“It’s No Fun to be The Man” (The One Where Sparky Talks about Corporate America)

Anyone who says that a job in Corporate America isn’t very interesting clearly doesn’t work for my employer. It’s not just interesting, it’s downright fascinating from perhaps an anthropological standpoint—exciting, even, in a creepy Very Corporate/Enron/Days of Our Lives sort of way. Life at my Very Corporate place of employment is, in fact, a Dilbert comic come to life with a little bit of the intrigue borrowed from 24 and a little bit of Office Space, just to round things out.

Case in point: This week, the New Guy got busted by the Big Wigs (BWs) at Corporate for attempting to stage a full-scale, take-no-prisoners, kill-‘em-all-and-let-god-sort-it-out Take Over and Raid of our little Midwestern-based publishing vendor. Oh, and while they were at it, the BWs fired the New Company President who hired the New Guy because, you guessed it, they were in cahoots from the get go.

Dallas, anyone?

So about a month or two ago, everyone at my publishing company was informed that the New Guy was coming in to analyze our “workflow” and make us more “efficient.” This was nothing new. The BWs at Corporate routinely ask us why we aren’t making the sort of money they want us to be making. (Reality check: we are a publishing vendor, not a hedge fund!) Occasionally, the BWs send someone out from the main office in Virginia to slum it with us in Madison for a few days, in hopes of enlightening us as to what we can do better in order to make more money for the BWs. So when the New Company President showed up one week with the New Guy in town, everything seemed totally normal.

The New Guy analyzed things. He made organizational charts and talked a lot of mumbo-jumbo about “Six Sigma strategies” and “5x growth” and adding “1000 seats” to our India operations. He asked really great questions like “Why do we use so much paper? Do we have to print everything?” and “What would happen if I moved all of the office equipment into the editorial office and took away your cubicles?”

We learned to ignore him.

But then, one day, the New Guy moved into the Big Office up front. He started making personnel changes: he moved my immediate boss, the Editorial Queen, into the corner office and he turned our General Manager into a numbers guy. One guy got fired. Another quit. Four more left to pursue other jobs. We started having weekly “all hands” meetings in the front conference room, during which we all huddled around the conference table to stare at the Star Trek conference call phone and listen to the voices of the BWs in Virginia. He changed people’s jobs—he decided that instead of having editors and project managers, he would just mush us all together and create one do-it-all role, and oh, by the way, we wouldn’t be getting any real training, we would just be expected to pick it up as we went along.

At the time, I thought This is it! This is the stuff of Dilbert lore! This is what Corporate America is all about!

Of course, this being my first time working for The Man, I thought that this was how it was supposed to be—that this was what I had to endure in order to get a decent salary and good benefits. I mean, I had dental for the first time in 4 years. Obviously to get dental, I was going to have to put up with a little shit.

So when they told me that I was going to be one of the guinea pigs for the new workflow, I went with it. It was okay. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I was catching on. Last week, I created a few job schedules and learned how to approach my contacts at the publisher. On Monday, I got my first job back from file prep in India and filled out my very first job report. I was getting the hang of it. I was ready for this so-called “5x growth.” I kind of liked it, even . . .

And then, at our first training meeting on Tuesday, the Editorial Queen informed us all that as of 10:00 that morning, the New Guy no longer worked for us. And oh, by the way, we wouldn’t be having the training because we would probably be reverting back to our old workflow. But that was all she could tell us for now.

“But wait, wasn’t New Guy here this morning?”

“He was.”

“And now he’s just gone?”

“He is.”

“Why?”

“I’m afraid that’s all I can tell you.”

That afternoon at 4:00, we had a video conference with the BWs in Virginia. They gave a few vague explanations for the immediate dismissal of the New Guy and the New Company President, something about trust and ethics, saying that their counsel advised them not to release any details.

And that was that. Case closed. No hope of learning any more, left to wander back to our cubes in stunned silence . . .

