Sweet Insanity

At a friend’s birthday party recently, cake was offered to another friend to take home. Her response was, Oh sure, the skinny girl pushes off the cake to the fat girl. The odd thing was that the skinny girl wasn’t skinny and the fat girl wasn’t fat, and neither were girls. They were sixty-year old women.

Yesterday, at the end of a department holiday party, a manager offered remaining decorated cupcakes to a co-worker. She responded with, and this is a paraphrase, as another co-worker told me about this exchange, You mean you want to give the poor black woman the leftovers? The white manager stuttered for a response… something like, No, you have five kids, I thought they’d like them. Then, she walked away. I understand that there was an apology a little later from the women with the kids. I don’t know who took home the desserts. The manager was white and a woman. The other person was black, a woman and mother of five children.

I do know that these are both examples of dots connecting to places never expected.

A few weeks ago, I completed a two-day course on diversity taught by a sixty-year old white male and an ageless black woman who told us she was older than her teaching partner. The course offered multiple opportunities to identify the filters by which we see, hear and react to people. One exercise instructed the participants to stand by a sign that made them feel most uncomfortable when discussing it. I found it difficult to choose between all of them, race, age, sexual preference, gender, religion, height, weight, able bodiedness or socio-economic status. For another exercise, participants stood on a masking tape line, then move a step forward or back for life experiences that presumably helped or hindered a person to succeed by conventional standards... getting educated, having access to transportation, money worries. It reminded me of the game Mother May I where one takes baby steps or giant steps forward, but if caught, you had to start over. I grew up mostly with all giant steps forward. One person barely left the line and other went so far behind the line that again, I was glad we had an opportunity to talk right there about the gap between us. The course continues to come to mind as the news shows the murders of black men by white policeman. 

Top of mind perceptions of how the world sees us triggered the quick and biting response in the two instances in my life. I might have determined that there was a unifying reason that catalyzed the hurtful words spoken... cake. I mean, I know the people involved, it’s hard for me to think that any of them meant ill will for the other. Yet, the words spilled out.

The murders were the same issues taken to exponential lengths. Sons died. Sons shot other sons. There are people who defend the deaths.  There are people who gather together to rally against the deaths. When and where are we sitting down and discussing it?  The conversation might be nice over a piece of cake. 

You Calling My Art a Hobby?

Last Saturday was the first day of a figure drawing class at that Palette and Chisel. I loved every second of it. Each two-minute and five-minute sketch felt like a second, the hour-long pose felt like a minute. If we weren't offered a break, I wouldn't take one. It didn't matter whether my depictions sucked. It was three hours of peace, of breathing in and out and feeling whole and flowing.

The teacher is in his 40s tall and serious, there's a guy in the class in his 30s and there's two people in art school likely still in their teens and me. One of youngest asked me if "this"... art was a hobby? I took immediate offense at the question.  If I was in a sit com, I would've jumped back, ala Chandler, and said, "whahaha?" I had a reaction but it wasn't to her. My response filtered through years of other experiences. I know, because I recently took a mandated course at work called, Crucial Conversations and they said so.

Future - she didn't picture a future for me. She didn't see that I could be like her, in or considering a career. Old came next. She just met me and I presented as an old person. Okay, I'll give her older... 40 years or so. I could be two generations ahead of her. In my self-aware state I recognize that I don't say, even to myself, grandmother. I am definitely filtering. Then again, her choice of a word felt like a paper cut.

When I heard the word hobby,  it reminded me of an argument with my former husband about my business, when early in its life it wasn't making money. He called it a hobby. I took umbrage then too. He wanted me to close it. He wanted to take vacations. He wanted me to get a real job and not invest any more of our money into it. We discussed and argued. I realized he meant the future value of my earning power. The business gained momentum, but still, as new businesses go, required financial reinvestment. I stood my ground. A battle won... at all cost. He left and I dug in. I would
prove it was worth it. I completely retooled. I let go staff and refocused the business model. What business I was in was decided and the business took off and went on for another fifteen years. I may have proved him wrong, but I didn't prove me right. Damn.

Still mulling about the meaning of hobby, I asked my wise friend Lynn for her definition. She said, it's what brings us peak moments... when time stands still, where your mind finds rest. It's not work. Peace.

