The Job (22 page)

“It’s your fifth glass tonight.”

“It’s only my third. And it never used to trouble you before.”

She gave me a sad stare.

“Well, it’s troubling me now.”

I went to see Nancy Auerbach the next morning.

“We’re back to ground zero,” she said.

“And we have to rethink your objectives. If I were to ask you, What’s your one true talent? what would you reply?”

“I’m a born salesman.”

“Then sales it is.”

As I quickly discovered, the Gerard Flynn Associates weren’t responsible for getting you a job. Like all out placement agencies, they acted as a resource center, a place which was plugged into the job market and knew which company was looking for what sort of executive at any given time. They tried their best to match up its clients with corporate employers-but, as Nancy Auerbach reminded me from the outset, it was the client who inevitably found himself a new job.

“We can give you tips on positions that are open, you can use our huge employer database to make contacts, we can teach you how to rewrite your resume and knock ‘em dead in an interview, but, in the end, it’s you who has to land. And remember: You only have eight weeks with us. That’s forty working days. So make each day count.”

Having squandered the first week-courtesy of the Computer America disaster-I went into high gear. I spent the mornings in seminars, the afternoons and early evenings working my way through the agency’s job database and polishing up my resume. And on day eight, I sat at that conference table with seven other out-of-work managers, listening to an executive retrainer named Mel Tucker take us through the advanced basics of interview techniques.

Mel Tucker was in his early fifties, balding, built like a cue ball, with a hangdog mustache and a deadpan comedian’s delivery.

“Okay, folks-let’s get things rolling,” he said, standing in front of a chalkboard at one end of the conference room.

“Now, at the start, I want to make one thing clear: I’m not here to talk about the theory of interviewing, because there is only one theory of interviewing: It’s all about you getting the information across.

“The good interviewers are lazy. The bad interviewers are worse.

“So, tell me about yourself.” .. . “So, Ken, if you were a car, what sort of car would you be?”… “If you could be anywhere in the world right now, where would you be?”.. . You’re going to be asked all sorts of dumb questions. But remember this: It’s not always the most qualified person who wins in an interview situation; it’s the best-prepared person. And so here’s a simple no-brainer for all of you to keep in mind before going in for that interview: Do research.

“Get to know the job-and I do not mean the title. Sell to the need of the buyer. Don’t go in there and tell the guy.

“I do ten things because he’ll turn around and say to you, “I don’t need ten things-I just need three things, none of which you’ve got.”

“In this marketplace today, it’s not what you think they need. It’s what they need.”

He looked out at the eight of us, then pointed to me.

“Okay, you’re my first victim, Mr….”

I introduced myself.

“Right, Mr. Allen. Here’s a question you’re bound to be asked in an interview: Why were you fired?”

I shifted nervously in my seat.

“Bad body language,” Mel Tucker said.

“You scream nervousness.”

I immediately sat still, looked him straight in the eye, and said:

“I was a victim of downsizing.”

“

“A victim of downsizing,”” Mel Tucker said loudly.

“Sounds like a bunch of guys in ski masks broke into your house and downsized you.”

Even I found myself laughing.

“The point here is: Be clinical. Be unemotional about an emotional event.

“They went through A … then B happened.” Get on and off the subject as fast as possible. It’s like that other great stupid interview question: “What are your weak points?” Believe it or not, people ask it. With one question, we go from an interview to a therapy session. One client I had-and I’m not joking around-said, “I’m a spitter. I spit a lot when I talk. And because I’m apprehensive about spitting, I get stressed.” Know what the interviewer must have thought?

“Oh, great-a spitter who probably turns violent.”

” On saying the word violent, Mel Tucker stared for the briefest of moments at my bandaged hand. And I thought, He knows. They all know.

“And say you come up against that dumber-than-dumb question, “Define yourself in three words.” Remember: “Armed and dangerous’ is not an option.”

More raucous laughter from the class. Was he scoring points off me? Or was I just being paranoid?

At noon we took a break for lunch. Hey, Mr. Allen.” Mel Tucker said as I was leaving the room.

