Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

by Barbara Ehrenreich

  Our half an hour is drawing to a close, I note with relief. She thinks I will need three months of coaching, meaning she will need $1,200. This will be a lot of work for me, she says, because she practices “coactive coaching,” which is “very collaborative.” “I want you to design me as your best coach,” she says, perhaps forgetting that she has already been not only designed but “branded.” If I were “designing” her, I’d throw in a major serotonin antagonist to damp down the perkiness, and maybe at some point I will find a tactful way to suggest that she chill. The session has left me drained and her more excited than ever: “We’ll dance together here!” is her final promise.

  I FEEL THAT I’m not finished with Morton. I should at least take the test so he’ll get his $60 and I will perhaps redeem the hour already spent with him. There are 200 questions on the WEPSS test, each in the form of a word or phrase which I am to rate from A to E in terms of its applicability to me; for example: dry, pleasure seeking, strength, peacemaker, and vengeful. I sit down at the dining room table with the intention of zipping through the test in ten minutes or less, but it’s not as easy as it looks. Am I special? From whose vantage point? What about looking good, which certainly depends on how much effort has gone into the project? Or what’s the difference—how can that describe anyone? Most of the terms are adjectives like judgmental, but there are plenty of nouns like fantasy and even a scattering of verbs like move against. Could I describe myself as almost never, occasionally, or almost always move against? Am I sometimes, never, or always wow or no big deal?

  Even where the syntax fails to offend me as a writer—or, as I should now put it, a “communications” professional3 —the answers are by no means obvious. Harmonious, for example: sometimes, but it depends on who or what’s around to harmonize with. Avoid conflict? If possible, but there are times when I seek it out, and in fact enjoy nothing better than, a good table-thumping debate. How about powerful or happy? I am, I realize, not the kind of person who, well, ever speaks of herself as “not the kind of person who . . .”

  The very notion of personality, which is what we are trying to get at here, seems to have very limited application to me and quite possibly everyone else. Self is another dodgy concept, since I am, when I subject this “I” to careful inspection, not much more than a swarm of flickering affinities, habits, memories, and predilections that could go either way—toward neediness or independence, for example, courage or cowardice. The best strategy, I decide, is to overcome hesitant, worrying, and correctness seeking and give what seem like the right, or most admirable, answers. I check “almost always” for disciplined, high ideals, independent, and principled, while firmly rejecting lazy, abrasive, procrastinate, and laid-back.

  A week later, after Morton has had time to “grade” my personality, we meet at his home to go over the results. It’s a modest ranch house in a residential area I have never visited, decorated in a style I recognize as middle-class Catholic, circa 1970—prints of nineteenth-century pastoral scenes, a teddy bear on a child-size rocking chair, a Madonna overlooking the armoire. In other words, perfectly normal—at least until we arrive at the dining room table, on which three foot-high dolls are perched—a scarecrow, a tin man, a lion, and—what movie is this?—a plastic Elvis.

  I decided in advance to lead off with my criticisms of the test, because if I give them after the results he may think I’m using them to deflect any criticisms of me that have emerged in his analysis. How in the world, I ask him, could I say whether marketing (that’s one of the test terms) applies to me? It’s a noun, for heaven’s sake, and while I may be “good at marketing,” I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, “marketing.” I tell him there’s no excuse for such sloppiness, and that I realize that in saying so I may well be revealing something about my personality: something rigid and unforgiving.

  Completely unfazed, Morton picks up the Elvis doll, whose legs are sticking out at a right angle to his trunk in some hideous form of rigor mortis, and tells me that he uses it to make the point that “there is about as much similarity between the doll and the real Elvis as there is between you and your personality type.” I want to object that the doll does resemble the real Elvis, in his youth anyway and before his unfortunate weight gain; at least anyone could see that it is not a Barbara doll. But that misses the larger questions of what I am doing here if the test is meaningless and what it has to do with finding a job anyway. Besides, he’s putting Elvis down on a side table now, leaving us alone with the Oz crew.