In an NPR's Morning Edition story recently, they asked rock-star scientist, Neil deGrasse Tyson to fact check the time (relativity) effects of gravity in the new movie Interstellar. The stronger the gravity, the more time slows. The time on our phones that go through the far out GPS satellites has to be calculated and slowed to account for the difference in the speed of time in space. My time is slowed when I'm drawn to drawing.

Now that I think about it, that young woman may have done me a big service. The word hobby for me obviously triggers a reaction. It's clearly time to rethink and retool, to find a response that speaks of my experience of flow, joy and peace.

Thanks for the provocative words, Kurt Vonnegut.

"If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something." Kurt Vonnegut

The Secret History of Wonder Woman

During the past week, I've heard various interviews about the new book, The Secret History of Wonder Woman. At first it reminded me of Allison and her homage to Wonder Woman on her desk and Shari with her fierceness in the Optimistic Divorcees and Sarah with her early employment and loyalty to Planned Parenthood. Though repetitive, the interviews of the author Jill LePore connected more dots.

Watching the traditions and hearing the conversations in our office surrounding two women getting married fascinate and disturb me. The role of wife and the meaning of marriage seem to be pre- suffragist or maybe not considered at all. Last week, I bluntly (and probably too directly) asked someone I’d just met who said she was getting married, why she would change her name. She said, "tradition." Not mine, I thought.  The guy in the room, also a Boomer, said his wife didn't, nor did many of my close friends. We were in our 20s and 30s in the '70s then.

In those days, I wore suits, ties, clunky wing-tip Bass shoes and custom men's shirts with darts to fit and show my female parts. I had my own little WW on my desk to motivate me. We were supposed to dress up like the 70s for our Halloween festivities this year. I chose not to wear what we really wore then… it no longer fit.

My ex husband Lee teased me and the women we hung with, by calling us "80s Ladies" after the song by KT Oslin. 80s Ladies tells the story perfectly of what made us who we were then. "More than our names got changed… Been educated, got liberated and complicated matters with men… We said I do and signed I don’t and swore we’d never do that again… We burned our bras and we burned our dinners and we burned our candles at both ends…. There ain’t much these ladies ain’t tried."

Jill LePore reminds me that there were many women who came before, both real and illustrated who led their own lives, not in the reflection of nor in service to men. The Secret History talks about the women who innovated “Birth Control” and founded and sustained Planned Parenthood to give women an opportunity to follow their dreams and build lives for themselves with or without a partner. Wonder Woman as originally drawn was the embodiment of a woman of self destiny and power. Later generations of her story-tellers relegated her to less than.

Some conversations around the office make me think that stories of fierce women aren’t known and the possibilities don't seem possible. The media, gaming and entertainment industries still show women in subservient, objectified positions. Recently a Hooters knock off opened near where I live - Twin Peaks. I’m floored, horrified even, that no one (including me) has cried foul.

All this is to say, I am very interested in a discussion about how woman are viewed today and more important how we view ourselves. Are we who we want to be? Are we dressing for our selves, in reflection of someone else or someone's ideals. With the prevalence of selfies, I am fascinated by the poses... I want to know who are they for and what's the outcome wanted? We need to talk.

The lyrics of the 80s Ladies song tells my story exactly. I was in my 30s in the 80s right along with KT Oslin’s song, (the video shows high school graduation as 67, we were 69.) I’d like to write the lyrics for the subsequent decades as 90s, oughts and ought-teens. I’d also love to hear how my women friends would write their lyrics.

Links:

An interview at the end of the Colbert Report with Jill LePore author of The Secret History of WonderWoman http://thecolbertreport.cc.com/full-episodes/ft09kr/october-29--2014---jill-lepore.The interview prior to her is about Gamergate - women looking to de objectify women in video games like Grand Theft Auto. 

About Jill LePore http://scholar.harvard.edu/jlepore/home

New Yorker Article: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/22/last-amazon

The Last Hour of a 17 Year Business

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 desk. A milk crate containing what usually covered it crowded an edge with a short stack of newly opened mail, a coffee cup, my Wonder Woman figurine that held an inspiring,"Sell" and the ten-line phone marked with staff names, still plugged in, held the dimmest of hope for a last minute reprieve. Guest chairs, piled too high to see the pink peony rayon upholstery were buried by brown cardboard boxes of books, white banker boxes marked by fiscal years or alphabetically by clients.

