This All-at-Onceness

by Wittes Schlack, Julie

  Together, we trundle off to the keynote speech of the day. It’s by another agency guy with a cool office in downtown Chicago. (“It has an old school Pac-Man console!” his introducer breathlessly informs us. “And the guy in Birkenstocks and the Death Cab for Cutie T-shirt who’s the champion player turns out to be one of the smartest big data analysts in the country!”)

  He begins with a story—this one about his son’s birthday party. Although he and his wife had barred weapons (“real or toy”) from the festivities, the kids found a way around the prohibition by dropping their pants, flashing their Fast and the Furious underwear at each other, pointing their index fingers, and shouting “bang.” After the party ended, he sat his son down for a talk.

  “Not the talk—he’s still too young for that—but a talk.” The agency guy puts his hands on his knees and bends toward an imaginary child at his side, lowering his voice to a gentle scold. “Dylan, you know that we had a rule against even pretending to hurt other people, and you and your friends broke the rule.” Then he straightens up, pauses, and once again directly faces us, readying us for the punch line. “But every little consumer is smarter than his parents. My eight-year-old son—did I mention that he’s eight?—he knew who he was talking to. Without skipping a beat, Dylan sat back on the couch, crossed his arms over his chest, and said, ‘Dad, you’re old enough to know that boys will be boys.’”

  A few titters percolate in the otherwise silent auditorium. The guy sitting next to me scrolls through his email in an iTrance. I stare at the broad-backed person in front of me. She has stuck her right hand down the back collar of her shirt—a synthetic, glistening plaid of lemon, orange, and strawberry sherbet-colored squares—and is scratching her shoulder. I’m mesmerized by the wriggling fabric, imagining a ferret on her back, or a mole, gleaming and blind, frantically seeking a way out.

  I’m in Boston, sitting in the company cafeteria with my twenty-something colleague Martin, preparing for a workshop we’re going to be leading next week. The session will be held in 7 World Trade Center, a new building in the original lower Manhattan complex. In attendance will be about thirty-five chief executive officers, chief marketing officers, and other executives from fifteen agencies in the “family” of agencies owned by our parent company. Our mission: Learn about how digital and data are transforming the retail technology! Mix and match with sister companies to outshine and out-perform the competition!

  Martin will be opening the half-day session with the obligatory relationship-building exercise.

  “We want to kick off the afternoon with an exercise that will hopefully help you let down your hair a little and create a climate of trust.” Martin’s rehearsing his opening. “I’d like you to break into pairs and tell each other a professional fact about yourself, along with a more personal fact that you’d be willing for your teammate to share with the rest of the group. For example, my professional fact is that I worked for a yacht manufacturer in Naples before joining my current company. My personal fact is that my father owned several bakeries and cannoli was my first word.”

  Martin pauses for my feedback.

  “Here’s the thing,” I say. “If we’re doing this personal sharing to break down some defenses and get people talking more freely, I wonder if your personal fact should have a bit more emotional content.”

  He looks at me, puzzled.

  “Like, for instance, speaking for myself, I’m actually a bit freaked out to be in the World Trade Center.”

  “Ooh, that’s good,” Martin answers. “Maybe I’ll use that.”

  Behind his head, the wall-mounted video screen is cycling through a series of company announcements. Welcome our Chinese colleague, Ching Ling! says one against a backdrop of the Shanghai skyline. Got a question? HR is here to help. Outside the window, I see employees of the government building across the street ambling out onto their roof garden for lunch. It’s the perfect day out there, sunny and breezy, warm but not hot. I feel for the guys in black suits and navy uniforms perpetually guarding the place, so enclosed and unavailable to the tangy air blowing in off the water.

  I will my attention back to Martin.

  “So now, I want you to share something private, something that you wouldn’t normally tell a stranger within the first few minutes of meeting them,” he continues. “For example, my private fact is…. Shit, I haven’t figured out what my private fact should be.”

  “Remind me—why are we doing this?”

  “The point of revealing the private thing is to break down barriers and show how we all carry around stuff that shapes us.”

  “That’s ambitious,” I say.

  “To accomplish in five minutes? Yeah, you think?”

  He’s getting flustered, and I realize I should try to be helpful. “Okay, so let’s think of a private fact that illustrates that point. For example, imagine you had a stutter as a kid. Even once you learned to stop stuttering, you might still be very deliberate in your speech. You might still hold back a little and internally rehearse, just being a really careful, intentional sort of person.”

  “Oh, that’s also great. Maybe I’ll use that, too!”

  “We’re so fucking authentic, aren’t we?”

  We both laugh. Don’t forget Corporate Social Responsibility week! There are many ways to give back, flashes the PowerPoint behind Martin.

  Between meetings, waiting for a coffee pod to release its goodness into my Luminoso: Shed New Light on your Data mug, I join the other smartphone checkers. Just the usual string of messages seeking urgent help with this client project or that sales opportunity, and a missed call from Mount Auburn Hospital.