  We move on to the results. It turns out that my scores “could fit almost any personality type.” I’m highest in Original and Effective, and when you plot that out on an Enneagram, the diagonal lines connect me to Good and Loving. This makes me a tin man with a little lion thrown in, he says, fingering the appropriate dolls. Next, he brings out the baffling transparencies, which have been sitting here all along in a file folder. This time I resolve to get to the bottom of things, but when he flashes the transparency labeled “The Enneagram Symbol,” with its nested triangles, all I can come up with is, “What is the circle doing here?” It’s there, he explains, “for graphic unity”—meaning that he just likes the look of it?—and also to show that “we are talking about a whole person.” And the big triangle? I continue, losing heart. “Those are the three centers of intelligence.”

  It turns out, though, that my Original, Effective, Good and Loving traits are not the point. The point is to understand my “nonresourceful” side, which seems to be my bad side, because this is what I need to do something about. Some people, Morton says, addressing the brown and wintry lawn outside the dining room window, resist hearing about this side. One woman, a schoolteacher, broke into tears when she learned about hers. In my case, the nonresourceful side includes being overly sensitive and prone to melancholy and envy, not to mention the bad traits that come up when you draw diagonals from Loving and Effective. What this comes down to, in a practical sense, is that, given my highly emotional and artistic personality (where did that come from?), I probably “don’t write very well.” The “suggested activity,” in my case, would be “intensive journaling workshops” to polish my writing skills.

  There is nothing to do but mumble my thanks, write out the check, and leave. I think of my father, whose personality traits included brash, cynical, bombastic, obnoxious, charming, kindly, and falling-down drunk, yet who managed to rise from the copper mines of Butte to the corporate stratosphere, ending up as vice president of research for a multinational firm. Did he ever take a personality test or submit to executive coaching? Or were things different in the fifties and sixties, with a greater emphasis on what you could actually do? What would he have made of Morton, the dolls, and the ancient wisdom of the Enneagram? I drive home with his deep guffaws echoing in my head.

  MORTON DOES HAVE one useful tip to offer: if I want help with my résumé, I should see Joanne, whose e-mail address he will e-mail me. Joanne turns out to be available at the same fee as Kimberly, and meets me at a coffeehouse only ten minutes from home—not the ideal venue since I’ve been to it before and there is a remote chance of encountering someone who knows me. I am expecting an impeccably dressed southernlady type, not the rumpled, makeup-free, fiftyish woman who greets me. She’s done “development” in the nonprofit world, she tells me, but has shifted—she says nothing about the circumstances prompting the shift—into executive coaching and is just coming from “a strategic planning meeting at Pepsi.” I bond at once; she is the anti-Kimberly, noninvasive and utterly down-to-earth. Although I’m not sure whether their functions overlap, I decide it’s best not to tell Joanne about Kimberly or vice versa.

  Of my three coaches so far, Joanne is the first to give me some real reason for hope. She picks up on the word speechwriting buried in my first, feeble attempt at a résumé, and tells me to ramp it up as a salable skill, and I realize, yes, that’s something I can actually do. Up to this point, crisscrossing my contempt for Morton and Kimberly’s psychobabble,
has been a deep strain of anxiety that I may, in fact, have nothing to offer, no skills of any relevance to the wide world of moneymaking. My PR and event-planning experience is, after all, derived from the more easygoing end of the nonprofit world and may not fully apply to the corporate setting. But speechwriting is speechwriting—from the initial joke or anecdote, through the marshaling of facts, to the exhortatory finale—and I’ve been doing it for decades. What no one needs to know is that all the speeches I’ve written were delivered by myself.

