Chapter 4
Chapter Four
HAPPILY EVER BEFORE
Arden
If someone had told me that my entire sense of self-worth would be reduced to a spreadsheet and a passive-aggressive email chain, I would have laughed.
I always think of that scene in Mean Girls where Cady is talking about life in Africa and the animals around the watering hole. She's talking about it in relation to students at the mall, but working in an office is the same. I don't exactly know what I was expecting. My points of reference for corporate-life didn't come from my mom and dad, whose careers took a different path than mine. My friends weren't much help because our interests couldn't have been more different. Stella stayed in Europe after a semester abroad, on more of an ‘Eat Pray Love’ journey than a career one. Ethan turned his love of anything outdoors into a career writing about it. The man of few words turned out to have no shortage of them. I made friends in some of my business classes before graduating, but most of them are the tadpole versions of the now finance-frogs that cluster across the room at the water cooler.
The office is less Silicon Valley startup, more Gordon Gekko's wet dream with a bull-pen that feels like a gladiator arena. Though twenty-something women are about as common here as unicorns in a Wall Street trading pit. I'm one of three, which means I've perfected the art of being simultaneously invisible and hyper visible.
This is meant to be my chance to prove I'm not just another millennial with an overpriced degree and an embarrassing number of dead houseplants. I mutter it in part to myself, because apparently talking to myself is my primary form of motivation these days. Talking to the plants that I continue to buy despite having no success in keeping them alive doesn't seem to be working. For either of us really.
My desk is a beautiful disaster, that's not an insult. Worse things have been said about me. Multiple half-empty water bottles, sticky notes with cryptic things to remember, and a new succulent I named Pricktor, after my boss Victor. Because, well, he's also a prick. He's the lead singer in my collection of ill-fated plants, though his backup band isn't looking much better these days.
This just isn't what I thought it would be. Or at least, not what I hoped. It's a far cry from the idea of being thirty-and-flirty-and-thriving, except I'm not thirty, and is anyone really thriving? I will be, right? This is just the beginning of the story. The main character always has some kind of work-hurdle before they get everything they've ever wanted. I just would like to feel like I am something more than a collection of student loans, attachment issues, and 3 a.m. dread.
I suppose Reid is right, it takes time. No matter how much I want to skip ahead.
Victor, the man not the succulent, who possesses all the charisma and subtly of one of those STD posters you see in the T station urging you to get checked, calls an all-hands meeting. And just like that the office transforms. His voice has everyone scurrying from the bull-pen of cubicles towards the large glass conference room with a view out into Boston herself.
The room has about as many seats as the Titanic had lifeboats, and who gets them works similarly. Not 'women and children' because again, unicorns, but it's based on seniority and importance. No one with a title below Director takes a seat while the rest of us stand gathered around the backs of the twenty seats as if we've picked allegiances.
"The Thompson Challenge," he declares. It's the word across the screen behind him and the only thing he says to silence the chattering amongst the group.
"As you know, every year this firm holds what we refer to as 'the Thompson Challenge.'"
Every poor schmuck here knows exactly what that means. The Hunger Games, where even golden boys like Reid emerged victorious and promptly fled. You can still see the difference in wall texture where first-year analyst Nathanial Wells got stabbed in the back (metaphorically, I think) and then punched the wall.
"The Vulcan Manufacturing account has been under management for three years. Take a brief, review it," he continues. "They are hemorrhaging money worse than one of you at a craps table. The CEO is stubborn, only a client of ours after pressure from the board."
I take a brief from the pile being circulated, immediately scanning through. Vulcan, with their clever reference to metalworking for a manufacturing company, has been losing market share faster than I lose bobby pins. Which considering I'm down to three from a pack of one-hundred-and-fifty I bought last month, is pretty alarming. They're stuck in the manufacturing equivalent of using a horse and buggy. Appropriate with their mythological inspired name. They might be functional, but it's embarrassingly behind the times.
