Company

Chris drags his pita through the thick puddle of tzatziki on his plate as Tammy nods along with him, attacking her salad with a plastic fork.

The Grecian Gyro is just about the only lunch option in the area, and it’s overstuffed in every way imaginable. Office workers cram the entryway and spill out into the parking lot, waiting to get their orders in. The cash register chirps and clangs over the grumble of the open kitchen, where a collection of damp, cramped cooks work the line. Even in the air — the oregano and char, an indelible fried stench — seems to take up physical space.

***

I’d worked in a variety of office settings before I ended up here at the headquarters of a logistics company, tucked away in a flavorless business park by the airport. I’d been the lackey, exposed, stuck in the open area in front of the offices. Managers on their way to meetings with other managers would empty their stale coffee into the plants on my desk.

I’d once been assigned an office with doors on either side, connecting a hallway to the breakroom. I was the short-cut to the coffee, the lingering point for the chattering, hustling sales guys who liked to compare the size of their deals at top volume. I worked my way up to a standard four-sided office with a single door and one rule: I wasn’t allowed to close the door.

But this is my first time in a cubicle.

I’ve been deposited into the paneled box that belonged to Laura’s last attempt at fortifying her position. I learned that it’s not so much a buddy she’s looking for; she wants a spy, a favorite she can leverage for the dirt on who’s slacking off and, above all, who’s talking shit about her. My predecessor had bolted after a little more than a year.

I find myself picking at the cube’s muddy green walls, a kind of carpeting that should block out sound but doesn’t. I notice that if you stare long enough you can see a subtle pointillistic pattern emerge: tiny dots of mustard, dull brown, rust. A sickly, paler army green. When you make your way through the rows of cubicle hedges, you only register the blend as a singular factory-matched swatch, but squint and focus, and you can see another layer of ordered chaos underneath.

Troll dolls, souvenirs and framed family photos dot the landscape of cubicles, but one feature is ubiquitous: rearview mirrors. Tammy, whose cube is attached to mine, explains that this is survival gear, the way you can tell who is creeping up behind you, who’s sneaking a glimpse at your screen. Every so often, Tammy’s eyes appear over the partition between us, eyebrows up in warning: Laura.

My job is to coordinate with the PR and marketing agencies and their relentlessly cheerful reps who take us to fake-friendly steakhouse lunches and charge us hundreds of dollars to copy our logo to a disk, a specific late-1990s kind of grift. Our conversations skate right at surface level, which works out fine for me because I can’t seem to get my brain to go deep on this business of logistics. Every explanation evaporates on contact. There’s trucking and telecommunications and supply chains, but exactly how it all connects is a mystery. It may be a fascinating industry, but its appeal remains stubbornly hidden to me.

None of this really matters, because the only tangible work I produce is the monthly employee newsletter. I spin stories about people I don’t know doing jobs I can’t decipher in warehouses from Albuquerque to Mississauga. I drop in photos of smiling, sprawling teams and gold-watch-receiving long-timers and try to imagine their lives.

When I assemble the mock-up of my first production, Laura comes back to me with just one note: “It’s fine and you can put my name on it as the editor good job thanks.”

***

The rearview mirrors aren’t just about Laura. There’s a kind of low frequency murmur of rumor and distrust that hisses along just below the surface of this place. I haven’t been with the company for more than a few weeks when the buzz heats up that one of the satellite offices, located about an hour and a half away, is being shut down.

For the old hands, this is soap opera-level high drama.

Long before there were warehouses in Albuquerque and Mississauga, decades before the company was sold to private equity and replanted in the shadow of the big city airport, this office, dubbed the “The Branch,” had been the hub and heart of it all. The founding family, gone now but for their name on the logo, had started up a little freight transportation and cargo hauling business with deep roots in this modest town. I soon learn that a tight-knit, fanatical workforce still occupies the original building. These are the die-hards, the protectors. The last gasp of tradition, standing their dwindling ground against the private equity vultures. And they are in a panic.

It gets so bad that one Thursday, the human resources director drives down to The Branch to personally reassure everyone that their office is not closing. The very next day, everyone in The Branch is handed pink slips and the namesake-founder’s office is shut down for good. Security goes on high alert in our office as word gets out that disgruntled staffers are threatening to drive up to HQ and open fire on HR.

As it turns out, neither the petty dramas of a hyperactive rumor mill nor the actual threat of death is enough to make the days trudge along any faster. I look at the 401k brochure sitting on my desk. Someone in HR had given it to me earlier in the week and explained that employees weren’t eligible to participate in the plan until their one-year anniversary. I throw the brochure in the trash.

***

One of the only perks of the company is the casual dress code, but you quickly realize it’s a liability when you’re back in the job hunt. More than once, Laura had eyed a suited-up employee with suspicion, whispering to one of us, “Do you think he’s going on an interview?”

Navigating a wardrobe change in your car or a public restroom isn’t ideal, so we make a deal to camouflage each other by dressing up every time any one of us has an interview. There are about seven or eight people in our group of co-conspirators, and the small sacrifice of squeezing into high heels and neckties pays off when Chris becomes the first to get out, giving the rest of us hope that we’ll soon follow.

