Restructuring to Better Serve Customers by Maury Shepherd Nobody told me it would be like this. Trudge. Trudge. Trudge. Get up. Shower. Put on the uniform -- panty hose, silk shell, crepe de chine suit, power 2 inch pumps. Grab briefcase. Commute. Pay tolls. Park in assigned spot. Walk between towering buildings. Wave to concierge. Drop off dry cleaning. Look at ceiling while waiting at elevator with other suited wall-watchers. Push floor button. Breathe lightly and don't cough as elevator stops on every floor. Walk hallway. Enter department. Enter regulation-size cubicle. Check in-box. Start computer. Read e-mail. Get coffee. Check voicemail. Begin new day. Again. I went to college. I played by the rules. I earned my degree. I earn my salary. I have a 401(k) and a Matching Gifts Program. Isn't this what it's supposed to be? Is this being an "adult," a "grown-up," a "responsible individual," a "success?" So why am I numb? Elise Pantori. 25 years old. Writer/editor in a corporate public relations department of a Fortune 500 company. Number 24892 to the company, serial number 290489KL3 on my company issue laptop computer. There's my stats. Brevity is appreciated around here. My job is to twist words. Turn issues. Give any situation a positive spin. Gloss it. Coat it. Cover it. Never lie outright, just manipulate the truth. Leave out important facts that would impact the positive story. Minimize negativism. Put out fires. Channel crises into "learning opportunities." They've harnessed my innate optimism, coupled it with my English degree and love of writing, and ran it through the $12 million highly touted state of the art corporate machine and produced me. A "communications officer." A spin doctor. Inspected by 54. Walks, talks, spins truths. Nothing is bad. "We're number one. Love me, love my company. Work hard, get ahead. Lay-offs? No, we are restructuring to better serve our customers. It's not about job loss, it's about efficiency. We care about you. We're your family." Nah, I'm not jaded. When I'm not doing that, I'm coming up with new corporate words -- the ones where you take a noun, add "ize" and call it brilliant. Like corporatize. I.e. "He isn't corporatized yet." (Meaning he still has an individual personality which, unfortunately, pisses off all those who are already corporatized into banality.) Or just use the noun as a verb. Like transition. I.e., "We're transitioning into a new structure." (Meaning lay-offs.) I'm also responsible for creating easy to remember acronyms for new initiatives, and plans to make them part of the corporate culture (corporatize them). Indoctrinate them into the minds of the "worker bees," if you will. That term isn't my own. That one I learned in a big meeting. The kind with boxed lunches all around and cookies served at 4 p.m. It might have even been termed a "strategy session" and held off-site in some hotel suite somewhere. I can't remember. The meetings are starting to blur. So are the acronyms. AIM -- Assess, Improve, Maintain. STAR -- Service That Attracts Recognition. TQM -- Total Quality Management. STOP -- See Through Old Procedures. GUEST -- Greet, Use Name, Empathize, Smile, Thank. That's the model for effective customer service, I'm told. People really get off if you use their name. Not me. I could see that they just read it off of my check and that they didn't know me, care about me, or remember me. I just want reasonable prices, effective products, and speedy, efficient service. But that's just me. And apparently people like me don't return the survey questionnaires, or the corporate marketing types discount our opinions because they would be too expensive to implement. Much cheaper to get a front-line employee to use a name. Then if the initiative fails, its effectiveness can't be measured anyway. Too many other mitigating factors. That way no one gets hung. That's how most programs are designed to begin with. If no one is accountable for its failure, but is in the spotlight if it's a success, then that's a winning initiative. No one wants to stick their neck out too far. Remember the parable. It'll get cut off. It's also my job as the 25-year-old female with 4 years at the company and ne'er a finance class behind me to write the quarterly financial statements, the corporate earnings releases and lo and behold, the chairman's column in the monthly newsletter. The banner says "with Joe Chairman" not "by Joe Chairman." It's by me. Little old me. I put the words in his mouth. I make him empathetic, witty, caring yet stern, concerned, positive, excited about the company and the prospects for the future and appreciative of every employee's hard efforts. I make him the "good communicator," the one who can translate complex