On my first day of work at HabitHelpers I got a brief tour of the large office space and the breakroom where someone had just microwaved fish. I was introduced to my new coworkers and watched several hours of onboarding videos. The onboarding videos included subjects ranging from the company culture, employee expectations, and a brief review of Washington State’s “at-will” employment laws and how, at any time, HabitHelpers could terminate my role without cause.
At the end of each video, there was a small quiz, perhaps to ensure I wasn’t snoozing my way through onboarding. After numerous videos, a general layout of the HabitHelpers corporation began to take shape.
My job as an Assistant Sales Representative (ASR) was going to be roughly 75% sales coordination and scheduling, and 25% copyediting and design. The sales coordination and scheduling portion of my job involved lots of cold calls. Lots and lots of cold calls. Hundreds daily, to the administrators, secretaries, principals, and district representatives of elementary, middle, and high schools across the nation—basically, anyone even vaguely associated with a school who might be in charge of the welfare and success of their student body, or at least, the drafting, rolling out, and enforcement of their school’s policies and procedures. In the case an ASR was not able to reach a decision maker (DM), a second-in-command would do, long as we got something on the calendar for our Regional Sales Representative (RSR) to visit in person.
Each ASR worked within a geographical region according to their “pod.” The pods were assigned large swaths of the American hinterland in five regions: The Northwest (including Alaska and Hawaii), The Southwest, The Midwest, New England, and The Southeast. Each pod worked to assist a team of RSRs in the field. During the big sales push (which was most of the year) it was our goal to stack our RSR’s days with as many appointments as possible. This was back in the early aughts when Google’s maps were not nearly as user friendly, or as inter-connected to businesses as it is today. So scheduling an RSR’s day demanded not only crack timing and an intimate knowledge of the layout and geographical features of our RSR’s region but a keen sense for orchestrating sales appointments along a linear trajectory for optimal efficiency. For example, an ASR couldn’t schedule their RSR’s day willy-nilly, having them zig-zag and backtrack all over town. In order to be successful, the RSR’s day needed to be a fine-tuned sales odyssey, one that began with an 8:00 appointment, that was en route to their 10:00 appointment, which was just around the corner from their noon appointment, and so on.
The product our RSR would be selling was school agendas. These were spiral-bound books that, at the beginning of the school year, were handed out to students. The inside of the agendas was mostly a calendar of the school year with a special section for the summer months. In the front of the agendas, however, there was a custom, school-specific portion called a “portfolio.” A school’s portfolio could include any information the school’s administrative team wanted to disseminate throughout their population of students. This often included a greeting or message from the principal or district superintendent, a list of school or district rules and regulations, a holiday schedule, lice outbreak procedures, drugs and how to identify drugs, pick up and drop off procedures for parents, what to do in case of a school shooting, and a list of staff and district resources with phone numbers and email addresses. The agendas came in a variety of shapes, sizes, materials, and finishes with costs that varied accordingly.
There was a college version as well, although these were not handed out for free. They were purchased individually at a campus bookstore for a grossly inflated cost so, naturally, no one ever bought any of those.
One of the onboarding videos stood out from all the others. The video was a recreation of a presentation that I would witness numerous times during my tenure at Helpers. This was a short, surprisingly prop-heavy tutorial many of our RSRs were encouraged to perform on sales appointments, mostly for potential clients, to emphasize the usefulness of the agendas and the power of planning.
A man in the video was standing at a table with a large empty glass container, about the size of a small bucket. Next to the large glass bucket, there was a sack of sand and a collection of large rocks. He was talking about how the calendars in the agendas were not just calendars. Calendars in and of themselves were useless. Calendars were just dates and days of the week. But these were powerful tools if only students knew how to use them properly.
Scattered throughout the pages of the agenda were a variety of lessons and hypothetical questions taken from a best-selling steeped-in-Christianity life skills curriculum designed to help students evaluate how they make everyday choices. The implication was that each choice a student makes is accompanied by consequences that would impact their lives. These could be good consequences or bad. These were consequences that were not only to be reckoned with in the present but which would hound the student well into their future, possibly even until they drew their last living breath.
