Who You Know (19 page)

The thing was, I was catching the vast majority of the errors. There was no such thing as an editor who caught every mistake the first time around. That was why documents were run by a few different editors a number of times. Having Eleanore constantly point out my errors made me wonder if editing was yet another thing I had no talent for. The thought that I could fail at this career too filled me with dread.

AVERY

O
ur graphic designer had come up with three logos, and we were testing them out on consumers, asking them which ones they preferred. One logo had a mortarboard on top of the
e
in Expert and spectacles that made up the middle line of the
e.
It was the corniest logo I'd ever seen. Another had a swoosh symbol encircling the
Expert Appliance
in a karma-wrecking shade of green. The last just had the words
Expert Appliance
in a shiny white and gray. The last one was classy, up-to-date, and offered the high-tech association we were going for. It was clearly the best choice, but everyone in the focus groups was choosing this boring swoosh thing or the bespectacled professorial one that looked like an owl on a kids' TV show who taught children how to subtract two from three or to determine how many licks it took to get to the center of a Tootsie-Pop.

I was getting unreasonably irritated. It wasn't the consumers' fault I was way behind and working overtime, knowing that we were coming up with an inferior product. These people were giving up their time, answering questions over the phone and in focus groups; I should be thanking them for their help.

Art was so kind and considerate. It was so nice to see a guy who really cared about his family.

Was he as wonderful in real life as he was online?

Maybe it was time I met him so I could find out for sure. We would meet in a public place of course, just in case he really was a psychopath. A restaurant. A nice one. He'd have gotten there a couple minutes before me. I'd enter the restaurant and see a good-looking man sitting at the bar. He'd turn and look right at me. My heart would race but I would tell myself that there was no way I could get that lucky. He would smile. “Are you by any chance . . .” he would begin. “Avery,” I'd finish. For a moment, I'd feel a little awkward, a little shy, but then he'd tell a joke, and we would start talking and laughing and wouldn't stop through the entire six-course meal or through the after-dinner drink at the bar. We wouldn't stop talking until we got on the dance floor. Then, my body, which had been hibernating for the last two years, would come alive again. His fingers grazing my arms would send shivers down my body. I would tremble with anticipation.

We would have lazy Sundays of slow sex and long, giggly conversations. We'd eat bagels and drink coffee and read the
New York Times
and rent videos and fall asleep on the couch, entwined in each other's arms.

I had to start dating soon—I was becoming too stuck in my ways. If it went on much longer, I wasn't sure I'd be able to make room for someone else in my life. I'd gotten a little too used to living alone. It was getting hard to imagine sharing my life with someone. But since Art and Les had come into my life, I remembered that, despite all the work relationships were, there was a lot I'd been missing out on. Art reminded me how nice it was to have romance and excitement in my life, and Les provided friendship and support. In many ways, Les played the role of the boyfriend without the sex and expectations. It was so nice to have someone in my life, someone to review the day's events with each night.

After work, Les and I went to our first swing dancing lesson. For the first half hour, the instructor reviewed the basic steps with us, then she spent the next half hour teaching us a couple of trickier steps and a dip. Les was a better dancer than I would have thought. For all his awkwardness in real life, his slumped posture and uneven gait, on the dance floor he had a gentle but self-assured lead. A couple of times I misunderstood his lead and stepped the wrong way. When Les and I tried to correct ourselves, we careened into another couple.

“Sorry, sorry,” I gushed to the couple.

“No problem,” the woman smiled.

“I think we're just about ready to go pro,” Les whispered to me. “We can call ourselves Twinkle Toes and the Foot Smasher.”

“Which one am I?”

“Twinkle Toes, of course.”

“I don't know, I think you're a better dancer than you think you are.”

“You're too kind.”

I had been so ferociously independent for so long, I'd forgotten how amazing it was to be close to someone, to have his warm hand on my back and his laughter in my ear.

After class, Les asked if I wanted to get a drink.

“Sure, but just one. I need to get some sleep. Work's been crazy.”

We walked to a nearby bar. I ordered a Chardonnay, and Les ordered a beer. We sat in a dimly lit corner in the back of the bar, at a sticky wood table.

“How are things going at work?” I asked.

He rolled his eyes. “We're about a month behind on the Expert Web site.”

“You're joking. Why so much?”

“Mark is just not a good manager.”

“Is he a good programmer?”

“Oh god no, he's awful.”

“Well how did he get promoted to manager then?”

Les shrugged. “His timing was right. He came to the company when the IT department was in its fledgling stages. They needed a manager, and he was there. He knows how to throw jargon-y terms around, and he sounds so confident in himself that if you don't know anything about technology, he can be convincing. Morgan loves him.”

“Mark can be charming,” I said.

“I guess. It's kind of funny though, because all of us who work for him know how full of it he is. He says the most ignorant things. Sometimes it's hard not to laugh. He'll say something that makes no sense. It would take more time and more money to do it his way, and the end result will be an inferior, unstable product, and if Rich or I or someone . . .”