financial jargon into readable prose or understandable speeches. Me, who didn't know an ROE from an EPS until recently, and I'm not so sure I'm glad I now know. I think those brain cells could be better used. But they've stuck in there as part of my corporatizing. Along with NPV and ROA and P/E. Now I can read all those tiny columns of symbols and digits in The Wall Street Journal (note that the "the" is part of the paper's official title). That's another one of those useless bits of corporate PR trivia I've come to know. Official news media names and who owns who. Where will that really get me? Nowhere I want to go, I'm sure. I said earlier I'm not jaded. I refuse to admit that I am. If I'm jaded then I'm corporatized. If I'm corporatized, I'm beat. Not Jack Kerouac's beat. Not like hip, beatific. Beaten, really. Lost. Defeated. I refuse to succumb to that. No matter how many times I have to replace my tongue because it has so many holes bitten through it. No matter how many cracks of the PMS 211 and 454 corporate-colored whip. No matter how many strategy sessions and corporate retreats and stock option carrots are dangled in front of my nose. I may be a prisoner of war, but I hold out hope for release or escape. Someday. Still I trudge. Maybe I am beaten, defeated, lost anyway, despite my attempts at holding on to a life of meaning. Or perhaps because of it. I used to say lobotomize me so I won't have to think about so many things. Ignorance truly is bliss. Intelligence and passion are curses sometimes. I'm a Scorpio too. So to top it all off, I'm romantic and idealistic and I expect life to have some sense of purpose. Now I have a function, but no purpose. I think about David Byrne and the Talking Heads (the "the" is not part of their official title). "You may ask yourself, 'how did I get here?'" That's me. Wondering where my beautiful house, my large automobile, my life, my happiness has flown to. Washed away in the water flowing underground. The tragedy is not that it took my happiness. It's that it left me here. To march aimlessly onward in this endless parade. I think I'm in hell. It's only when I dream that there is any sense of reality. Even the sequined pigs and the rare white tigers and the high school acquaintances playing kitchen appliances as a back up rhythm section for the Rolling Stones there make more sense than the day to day. Still I trudge. It must be some sort of divine retribution. What crime have I committed? What horrible karma did I pick up? Who knows? All I know is I'm headed to the airport, again, to get on another plane to fly to another city to sit through another meeting to take more notes to become further corporatized. I have my laptop with the PCMCIA modem so I can dial up and access my e-mail. I have my black ballistic woven nylon rectangular travel bag with built-in wheels, filled with the requisite corporate casual wear. I have my corporate credit card, my itinerary, my beeper, and my briefcase of course, with a couple of extra US Banker, BusinessWeek and Fortune magazines to pass the time. I don't even pay attention as I walk through the airport, dragging my baggage behind me. There are people walking by, some joyous as they head out on vacation, some saddened as they say goodbye to a distant relative. But I have that businessperson walk. The fast-paced, beat-the-market, my ass-is-so-tight kind of strut that keeps the upper body still so as not to swagger. You have to be a vice president to do that. I've carefully learned the proper walk, such that it is now involuntary. Like breathing. I get to the counter, hand over my tickets -- I'm headed to Miami this time. The flight is non-stop for once. Usually I get shuffled through Charlotte or Philadelphia or Cincinatti as part of the business class frequent traveler get the least expensive flight out there without putting the employee through too much hell plan. One, or even two transfers or layovers, depending on the length of the trip, is considered acceptable. But this time it was non-stop. And they were serving dinner too. I wondered how my secretary got this one through. The airline clerk at the counter told me they had changed my flight and that it would be loading at another gate. C-15. I was at A-23. Needless to say, it was quite a haul to get to the new gate: down escalators, under the runway, up escalators, through the B terminal, down again, up again and into the C terminal. But I'd been through this before. And my cart had wheels. And walking was better than sitting sometimes anyway. Besides, I didn't have the energy to get angry. I didn't have the energy for much anymore. I thanked the lady, took my boarding pass and set off for the new gate. The flight didn't leave for