More importantly, and this was part of the curriculum I could actually get behind, the agendas had the potential to help students overcome insurmountable odds with nothing more than the simple power of planning. Granted, much of the curriculum seemed overly grandiose and recklessly trafficked in confusing metaphors and conditional statements. It was implied, for example, that one could move mountains if only one was inclined to set realistic goals and turn the tasks to accomplish the goals into a routine in service of a strict, overarching schedule. That said, something about knowing what you want and planning to actualize that goal spoke to me.
It was the kind of selling point that resonated wildly with the if-this-then-thatisms adults use to hopefully scare kids into doing the things we’re convinced are best for them.
If you don’t study hard and ace geometry, you’re going to die, toothless and bald and alone in an apartment w here nobody will discover your body until the neighbors complain of the smell of three hundred pounds of rotting flesh.
Secretly I suspected the HabitHelpers agendas were such hot sellers because in theory they provided parents a great out from some of the heavy lifting of parenthood. Students who were given the agendas would use them, obviously. Therefore, their parents were not solely responsible for helping their kids with schoolwork, or with life. Setting and achieving goals? That’s in there. Navigating complex social situations? It’s in the book. Understanding life’s abundant moral gray areas and acting decisively? Check, check, and check. It was precisely the kind of curriculum that parents just gobbled up. And the kids? The kids who have the metabolism of a hummingbird, and who couldn’t give a rats ass about the future? Nobody asked the kids. But then, it was the parents, not the kids who were buying our product, even if by proxy of their school or district so, whatever.
“Imagine,” said the man in the video, waving his hands over the glass bucket. “This bucket represents your day. Your day has twenty four hours.”
He went on to explain that everybody is busy. We all have full days. And whether we know it or not, every choice we make is part of a larger network of priorities. To illustrate this, he picked up a small rock, “You have to drive the kids to karate,” he said, setting the karate rock down. He picked up another rock, a really big one, “Your job!” he said, hefting the sizable rock. Another rock he called “Sleep.” He worked his way through the pile of rocks, pointing out the stuck-in-traffic rock, the grocery shopping rock, and the rock that represented a meeting with college buddies for happy hour after work. He held up another rock, another big one, and with a pointed eyebrow said, “And then there’s the wife!”
He set down the wife rock with a WHEW, dramatically wiping his forehead.
Then he turned to the sack of sand. He reached in and grabbed a pinch. He held up the pinch of sand, sprinkling it back into the bag saying, “Going to the bathroom. Watching the news. Taking the stairs instead of the elevator. Looking for the keys. Eating breakfast. Mowing the lawn. Changing the oil. Gossiping with the neighbors.” He went on, “All of these things, though small and insignificant, they all add up. They all take time.” He hefted the bag jokingly, “And lots of it!”
I was on the edge of my seat.
“So what happens,” he said, hoisting the bag of sand ready to pour. “If you don’t have a plan for your day? Or week? Or Year?!”
To illustrate what was supposed to be the obvious answer, he poured the entire bag of sand into the glass container. After emptying the bag, he set down the sack, winded, and paused to allow his point, whatever it was, to sink in. Finally, he turned to the rocks.
He picked up a rock, recalling its significance, “We can’t forget the wife, can we?”
With an expression, he put the wife rock into the container, setting it atop the sand. It fit, but just barely. There were several other rocks to go. He held up another, “Karate!” he said, placing it in the container. He went on, trying to put the stuck-in-traffic rock in the container. He positioned it this way and that, but no dice.
As if to drive some obvious point home, he made his way through the other rocks that would not fit inside the 24-hour container: Billy’s math homework, a bike ride around the cul-de-sac, a full night’s sleep. After some time dancing around a conclusion, he held up a finger.
“Many of you don’t know it, but you’ve got your priorities all wrong!”
There was a clunky jump cut to a new scene in the video. There was the same man in the same clip-on tie, the table, rocks, and sand.
“If you plan to succeed,” he began again, emphatically, holding up a Clinton thumb. “You must succeed in planning.”
He held up the wife rock and placed it in the container with a knowing smirk. He joked, “Gotta pay attention to the wife!” He picked up the do-Billy's-math-homework rock, and with an eye-rolling sigh, placed it in the container. On and on he went with all the big rocks, placing them in the container. Perhaps not surprisingly, they all fit just below the lid of the glass container.