The 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 enterprise 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 1950s ranch, where we commandeered an extra bedroom and placed the butcher-block table against one wall for my desk and removed the doors from the closet 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 took over the entire basement; my family lost our TV room. When the client arrived for a site visit, he registered admiration for our “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 the office, “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 of the fifties and sixties were given at the start of lent to save foreign babies.

Straightening the wick, Cracker chose a match from a gold foil box with black flocking we’d picked up after an expensive lunch that didn’t persuade the prospect to buy. She studied the box as she struck the match and lit the candle, “who says, the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach? We should have fucked him.” I recalculated for the umpteenth time, the cost of that lost sale and felt her frustration.

 Cracker assembled the corkscrew and handed it to me as she leaned over the desk and pushed the bottle toward me. 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 that very day. 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.

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 icing 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 our 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 sets of floppies as we needed them, until technology changed and compact discs were preferred over floppies. 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 for 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 outweigh 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 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 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 angry.” 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 quivering - my stomach did likewise. I looked across at Cracker then fixed my eyes on the white bird on the cab bottle.

“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 at least once a week over the last five years.  More than one of the Random Task Force told us Roccos’ was one of the best perqs of working with us. I never had trouble keeping employees, except for that running out of work for them thing. We offered 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. If I had cut those benefits, if I had paid commission only, if I demanded more hours- could we have survived? From the beginning, I always paid myself first. As soon as I learned there were no more options to make pay roll I put the close into motion.

I called them Cracker and Mitsy 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 said with some vehemence.  She cut through my hesitation with her usual cut to the bone sensibility. And, that was that.

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 worry about you.”

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. For the first time the bank didn’t pay us a visit: an ominous sign. I counted on the bankers seeing our earnest office. I knew we three could win her over, but we didn’t get the chance. The line of credit was near the top, and it wouldn’t be extended. There wasn’t enough room to use it for pay roll. I knew what Mitsy meant. The bungee was stretched beyond recoil and about to snap.

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 I was the chimney hung with stockings. I think I took her contact information and hung up.

“Should I have given her a prize for being the last call of the company?” I asked. The Willie Loman part of me could not bring myself to tell the caller that I would do nothing as a result of that call. In less than an hour the phones would be dead and 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. Knobby Knee Ken the UPS driver nor Sexy Steve the Fed Ex guy would no longer deliver. There was no postage to send the boxes of promotional literature. The lights, heat, printer, copier and water cooler would no longer function. That we wouldn’t hear another complaint in the lavatory from the Russian ladies next door about their boss, nor have him, who we called Slipper Boy, 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. One last hope prevented me from telling her that I’d never send the materials. Maybe, 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 with 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 in the last day 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, turned off the lights and shut the door.

###

Workout - How and Why I Closed a 17 Year Business

Workout.  Like the words set or take, this word has more than one meaning. I wish this term meant a route to personal fitness. Instead, for me, workout means a route to shuttering an expiring business. It means a dire situation, not enough money to pay the bills... ever. It means lawsuits and loans and the possibility of bankruptcy. It means legal documents, harassing phone calls and rightful creditors that transform into predators. It means finding a way to live with your self, as the others involved hold a mirror darkened and smudged like a brassy elevator wall.  And, it means getting on with your life – even when you have no vision of a future without the business.

From a distance of ten years after closing a business that designed specialty resource centers - libraries and retail stores for health care and employers, I knew it should have closed much earlier than its final day. I prolonged the inevitable   by generating new sales. Each sale paid for the prior project. I watched the size of sales dwindle and debt escalate. The bank continued to fund the line of credit because with each influx of cash we paid it off, knowing that we would spend it down with the next order of supplies. I felt a huge sense of relief when we won our largest project followed shortly by devastation as the computer system melted down. The cash earmarked for marketing evaporated into servers and software and the computer geek’s time.

I knew the business needed to cease. The rise of Amazon and the increasing ease of finding, scrutinizing and sourcing media diminished the need for our services. Y2K, 9/11 gutted the discretionary dollars organizations could spend, and patient's and consumer's reliance on the internet reduced the original cause of our buyer's purchase. No product improvement or fabulous marketing campaign could make a difference in our trajectory. Anyway, it wouldn't have mattered. I ignored the facts.