  Joanne has other useful advice: Take I and my (as in “my responsibilities included . . .”) out of the résumé, which, I’m beginning to see, should have an odd, disembodied tone, as if my life had been lived by some invisible Other. Break everything I claim to have done down into its smaller, constituent, activities, so that, for example, I didn’t just “plan” an event, I “met with board to develop objectives” and went on through the various other phases of the job to “facilitate post-event evaluations.” What can I say? It certainly fills up space. And then her most ingenious tip of all: go to the professional association web sites for my putative professions and pick up the buzzwords, or professional lingo. If she doesn’t know I’m a complete fake, and I don’t think I’ve given her any reason to suspect that I am, she nonetheless has a remarkably clear idea of how to perpetrate the fakery. Which may just be the essence of résumé writing.

  I am not, of course, pinning all hopes on my coaches. For one thing, I have been fleshing out my new identity: opening a checking account for Barbara Alexander, ordering her a credit card, having business cards made up for her at Kinko’s. She already, of course, has an e-mail address. As for clothes, she will have to share mine, and at this point I am still clueless enough to imagine that the outfits I use for lecturing on college campuses will pass muster in the business world. I expunge Ehrenreich from the greetings on my home and cell phones; I buy new glasses frames, striking dark ones, chosen solely for their difference from my ordinary dull ones. I start cruising the business section of the local Barnes and Noble.

  Besides, I have already learned from Kimberly the necessity of being “proactive” and also a “self-starter.” My résumé is too much of a work in progress to warrant posting on the major Internet job search sites like Monster and HotJobs, but there’s still no end of things to do on the web. I go to the event planners’ professional association web site and pilfer it for event-planning jargon to pad out my résumé. Way beyond just planning events, I expand into “providing onsite management” and “evaluating return on investment.”

  Looking for advice and, better yet, company, I Google all possible combinations of unemployed, white-collar, professional, and jobs. These are not the best keywords, I discover. First, jobless white-collar people are not “unemployed”; they are “in transition” or perhaps engaged in a “job search.” Only the lowly—the blue- and pink-collar people—admit to actual “unemployment.” Second, avoid the word job, which, unless carefully modified, will lead to numerous sites in which it is prefaced by hand or blow.

  The time I spend on the web has a dank and claustrophobic feel. After traversing a few links, I forget where I started and am lost among the pages full of advice, support groups, networking events, and coaching opportunities geared to various salary levels. I join something called ExecuNet for a fee of $150 and decide that’s what I am—an executive. I throw executive in among my keywords and start up the searches again, leading to still more support groups, networking events, and so forth. Is this a total waste of time, job-search-wise? I might as well be hacking through thick jungle undergrowth with a bread knife instead of a machete.

  At my second session with Joanne, conducted by phone, Barbara Alexander begins to earn my respect. I had initially thought of her as a stay-at-home wife who didn’t have to work for the money—just enjoyed her little dabblings in PR and event planning, sort of as an extension of her busy social life. Her husband must have been pretty well-heeled, and I suspect that his contacts provided her with most of her clients. Divorce has confronted her with the need to earn money, an enterprise for which she is sorely unprepared. But now Joanne asks me what has distinguished my work from that of other PR and event-planning people. I search for an answer and come up with: “My thorough research on whatever topic or theme I’m working on . . . My goal is to be thoroughly conversant with the major issues and trends in the field, to the point where I can participate in substantive decision making, like picking a keynote speaker.”

  “Conversant!” Joanne exclaims in a rare show of enthusiasm, “I love that word! We’ll use it in the résumé or maybe the cover letter.” So Barbara Alexander is not an airhead at all but a towering intellectual of the event-planning field.

  Meanwhile I have homework from Kimberly. First I have to fill in the questionnaire she included in my “Client Discovery Packet,” asking me, among other things, to list five adjectives that describe me at my best and five that describe me at my worst. For the best I choose energetic, focused, intelligent, compassionate, and creative, while for my dark side I choose anxious, compulsive, disorganized, distractible, and depressed —all true at various times except for distractible, which was simply a way of filling in space.