“You see?” he said. “All your biggest priorities for the day are taken care of. Why? Because you planned to make it so.”
To bring his point home, he hoisted the sack of sand and poured it over the rocks. The camera zoomed in on the sides of the container. The sand trickled between the rocks, filling the gaps and crevasses until the rocks were buried and the sand sack was completely empty. Not a grain of sand stood proud of the edge of the container.
He beamed back at the camera holding up one of the agendas, “Only when you understand the importance of planning,” he crowed. “—will you be able to plan for the important things in life!”
Occasionally, our RSRs would recreate this presentation for potential clients in the field. Although since it was a decidedly elaborate presentation, with heavy and unwieldy props, rarely was it repeated for a one-off meeting. It was usually reserved to wow members of the school board in bulk, the district level decision makers who could give the go-ahead on an order for multiple schools. Although, even for these presentations, our RSRs would use a regular bucket since a sizable glass container like the one in the video was not so easy to procure, not to mention highly breakable.
The big push for sales began to wind down in the late spring and early summer months. This was when business operations at HabitHelpers shifted from endless cold calls, meetings, and scheduling to the busiest time of year when the school’s portfolios began arriving in great shipments. These portfolios were most often a disaster and required a substantial degree of copyediting and even redesigning before they were officially print ready.
Few, if anyone who’d prepared their school’s portfolio seemed familiar with any of the lessons championed within the agendas. Many of the portfolios we received were a holy hot mess and completely unusable. Or they were submitted woefully beyond deadlines. Paradoxically it seemed as if the HabitHelpers agendas were the very antithesis to the modus operandi by which our clients, the faculty and administrators of American schools, functioned.
I tried to give them the benefit of the doubt, to consider these godawful portfolios as the proverbial children of shoemakers who must go without shoes. Hopefully, these schools were so busy modeling responsible behaviors and inspiring excellence and punctuality in their pupils, there wasn’t any leftover for their poor school agendas.
This is why the period from late spring to the printing deadlines in the late summer was, to put it mildly, a crunch. Things got so busy that HabitHelpers would allow ASRs and Pod Team Managers (PTMs) to work all the overtime they wanted for pay that was, after the 8-hour threshold, time-and-a-half.
During this time, I was separated from my then wife. We found her a place to live temporarily with three of her coworkers, who fed a house full of cats a strictly vegan diet. So I had all the time in the world on my hands.
I met Dorothy at her office, to ask her about the overtime. Dorothy was the president, or CEO or something. I adored Dorothy. She had a gigantic, brassy personality, big red hair and a scandalous sense of humor. Just nasty.
We were dear friends immediately.
I asked her, “Will there be an option for overtime this year?”
She looked up from stacks upon stacks of portfolios on her desk that for whatever reason couldn’t be processed by an ASR.
She asked, “Are you high?”
You’d never guess Dorothy was a woman struggling to straddle our office and the boy’s club at the head corporate offices. Either by her effervescent personality, her scathing wit, or her raunchy sense of humor, she not only held her own magnificently against the Old Guard, but kept the brass on their toes. She was the polar opposite I’d come to understand about corporate culture and its myriad humorless hierarchies. She was neither subservient to anyone above her, nor condescending to anyone of a lesser rank. Always available and sharply frank. Dorothy was friends with everyone but she didn’t treat anyone with kid gloves. She expected her employees to work hard and they did, not because they had to, but because they wanted to, for her.
Only a couple of months earlier, Dorothy had seen how miserable I’d been in my previous pod. She brought me into her office and sat me down and told me she wanted to talk.
She said, “I heard about the broccoli situation at your weekly huddle.”
I was terrified.
For the record, it wasn’t just broccoli. It was a whole veggie platter. And it’d been the final straw between me and the other four members of my pod with whom, to put it diplomatically, I had not been a good fit.
Every week our pod had a painfully useless weekly meeting called a “huddle.” Our huddles lasted an hour, sometimes more. The weekly huddles were designed to keep all members of the pod working on the same page, informed of corporate goings on, developments with product offerings, and a cornucopia of other subjects that could’ve been summarized in a succinct email. The meetings were a great opportunity for anyone who loved to hear themself talk at length about nothing or for others who enjoyed asking superfluous questions.
