The Job (20 page)

“Yeah,” came the voice from inside the helmet.

“They do.”

I signed for the letter, gave him a $5 tip, then ruefully thought, You really can’t be so loose with cash anymore. With a nod, he turned and clumped down the hallway, as if powered by batteries.

The envelope was embossed with Spencer-Rudman’s letterhead. Nervously, I tore it open. And read:

Edward Allen 16 West 20th Street New York, NY 10011 Dear Mr. Allen:

As you know, CompuWorld ceased to exist as a title on January 2, 1998. Having been employed by the magazine since 1994, you are entitled, as part of the standard severance package, to two weeks pay per year of employment, plus any unpaid vacation time.

You are also entitled, under COBRA (Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act), to continue your corporate medical insurance for eighteen months (i.e.” July 2, 1999). Your monthly premium was $326.90. Should you wish to enjoy continued coverage, please send us a check for this amount by February 1. Please ensure that all future Blue Cross payments reach us by the first day of each month.

According to our records, you took your allotted two weeks of vacation time during 1997. You are due eight weeks of pay (4 years X 2 weeks).

Your annual salary was $60,000, or $1,153.84 per week. This means that your eight weeks’ pay comes to $9,230.76.

We note that on December 20, 1997, you wrote a letter on CompuWorld stationery to a Mr. Joseph Myers, the bursar at Faber Academy School, guaranteeing that a $4,500 tuition fee owed by a Miss Deborah Suarez, a former employee of CompuWorld, would be paid by the company. Our Legal Department informs us your former position at CompuWorld did not give you the authority to write such a letter, let alone guarantee such payment. By doing so, however, you have legally bound the company to honor this financial liability.

Our Legal Department informs us that we could file suit against you for impersonation. Given your recent loss of employment-and to spare you the costs involved in defending such a case-we have deducted the $4,500 sum involved from your final payment of $9,230.76. A check for $4,730.76 is enclosed.

Please be informed that, should you wish to contest this course of action, we will have no option but to file suit against you.

Should you have any further questions about this matter, please address your enquiries to Ms. Heather Nussbaum at Human Resources, Spencer-Rudman.

Sincerely, Michael Krusiger Director, Human Resources Spencer-Rudman I balled up the letter and tossed it at my window. Then I staggered over, picked it up, un balled it, and carefully removed the check that had been stapled to one corner. I couldn’t afford to be throwing money away.

I fell back on the sofa, absently smoothing out the crumpled check on my knee. The bastards. Spencer-Rudman was a massive multinational corporation with an annual turnover well beyond the $3 billion mark. To them, 45 hundred bucks was chump change, the price of a pack of Juicy Fruit gum. To a guy like me-suddenly unemployed, in deep, serious debt-it was a small fortune. And yet, the vindictive shits insisted on sticking me with the bill, even though they knew I was only helping out Debbie. What does doing a good deed get you? Nada.

Given your recent loss of employment-and to spare you the costs involved in defending such a case… Such humane, charitable people! And then there was the business of my medical insurance. That spineless bastard at Human Resources told me I would “enjoy” company medical coverage for the next eighteen months. What he failed to mention was that I’d have to pay for it. $326.90 a month! First they rob you of your bonus. Then-to really kick you in the teeth when they know you’re desperate-they nickel-and-dime you out of a miserable few thousand bucks.

The phone rang. I reached for it.

“Ivan here.”

He sounded beyond despondent.

“I was going to call you today,” I said.

“I was planning to visit you at the hospital, but when I called on Saturday they said you checked out. You still in pain?”

“Definitely. And how are you doing?”

“Considering bankruptcy court. My ass depended on that second bonus check. Eight-nine they owed me. And all of it was already spent.”

“Tell me about it.”

“And did you hear what happened over the weekend?”

“Do I want to?”

“I just got off the phone with Phil Sirio. Seems Chuck Zanussi called everyone on the Northeast outside sales team-Maduro, Bluehorn, and Phil-offering them jobs at PC Globe. Everyone, that is, except me.”

I was on the verge of balling up that check again, but I stopped myself.

“I don’t believe it. Anyway, when Phil called me last night, he didn’t mention he had a job offer.”