  What are my three major fears? I offer “too old to find work” and “likely to end up in poverty,” but cannot think of a third. The only question that gives me pause is “list five things you are tolerating or putting up with in your life at present (examples: disorganized office, disrespectful relationships, poor communication, etc.).” That’s it: disorganized office. Stacks of paper mount and subside around in me in waves; the floor moonlights as a filing space; empty cups and glasses crowd the desk, along with unpaid bills, unanswered letters, manuscripts I am supposed to review. Talk about a “distorted passion,” as Morton would put it; to judge from my home office, I have the administrative talents of a twelve-year-old boy. Kimberly had promised in our initial talk that I would come out of our coactive process not only with a job but with “a whole new view of myself.” With luck, the new view will be far less cluttered.

  The other Kimberly assignment is to take yet another personality test, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which is marginally craftier than the WEPSS, in that I am not asked simply to choose the attributes that fit me, but am given somewhat more roundabout questions, such as “Do you usually get along better with (A) imaginative people, or (B) realistic people?” Once again, the only sensible approach is a random one. Do I usually show my feelings freely or keep my feelings to myself? Hmm, depends on how socially acceptable those feelings might be. If it’s a desire to inflict grievous bodily harm on some person currently in my presence—well, no. When I go somewhere for the day, would I rather plan what I will do and when, or “just go”? Again, it’s somewhat different for a court appearance than for a trip to the mall. I race through the test with the mad determination of a monkey that’s been given a typewriter and assigned to generate Shakespeare’s oeuvre, hoping that some passably coherent individual emerges.

  CAREER COACHES CAN perhaps be forgiven for using baseless personality tests to add a veneer of scientific respectability to the coaching process. But the tests enjoy wide credibility, not just among coaches but among corporate decision makers. In 1993, the Myers-Briggs test was administered to three million Americans; eighty-nine of the Fortune top 100 companies use it to help slot their white-collar employees into the appropriate places in the hierarchy.4 On its web site, the Enneagram Institute lists, among the companies supposedly using the Enneagram test to sort out their employees, Amoco, AT&T, Avon, Boeing, DuPont, eBay, General Mills, General Motors, Alitalia Airlines, KLM Airlines, Hewlett-Packard, Toyota, Procter & Gamble, International Weight Watchers, Reebok Health Clubs, Motorola, Prudential Insurance, and Sony. Amazon offers a score of books on the Enneagram, none of them apparently critical, including The Enneagram in Love and Work, The Spiritual Dimension of the Enneagram, and The Enneagram for Managers.

  It is true that I enco
untered the Enneagram in the particularly wacky company of The Wizard of Oz. But the test I took was the real thing, which, a web search reveals, is variously said to be derived from Sufism, Buddhism, Jesuit philosophy, and Celtic lore—with a generous undergirding of numerology. The early twentieth-century Russian mystic G. I. Gurdjieff seems to have been a fount of inspiration, but the actual development of the Enneagram theory is usually credited to two men—Oscar Ichazo, a Bolivian-born mystic, and Claudio Naranjo, a psychiatrist who made his mark in the nineteen sixties by employing hallucinogenic drugs in psychotherapy. Whatever “ancient learning” the Enneagram test purports to represent, it is nothing more than a pastiche of wispy New Age yearnings for some mystic unity underlying the disorder of human experience.

  Even the more superficially rational of these tests, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, possesses not a shred of scientific respectability according to Annie Murphy Paul’s 2004 book, The Cult of Personality. It was devised, in the early forties, by a layperson—a homemaker in fact—who had become fascinated by her son-in-law’s practical, detailed-oriented personality, which was so different from her own, more intuitive, approach. Inspired by the psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s notion of “types”—which were by no means meant to be innate or immutable—Katharine Briggs devised a test to sort humanity into sixteen distinct types, all of them fortunately benign. (There were no psychopaths, of the kind who might show up at work one day with an automatic weapon, in Briggs’s universe.) To her eternal frustration, the test never won respect from the academic psychology profession, and not only because of her outsider status. Serious psychologists have never been convinced that people can be so readily sorted into “types.”