Each week one member of our pod was responsible for bringing treats—an incentive to keep huddle participants from opening their wrists. The snacks were always cookies, cakes, bars, donuts, or something equally unhealthy. And this was in addition to the constant rotation of cakes that appeared in the breakroom for birthdays, bridal showers, baby showers, retirements, and Thursdays. With cakes and sweets and treats coming out of my ears I decided, when it came my turn to bring snacks to our weekly huddle, I’d bring a large veggie tray. You know, mix it up a little.
I mean, at least there was ranch dressing.
To say the least, everyone was furious. The ranch dressing was gone immediately. I’d watched in horror as my pod mates basically drank it straight without even touching the vegetables.
Stephanie, who spent her whole day bouncing around on a yoga ball with weights strapped to her wrists and ankles as her “office workout” wanted to know my plan now that all the ranch dressing was gone. She said, “What now, veggie guy?” visibly frustrated that the tray of naked vegetables had derailed our super useful huddle.
“What do you mean?” I said stubbornly. “Raw vegetables are delicious!”
And to prove my point, I bit off the head of a broccoli flower, chewing it merrily. Doubling down, I spent the remainder of the meeting spite-grazing my way through the vegetable platter. That many raw vegetables were an incredible shock to my digestive tract, all that fiber in one dose. The result was a violent bout of indigestion followed by an affliction of uncontrollable, room-clearing broccoli farts that soon filled our communal cubicle and sent tempers flaring to the boiling point until I was quarantined to an enclosed meeting room to carry out the rest of my cold calls for the day.
It was a much-discussed and joked-about event that, around the office, was hilariously referred to as “the broccoli incident.”
But instead of twisting the knife on the broccoli incident, Dorothy went on to ask if I was doing okay in my current situation.
“Do you like where you’re working now?” She asked. “Are things going well?”
I surprised myself by responding with the truth.
I said. “No. Not at all.”
She nodded, her suspicions confirmed. The problem was, she said, none of the other pods had openings. Or, rather, the Southwest pods had an opening, but Dorothy pointed out the obvious non-starter—the Southwest pod was very cliquey, like super tight…
She got up and shut the door to her office. She went on, sitting in the seat next to me and scratching at a stain on her pants. She continued, they were weirdly tight like they had sleepovers and stuff. It’s creepy.
She said, rolling her eyes, “And I’m sure you heard about the affair?”
I had heard about the affair. Everyone in the office knew about the affair. Or, at least, everyone except for Carrie apparently. Either that or, Carrie wasn’t letting on that she knew about how Trish, who sat next to Carrie at work and at church every Sunday, had a months-long fling with Carrie’s husband and that Carrie’s husband was most certainly the father of Trish’s forthcoming baby.
I confessed to Dorothy that, beyond the affair, I’d kept an uneasy eye on the Southwest pod since my first day because on Fridays they all wore footy pajamas with Disney and Looney Tunes characters on them. Kelly, the pod’s top cold-caller, once cornered me in the breakroom. Wearing Tweety-Bird footies, and holding a Tweety-Bird plushie Kelly asked me if I read through any of the religious pamphlets she’d left on my keyboard yet.
I said, “That was you?!”
Tapping her foot impatiently, she implored, “So? Have you found Jesus Christ yet?”
Dorothy and I were having such a good time roasting the sanctimonious WASPS in the Southwest pod, she suddenly stopped and said, “Oh shit, I think I just peed a little!”
I was stunned speechless when Dorothy casually took a fresh pair of pants out of the bottom drawer of her desk and said, recalling one of HabitHelpers most annoying platitudes, “If you plan to succeed,” she called out, pointing at the ceiling dramatically. “You must succeed in planning! Now get the fuck out of my office.”
After changing her pants, Dorothy removed me from my old, loathsome pod—a move that sure pissed off our Regional Pod Leader (RPL) since she clearly enjoyed having me under her thumb where I could be micromanaged to smithereens.