We battle through the weeks by scouring job boards, emailing resumés, and putting in the bare minimum on what little work we have to do. And then one day, Tammy and I receive an unexpected gift: Laura’s husband is transferred to China for work, and she joins him there. Desperate striver though she was, I can find a bit of grace for my manager in her absence. I imagine how uncomfortable it must have been to live in her head, where every move is a motive and every question is a challenge to prove that you deserve the title, that you have worth. Mostly, though, I’m relieved to be out from under the weight of her gaze and her anxieties. Now that she’s a day away from me, I replace her name with mine as editor of the newsletter.

The satisfaction of this tiny victory is short-lived when Laura’s hovering presence in the rearview mirror is replaced by a surly man with a vague title whose only job seems to be monitoring our comings and goings. He tells us the company’s cracking down and productivity better go up — or else.

“I’ve heard about how some of you are pushing it, coming in at 8:15 or 8:30, leaving before 5. That’s not happening anymore,” he growls.

With the gauntlet officially thrown down, I start arriving half an hour late instead of my usual fifteen. Tammy and I drive to far-flung corners of town for lunch, sometimes leaving our cubes for hours. People marvel at our brazenness, but I know I’m not lucky enough to get fired. I also know the tough guy patrolling the halls doesn’t know my name. He stands at the front door every morning as I walk past him at 8:45, 9:00, staring right into his eyes.

On those long, slow drives into work, my mind drifts back to my last job. Sure, I wasn’t allowed to close the door to my office, and yes, the intensity and hustle over clients and deals and deadlines could border on manic, but when I peer into that particular rearview mirror of memory, I can see that none of that mattered. There was a loudness that lifted you. An ambition and energy and pace that permeated the walls and thundered down the floors. You couldn’t help but get swept up into it. I remember a group of us laughing over the fact that we’d all taken pay cuts to work there. No one cared when we got there in the morning. They trusted us to do the work, and we did. We stayed late, not because we had to or because someone told us to but because we wanted to. Here’s what I mean: It was fun.

I remember my sister telling me, “That’s not normal. No one likes their job that much.”

I’d hit the ceiling at that company. There was no place to grow and no livable wage in close range. I had to leave if I wanted to advance. So I came here, where the money is greener, but the grass certainly isn’t.

And now I’m beginning to realize, even the money isn’t as green as it might have appeared.

***

If the company was never much of a finely tuned machine, now the parts are starting to crumble and fall off. My printing vendor calls to tell me that, yet again, he hasn’t been paid. When I complain to accounting, they explain that I have to type up a memo that expressly says: Pay the printer. Otherwise, their policy is not to pay vendors. Someone else tells me this is the only way the company can cover payroll. My father tells me this is how you plan a bankruptcy.

I think of these conversations when Tammy and I meet Chris at the Grecian Gyro for lunch a few days later and he mentions that he had to call accounting more than once after he quit because they screwed up his final paychecks.

Eventually, the belt-tightening finds its way to the six-figure-salaried hall monitor manning the front door, and my nemesis is kicked to the curb. This is probably to no one’s surprise but his, and while I’m happy I don’t have to lock glares with him anymore, I’m not sure I’ve actually won this battle. Sure, I outlasted him, but that means I’m still here.

Soon after his exit, we’re called into the conference room for an all-hands meeting so the president can shoot down the latest rumor. No, he assures us, the company is not being sold to Ryder. I plod back to my cube and look out the window. A Ryder truck is idling in the parking lot.

***

Just days shy of my one-year anniversary, I land a new job. With Laura still in China, I tender my notice to her boss, the vice president of the department and one of the only leadership team members to predate the private equity takeover. He has a sharpness about him that reminds me of the leaders at my old company, a no-nonsense business sensibility and drive that came through right away when I’d interviewed with him for this job. He was a selling point. Since then, I’ve wondered why he stays, how he can stand it.

I knock on his door to ask if he has a moment, and he waves me in as if to say, I knew this was coming.

“Is there anything we could do that would convince you to stay?” is what he says to me, but even he seems to realize how comical this statement is, and I can hear the unmistakable undertone just below the surface: Oh yeah, you’ve gotta get out of here.

I’m about a month into my new job when I get a call from Tammy. It’s a relief to be away from that place, but as soon as I hear her voice, I realize how much I miss my friend, my comrade, the one who could make me laugh through all the toxic absurdity of it all. I can’t imagine how our paths would have ever crossed if we hadn’t done time together at the company, and that’s about the only good thing to come out of it.

She tells me the morning started out the usual way. She came in around 45 minutes late and went straight to her cube. She could feel something different simmering in the air. People seemed fully tuned in, alive for a change. That’s when she spotted the police officers at the other end of the floor.

She laughed as she replayed the scene for me. I knew she was long past caring about the company’s deceits and melodramas, and I could picture her calmly sitting down at her desk, putting her purse away and switching on her computer as the frenzy swirled around her.

“Tammy!” The marketing assistant rushed over to her, breathless. “Didn’t you see the cops? They took her away in handcuffs!”

The story, as Tammy understood it, was that one of the more enterprising accounting assistants had been skimming money from the receivables. Of course, when the receivables are already shrinking and you’re scraping by with every penny, that kind of thing tends to get noticed. Or at least, eventually it does. For example, when a potential buyer starts the due diligence process.

Within weeks, Tammy would leave for a new job, too. A few months later, the company would declare bankruptcy. And then one day, the last of the troops would be discharged as the company finally churned itself into the ground.

From what I hear, Ryder got quite a deal on the leftovers.