“That’s because Phil only got the call an hour ago. Then he phoned around, found out that Zanussi had called Maduro and Bluehorn yesterday, and wondered if I’d been offered anything.”

“So they’re all going to be licking Zanussi’s ass at PC Globe?”

“Maduro and Bluehorn grabbed it, but Phil called Zanussi a scumbag and told him he’d rather work for the Department of Sanitation.”

“He is a great man, Phil.”

“Anyway, I spent the last hour trying to get through to Zanussi at his new office. Ten minutes ago, his secretary calls back: “Mr. Zanussi wishes to inform you that there is no position for you with PC Globe or any other Spencer-Rudman publication.”

” “I’m really sorry, Ivan.”

“I’m fucked, Ned. Finished.”

“Ivan, it’s just been seventy-two hours since all this went down. They put you in a program, right?”

“Yeah, some out placement company called Gerard Flynn Associates.”

“Same as me. Well, look, the bottom line is, they’re there to get you a job. And they will find you something new. You’ll land. I don’t worry about you, pal.”

This was a total lie. Our industry was a small one-and word would leak out that Ivan was the only member of the CompuWorld outside sales team not to be offered a job by Chuck Zanussi. Even if he did eventually find something, when his prospective employer called Chuck for the lowdown on Ivan, I doubted the vindictive sonofabitch would give him rave reviews. To Zanussi, Ivan and I were the two guys who nearly cost him his job. And he was going to make us both pay heavily for it.

“Thanks for the encouraging words,” Ivan said.

“I need them. You doing anything for lunch today?”

“Between the snow and my hand, I’m not really planning to leave the apartment.”

“Tell you what,” Ivan said.

“You know I live right near Zabar’s. I could pick up some cold cuts, a bunch of cheeses, a bottle of red, jump the subway, be down at your place within the hour.”

I had enough reasons right then to stick my head in an oven.

“The pills they’ve got me on have really left me kind of zonked,

T “

Ivan.

“Understood, understood.”

“See you at out placement I said.

“And stop worrying.”

“Man, I wish I had your calm.”

But I was anything but calm. As soon as Ivan was off the phone, I reached for a legal pad and began filling it up with numbers. I was doing the math. And it didn’t look encouraging:

CompuWorld settlement $ 4,730 Savings 8,000 Stocks, bonds 5,000 401k

9,600

$27,330 DEBTS

f& Chase (bridge loan) $25,000 Credit cards:

American Express (incl. Nevis vacation) 9,100 Diners (incl. Xmas gifts, etc.) 6,255 MasterCard 940 Visa (Dr. Gordon) 3,200 New York Health and Racquet Club (annual fee) 795 Barneys store card 1,250

$46,540

Rent (my share) $ 1,750 Medical insurance 326 Con Ed say 50 Phone say 75 Food say 320 Cable 30 Insurance: home, contents, etc (excl. health) 125 Eating out entertainment (my share) 800 $ 3,476 If I cut out restaurants, bars, buying new clothes, books, and CDs, going to the movies, or even dropping $3 on this month’s GQ-if, in short, I never left the apartment-I could probably eke out a very rudimentary living on $2,676 a month. That’s $32,“2 a year after taxes-which meant (factoring in federal, city, and state) I would still have to earn well over $55,000 per annum. Unbelievable. And that fifty-five grand was based on dividing the costs evenly between Lizzie and myself. One hundred thousand bucks a year for a minimal New York existence. No wonder I had landed myself in such debt. No wonder my stomach was now feeling ulcerated. If I liquidated the modest amounts of stocks, bonds, and savings I had put aside, I would still have to find $19,210 to clear the remaining debt.

If only I had been a little more prudent during my CompuWorld years and built up some sort of financial fuck-up fund, earmarked for a bad time like this. But I was a high roller-Mr. Fast Lane-who considered himself Teflon tough, resistant to all corporate harm or damage, always able to produce the goods when the heat was on.

