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A pizza box, napkins, red plastic cups, clear plastic
forks, a thirty-two dollar bottle of cabernet and a wood–look corkscrew expectantly
arrayed the top of my antique library table-desk. A milk crate containing what usually covered it crowded an edge with a short stack of newly opened mail, coffee cup, my Wonder Woman figurine that held an inspiring,"Sell" and the ten-line phone marked with staff names, still plugged in, with the
dimmest of hope for a last minute reprieve. Guest chairs, upholstered
with vintage fabric were buried by brown cardboard boxes of books, white banker
boxes marked by fiscal years, and others marked alphabetically by clients, piled
too high and too many to notice the pink rayon peonies beneath.
The shelves and drawers of bookcases and file cabinets stood empty but topped by boxes filled from their contents. Labeled for storage, they
were destined for a location where they would settle like refugees. Only three months
earlier, in an attempt to reduce costs, we moved from a 3,000 square foot space
down the hall to our current 600 square foot office. At that time, we stored furniture, weeded accumulations
of office supplies from the past seventeen years and donated more than 30 boxes
of books to a school in Costa Rica.
Though that helped, brown boxes and banker boxes oozed like extra slices
of cheddar on a grilled cheese.
I relocated the business four previous times – each occasion
adding space for the growing company. The initial seed of the idea for the
company sprouted in a two-bedroom condo in Chicago, on a butcher-block table,
on an enclosed back porch that required a space heater and heavy socks in winter. We advanced to a suburban 1950s ranch, where we placed the butcher-block
table against one wall for my desk and removed the doors from a closet in an
extra bedroom for a computer station for Heidi, the first employee. When we required more space for additional
employees, we built-out an office in the basement. As I brought on a project
for one of the country’s largest banks, we commandeered the entire basement. We
were ready when I brought in the client for a site visit. Pleased he registered
little surprise when we pulled into the driveway of a suburban home, I declared
my residence, “corporate headquarters.” Not long after, when my son, a toddler
at the time, referred to our half-bath as the "worker’s bathroom." I knew the business must move to a different space.
We leased an office a few blocks away in the center
of town above a liquor store and next to the prep space of a busy hair salon. The
smells were intoxicating and nauseating. Condemned three years later to revitalize
the town square, the next move took us further away, but to the far less noxious
building where we stayed until this last day of business.
I watched Cracker, an employee who began in year ten, as she slowly twirled the lid and
read from a candle-in-a-tin given by a vendor selling premiums to promote
business, “Bright light, for sales out of sight, buy from Barry, always right.”
Mitsy hooted as she entered, “Remember that guy who sold that crap? God, how does he stay in business? His great meaning in life was to get Oprah to
do a show on reuniting sponsors with their pagan babies.” Once after Michael delivered
an Account Paid self inker, Mitsy and
I spent lunch explaining to Cracker the cardboard banks catholic grade school
children apparently all over the country were given at the start of lent every
year to save pagan babies. Given the status of the church, we were skeptical
that any baby was saved.
Straightening the wick, Cracker chose a match from
a gold foil box with black flocking we’d picked up at Le Francais, after an
expensive lunch that didn’t persuade the prospect to buy. She studied the box
as she struck the match, “who says, the way to a man’s heart is through his
stomach? We should have fucked him.” The
image of Dr. Goldman, his bow tie, Indiana Jones hat, ivory buck shoes, and
man-purse with the three of us, no four of us, Babe was here then.”
“Oh Jeez.” “Please, let’s get on with the
wine.” I recalculated for the umpteenth
time, the cost of that lost sale. Cracker assembled the corkscrew and handed it
to me as she leaned and pushed the bottle toward me too. In that move, she also
pushed the scent of the candle; a putrid peach collided with the aroma of
garlic and oregano. It didn’t matter--
my stomach was queasy and could tip at any moment.
The sensation was not foreign; I’d felt nauseous for weeks… months, maybe longer if I’d let myself analyze it. I incorporated LLL seventeen years and twenty-nine days earlier. The pressure was on from the beginning- to garner my first customer, then the second and hundreds since… till today. In the early days, I handled sales, fulfillment, vendor relationships, accounting, mailroom, and maintenance. I gained ten pounds by the third month eating Oreos for courage. Late at night, with the whirring of the dish washer and the dahdump of the dryer serenading, I opened and paid the bills.. One by one the customers increased like an add–a-pearl necklace, ten by ten invoices multiplied and so did staff. Once in a sand box, brushing the grit from my son’s hands, I struck up a conversation with a mother pushing a bulldozer toward her son’s truck. She wondered whether I needed childcare because she wanted to stay at home with her son. Turns out she was a CPA, Instead. I hired her to tend the finances; she stayed home and I minimized my cookie binges. Rhonda, another mom in search of part-time work, joined to help fulfillment. More people generated more expenses, more expenses necessitated more sales, more sales required more people… I hired and fired to find the right constellation of stars.
