “I need your assistance.” At first she regretted her candor—merlot made her talky—but with Peter she was safe.

  Peter hadn’t been expecting a promotion, which pleased her. He wasn’t an entitled person, so he was able to experience joy. (She saw the opposite in younger generations, the inability to feel happiness. Because kids expected so much—money, jobs, love—they were never satisfied, even when they got everything they wanted.) “But why me?” he’d asked. “What about Leo or Lucy? You always said Lucy’s as smart as a whip.”