Until yesterday when, midafternoon, our General Manager let fly the sordid tale of conspiracy and treason. (Okay, well, really he just told one of my very blunt coworkers who just flat out asked him, but it sounds much more soap opera-ish the other way.)

Apparently, the New Guy and the New Company President had plans. Big plans.

The New Guy and the New Company President were planning a TOTAL COMPANY TAKEOVER.

They saw the potential in the situation: Big Corporate Office over 800 miles away, Small Publishing Subsidiary chillin’ in the Midwest with no real leader but several Big Customers . . .

So they started telling corporate that we weren't making any money, that we were going down, that they needed to sell us off. They were looking for a new office space in Madison, which they couched as a “more convenient workspace centrally located for all the employees.” They were making tons of sales calls, drumming up new business left and right. They were telling us that we were preparing for tons of new growth.

They weren't telling Corporate about anything.

Their plan, in all its sneaky glory, was to totally shut down our Small Publishing Subsidiary and to poach the ENTIRE staff to operate their new company, while simultaneously walking away with all of the big, new accounts they had secured.

Just one problem: they didn’t tell any of us their sneaky plan.

Unbeknownst to the New Guy or the New Company President, our old General Manager was still plugging away, sending his regular reports to the Big Wigs back in Virginia, letting them know how operations in Madison were going because he’s good like that and because no one had ever told him not to.

When the New Guy walked into the General Manager’s office one day to tell him not to, the General Manager got extra suspicious.

“Why can’t I email the BWs?”

“Because they don’t want you to. All communication from Madison to Virginia goes through me from now on.”

So of course our General Manager did the only thing a sensible, honest, suspicious person could do: he started forwarding everything to the BWs.

The BWs were pissed, but savvy. The BWs waited until they had enough proof, retained counsel, and immediately sacked the New Guy and the New Company President.

All of this on a Tuesday before I’d had my second cup of coffee. Clearly it was going to be a very long week.


((Fade to deeply contemplative, schmaltzy piano soap opera theme music))

[[Large Announcer Man Voiceover: Tune in next time for another riveting episode of As the Page Turns, when Sparky has a fateful run-in with the filing cabinet and contracts amnesia while trying to save the office from the pregnancy-crazed project manager about to give birth to the two-headed alien baby. Too bad she never got that second cup of coffee.]]

Pie in the Sky (The One Where Sparky, Expat, and the Cooking Junkie Go Apple Picking)

(This post was created yesterday, but for various reasons that shall go unnamed *cough, crappy internet connection, cough, cough* could not be posted . . . )

October 31, 2006

This last day of October is sunny and windy and deceptively cold: an appropriate bookend to the beginning of the month, and especially to that first weekend when Expat and I and our friend, the Cooking Junkie (CJ), drove out to rolling Cross Plains, Wisconsin, to go Apple Picking.

The people who pick their own apples in October are the same people who cut their own Christmas trees in December and pick their own blueberries and strawberries in the summer. These are Family Traditions. We like Family Traditions. We like knowing that once a year, we’ll blow off the laundry and the vacuuming and the college football, and tromp out into the day to chop or pick living things and drag them back to our houses to remind ourselves of what it’s like outside the next time we’re stuck at home vacuuming and doing laundry. People like us also tend to grind their own coffee, change their own brake pads, knit their own scarves, and make their own birthday cakes from scratch, but these do not fall into the larger Family Tradition category, they are instead Small Habits of Which We Are Proud.

But as far as Family Traditions go, I think I love Apple Picking best. I had been planning this trip for months—really, since Expat and I went apple picking last October. In my own lived experience, prior to the Apple Picking, there was the Apple Getting, in which my little Massachusetts Family Unit drove an hour and a half to this one particular apple stand in Woodstock, Connecticut to bring home bushels upon bushels of apples for cooking and eating and saucing, and gallons upon gallons of unpasteurized cider for mulling or for drinking cold straight out of the jug. Apple Getting was perhaps more on the scale of a Grand Family Tradition; it happened every year from the time I was old enough to form memories until I was eleven, when we moved from apply New England across the country to the Land of Cotton-Not-Apples.

