The Job (25 page)

“You’ve got a new job, remember?”

“I get the hint,” I said.

Another awkward silence, during which I puffed heavily.

“Are you smoking?” she asked.

I certainly was smoking again. After two weeks back on the habit, I was now inhaling a pack a day, and developing a nice phlegmy cough. Re-embracing cigarettes was like rediscovering-in the midst of bad times-a dangerous but chummy old friend, someone who’d gladly help me through this current crisis … at a price. But I wasn’t thinking about the long-term risks to my cardiovascular system, or the dangers of lung cancer, or the fact that my dad was a corpse at forty-seven, thanks to the killer weed. I wanted, craved the disreputable company of cigarettes. Just like I also wanted and craved all the junk food I could stomach. And sleep was now only possible after downing a six-pack of Busch (chosen for its unapologetic cheapness) every night.

Of course I knew that I was now on a hiph-trash hist but I

didn’t care. Professionally and personally, I was now a full-fledged fuckup. With the zeal of a convert, I had abandoned all discipline, rejected moderation, embraced the disaster that was me. Three months ago I was a paragon of ambition and high-performance drive, my trajectory level stratospheric. A reckless moment, a couple of bad breaks, a bit of major inattention on the domestic front, and suddenly

.. .

“Allen! What time is designated as start of business in this company?”

This was Burt Rubinek talking. Check that: This was Burt Rubinek bellowing. It was my fourth day on the job-and as I was quickly discovering, Rubinek’s passive nerd act was total camouflage. Lurking behind that geek exterior was the soul of a sadist: someone who needed to give everyone around him nonstop grief.

“Did you hear me, Allen?” Rubinek boomed again. I looked up from my computer terminal. Rubinek was standing ten feet away from me, smack dab in the middle of a room that was known as the cattle car. It was the size of half a football field, crammed with cubicle-like workstations. Each workstation had a computer terminal, a desk chair, a headset. There were 120 workstations in the cattle car, divided into six subdivisions, each of which was assigned to tele market specific PC Solutions products. Computers and software was the biggest division (with over eighty tele sales operators working the phones), while the remaining forty employees handled direct sales of faxes, printers, modems, and exciting accessories like customized mouse pads (“Send us a photo of any loved one, and we’ll have it made up as a laminated computer mouse pad within seven working days!”).

Burt Rubinek was constantly prowling the corridors and alleyways of the cattle car. Like a Marine Corps drill sergeant, he saw it as his duty to threaten and castigate his underlings, reminding them that, in the great scheme of things, they were worthless pieces of shit. Watching him at work, I couldn’t help but think that he was getting his revenge for some really awful years on the school Playground.

Allen? Are you deaf, or are you simply on a different astral plane this morning?”

I poked my head out of my cubicle. All around me my coworkers were staring straight ahead at their terminals-a habit we all fell into whenever Rubinek decided to berate someone, out of fear that he might catch our eye and turn his poisonous attention to us.

“I didn’t hear the question, Burt,” I said.

“So you are deaf.”

“I was just preoccupied with-” “I WILL REPEAT THE QUESTION ONCE AGAIN: What time is designated as start of business in this company?”

“Eight-thirty,” I said quietly.

“Very good. Very good. Eight-three-oh. We are at our desks at eight-thirty, ready to make our first calls at eight-forty-five. And what time did you walk in this morning?”

“Around eight-thirty.”

“Wrong! You arrived here at eight-thirty-six. How many minutes late were you?”

“There was a delay in the subway. Someone jumped under a train at Thirty-fourth Street. I think he used to work here.”

Nervous titters from a few of my neighboring coworkers. When they saw Rubinek’s face go crimson (a sure sign he was about to declare war), they immediately refocused their eyes on their computer screens. He approached my cubicle and lowered his voice to a near whisper.

“A comedian, huh?”

“I was just trying to lighten things up, Burt.”

“My name is Mr. Rubinek. You were six minutes late this morning. And you were insubordinate.”

“It was a joke, Mr. Rubinek.”

“I didn’t hire you to do stand-up. I hired you to push the product. And to show up not around eight-thirty, but at eight-thirty. Your quota this week is now eighteen units.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake…”

“You don’t like it, there’s the door.” He glanced at the big digital clock that hung on the main wall of the cattle car. 8:44:52. Everyone else in the cattle car fell silent, watching the seconds tick down.