  I go to an unused telephone room and call Liz, a nurse practitioner. I’d met her two days earlier, immediately after a needle biopsy in my breast.

  “The news is mixed, but mostly good,” she says. “The pathologist didn’t find any malignant cells.” My heart leaves my throat and settles back into my chest. “But there’s some atypical tissue, a papilloma that really should come out, just to play it safe. So, I’d like to schedule day surgery for you, an excisional breast biopsy so that we can remove it, just to make absolutely sure it doesn’t turn into cancer.”

  Having gone through a similar drill fourteen years ago in my other breast, I dread the procedure. I’ve done my research since being told the previous week that the mammogram showed a small mass (“probably nothing, but just in case”). As I’ve studied my own films and ultrasounds in ignorance and fearful curiosity over the past few weeks, I’ve seen striations of white against the conical gray of each breast, the marbled markers of weight and time. And now, I once again consider the pros of early information against the cons of simply too damn much of it.

  Swipe away.

  It’s my last meeting of the day. Two finance guys from the parent company are making the rounds of all seventy companies within our corporate division on a tour they call “Spend Together, Grow Together!”

  “Now, we’re not here to tell you how to run your business,” the tall, cheery one reassures us. “We just want to introduce you to the capabilities of your sister companies so that if you’re spending on printing or advertising or public relations, you can keep those dollars within the family. After all, a rising sea lifts all boats!”

  Then his skinny, ghostly partner starts going through the list of all our expenditures that could have gone to a preferred vendor or a parent-owned company and didn’t. He goes to great lengths to say that we may have had good reasons for choosing other suppliers—just as there may be a justification for fratricide—but for everyone’s sake, he’d urge us to look within the family first. He concludes with a video he hopes we’ll find inspirational.

  It’s an animated movie. Against a soundscape of upbeat, synthesized music—a formless but repetitive collection of chords that sounds like an early version of a Diet 7Up commercial— a young man with a perky voice ex
plains how the world works. “Doing business within the family creates jobs,” he begins, and pictures of happy new employees fill the screen. “Creating jobs increases wealth”—though he neglects to mention that our corporate overlord is already a $15-billion company—“and greater wealth should lower taxes. Lower taxes puts more money in people’s pockets!” We can see that. Like an amazing rewind, money is spurting out of dollar-sign-adorned bags and streaming into the pockets of the happy new employees. “When people have more, they spend more on the things they want. That makes them happy. Happy people are peaceful people. And isn’t that what we all want—a peaceful planet?”

  The video ends. I don’t dare make eye contact with anyone else at the table. My mental jaw is hanging open to my chest, and I’m too stunned to know whether to laugh or cry.

  On Monday, seventeen of my colleagues are laid off. I knew this was coming, and for a time I thought I’d be among them. This company, which took shape in my old office and living room, which was partially funded for a few months by the earnings I brought in as a freelance writer, has long since outgrown any claim I might have had on it. Real business people, people who have MBAs and track records, who know their bookings from their revenues, their margins from their COGs, who care deeply about “growing the business,” have long since taken over its leadership. I’m still valued, of course—as a smart person, a nice person, maybe even as someone with a degree of wisdom appropriate to her age (which is a couple of decades more than most of the young marketers and ad agency graduates swarming into management)—but I’m a luxury now, a sentimental attachment, a favorite aunt whose company is still welcome on Thanksgiving but would never be invited to go out to a bar, let alone to a vacation home.

  The confidential memo those of us in management received last night in preparation for the layoffs advises us to be proactive in checking in with the survivors, to be empathetic while still projecting an air of stability.

  The one vice president getting the axe in this round was notified at the end of day Friday, given the chance to pack up and walk out after the office had largely emptied. The one or two more VPs on the chopping block will ostensibly get to leave of their own volition a few weeks from now, when “family” or “exciting new opportunities” will draw them out of our orbit. But apparently the dignity of the more junior people isn’t quite as protected. For many of our millennial employees, this will be the first time they’ll see a person they’ve worked next to for months or years stagger out of a conference room like someone concussed, who’ll then discover that packing boxes were placed on her desk while she was having a “check-in” with her manager. This will be the first time they’ve had to choose whether to hug, offer consoling words, or avoid the gaze of the normally wiseass colleague whose eyes are now swimming and whose cheeks are aflame with rage and humiliation.

  Be positive, but be genuine, the memo advises. Acknowledge that this is an emotionally difficult time, but demonstrate confidence in our future. For those unsure of how to achieve this delicate balance, it offers some suggested phrases: This was a hard decision that we were reluctant to make, but this short-term pain will put us on a much better footing for the long-term. And rest assured that we will do our best to support your colleagues in their future endeavors.

  Meanwhile, in a conference room at the other end of the building, seventeen new summer interns—college seniors or brand-new graduates working for ten or fifteen dollars an hour—are assembling for the start of their Professional Development Day. We’ve gotten an email about this, too, which outlines the agenda for the session that our head of Learning and Development has put together. It features training in how to become a better face-to-face communicator, including a small-group workshop on How to Win your Clients’ Trust and another on what it takes to Own Your Awesomeness!