“Who's Rich?”

“Another programmer. Really smart guy. Anyway, we'll suggest a better way to do it, and Mark will get really pissed and argue even harder for his stupid idea. I'm not very good at kissing up, but you'd think I could at least keep my mouth shut, but I just can't bear to see things done in such a completely moronic way. He's been making me do tech support stuff. It's ridiculous to have a programmer doing tech support, but it's his way of putting me in my place.”

“Why is it ridiculous?”

“I've got a very specialized knowledge. I make a lot more money than a tech support person does. It's just not a good distribution of resources. I mean I can do it, but it makes more sense for me to be doing something that's going to make the company money.”

“Mark sounds like such a power freak. He sounds like Sharon. She was a week late giving me the approval on the dishwasher research questions—and by the way, I wrote them and she didn't change a single word, she just kept them on her desk for three weeks collecting dust—and then yesterday she yelled at me for being behind. She sees absolutely no correlation with her holding up the questions for a week and our being exactly a week behind. And she's so snippy about it, you know? It immediately gets me on the defensive. Oh, and then, today she asked me to get this report up onto the intranet. I sent it to IT the second after she asked me to. I even cc'd her so she'd know I sent it. So a few hours later, she forwards me a message from Morgan and cc's him on it, asking me accusingly why the report isn't online yet. So I hit
REPLY ALL
and added Mark's name to the list and asked Mark if he knew when the file I sent him would go online. I wanted to write, ‘the file I sent to you the very second Sharon asked me to.' It was so obvious that Morgan had asked Sharon a few days ago to take it online and she was trying to blame the delay on me. Oh and that Mary from marketing is such a liar. She was supposed to send me this file three weeks ago. When I reminded her, it was obvious from her expression that she'd forgotten. Which is fine, why can't she just say, ‘Oops, sorry, I forgot'? But no, she claims she did send it but it must have gotten lost in e-mail. But strangely, she doesn't have a copy of what she sent. Whatever. . . . Why are you laughing?”

“Let's try not talking about work for a few minutes.”

I took a sip of my wine. “That was fun tonight, wasn't it?” I said.

“It was a blast. It's been awhile since I've been on the dance floor.”

“I wish I could take classes all day. If I didn't have a job, I could take all the classes I wanted. I could take tap and jazz and yoga and Pilates. I'd take drawing and writing. Why can't I just be independently wealthy? Work is so stressful. Oh, did I tell you how Sharon . . .”

We stayed for two more drinks, bitching about work the entire time. I didn't get home till way after my bedtime.

 

 

O
n the bright side: When you have a silly amount of work to do, the day goes very quickly.

“Avery.” It was Sharon, who lurked outside my doorway. “I need you to do something. I need you to create a PowerPoint presentation for the meeting tomorrow afternoon that gives an overview of everything we're working on for Expert. Present some graphs of the findings we've uncovered so far. I'll need it completed by ten so I'll have a chance to review it.”

What I thought was,
You want me to get this done by ten tomorrow morning? Are you crazy? I'm completely overwhelmed. Why can't you do it? And why didn't you tell me about this sooner!
But what I said was, “Okay, I'll get right on it.” If I wanted her job while she was on leave, this was the kind of thing I had to do.

Sharon gave me the project timeline for each department's part of the project, and I spent the rest of my day running around, trying to track down department heads to see where they were and whether they were on schedule.

Everybody seemed to be behind, but the IT department was way, way off schedule. I left three messages and an e-mail for Mark, but he never got back to me, so I called Les to try to figure out what was going on.

“Les, according to this project plan, Expert should already be testing parts of the site. The interface should be done, the storyboards should be done, the ‘Click here for more information' template should be complete. From what I can tell, nothing's even been started.”

“Sure, I'd love to go across the street and get a sandwich. I'll meet you in your office.”

I was puzzled for a minute, and then I realized that of course Les wouldn't be able to talk about it in the office.

We went to the deli across the street and each got a sandwich. We sat down at a table, and Les leaned in close.

“Mark hasn't even finished the specs for the Expert site yet,” he said in a hushed tone. “It should have been finished a month ago, but he's been working on this other project.”

“What does that mean, ‘the specs'?”

“Expert needs to approve the storyboards and interface, and then each of the programmers get their spec, essentially the details of their assignment for the site.”

“Doesn't he know how important this is?”

Les shrugged. “I've been in a panic about it, but what can I do?”

“Does Morgan know about this?”

“Not yet, but he will soon. I asked Mark about it, and he said the text hasn't been approved yet, which is true, but that's no reason to be delaying the rest of the project. You can throw copy up in no time at all, it's all the back-end stuff that takes time.”

We talked about work for a few more minutes, scarfed down our sandwiches, and returned to work.

Sharon left at five o'clock, I noticed bitterly. I stayed until ten, crunching numbers, creating charts and graphs, writing and rewriting talking points. When I finally left the office, I was so exhausted I could hardly see straight.