Instead, I worked harder. I made more sales calls. I eliminated staff like daisy petals to cut expenses. We gave away excess furniture, sent boxes of books to Costa Rica, crammed the remains of seven offices and 3000 square feet to a space down the hall, with two offices in 600 feet.  I continued doing what I had been doing. I talked to friends and strangers, experts and idea generators to gain perspective and new thinking. Rarely… okay, never, did I disclose the utter hopelessness of the situation. In other words, I knew the truth and a future direction. And, I didn't "own it," as is said. 

One Thursday, the accountant arrived for her twice a month visit to run payroll and pay the bills. Her usual process included looking over the bookkeeper's inputs, checking the payable dates and coming into my office to discuss what got paid, when. That day, she came into my office without her usual cheeriness. For the first time in seventeen years, the line of credit stretched beyond where it was possible to make payroll. That signaled the end. If I couldn't pay staff, or myself, the work couldn't get done. In the recesses of my mind, that was the line in the sand that closed the door.

Within minutes,  I informed my two remaining employees that we were done. The bookkeeper hugged me and said she was relieved - the late payables were a dead give away to her. The other employee sobbed. And sobbed. She joined the company the summer she graduated from high school as part of our Random Task Force. She worked every school break with us. On her graduation day from Indiana University, though she received a teaching certificate, she agreed to set it aside and work for me. Seven years later she faced dusting it off.

My brother, a banker, put me in touch with Bob in Wisconsin who worked with him settling bad loans.  He usually supported the bank’s interests. To my relief, he came to my office the very next day to support my interest.  His first act included asking me to tell the story of the business.

That Friday in the office was Sunday-afternoon quiet, devoid of phones ringing, clacking of computer keys, and chatter. I started the narrative in humiliation, embarrassment and fear. I spoke of the bad decisions, the crumbling market, the early bankers who visited, encouraged, suggested their family for jobs, and the recent bankers who only knew the company by the its monthly financial statements. I told him about the big wins, a bank wanting materials for thousands of employees around the world - even after a surprise visit to our "headquarters" located in my basement, a computer manufacturer asking us to design software, a move to commercial office space, then to a larger one, a conglomerate wanting libraries for every single office they staffed. I described the successful times, the great plans and the problems that occurred. I spoke or rather choked out the names of the people who worked for me and who, the day before closed the door behind them for the last time. I watched them go knowing we did good work. We offered a valuable product. Many customers bought from us multiple times. Though likely unintended, the process of telling the story was cathartic - remembering high points allowed me to face the slog toward the next task. 

Bob filled a legal pad with notes asking me to provide detail on every supplier we used and every bill and promise due. He reviewed each source of revenue and every account – checking, savings, lines of credit, credit cards and receivables. He divided the creditors, those with my personal signature on the line and others where the company held the accountability.   The day the door shut, we couldn’t pay for the supplies or the labor to finish one customer’s project.  Having spent time with the customer and their team, I understood what they wanted and promised them that we would deliver. We couldn’t. This unfinished project and the employees I jettisoned were the most difficult items to add to the yellow legal pad.

Filling the pad finished day one.

Bob returned. He proceeded to lay out a plan of attack. He instructed that I get an unlisted phone number and a post office box in a different town from where I lived or did business. He handed me three handwritten pages with templates for letters for me to type and send to the creditors by registered mail. One letter focused on the customer with the unfinished project.

The first of the two letters for suppliers went to those who did not have my personal signature as security. It explained that the company closed and unequivocally no money remained to pay bills, nor was there any hope to receive a cent from us through collections or a suit.   We sent thirty-two of those. Surprisingly, we heard from fewer than ten of those vendors after ninety days. A few sent collections notices then eventually stopped. I actually received a couple notes sympathizing with our situation and wishing me well. 

The second letter went to those where my personal signature secured the receivable. That group included the landlord where we had nine months left on the lease, our two largest suppliers, and, two banks where we had credit and two highly leveraged credit cards. That letter also stated that the doors were closed, there was no money and we used stronger language that bankruptcy pended. The idea conveyed that they would receive little or nothing.  I was instructed to preemptively call them prior to the delivery of the letter, so we could stay in the driver’s seat for as long as possible. Cumulative debt topped one hundred thousand dollars. The workout had begun.

Bob instructed me to hire a bankruptcy attorney to ensure I worked within Illinois laws. All the research Bob put together, the attorney pushed aside and did his own assessment, charging me for many hours. He eventually came to the same conclusions as Bob. I reminded myself that if the topic was the possibility of brain surgery, there is no doubt I would seek a second opinion. At this point, to say the least, a lobotomy sounded pretty good. The attorney reviewed my personal financials along with the company’s and recommended I stop paying my mortgage and taxes. I was to show that I was personally destitute.