“hope you didn’t mind me teasing you about the Victim-of-downsizing’ comment.”

“I am not violent,” I found myself saying.

“No matter what you think, I really don’t go around punching people.”

He looked at me wide-eyed. That’s when I knew I was really being paranoid.

“I take your word for it, Mr. Allen. If you say you’re not violent, I’m sure you’re not. The thing is, the thought never crossed my mind that you were violent.”

I now felt beyond embarrassed.

“Glad to hear it,” I mumbled, and left the room quickly.

It’s the shock, I told myself as I walked down the corridor toward the elevator. You’re like a man who’s just stumbled into an empty elevator shaft. You’re dropping down so fast you can’t believe what is happening to you. And you’re desperately trying to clutch at something, anything, that will break your fall.

I pressed the “down” button and waited for the elevator to arrive. As the door opened, Ivan Dolinsky walked out. He was a changed man. His grief-laden eyes were bright and animated. His shoulders were no longer slumped. He even had a smile on his face.

“Ned, great to see you,” he said, throwing an arm around me and giving me a big hug.

“Afternoon, Ivan. You feeling okay?”

“Never better. In fact, today I’ve decided something: There is a God.”

“Glad to hear it,” I said.

“What gives?”

His smile was now incandescent.

“I’ve landed,” he said.

leave it to Ivan. Just when the guy looked like he was about to drive off the cliff, he suddenly slammed on the brakes, reversed gears, and pulled off something of a coup.

“I’ve landed.”

The job wasn’t exactly glamorous-but at least it was a job. Over lunch at a little Italian place on Thirty-sixth and Madison where Ivan insisted on dragging me (“My treat, Ned”), he told me that he was now the new Instate sales guy for Home Computer Monthly, a new mid-market glossy aimed solely at the suburban domestic market.

“Let’s face it,” Ivan said, “we’re not talking about a magazine in the same league as CompuWorld. And the job means a re-lo to Hartford.”

“Insurance capital of America.”

“Yeah-and not exactly the city that never sleeps. Still, I’m going to be on the road most of the time, the cost of living up there is about a third less than in this town, and what’s great about the job is that it’s helping build something from the ground floor up.”

“Who’s backing the title?”

“Transcontinental Communications. Ever heard of them?”

Yep. A bargain-basement outfit. Publishers of such cutting-edge titles as Supermarket Today and International Dental Technology and VCR Choice. Not exactly Conde Nast-and notoriously cheap when it came to remunerating its employees.

“Who hasn’t heard of Transcontinental?” I said.

“Is the package decent?”

“Like I said, it’s not the major leagues.”

“Forty?”

“Thirty-five. Plus seven percent commission on all sales. Major medical after six months. And a three-grand re-lo fee which will pay off a couple of bills.”

Just as I thought-a substandard deal, only attractive to the truly desperate. Like Ivan. Or me.

“I’ve heard of worse packages,” I said, trying to sound upbeat.

“Believe me, I’m not fooling myself into thinking that this is a Rolls-Royce deal. And to make the math work, I’m going to have to close at least five hundred thousand a year. But, hey, at least it’s a job. Some kind of a future.”

He raised his glass of house Chianti and clinked it against mine.

“Good times ahead for both of us, Ned.”

I felt like asking him, what good times? Just as I also felt like verbally assaulting him for setting off the chain of events that cost me the Computer America job. But, as always with Ivan, I stopped myself from going on the warpath. It was my call to challenge Peterson on his doorstep-to intimate I had something on him-and I paid one heavy price. Anyway, this was the first time since the death of Nancy that I’d seen Ivan looking even remotely pleased with life, and I certainly wasn’t going to ruin his day.

“Are you close to landing yet?” he asked me.

“There are a couple of things brewing,” I said.

“I’m not worried.”