“Right, people… ,” Burt Rubinek shouted. The clock turned 8:45. A loud bell sounded. The selling day had begun. Suddenly the room erupted into babble, as all 120 tele sales operators began chasing the first sale of the day. everyone fearfully conscious of the weekly quota they needed to reach in order to report back to work next Monday.

Rubinek turned back to me and said: “Eighteen units by close of business tomorrow, or you’re out of here.”

“That’s not fair, and you know it,” I said.

He gave me a wall-to-wall smirk.

“You’re right. It’s not fair. I do know it. And I don’t care.”

As he sauntered away in search of another target, I felt like ripping off my headset, upending my computer terminal, and marching to the nearest elevator. But I managed to muster the last remnants of my self-control and instead gripped the sides of my desk so tightly I thought I was about to snap my tendons.

Careful, careful. He obviously knows you were once a sales manager. Just as he has also checked into your background and found out about the Kreplin assault. And he’s such a twisted bully, he now wants to see if he can inspire you to detonate again.

So I inhaled my pride, turned my attention to my computer screen, lined the cursor up with the first phone number of the day, and…

“Hi there, Ms. Susan Silcox? It’s Ned Allen here, from PC Solutions. Hope this is a convenient time to talk….”

It was a convenient time to speak with Ms. Silcox. As she explained, she was a housewife in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and she had just done that post feminist thing of giving up work to look after her five-month-old son, Michael. She surfed the Net whenever she had a free moment (“It makes me believe I’m still connected to the outside world and not imprisoned in baby land all the time”), so, sure, she’d be happy to upgrade to our $329 software bundle.

“Hang on, I’ll just get my credit card….”

Got her. Not that she needed much persuasion. This sort of tele-home-marketing” was aimed directly at the domestically incarcerated-people like Ms. Silcox, who were stuck at home, felt bored, lonely, sequestered, and looked upon the tele sales rep as a temporary friend, someone who was happy to listen to their complaints about a husband who was on the road four days a week. Or a daughter who was a big-deal executive at one of the Hollywood studios, but hadn’t bothered to call her widowed mother in St. Louis for the past three months. Or the husband in Sacramento forced into early retirement at fifty-seven, who was now spending nine hours a day in cyberspace because he didn’t really know what else to do with his time. Or … As I quickly discovered, the trick to tele-home-marketing was to come across as a sympathetic voice in the telephonic wilderness. Unlike the sort of tele sales we used to practice at CompuWorld, we weren’t dealing with a large, established company client base. At PC Solutions, we hustled individual consumers-99 percent of whom certainly didn’t need what we were plugging. So what you had to peddle them was fellowship. Within the space of a few short minutes, you had to become their buddy, their ally, their confidant. You didn’t sell them a product; you sold them a sense of personal affiliation, the subtext of which was: We have a relationship here. It didn’t matter that this relationship would last only for the duration of the phone call. The object of the exercise was to connect. Once you connected, you closed.

The problem was: Only one in twenty customers was willing to let you make that connection. Most of the time your call was greeted with an immediate dismissal-which was still infinitely preferable to the sort of bored schmuck who took up twenty minutes of your time, hemming and hawing, making you repeat your sales pitch two or three times, then finally telling you, “Nah, it’s not for me.”

Clowns like that were commonplace within the PC Solutions customer base. My average working day involved seventy calls, fifty of which were of the “instant hangup” variety. Of the remaining twenty, at least fifteen of these customers had no intention of buying anything from you… but were delighted at the opportunity to talk at your expense. (During my second day on the job, for example, I spent twenty minutes playing grief counselor to a woman in Myrtle Beach, Florida, who had just lost her pet Pekinese. When I finally got her back to the issue of the software bundle, she then informed me, “Oh, I sold my computer to a friend a year ago.”) In the end, there were only five calls a day where you had the chance of closing. And since the weekly quota was fifteen sales, it’s no wonder that there was such a desperate atmosphere in the cattle car. Remember those old turn-of-the-century photos, showing hundreds of hollow-eyed workers hunched over sewing machines in a factory, desperate to fulfill their daily allotment of thirty potato sacks? There were times during the working day when I’d stand up for a moment from my terminal, stretch my hyper tense shoulders, look out on the frantic, heads-down landscape of the cattle car, and think, This is the sweatshop of the future. A place where-like some Union Square shirt factory in 1900s New York-the workers survive or perish, depending on whether they meet their quotas. Cyberspace meets the bottom line.