  I feel like I’m in that scene in The Godfather, the one where Michael Corleone stands in church as his newborn nephew is baptized while his hit men are out executing the family’s enemies. As reverential music soars, the camera cuts back and forth between the rays of sun streaming through the cathedral’s stained glass windows and Moe Greene being shot through the eye as he lies on a massage table, between the gentle kisses being planted on the silky head of the baby boy and the machine-gun bullets pulverizing the gangster stuck inside the revolving door of the St. Regis Hotel.

  Emily, the snub-nosed young woman who had only been working at the company for a couple of years comes to our pod to say goodbye to Mike, the almost-thirty-but-still-very-very-young man who I think she’s had a crush on all this time. She makes no effort to hide her tears, and one of her coworkers—accompanying her as a friend, guard, or both—feebly pats her shoulder. Mike gives Emily a hug, then sits down, ashen-faced, and immediately resumes work. Inside his kelly-green Celtics T-shirt, his back is rigid.

  “It’s tough, isn’t it?” I say.

  “Yeah,” he mumbles, still not quite daring to look up.

  “Don’t worry,” I tell him. “Your job is safe. If any of us were being laid off today, we’d know by now.”

  His shoulders sag. “Phew.” Then blushing, he turns to face me. “I mean, I feel bad for Emily and the others. Who were the others?”

  I violate the explicit instruction to not reveal those names—a stupid edict, given that it’s just a matter of time before word will spread—but otherwise try to honor Tip #3 in the memo about helping staff cope with layoffs: If asked who’s being laid off and no one on your immediate team is affected, reassure them that while this is a difficult day, your team is safe. If jobs on your team are being eliminated, say everything but the part about your team being safe.

  #helpful

  But here’s the thing. It’s all true. These were difficult decisions that will, at best, disrupt the lives and confidence of hardworking people, but will also save the company money and prolong the jobs of those who remain.

  I can’t find a villain here, at least not a human one. Our parent company is demanding higher margins. And why? I don’t know if anyone even in the parent company’s boardroom could answer that question beyond paying a vague homage to “growth.”

  This is how the system works. I’m just not sure I can bear to be a part of it for much longer.

  Martin, our colleague Jenn, and I pull up a block away from 7 World Trade Center. After signing in and being issued photo IDs, we head up to the thirty-second floor. The view is spectacular. The copper cupolas of the Woolworth Building gleam, as do the shoes of the women who greet us. We’re welcomed as experts, as stars in the craft of facilitating conversations. I feel vaguely queasy, and as every good workshop leader knows to do, steer clear of the arugula-adorned tuna-salad sandwiches offered for lunch. Never eat anything with mayonnaise before getting up in front of people.

  The room has a wall of windows facing out over the Hudson, and as at McCormick Place, I get momentarily lost in the silent blue outside the glass. But this is no time for reflection. The execs are taking their assigned seats, Martin and I are being fitted for our lavalier microphones, the English woman who leads Corporate Learning is introducing us.

  Make it a great performance, I think, planting myself in front of the giant ficus tree. Gliding from one slide to the next, I tout my company’s services and give an overview of the day.

  “Before hearing from the first speaker, we’re going to do a short team-building exercise,” I say, then rush to add, “I can see you rolling your eyes. Don’t worry, it’ll be short and high-impact, but no Koosh balls, no trust falls.”

  They laugh appreciatively. My nervousness has passed. I speak authoritatively, though I occasionally and disarmingly confide my ignorance about things that don’t really matter.

  I hand off to Martin, whose coppery hair, crisp delivery, and obvious smarts evoke a young, corporate Jude Law, at least to every woman in the room. But he plays it straight and confides his sample secrets with disarming sincerity before ins
tructing the attendees to pair off and share their own professional and private facts.

  The room gets as noisy as a pick-up bar. People are eager and willing to share, to generate some interpersonal spark that will make their next few hours together a bit more fun. In the share-out, we learn who likes to surf, who has just had a new baby, who has just moved from one coast or continent to another and misses the weather or friends or housing prices or taco restaurants of their old homes. They seem like nice people.

  We introduce the first round of speakers. A brilliant Brit talks at length about how our purchasing data, RMV records, and browsing data are triangulated so that companies whose business is to measure the return-on-investment of advertising can determine who is seeing what and how it correlates to who is buying what.

  “It’s anonymized, of course,” he says smoothly, but the net is that “marketers can do amazing things with this incredibly valuable information. You can see that the people living between East Fiftieth and East Fifty-Fourth who watched Dancing with the Stars didn’t change their behavior after seeing your ad, but those who saw it while watching South Park went out and bought a new pair of your sneakers sometime within the next three weeks.”

  “The holy grail,” a paunchy man next to me murmurs to his female companion. “Measurable ROI on creative. The agency guys must be shitting their pants.”

  “And this is just the beginning,” the Brit speaker concludes with something approximating animation. “Five billion people are already walking around with the Internet in their pockets. I believe the applications of Big Data are infinite and transformative.”