Cubicle Envy

Geoff Jarok

Description

In the cubicle building blocks of American industry, April of 2009 brought workers little more than meeting requests to pull them away from barely hidden job searches and online gambling losses on their 401Ks.Product Wave, Ltd., a global software company headquartered in Massachusetts, was just as rife with frustration, dotted among endless rows of cubes, as any company withering in the recession. The difference was that the workers were still engaged hoping for a turn-around. In fact, their efforts were so outstanding it earned them an indefinite salary and bonus freeze. Most employees were so busy worrying about the economy that they didnt notice management had authorized bonuses to be paid...to management.The bigwigs wouldve gotten away with it, if not for those meddling accountants. Long a disregarded entity within the halls of Product Wave, the rambunctious accounting team was given a chance to make noise by managements misstep. Follow them as they find friends and enemies across the corporate landscape, while making certain the bonus check goes nowhere, but back into the pockets of the cube dwellers who earned it. When the whistles stop blowing maybe the bottom line comes out a little differently than expected. Cubicle Envy is an offbeat look at a corporate world flush with cheeky office workers, rogue accountants, and middle managers just trying to get some work done so they can get out before 9:00PM.

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 09 juin 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781456616359
• Langue: English

Extrait

Cubicle Envy
 
 
By
Geoff Jarok

Copyright 2013 Geoff Jarok,
All rights reserved.
 
 
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
http://www.eBookIt.com
 
 
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-1635-9
 
 
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

 
For Samantha, whose love is too big to fit in an email attachment.
Chapter 1
-Let’s do some onboarding and get you in the loop-
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
 
