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.

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