Not having anywhere to go, I was moved to my own corner of the open office in what amounted to a construction zone with wires hanging from the ceiling, drywall, and plastic sheeting. HabitHelpers had recently purchased the adjacent office space and a small crew of contractors were in the process of joining the two spaces. Dorothy had created a whole new position for me. My new role was undefined. I had no manager. I literally had nothing to do. I had zero emails coming in and nobody to email, not even my estranged wife. I had nobody to call and no cold-call quotas to fill. I just sat, watching the clock.
It was a very bizarre time to be alive. I was in limbo until another pod had an open availability. Without work, I had nothing to help pass the time and no reason to be there. Without anything to do, five minutes had a way of stretching on forever and ever. A full eight hours with a break for lunch became intolerable. There was nothing but the cakes in the breakroom, calling to me.
In addition to rapid weight gain, I’d started to develop tics in my eyelids and, weirdly, narcolepsy.
I’d wake up from out of nowhere, not knowing how long I’d been asleep. One time I fell asleep with a full cup of coffee on my desk, my hand wrapped around the mug. Right away I dreamt I was falling, screaming, and just before I splattered on pavement I woke up in a panicked seizure, arms and legs shooting this way and that. The mug of coffee became a projectile.
The drywallers had just finished the area in front of my desk. Against the new white mudded drywall, a conspicuous rooster tail of coffee spray arched for a good twenty feet or so. Almost everyone in the office gophered above their cubicles to see about the commotion. Everyone found this new decoration very funny of course. But also the coffee stain was a badge of shame for the whole office to behold, to walk by and comment on.
“I don’t think that’s what IT meant by installing Java, HAW HAW HAW!!”
One time I woke up, and someone had mercifully pinned a large poster over a portion of the brown stain on the wall. It was a picture of a kitten, wide-eyed and dangling precariously from a branch. Below, in large text was the old familiar suggestion: Hang In There, Baby!
Finally there was an opening in New England.
Not only was there an opening, but the busy season had officially begun again. Over the weekend, we’d gotten our first large shipments of school portfolios. There were so many portfolios, the mailman had to waddle them upstairs in umpteen trips. One week I was begging people for little odd jobs and things to do. The next week, there was more than enough work to go around.
Dorothy came around asking how I was fitting in with my new pod. I said we were getting along famously which, again, was the truth. I was more productive than ever. We actually had conversations that were interesting. We had laughter. This was a welcome and stark contrast to my former quarters that, funnily, were less than ten feet away from my new desk, just across the main office walkway—so close that my sour old coworkers would often gopher above their cubicle walls and hiss at us to keep it down.
Answering Dorothy loud enough for my old pod mates to hear, I said, “This place is great! Way better than the last one. Thank you!!”
Dorothy gave me a sideways smirk to let me know I was crossing the line.
“Good good,” she said. “Because you probably noticed it’s go-time?” With her chin, she indicated to the stack of plastic USPS boxes stuffed with portfolios in the middle of our pod. “I hope you’re down for more overtime this year?”
With an obtuse smile that emphasized the big gap in my front teeth, I stole her punchline, “What are you? High?”
Now this was work I could sink my teeth into! I plowed through portfolio after portfolio, copyediting like the wind, straightening out tables of contents, and replacing terrible artwork with better, high-res files I turned up from previous year’s portfolios. Mondays through Wednesdays I worked twelve, sometimes thirteen-hour days with end-of-week fourteen-hour crunches on Thursdays and Fridays.
I became an expert at solving the most problematic portfolios, the submissions that were so half-assed or poorly assembled they required a complete resubmittal from the client—a process that was made trickier during the summer months when all our contacts were on break. Calling the schools was often a worthless longshot. On exceedingly rare occasions I’d catch a secretary who’d come by the school to do some quick task, or a janitor who answered a constantly ringing phone. More often, I’d have to delve through contact forms in old portfolios, search through our RSR’s email inbox for clues, or stalk faculty members online until I could turn up a cell number or an email.
Everything was running smoothly until I hit a brick wall working on a portfolio for a large school district. This packet was not just for one school. It was for a massive, district-wide order that included about fourteen schools, elementary through high school, each with roughly 900-1200 students. Inside their packet was only a copy of the previous year’s agenda. There was no note in or outside the agenda and, mysteriously, their entire front-of-agenda booklet was crossed out in thick red pen.
None of the phone numbers got an answer. And none of my sleuthing tricks online turned up any information. I called the RSR to explain the situation.