“I was in the copy room getting a printout and this guy walks in. I remembered I had seen his picture in the financial statements so I knew he was big time. It was William Ormsby-Gore, you know the VP of sales. He had some lackey with him. For the sake of the story we’ll call him Toady McKissass. Like I’m an illegal immigrant he pretends that I’m not there and he says to Toady, ‘It’s been a long time since I used one of these things,’ referring to the copy machine. Then I said ‘The first thing I like to do is loosen my tie a bit so the blood can flow properly to my finger to press the button, plus it makes people think I’m human.’ I didn’t say that. In fact, I just grabbed my stuff and left and then I did a voodoo prayer for a paper jam which surprisingly was ineffective.” Chris had a rare turn as the lunchroom emcee.
“Who is this guy?” Dennis met J Lo once and he now knew more about her via internet searches than he did about the upper management of his employer.
“Dennis, dude you’re in marketing and you don’t even know who the VP of Sales is?” Chris’ role as an accountant provided that he meet a daily quota of questioning. Lunch hour was as good a time as any. His cohort, Lisa, liked to ask more pointed questions.
“Remember how steamed we were in February after the last ‘Town Meeting’ when they mentioned that we missed the earnings mark by two million bucks because we couldn’t get the final deal done with Lever? Meaning the deal didn’t get cleared because Accounting thought the revenue recognition was too aggressive,” explained Lisa. “Yeah, well that was freakin’ Ogre opening his big mouth on that one too.”
“Oh yeah, yeah, yeah,” Dennis recalled, his Lead Nobody title from marketing shining brightly.
“That’s the British guy that Kelly likes?” Dennis prodded
“Na-uh. Well, I mean he does look like Pierce Brosnan a little bit,” Kelly offered like she was at a teenage sleepover.
“Yeah, but with a faker accent. I bet he’s from New Jersey. Like that Rockefeller guy. He’s got a German accent, but he says he’s a Rockefeller. OK, please don’t cut me up Jeffrey Dahmer Rockefeller!” A howl rattled through the kitchen at Lisa’s analogy.
The door opened slowly. It was Philip.
“Speaking of creepy,” Kelly muttered softly. Empty paper bags and plastic-ware were strewn all over the table.
“Philip, are you gonna break the microwave again?” Lisa was on a caffeine rush after drinking her Coke. Philip ignored her.
“What’s the sign on the door?” he asked. While Lisa took another swig from the bottle, Chris explained.
“Our manager got a complaint that we were too loud in the lunchroom so then HR got involved and then the sign magically appeared saying please keep the door closed to preserve the work environment.”
“I think they’re just trying to smoke us out,” exhorted Lisa as she slammed the bottle down on the table harder than she planned.
“They send in spies to cook nasty fish in the microwave and stink the place up. Philip, are you cooking fish?” Lisa’s eyes had a way of squinting slightly when she was being jocular as if she were always trying to sight the next target.
“I was going to eat it, but maybe I’ll just leave it in your cube.” He had played these games before with Lisa. There was a line of demarcation in regard to their playful bickering, but more often than not Philip did not fight back when Lisa crossed it.
Lisa gave up that fight and turned back to the table. “Anyway, I think it’s about time for another ESO.” Lisa was fond of code words and acronyms. The others figured she got off on being secretive, and they were happy to play along. In reality she just liked making shit up to seem more glorified than her title that wasn’t much more important than Dennis’.
“What’s an ESO?” Dennis asked.
“I can’t tell you,” Lisa quickly replied. Employee Sponsored Outing had lost its sexiness along the way. She couldn’t actually recall what ESO stood for anymore, but she wasn’t letting on.
“Can I come?” Dennis said hopefully.
“No, you can’t. It’s at a secret location. You can hang out with Philip. Go…I don’t know, listen to that Indian Bollywood music. What is that shit you listen to, Philip?
“Brazilian folk music?” he said quizzically, trying to connect the dots that were often scrambled in her mind.
“Oh, yeah. Brazilian, Indian, it’s all the same,” Lisa said while the others marveled in snickers at her flippancy. They knew that when she had an idea she wasn’t going to suffer any distractions.
“Look, Dennis, you can take my spot. I’m still trying to work out Lisa’s last hair-brained idea,” Chris graciously offered.
“Nice try, bud, but we own your soul,” Lisa joked.
“Sadly, that’s probably true,” admitted Chris.
Chris looked at his coworkers and realized how much he’d miss the minutiae of eating lunch at the kitchen table. It was April of 2009 and the waterline of the recession was too high to pretend nothing was happening. Since no one is an expert swimmer when they’re being pushed underwater, he figured another job could be a life preserver. He could muster sweat equity for the Devil and it wouldn’t bring him back to these cheap laughs or familiar smiles. The market of open positions barely threw scraps to the qualified much less offered ready-made companionship, but something convinced Chris he had to go.
He, like the others, was with Sound Tech Inc. before they were purchased by Product Wave Ltd. While the former office in Wakefield wasn’t much to speak about in general, a lot of time was spent in the kitchen during the glory days of the dotcom boom. Over time the company spent money to make the kitchen corporate state of the art. It would often hold twenty people for lunch without too much trouble. Sitting on a butcher block island were bowls of M&Ms or Cheeze-Its and underneath was a full-capacity dishwasher. A TV and foosball table occupied an adjoining room. And, to HR’s delight, there was a big soundproof door to keep it all in. Even after the bust the tables and chairs were never replaced, but they worked fine and gave a good view of the Italian tile molding job that was stopped halfway through once funds dried up.
Sound Tech never made any money, but the R&D was so impressive that a suitor was easy to find. In 2006 the purchase was made by Product Wave, Ltd. based in Cambridge, England. They scraped away the old management, both beloved and hated, but for the most part kept the same staff. A year ago was the beginning of the corporate simplification with the first maneuver to move corporate offices from Wakefield, Massachusetts to Waltham, Massachusetts. Physically it wasn’t a massive move. It was a question of how the soup would bind with multiple companies under the PW umbrella coming to the same site.
With the economy down Chris had to think about a lot of factors. He had been in a long relationship with Donna, beautiful Donna, who as a veterinary assistant didn’t know much about corporate life, but she wasn’t only sensitive to dogs in pain. She could see Chris was having a hard time. He proposed to her over the previous Christmas, but the timetable for the wedding seemed to inch further and further away as if the newsmen were reporting on the sinking chances of the nuptials rather than declining stock prices. It would happen someday as they were in love just at the wrong time.
Chris was already underpaid compared to his peers and now PW instituted a salary freeze for at least half the year. He was still young in his career, though, and so he wasn’t used to moving from job to job on speculation that things were better elsewhere. He had spent five years at Ernst and Young; probably two years too many of the sixty-hour workweeks. He said it was experience that kept him there, but in fact it was fear. Now he had come to the same spot. He was leaving PW. Chris had a couple of second interviews lined up so it was all, but done, though he’d been quiet with his co-workers.
The crisp energy of springtime in New England would have permeated to PW if the staff had windows out of which to look - management offices rimmed around the outside of the building. A heap of cubicles caught the remainder of the staff in the middle of the floor. Rows of cubes all set up the same way like a phalanx that can bring the people closer together or destroy them all with equal speed and efficiency. With the first quarter close completed, the finance team was just trying to clean up like London after the Blitz. Papers with notes scribbled in the corners in multiple sets of handwriting, binders left open to chapter and verse, boxes brimming with old reconciliations, and post-it notes artistically stuck to plastic, but already withering.
Chris was fairly organized so his cleanup had been quick; Lisa less so. They were opposites, which made them work well as an accounting team. He was more serious and reserved. While Chris had come to care for these people and listened to their daily thoughts about work and family, he preferred to keep a level of anonymity. They had met Donna at the summer outing of the previous year and it took them about a month of badgering to finally get Chris to bring her picture into work. It sat guarded in his cube by the square, plastic, pencil holder. Conversely Lisa was an open book for whom, if she had been hiding anything, it couldn’t possibly have been legal