But then I threw those punches. And…

Don’t panic, don’t panic. Maybe Lizzie was right: Prospective employers would look at my overall record and not judge me solely on one irrational act. In an interview I could convince them that I had been reacting to extraordinary circumstances,

extraordinary pressures. And that-given the chance-I’d be the biggest moneymaker their company had ever seen. I mean, did you see how CompuWorld came out of nowhere to surpass Computer America as the number-two computer magazine in the country? Now I’m not trying to take credit for its market-share resurgence, but-put it this way-in the course of the sixteen months I was running Northeast, our regional advertising revenues tripled. And the relationships I forged with the biggest names in our industry…

Once a salesman, always a … But now I was a desperate salesman. $19,210 worth of desperation. I couldn’t afford a long convalescence. I needed to get back into the game. Now.

So I reached for the phone and called Gerard Flynn Associates, and made an appointment with my out placement facilitator for the next morning.

Which is how I came to be sitting opposite Ms. Nancy Auerbach on this still-snowy Tuesday morning, listening to her finish her telephone conversation with some poor sucker who didn’t want to “re-lo” to Rochester, watching her sneak looks at my bandaged hand, and wondering if she had already filed me away under Hopeless Cases.

“… I said it once, Matt, I said it before-it’s your call. You don’t want the position, you pass on it, and we go back to the drawing board. But I wouldn’t write Rochester off completely…. Okay, okay, it’s not Paris…. Look, we’ll have to wrap it up here, I’m in with a client… . This time tomorrow is just fine.”

She hung up and turned back to me with a forced professional smile.

“Sorry about that, Ned. How’s the hand?”

“Still broken.”

“A sense of humor. I like it. Humor’s really important at a time like this. So is perspective. And-just to kick things off, to start broadly identifying areas of mutual concern-I’d like to ask YOU this: What is the single biggest concern in your mind right now?”

I met her eaze and said.

“Will anyone ever hire me aeain?”

Her eyes glanced down yet again at my ink-colored fingers. Then she nodded several times, absently biting her lower lip. And in her most logical, rational, I’m-going-to-choose-my-words-carefully tone of voice, she said, “That strikes me as a very sensible concern.”

There were ten of us seated around a table. Eight men, two women. We all wore suits. Age distribution: thirty to mid-fifties. Educational level: minimum, bachelor’s degree. Previous mean income: around $75,000. Professional level: middle-management to senior executive. Current job status: all unemployed.

It was 8:30 in the morning on day eight of The Program, and I was about to attend my first seminar on interview techniques. On days six and seven, I sat through classes on subjects like “Getting the Resume Right” and “Reinventing Yourself in the Information Age” and “Maximizing Personal Strengths After Downsizing.” I hadn’t wanted to attend any of these “workshops.” In fact, earlier the previous week-around day two-I thought that my days on The Program were happily numbered. Because, out of the blue, a job dropped right into my lap.

It happened on Wednesday morning-the day after my first meeting with Nancy Auerbach. The meeting where we identified “career destination goals,” and “optimum landing places,” and discussed “crafting an advantageous exit statement.” The meeting where she admitted that my search for a new position was going to be “a challenging quest.”

It was also the meeting where I began to decipher some of her language. To land-in out placement-spiel-meant to find a job. The exit statement was the explanation you’d give on your resume (and, eventually, in an interview) as to why you’d been shown the door by your previous employers.

Now if, off the ton of my head. I were to craft an exit statement for you,” she said, “I’d probably write something like, “Having spent four years as the Northeast’s regional sales manager-during which time my division increased its market share by 300 percent-I was downsized when Spencer-Rudman bought the title and decided to close it down.” Short and sweet. Pointing out that you were a success at your job, while also highlighting the fact that your termination came as a result of a corporate takeover, rather than anything of a negative performance nature.”

“You mean, like assaulting the group publishing director.”

A pinched smile from Nancy Auerbach.

“I like that sense of humor,” she said.

“But that is going to be a stumbling block, isn’t it?”

“It does create certain impediments….”

“Which are going to make it downright impossible for me to get hired anywhere.”

She paused and looked carefully at me.

“You obviously don’t want me to sugar the pill?”

I nodded.

“You want it straight?”

I nodded again.

“Okay, I’ll give it to you straight. You’re in big fucking trouble.”

I winced-not because of her prognosis, but because I never expected the very patrician Ms. Auerbach to use bad language. She saw that and gave me a small, mischievous grin.

“I do gather, however, that the man you assaulted was a suitable candidate for a fat lip. What we have to do is make a prospective employer understand that. And also understand that, if they hire you, they won’t need extra dental insurance.”