The pressure never let up and my stomach was a constant state of upheaval. It was a peculiarly comforting day, when students from Lake Forest Graduate School of Business confirmed in a workflow study that we were officially on a hamster wheel. I’d sell, we’d get a project, I get pulled from selling to help complete the project, sales would suffer, I’d get back on the phone, get a job and around and around we went. My stomach was the constant reminder of the fear and worries never far away.
I once won a project that was financially six times larger and exponentially more complex as any previously. The deposit alone covered a year’s rent and salaries. We were flush enough and caught up from our usual slow payment mode. I took a three week vacation with my son- the only one I ever took. No one sold during that time. I came back. The project was underway, but problems surfaced. I got on the phone to sell again but was pulled away to renovate the computer system causing the problems. An outside firm was required to redesign the system and the server needed upgrading. The mega-client pushed back their opening and all the subsequent pay per performance payments along with it. The hamster wheel flew and I had motion sickness.
Cracker placed a corkscrew in my hand as I reached for the wine bottle. She possessed a knack for anticipating what I needed, when I needed it, to get the job done. I uncorked the wine.
“Another plastic cork and in a $25 bottle of Cab," she pointed out. It was a familiar conversation. We’d been together for seven years, since she joined us after her college freshman year. For her, we coined the position title, Random Task Force. It adequately described the work of the college kids we hired. The plastic corks were a constant source of amazement to us, especially when found in good bottles of wine – we agreed it seemed so wrong.
The sensation was not foreign; I’d felt nauseous for weeks… months, maybe longer if I’d let myself analyze it. I incorporated LLL seventeen years and twenty-nine days earlier. The pressure was on from the beginning- to garner my first customer, then the second and hundreds since… till today. In the early days, I handled sales, fulfillment, vendor relationships, accounting, mailroom, and maintenance. I gained ten pounds by the third month eating Oreos for courage. Late at night, with the whirring of the dish washer and the dahdump of the dryer serenading, I opened and paid the bills.. One by one the customers increased like an add–a-pearl necklace, ten by ten invoices multiplied and so did staff. Once in a sand box, brushing the grit from my son’s hands, I struck up a conversation with a mother pushing a bulldozer toward her son’s truck. She wondered whether I needed childcare because she wanted to stay at home with her son. Turns out she was a CPA, Instead. I hired her to tend the finances; she stayed home and I minimized my cookie binges. Rhonda, another mom in search of part-time work, joined to help fulfillment. More people generated more expenses, more expenses necessitated more sales, more sales required more people… I hired and fired to find the right constellation of stars.
The pressure never let up and my stomach was a constant state of upheaval. It was a peculiarly comforting day, when students from Lake Forest Graduate School of Business confirmed in a workflow study that we were officially on a hamster wheel. I’d sell, we’d get a project, I get pulled from selling to help complete the project, sales would suffer, I’d get back on the phone, get a job and around and around we went. My stomach was the constant reminder of the fear and worries never far away.
I once won a project that was financially six times larger and exponentially more complex as any previously. The deposit alone covered a year’s rent and salaries. We were flush enough and caught up from our usual slow payment mode. I took a three week vacation with my son- the only one I ever took. No one sold during that time. I came back. The project was underway, but problems surfaced. I got on the phone to sell again but was pulled away to renovate the computer system causing the problems. An outside firm was required to redesign the system and the server needed upgrading. The mega-client pushed back their opening and all the subsequent pay per performance payments along with it. The hamster wheel flew and I had motion sickness.
Cracker placed a corkscrew in my hand as I reached for the wine bottle. She possessed a knack for anticipating what I needed, when I needed it, to get the job done. I uncorked the wine.
“Another plastic cork and in a $25 bottle of Cab," she pointed out. It was a familiar conversation. We’d been together for seven years, since she joined us after her college freshman year. For her, we coined the position title, Random Task Force. It adequately described the work of the college kids we hired. The plastic corks were a constant source of amazement to us, especially when found in good bottles of wine – we agreed it seemed so wrong.
Like the plastic bottle stoppers changing the
experience of wine, the internet radically impacted LLL. We sold books, we sold
information and there was no cork, natural or plastic to stop the affect of the
internet on our business. Not that we didn’t try. We established our own web site
but six months into it and thousands of dollars later, the developer vanished,
evaporated, disappeared. We searched but stopped short rather than get mired in
some sink hole of restitution and revenge. The business wasn’t that agile. We
simply couldn’t afford the resources to fight it. It had happened once before
with a partner.