about an hour -- it was business practice to be at the airport one hour prior to a flight -- so I had time to amble rather than push it. I tried to relax, but I just couldn't pull off the laid-back look of the bearded guy in the T-shirt carrying a backpack with a rolled up sleeping bag attached. Not with the corporate fare. I was jealous of him. That's why I don't look at other people much. Reminds me of my own sad state. I guess I sound like I'm complaining, don't I? A lot of people would be overjoyed to be 25, flying around on the corporate jet, passing out the corporate credit card, making $50,000 a year. There are a lot of wretched people in the world. I'm just wretched in my own way. I'm not poor, as in money. I've got plenty of that. I'm just poor in terms of happiness. In terms of life. I think I'm depressed. Really depressed. The mentally ill kind. The drug me into indifference kind. But I'm too apathetic to go to a doctor. I just go to work every day. Do what I have to do. Play the game. The Hindus and the Buddhists were right. Existence is suffering. Our only hope is to escape. I sat in my window seat. The seat next to me was empty, and the flight was scheduled to take off in five minutes. I couldn't believe I might get to spend the three-hour flight without some coughing, farting, belching, rifling through pocketbook or briefcase, trying to start a conversation, suffering through a boring life companion. This was a lucky trip. The plane started to back up from the gate and the captain introduced the flight crew who began their how to put on the oxygen mask performance to the indifferent audience. This was a Boeing 737, equipped with two emergency exits, blah, blah, blah. I glanced at the person who was seated next to the emergency exit on my side of the plane, the one who would be responsible for not panicking and for turning the door open and throwing it out. He was a businessman, about 40 pounds overweight, and already chomping at the bit to be able to pull out his laptop after takeoff. My escape was in his hands. The captain came on the loudspeaker and started his weather report and flying altitude and the we value your business stuff in his most calming captain's voice. We were third in the lineup and would be taking off soon. Please remember no smoking or use of any electronics during takeoff. And keep your seats in the upright position. Right. We turned the corner for our turn at the end of the runway and I felt the engines run up for their test. Everything seemed fine, so the calm captain pushed the throttle forward and the g-forces pushed everyone to the back of their seats. We sped down the runway and I felt the nose go off the ground, then the back wheels. We were airborne, on an uneventful takeoff. The passengers began to relax, and the overweight businessman in the emergency exit row immediately reached for his laptop. He must have had some powerful deadline to meet, that or he was in a firmly-fused, codependent relationship with his computer, because he couldn't wait to put his fingers on the keyboard. We hadn't been cleared to use electronics yet, but the guy had waited long enough and must have decided it was worth the risk to foul up the navigational equipment by firing up his spreadsheet. A few seconds later, there was a loud bang from the back of the plane and we dipped sharply to the left. "Ladies and gentleman ..." the captain said over the speaker, but no one heard him but me because they were too busy screaming and watching their lives quickly flash before them. He said something else, but I didn't catch that, and the oxygen masks were falling from the overhead bins, and the noise of hurtling through the air was deafening to the point of peaceful silence. Womblike, I thought, even though my spell-check says that's not a word. Always wants to replace it with tomblike. We had no recovery time. My uncle had always said landings and takeoffs were the most dangerous time because you were so close to the ground that the pilot didn't have time to get the plane under control or make adjustments in the cushion of altitude. Well, looks like he was right about that. He'll be able to use that I told you so story for years. My life didn't flash before my eyes. What life? I didn't scream. I don't think my heart even beat any faster. I looked out the window and saw we were over a suburb. We were going down into a neighborhood of cookie-cutter houses with corporate issue aggregate driveways. Fitting. I closed my eyes. What a lucky trip. I was finally going to a destination I had dreamed about. Then in a burst through the sound barrier, everything went black. And everything was crystal clear. Escape.

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