Jim, the RSR, was at Disney World with his family, a vacation that no doubt was paid for by the massive commission he got from this one-signature deal that every other RSR in his district hated him for. He was standing in line for one of the rides with his family. I was the last person he wanted to hear from, which is odd since, if his sizable commission was in danger of going poof, you’d think I’d be the very first person he’d want to hear from.
“What do you mean there’s nothing there?!” he said, almost shouting. “There can’t just be nothing in there.”
I explained what I’d found in their packet, and the mysteriously X’d out pages in the previous year's booklet.
“Yeah,” said Jim. “I got that part. And no, we can’t possibly send that to print. Not for such a huge order.”
“I realize that,” I assured him. “That’s why I’m calling you.”
“Why are you calling me?! You should be calling the school. Try calling the school!”
I told him that sounded like a good idea and maybe I’d try that after checking to make sure my computer was plugged in. If that didn’t work, maybe I could jiggle the handle a little.
“You don’t have to be sarcastic,” Jim shot back. “I’m just spitballing here.”
Dorothy took it from there. She called Jim in her office with the door closed. And whatever she said in there straightened him out right away. Finally, Jim understood the gravity of the situation and he was thinking rationally again. The situation was still dire, however. It was just after lunch, Thursday. The deadline for their district order was Friday by EOD. Jim scoured his email for any personal information, phone numbers, an email, anything. But there was nothing. After an all-hands-on-deck scavenger hunt I found an exhaustive list of contacts from an old file they’d submitted two years prior—it was the contact information for everybody in the school district. Everyone from the Superintendent on down to the lunch ladies.
Dorothy handed the contacts back to me and suggested I should start with the Superintendent, and work my way down from there.
After fifteen calls, I finally got someone who answered their phone.
“Hello?!” barked a man. “Who is this.”
I introduced myself and our company, indicating we were the group that printed their school agendas.
“Ah yes,” he said. “You guys print our expensive worthless calendars all the students rip up and throw in the garbage on the first day of school. What can I do for you?”
I explained the situation, and how important it was we get a hold of someone who could help us. The man wanted to know, just between him and me, if we let the deadline pass, and the district doesn’t get their agendas, would they be able to reallocate the substantial sum of money they’d spent on the agendas and use it for something that was actually useful? Like actual textbooks that had actual information in them? Or ink cartridges for their copy machine?
In the end, I wasn’t able to extract any names or numbers from him. Still, ours was surprisingly one of the better conversations I had as I made my way further down the huge list of district contacts and, consequently, further down the district hierarchy. Perhaps not surprisingly, the further down the list I called, the more willing people were to give me a piece of their mind about where I could shove our stupid books—and how deeply.
And then, finally, jackpot.
I’d been making my way through the dregs—a miscellaneous group of phone numbers without the contact’s title or even a name. As it turned out, I reached the wife of the district superintendent—a pleasant, soft-spoken woman by the name of Mrs. Merriwether.
“He’s at a convection,” she said. “He’ll be there for another couple of days. Maybe a week.”
It was already Friday. We were down to mere hours before the shipping deadline passed. We didn’t have a week. I urged her, breathlessly, “If I could just get his cell number? Anything…”
She said, “He doesn’t have cell reception on the beach.”
I asked, “The beach?”
“That’s right,” she went on. “He told me specifically that I wouldn't be able to reach him.”
None of this was making any sense. First of all, any whiff of a convention and you could bet our RSRs would be swarming their breakout sessions, performing their bucket-and-rocks routine from our corporate booths. But there were no conventions, none that anyone knew about. And the beach, what kind of convention didn’t have cell service? I did get a phone number in the right direction, however. Mrs. Merriwether said her husband's secretary was traveling with him. Her phone would also not work at the beach, but she had the secretary’s husband’s cell number, and that sounded promising. When I called, surprisingly I reached the husband. He said he’d been given the same song and dance about the beach and the convention and the cell service, but it was all bullshit.
“You want to know where they are?” Asked the angry man on the other line. “You want to know what they’re doing?”