That experience nearly killed the business. Paul and I met over a tub of beer at a Fourth
of July picnic. It took little time to form a partnership with his two-person company
and develop a piece of software to manage operations for clients. For them,
Paul was sales and Allen wrote code. They serviced other clients but together
we built the software in a couple months and installed it in 30 sites. Like the
creation of the days of the week as told in Genesis, it was good. It took four
floppies to contain the program and the data. My partners’ partnership changed.
Paul went to work for another firm. Allen stayed to take on projects and would
deliver soft ware as we needed it, until technology changed and compact disks
were preferred over floppys. This required the code to be rewritten from scratch.
Allen promised a new program, but bugs appeared and multiplied. A correct user’s
manual became as elusive as a whack a mole at the arcade. I kept whackin’. I
kept putting off customers and installations until I lost a sale. And I couldn’t
bill my half installed clients. The software was no small part of our services.
Eventually, after eliminating valued workers to
eliminate expenses that were diverted to the software project, I spent another
couple months searching and finding an adequate off-the-shelf program.. It
wasn’t customized to our specs but it was stable. We were nothing if we weren’t
resilient.
Mitsy, the most maternal of the three of us bent
her knees to sit then sprung up and returned to the room with a pizza cutter
and a table runner that she draped and reset our glasses upon. She lifted the
box top and began rolling over the slice marks that congealed since pizza arrived.
“Domestic goddess to the end, Mitsy,” I anointed.
“I found the pizza cutter yesterday as I packed Catherine’s
office. It was in with the scissors and paper clips.”
“Did you wash it?” She thought it was one of my -
once a health educator always a health educator remarks and smirked. Catherine
was my last attempt at reducing employee expense ballast to keep us afloat. She
didn’t go easily. She was angry. She took it personally and thought it was
unfair that I kept Cracker
rather than her since, she had seniority. But Cracker had more versatility and
could do more jobs throughout the office. Catherine had good clerical and
design skills.
“Mitsy, you are slicing that pepperoni with a
rotary cutter Catherine used for posters - I always appreciated (I heard the
past tense creep into my language for the first time.) your creativity. I just
wondered if you rinsed off the glue and foam board shards.” A look of horror
and disgust registered but it didn’t stop her movement.
“Moving days are exempt from all food-born illness.
No one ever eats with clean hands or utensils. Their strained backs and hernias
far out weigh any gastric discomfort.” She had a point. I’d nearly forgotten my
queasy stomach.
“Besides”, as she pulled a short bottle of Korbel and three plastic flutes from her always-present enormous carpet bag, “the
alcohol will kill the bacteria.”
I reached my pain tolerance the Monday before. I
was grateful to slow my senses with the good wine and now exquisite champagne.
“Shouldn’t we save this for something to celebrate?” I asked.
She waved off the idea and in the same fluid motion, unwrapped the cork hood and popped the cork without losing a drop.
“Mary, I know I am losing my job today. I know we won’t
ever be together again. I know there are vendors who aren’t getting paid and
customers who are going to be pissed.” My stomach was having a really hard time
finding any connection to this from the segue of celebration. She filled our
glasses. Holding hers up, till we did the same like a six grade teacher waiting,
quietly demanding attention till the last student complies. “We have something to celebrate-- seventeen
years.”
I saw her lip beginning to quiver - my stomach did
likewise.
“Fifteen -can’t count the last two” Cracker hissed.
I didn’t know whether to hear the attempt at finding a silver lining or the contempt
in that last utterance. I saluted with my glass and gulped it down. They were
both right.
Cracker, bit into her pizza, “I’ll miss Roccos.”
We’d ordered pizza from there nearly every Friday for at least five of the
seventeen years. More than one of the Random Task Force, told us Roccos’ Friday
was one of the best perques of working with us. The RTF were mom's with available hours between school drop off and pick up, college kids- Cracker started as one, and my own son. I didn't have trouble finding or keeping
employees, except for that running out of work for them thing. We had health
care benefits and a 401K. I paid severance. (I noticed my difficulty in
separating the plural we of the company that we had become and the singular me,
who started it.) We offered flex time in
recognition of the working moms we hired, including myself. that everyone used.
I wondered if I had cut those benefits, if I had paid commission only, if I
demanded more hours- could we have survived?
From the beginning, though, only Donna, the accountant and all the ones
up till Mitsy knew, I always paid myself first, as a reminder of the responsibility and my role. Unfortunately, I knew too, that there wouldn't be a company without paying the others. Four days earlier, for the first time in 17 years I knew we
weren’t going to make pay roll for me or anyone else.
I called them into my office and told them. Cracker
denied it, “We have always gotten a check just in time. We still have four days
till pay day.” Like steam evaporating from
a mirror, the words I needed to say became clear to me, but I didn’t know if I
could say them.