For the suppliers and one credit card, we arranged to pay them with the cash we had in reserve. I left my unique antique furniture for the landlord. While not of equivalent value to the rent owed, it proved attractive enough to quickly recruit another renter. The landlord did not pursue further legal action. The banks and the one customer did.

One Saturday about 5:30 pm, eight months after the workout began, as I was dressing to go to a black–tie birthday celebration, the doorbell rang. Like in the movies, I descended the stairs enamored with the elegance and rustling of my aqua silk skirt as I approached the door. A man in a navy blue police uniform stood a step below looking up at me, as I pushed out the storm door to talk with him. He asked my name, confirmed it on a clip board, declared that I had been served and walked away. My elegant evening plundered. That doorbell rang twice more over the couse of the workout. It took several months, but Bob and I worked out an arrangement to pay a portion of the amount owed to the bank, and we settled the second suit with reserves and incoming receivables.

The third suit, from a bank covering the other line of credit and one of the credit cards was brought eighteen months after we settle the first bank suit. By then, I felt complacent, maybe even hopeful that the bank wouldn’t come after me. I remember thinking that if I didn't bring any visibility my own financials, it would be ignored. 

By then, because I heeded the attorney's recommendations, my house was nearly in foreclosure. As soon as the bank case was decided, I paid the mortgage and brought my mortgage current. I doubt that stand made any difference in any of the court outcomes. The consequence to me however, meant that my credit rating took a terrifying dive. I couldn’t find a bank to refinance my adjustable rate mortgage due to my tanked credit score… just as interest rates soared.  My mortgage nearly doubled over the course of the workout process. A few years later, sitting in the theater watching The Big Short, I realized that mine was one of the toxic mortgages at the crux of that movie. In one of my last ditch efforts to save the company, the banker/friend extended the line on the stipulation that I refi into a new mortgage, so he could show a transaction. I left the theater stunned, and once again aware that every action I took to prolong the life of Longe Life was a self inflicted wound.

Though the suit loomed, Bob advised that I shouldn’t pay the entire amount without the bank coming to the negotiations table. None of the players expected that I would have to pay the full amount owed.  I found a new attorney, one who was less anxious to use bankruptcy as an offense. It took several months of negotiations and two court appearances - one which I was told to stay in the hall as the attorneys talked to the judge. The other person in the hall was the banker who gave me the loan initially. He wasn’t friendly.

The judge ruled I owed money… dollars that I didn’t have available in the time frame stated. Though I didn’t have the cash, the bank could see my retirement funds. each attorney assured me that a bank couldn't go after my 401k and other retirement dollars, but, I learned, they could pressure to  borrow against them.  I didn’t want to lose those dollars nor pay a premium for releasing them. Bankruptcy was now a real option. The good news was, the judge apparently didn’t think much of banks and the money they make. He set my payment at twenty-five cents on each dollar I owed and ruled that they forgive the credit card. 

Even with the significant discount the judge arranged, I did not have the funds to pay the amount. No public institution would extend a loan to me in the wake of the 75 percent loss the bank wrote off. It took a lot of teeth grinding, but I asked a family member for a loan.  We signed a formal agreement using Excel sheets, interest formulas, a monthly payment plan and the promise to sell my home – once my son was out of school.

In the meantime, I returned some of the deposit the customer paid, provided all on-hand materials and supplies in inventory, as well as consultation to complete the project themselves. The outcome remained far from ideal, but the customer appreciated and accepted the attempt to make the project whole.

My son graduated from Indiana University, May 4, 2008, two years after the last court appearance. I'd sold our home as promised, moved May 13 to a rental, and paid off my family with the proceeds.  It took four years, humility, courage, stoicism, and integrity, and the enormous help of  workout King Bob, two attorneys and family help for both moral and financial support to complete the workout.   

Last weekend, a friend asked how long it took to get over closing a business. I never got over it. I got through it and I learned so much from having a business and closing it. It's like laboring to deliver a baby. You can’t stop the momentum. You must push on to deliver that new life. And since?  The bookkeeper went to work for the accountant, and the other employee went with the sale of our software to one of our suppliers. I found meaningful work and I own a home again. Every day, I use the learnings of leading and closing a business. I've worked out reality and peace of mind.