I assured him, none of the specifics were any of my business. I was just trying to complete their school agen—
“They’re fucking,” he interrupted. “My future ex-wife is in some Sandals resort in Aruba with her greasy-dick Superintendent boss.” He went on to say, he couldn’t think of anything that’d ruin their vacation more than the news I had to deliver. So, gladly, he gave me the name and phone number of the resort where they were staying which I called immediately.
I was elated when the concierge answered the phone. But after explaining the situation, I discovered he was a brick wall.
In an elegant accent he demurred, “I understand the situation, sir.” he said. “But our guest requested specifically that he and his…companion are not to be interrupted during their, uh, convention. And we take our guests' requests very, very seriously. I'm so glad you can understand. Thank you and good day.” And with that he hung up.
Dorothy, who was perched like an owl on the edge of my cubicle, was nonplussed.
“Well?!” she implored. “What did they say?”
I said, “He told me where I could go, and how I could get there.”
“We’ll just see about that!” Said Dorothy. “Gimme that number.”
I gave Dorothy the number, which she took, running to her office post haste. She closed the door behind her. At first, there were only muffled shouts coming from her office. Then, oddly, I heard laughing and even cheers. Her office door suddenly swung open to where I and a substantial crowd of coworkers had gathered to eavesdrop on her conversation. Triumphantly, she held out her cell phone with her palm on the receiver.
“You’re on hold,” she beamed to me and the crowd of gawkers. “They’re getting a phone with a cord long enough to, get this, reach the beach.”
Finally, after some time, by way of the most razor-thin of connections, there was a click on the other end of the line. The on-hold music cut and, for a moment, my heart stopped to the silence. The crowd of coworkers who’d thronged around my cubicle seemed frozen in terror, leaning in.
Then there was chewing on the other line like he was eating chips directly into the receiver.
“You wanna tell me,” he barked in classic tough-guy. “Why the fuck some bellboy is handing me a phone out here on the beach?”
I repeated the scenario for probably the 500th time that day. Except now, we only had hours left before the USPS was due to pick up the end-of-week shipment.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “We sent you our new portfolio.”
I confirmed, “We got an old one, yes. With all the pages crossed out.”
“Yeah, that’s because it was shit.” he said. “We need a new one this year. Something that’ll really knock these kids in line.”
I agreed, that would be ideal. However, I repeated, since there was nothing submitted for this year, we needed to know what they wanted to print. Otherwise, they’d get a bunch of generic agendas that didn’t have any customization. Even their covers would be the boilerplate HabitHelpers logo and tagline, “Helping kids conquer tomorrow, by planning today.”
“It’s a shit tagline,” he joked.
I continued, “All the more reason we get the right tagline, from you. In addition to the rest of your portfolio.”
He laughed, “And how do you suppose we do that, Einstein?”
I said, without humor, “You’ll have to dictate it to me.”
There was a pause, just the sound of chewing and talking off receiver. He was arguing with someone, a woman there on the beach with him, likely his secretary. To the crowd that’d gathered around my cubicle, I made the “talking, talking” sign, rolling my eyes.
He returned and said, “Okay we’ll do it like Dottie and I always do it. Dottie, my secretary can dictate it to you because I’m on a fuckin’ vacation and don’t have time for this, okay?
With a thumbs up to my small audience I said, “Yes, thank you. That works. I’m ready.” There were muffled cheers.
With a finger to my lips and bulging eyes, I shushed the crowd and put Dorothy’s phone on speaker so I could transcribe for Dottie.
“Are you ready, sir?” asked Dottie.
“I’m ready,” I said, my fingers poised at the keyboard.
And there, from a remote beach in a luxury resort in Aruba, Dottie the secretary dictated the superintendent’s welcome message to the thousands of students in one of New England's largest school districts.
“Dear students,” began Dottie. “Welcome back to another exciting school year! As your District Superintendent, it gives me great pleasure to address each and every one of you on this momentous day, the first day of the rest of your lives. I hope this message finds you filled with anticipation, renewed energy, and a strong commitment to embark on a journey of knowledge, growth, and success. Today, I want to emphasize the extraordinary importance of being present in school, as it serves as the foundation upon which your dreams will flourish and your future will be shaped. As we gather here together, I invite you to embrace the boundless opportunities that lie ahead, and together, let us make this academic year an unforgettable chapter in your lives…”