“It’s time to close the doors,” Mitsy interjected
my thoughts, and cut through my hesitation with her usual cut to the bone
sensibility. And, that was that. I told them to pack their things. the movers were coming.
Punctuating her words by raising her glass, You do
have something to celebrate. You made the hardest decision of your career. You
no longer have to live with the worry. I don’t have to live with the worry.”
Her quivering lips erupted into sobs and through it
and among sniffles and un-even gulps of air, she said, “I thought you should
close months ago, but you kept selling new jobs, the line of credit is a bungee
cord. The bank liked the up and down activity of a credit line. It showed it
was active.”
But the last time they renewed it, there was a new
banker. She introduced herself over the phone, asked for our financials; and for
the first time didn’t pay us a visit: an ominous sign. I knew that if s like
the bankers before him, if she could see meet us, see out earnest office, we
three could win her over. Like witches who lost our powers, it didn’t work on
Dr. Goldman, and it didn’t work with the bank. The line of credit was near the
top and there wasn’t enough room to use it for pay roll. I knew what Mitsy
meant. The bungee recoil, was stretched beyond
recoil.
I looked at both of them, raised my glass, “Here’s to…” the phone interrupted me. We all jerked toward it as it rang. I
picked it up, not sure whether I should use the company name to answer
it.
“This is Mary, oh yes, sure I remember meeting you
at ASM. Of course. I’d be glad to send you pricing… can you tell me a little
more about what you are thinking…, four sites… maybe four more after the new
year?” Cracker and Mitsy stared at me like seeing feet coming down a chimney. I think I took her contact information and hung up.
“Do you think I should have given her a prize for
being the last call of the company?” The Willie Loman part of me could not
bring myself to tell the caller that I did not intend to send her anything, that in
less than an hour, the phones would be dead, the website down.
I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that there were 4,900 envelopes printed with an address that was no longer ours, that there were no more stamps to send the promotional
literature, that we would no longer get deliveries from
Knobby Knee Ken the UPS driver or Sexy Steve the Fed Ex guy, that the lights
and heat and water cooler would no longer function, that we wouldn’t have to
hear all the Russian ladies from next door complain about their boss in the lavatory, nor have him, who
we called Slipper Boy, because of his
footwear, stop us in the hallway. Cracker called him a letch, Mitsy called him
an erudite and I, appreciated his business acumen and wondered if I should ask
him for a job. I couldn’t bring myself to tell the caller that I’d never send
her the materials, yet, I held a thought, that perhaps,
once the boxes were settled in internment, and I was back in my basement, I
could help her.
The office door burst open. Two burly guys, one
with a Yale sweatshirt wielding an orange dolly and the other wearing a dirty
suede jacket and pushing a huge laundry hamper, wheeled through the door. A third,
who we could not see, was pounding, apparently at the hinges to make room to
move the contents of the office. Cracker poured first the remaining cab into
the cups and then the remaining champagne evenly into the flutes with the
accuracy of a ten year old fairly distributing Koolaid. Like office Rockettes
all kicking in unison, the three of us stood up and
started giving directions to the movers.
No one could hear or understand a word. We started
to laugh. We always worked that well together. The movers didn’t move. Mitsy
and I watched Cracker cross her legs. Since her college days, her Monday
morning stories nearly always included one where she laughed until she peed. I
couldn’t catch my breath as I watched her shuffle off to the ladies room with
the Russian ladies. A button popped, Mitsy’s laughter exposed a Bullwinkle
t-shirt beneath. The movers took a step back. Again, at the same time, the remaining two
of us started to give directions. Our laughter muted us. I could only point and
the movers began to load the dolly and fill the cart.
When Cracker returned, she was sober, or at least
somber. Without words she carried boxes to her car and moved others toward the
door for the movers. When the trunk and seats were loaded with her personal
belongings she came over to me. We hugged. I lamely said “thanks.” She
eloquently said, “I love you” and left.
Moving out of the way of the movers, Mitsy stood
shoulder to shoulder with me and asked if I needed anything else. “Not really”
I exhaled … a death rattle, the understatement of a lifetime. We hugged too. I
watched her turn, pick up a plant from her desk and disappear through the
door.
The movers grabbed the last of the file boxes and
took them to the truck. I’d made arrangements to leave most of
the furniture for the landlord in payment for the incomplete lease. I looked
around, tossed the pizza box, plastic cups, and flutes in a garbage bag and
left a $50 bill and a thank you note for Cornelius, the cleaning guy. I looked
around again, a little slower this time, dusted Mitsy’s desk with my hand where
a circle implicated the place the plant sat, and turned off the lights.
###