Having closed the sale to Ms. Susan Silcox of Shaker Heights, Ohio, I had now moved thirteen units this week. Considering that it was only 9:05 on Thursday morning, I wouldn’t have worried terribly about reaching the quota of fifteen units by 4:45 on Friday afternoon. But thanks to Rubinek’s punitive action against me, I was forced to find an additional three sales within the next two days. Not impossible, but..

.

The rest of the morning was a total strikeout. Every number I tried didn’t answer or was an instant “no sale.” At 11:45 I took a fifteen-minute lunch break: five minutes gobbling a soggy egg salad sandwich bought at the snack bar situated on the ground floor of our office building, the final ten minutes spent standing outside the main entrance in the bracing cold, wolfing down two Winstons in the company of a dozen other nicotine addicts from the cattle car.

“Heard you gave the Jellyfish some lip this morning,” said a Latino-looking guy who introduced himself as Jamie Sanchez (and who devoured four Salems in the same time that I smoked my two cancer sticks).

“You call Rubinek the “Jellyfish’?”

“Yeah-‘cause the guy’s a blob with nasty tentacles that sting. How many extra units did he give you?”

“Three.”

“You gonna make it?”

“I have no choice. Does he pull this shit often?”

“Man, the Jellyfish lives to pull everybody’s chain. There was this guy, Charlie Larsson, thirty-something, real educated and respectable, used to be some kind of a trader at Kidder, Peabody before some big layoff…. Anyway, the Jellyfish hated his button-down ass, aud was on his case day in, day out. Kept finding reasons to up his quota, kept canine him “Mr. Die Shot Wall Street.” One afternoon.

Charlie couldn’t take it no longer, and suddenly, out of nowhere, he put his fist right through his terminal screen. Poor bastard had to be rushed to Roosevelt Hospital with his hand still inside the monitor. Didn’t see him ever again.”

“Why the hell does PC Solutions allow Rubinek to behave this way?”

“Simple: He makes them money, so they love him. Anytime someone complains to management, they tell the Jellyfish, who immediately doubles their quota for the week, which means they’re, like, automatically dead. Life in the cattle car is kind of cut and dry: You don’t like how the game is played-tough. Problem is, where are you gonna go after you walk out the door?”

I didn’t want to consider such a question, so I hurried back up to my workstation and made call number twenty-two of the day.

“Hi there, Mr. Richard Masur? It’s Ned Allen here, from PC Solutions. I hope this is a convenient time to talk….”

“PC Solutions? I’ve been hoping to hear from you people for a while. Got a problem with my Windows 95 CD-Rom drive. It doesn’t run the disk automatically anymore….”

Bingo.

“Well, that’s officially a problem for Microsoft. And since you bought your computer from us in February ‘ninety-six, I’m afraid that your software warranty is long expired. However, the good news is that we’re offering brand-new cutting-edge software in a phenomenal bundle for only …”

Sold. Ninety minutes later, I closed unit number fifteen. Thank you, Ms. Sherry Stouffer, a self-employed yoga instructor from Cambridge, Mass. Eighty-two minutes after that (the “order dispatch software” on our server logs the exact time of the sale), I sold unit sixteen to a Mr. A. D. Hart, a freelance writer in San Jose, California. And then, at 4:31-a mere fourteen minutes before quitting time-I scored the final coup of the day, as units seventeen and eighteen were bought by the reverend Scott Davis, a Unitarian minister in Indianapolis, who was planning to install the bundle in his church computer and make a gift of the second bundle to an inner-city poverty project in which he was involved.

I was on a winning streak-one of those gold-dust moments in sales where everything suddenly changes gears, and the music of change is on your side. Five sales in five hours. It was a windfall beyond my dreams. My increased quota for the week already reached-a full day before the Friday deadline. As I stood up from my terminal at 4:45 P.M.” I couldn’t help but feel that luck might just be returning to my corner.