Returning again to an apple-friendly climate meant again finding an orchard to love and prize above all others, and last October, I fell hard for the first one I visited. I loved Appleberry Farm from the moment I saw the hand painted apple sign stuck into the median at that intersection out by Target—nothing fancy, just a bright red apple and an arrow pointing out into the country. The big wooden sign at the first turn off had 5 small pumpkins balanced along the top. “Look!” I said, “Pumpkins!”

Expat grunted.

We drove on. A few turns later and wide, neatly mown orchard spread out around us and the small store building stood uprightly in front of us, red and rustic looking, as an apple orchard store should be, and I knew that this was the beginning of something good. Case in point: we went back this year.

This October I invited out new friend CJ to tag along because CJ (as you might have guessed by her aforementioned full blognomer) has a thing for food and is also a Believer in Family Traditions, which is a very important quality to look for in a fellow Apple Picker. We met at 10AM. We donned out hats and scarves and mittens and gloves, but not our big jackets, as it was really Just Fall, and beguilingly bright and sunny. We piled into the Subaru and Subarued our way across the city, past the now-familiar signs and down the gravel drive. We piled out of the car, trooped into the store, and picked up our peck-sized pick-your-own bags. And then, we went to consult the Map.

Orchards, of course, usually provide a map that shows where patrons can pick and where they can’t and which apples are where, etc. Some orchards give them to you to take with you on your picking adventure, but at Appleberry Farm, there is only one Map, hand-dawn on hot pink paper, laminated and staple-gunned to the post right outside the little store’s front door. Having one central Map must certainly cut down on the amount of paper trash that may or may not get dropped out in the orchard, but it does lend itself to a few problems. For patrons who forget to read it altogether, it means two things: A) you’re blissfully unaware of the picking boundaries and which trees you can and can’t pick from, and B) you have no idea what kind of apples you are picking. For those who, like us, give the Map a brief read-through and then charge fearlessly like seven-year-olds out into the orchard, it means two slightly different things: A) you know that there are apples you can’t pick, you just can’t quite remember where they are, and B) you know approximately where different kinds of apples start and stop, but only just enough to be angsty about whether you’re picking cooking apples or eating apples, and for some of us, this distinction is crucial.

But for some of us, this is not.

Take, for example, my husband. Expat’s favorite thing about this whole endeavor isn’t that he gets to choose the very apples with which we will bake tasty desserts, or that he gets to spend a whole morning outside in a rustling orchard. For him, the fact that he gets to try the apples before he picks them trumps all other potential excitements. While I circle tree after tree looking for the perfect pie-making specimen, Expat yanks any old thing off the nearest branch and commences chomping. And on this trip, he had chomping competition. Whereas I seem to feel some inexplicable Catholic guilt about eating apples for which I’m not technically paying, CJ and Expat tried every kind in the orchard (sometimes twice) and—since none of us could remember anything from the Map—loudly declared their preferences for “this grapey-red one over here,” or “the big ones from this tree over here.”

By the end of it, of course, we had all eaten more apples than we could really hold—more apples, probably, than any of us had eaten in months. We took our heavy bags back to the store, pulled gallons of dark, thick unpasteurized cider from the cooler, and lined up with all the parents and 10-year-olds paying for their respective bags and gallons. On the way out, we bought Styrofoam cups of hot mulled cider for 50 cents, and apple cider doughnuts, and one caramel apple for yours truly. We ate and drank and felt decadent. Not Corporately Decadent, but Honestly Decadent—rich in Good Things from Good Earth and Good Hands. Rich in Good Traditions shared by Good People.

And already, I cannot wait for Apple Picking next year.

Sparky’s Favorite Apples (for the record)

• Empire (eating)—always crunchy, nice and small, sweet-tart
• Honeycrisp (eating)—always crisp, oddly pear-sweet, pretty pink skin
• Macintosh (eating and baking)—classic “apple” taste, does double-duty with class
• Courtland (baking)—big, hearty, hold their shape like no other, great