And there it is. The real challenge isn't just figuring out how to improve market share, but getting them into the 21st century with a CEO that is interested in security of what's known.
I can practically hear the murmurs across the room already, planning for acquisitions, looking for the quick escape hatch.
"I don't care how you get this done. I care that it's done. Draft a proposal for acquisition and submit it by the end of the month." Victor continues. "This quarter we have two open seats for new associates…" He scans those of us standing in the back, the group that would undoubtedly be up for this type of step up. "Two of you," he repeats curtly. "This is how we will decide. The best strategy will be promoted. It will also become their first account under management."
I already work like an associate. I'm the one turning off the lights in the office, and this will be how I prove it. I'm scribbling notes on the yellow pad in my hands while Michael and Brent-number-two are standing next to me smirking with the same smug ' I got this in the bag' face they give themselves when talking to a woman at a bar.
Victor carries on for another ten minutes before the command of 'back to work,' has everyone running back to their cubicles. I return to mine and find Brent-number-two leaning against my desk. This is exactly the kind of behavior that got him the number-two spot to begin with. I find the other Brent far less offensive, if only because he at least pretends his eyes don't drift south during meetings.
"Bancroft." He sings through his far-too-white-teeth.
"Oh wow, you remember my name, super impressive." I say, and by the way his lip pulls up and his shoulders shrug, I don't think he realizes I'm being sarcastic.
"I've been thinking…"
"Careful, I've heard that can be dangerous." I yank my chair out from where he's got it trapped and take a seat. He laughs again, but I think our interpretation of the joke is different.
Brent-number-two, because apparently, we've reached a point where men are so interchangeable they require numerical categorization, deciding this is the perfect moment to grace me with his professional proposition.
My silence here is strategic and has him filling the space with the same blubbering babble he has in meetings when he has nothing to say but wants to be heard. Usually when I play the game of mental buzzword bingo to see how many of the same corporate empty words are bandied about between them.
"You know we have great synergy," he starts off, in a way that suggests this is peak seduction. Though from personal experience from a happy hour last month, I know full well what his peak seduction looks like and to be fair, it is about as appealing as his use of the word synergy.
I resist the urge to explain that 'synergy' is corporate speak for 'I have no actual plan.'
"Is that what we're calling it?" I cock my head ever so slightly to the side in a way that makes him shift between his feet. I've learned that hesitation is a language all its own and I'm becoming fluent.
My friends think I'm playing some elaborate game. Maybe I am. But this isn't just about a promotion. This is about proving that the girl who loved her business classes isn't going to become another statistic, another twenty-something who settles. There are enough ways in life women are expected to settle. With pants-pockets, in bed, my career won't be one of them.
Those 'Thirty Under Thirty' lists are psychological warfare, by the way. They're basically telling an entire generation that if you haven't changed the world by your thirtieth birthday, you might as well start collecting cats and giving up. Jokes on them, I'm much more of a dog person anyway.
A partnership would be an inflated way to describe what I think we could pull off, but watching Brent-number-two lean against my desk with a jawline and fortune-500-future-CEO smile, I know exactly what I'm doing.
Guys like Brent have connections that run deeper than merit while being the kind of handsome that makes people forgive his mediocrity. The type that peaked in his fraternity days but still maintains the confidence that comes from never having understood the word 'no' in his life.
His smile widens as I agree 'we should totally work together on this.' The words taste like compromise, but I swallow down the barbs of it. He's a shortcut wrapped in a Brooks Brothers suit and I'm just being pragmatic enough to use that. After all, Reid did say to find a partner.
I watch Brent swagger away, already mentally rehearsing how he'll tell this story to the other bros at their next happy hour.
Machiavelli would be proud. Or at least mildly impressed. He was more focused on being feared than loved. Fear seems to be a non-starter here on the basis of sex alone. And love? Well, that's not even on the docket. So sorry, Machiavelli, in this case, it might be best to be underestimated.