Naturally, I was lying like a rug. And over the next four weeks, my alarm intensified. Because not only was I failing to land, I wasn’t getting even a single whiff of employment possibilities. Not that I wasn’t trying. I was at Gerard Flynn Associates from 8:30 every morning until they finally closed up shop at 7:00 P.M. I had my own little workstation in their database section, and (when I wasn’t learning how to sell my ass in the workshop sessions) I spent much of the day surfing the Net in search of job prospects. I must have sent out over a hundred resumes, to everything from the big magazine companies (Hearst, Conde Nast, and Murdoch all wrote back, saying there were no sales positions open at present), to the glossies that specialized in audio/video/cameras/electronics, to around two dozen big marketing agencies. Again, no dice-though the sales director at Stereo Review at least had the decency to call me up at my so-called office (my workstation had a direct line) to tell me that he was impressed with my credentials.

“You’re exactly the sort of guy we’re after,” said Mr. Stereo Review.

“Perfect sales background for the kind of high-end thing we do here. The problem is, Ned-and it’s the reason I decided to phone you-I called the personnel department at Spencer-Rud-man, since they were the last owners of CompuWorld. Now, the guy there told me that you assaulted a superior, and were subsequently arrested for the attack. Please tell me this isn’t true.”

“The charges were dropped. And the reason I hit the guy-” “So you actually did assault someone on the job?”

“There were extenuating circumstances….”

“I don’t care what sort of circumstances there were, Ned. I just can’t hire anybody with that sort of blot on their record.”

“If I could just explain-” “Sorry, Ned. Impressive resume, but… who’s to say you won’t strike someone again?”

It was pretty obvious why I wasn’t getting beyond a “sorry-no-vacancies” letter from any of the hundred companies to whom I’d written. Whenever a personnel director ran ac heck on my employment record, Spencer-Rudman told them the same thing: Don’t go near him if you value your teeth. Of course, I knew that this was going to happen-but I’d been hoping against hope that someone might just forget to run that check.

At the end of week five of The Program, I asked Nancy Auerbach, “Is there any way that I could stop employers from calling Spencer-Rudman?”

“Only if you completely excise CompuWorld from your resume.”

“Sounds like a good idea to me.”

“Then how are you going to explain away the last four years? A stint in the French foreign legion?”

“I could say I was … I don’t know… studying, traveling …” That makes you look like some aging flower child-not a savvy thirty-something professional. Anyway, say someone did hire you on the basis of a resume that didn’t include CompuWorld, and then subsequently found out that you’d spent four years with them? You’d be out on your fanny before you had a chance to breathe. Sorry, Ned-like I told you on day one, this is going to be a tough call. But can I give you a piece of advice?”

I shrugged.

“Stop chasing everything in the tri state area. Start thinking about re-lo. The way I figure it, a smaller organization in a second-or third-tier city might overlook the Kreplin business in order to snag someone with big-time experience like yourself. Especially if you can convince them you were under extreme pressure at the time.”

“My wife’s career is totally New York-based,” I said.

“She wouldn’t want to leave.”

“How can you know that,” Nancy Auerbach said, “until you ask her?”

But I didn’t want to ask her-because, to me, the idea of finding employment outside of New York was an admission of defeat. It would be like a demotion to the minor leagues after an extended stint with the Yankees-and I wasn’t willing to consider such a regressive step yet. What’s more, circumstances between Lizzie and me were definitely not “right enough” to even consider broaching the issue of a potential move away from Manhattan. Within a week of being fired, my severance package was gone-eaten up by minor necessities like my share of January’s rent, the recent telephone bill, and the bank deposit I’d made to pay my health insurance premiums over the next twelve months.

That was over a month earlier. Since that time I had become a kept man-financially reliant on Lizzie for everything.

And everything meant everything. When Chase Manhattan Bank began to make “we-have-run-out-of-patience” noises in late January and threatened legal action to recover their $25,000 bridge loan (well, I had missed six payments in a row), I made a radical decision. I liquidated all my remaining assets (stocks, savings, the remnants of my 401k) and paid off the debt in one go. But this meant that I was still $19,000 in the hole to a variety of plastic money folk. More troubling, I had no cash of my own. It was the Chase Manhattan debt. She had always been horrified by my reliance on bridge loans to finance my heavy spending habits.

“The important thing right now,” she said, “is that you clear up as many financial obligations as possible-and not get yourself further in the red. Don’t worry-I can keep us going until you find something.”