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

by Barbara Ehrenreich

  I could be really mean. I could demand to know, “What’s Patrick’s problem?” and shout “Patrick!” as the boot campers did with the hapless Kevin. But I just barrel along with my plan for him. In the boot camp he had mentioned that he is writing a book, I remind him. That could be the platform we launch him from. When will it be done? Because with the book in hand . . . And I outline the book tour, the Oprah appearance, the lecture bookings, and how about a Wall Street event—a lunch maybe, for some of the movers and shakers, with him as the speaker?

  “You could do that?”

  I assure him that I do that and more every day of my life as a PR person-slash-event planner. Could he give me a brief summary of the book?

  This, it seems to me, is his last chance to rise from the mat and reclaim his position as coach. But he seems to have lost interest in the match, or maybe I never quite engaged his attention. “If a person has a gift. . .,” he begins, and goes off into a couple of sentences that are too garbled for me to record in my notes.

  Hmmm, we’re not quite there yet, I tell him, but not to worry; it’s almost as much effort to perfect a media-ready summary as it is to write the book itself. Plus, I can help him write the book. I can edit, pull things together. Does he have a publisher? No. An agent? No. I can help him with all that. I’m connected.

  The hour is coming to an end, thank God, and I want to be the first to acknowledge this fact. I tell him that I don’t want to take up any more of his time, although it is hard to imagine that he has anything else to do with it, the phone having rung only once during our time together—a low rate of interpersonal contact, I cannot help but observe, for the self-proclaimed inventor of career coaching. One of the things I learned from Kimberly is to tell people exactly what you want them to do for you, so I tell him two things: First, I want him to think my proposition over. I know it must be strange, coming out of the blue like this, but I’m perfectly serious. Second, I want him to let me into the ExecuTable group.

  He has one last bit of fight in him. As I pack away my notebook and pen, he announces that he could coach me on “presentation.” My manner is too “gruff.”

  Gruff? It seems to me an odd word to apply to a person who has spent the last hour cajoling, persuading, selling.

  “You told me all kinds of things without knowing what I’m going through. You seem angry.”

  I am taken aback. I don’t feel any anger toward Patrick—pity, of course, and a certain contempt for his entire profession. If I’m guilty of anything here, it is an excess of that vaunted corporate quality—focus. I came to sell myself and did not let myself get deflected from this mission by Patrick’s obvious distress; wicked from a humane point of view, perhaps, but perfectly acceptable, I had thought, for a go-getting, proactive, highly focused, “seasoned professional.” Yes, I’ve been using a beaten man to hone my self-selling skills, but Kimberly, I suspect, would approve.

  Then too—how could I have forgotten?—I’m a woman. The typically masculine word gruff is the clue that I have broken some perhaps Atlanta-based gender rule here. Maybe it’s the “inaccessible” tailored shirt. But I do not give an inch. It’s not anger, I say, it’s aggressiveness, and I apologize if I was too direct but I’d do the same in any potential employment situation: tell the interviewers exactly why they need me and what I can do for them.

  “Well, you haven’t told me anything I don’t already know.”

  “Good, people only really hear what they already know.” With that brilliant riposte, I offer to pay him for his time, since I’ve taken up an hour that could have been used as a coaching session. He says the fee will be $175, quite a bit more than the $75 he mentioned in his e-mail confirmation of our session, but I write the check without comment, shake his hand, remind him I’ll be calling in a week, and leave.

  So who won? If a job was the goal, I lost, but I knew from the moment I entered his office that there was no job to be had. The important thing, I tell myself, is that I managed to make my pitch for almost an hour, and this man supposedly gifted with such superior insight, such rare “people skills,” never saw through it. Unless you count that outburst of sexist cattiness at the very end, he was taken in, even tempted, by visions of Oprah dancing before his eyes. On the other hand, he’s the one who has the $175, so from a brutal bottom-line perspective, he’s the one who came out ahead.

  I make my way back down the freeway toward the hotel, aware of all the feelings appropriate to a pacifist on the occasion of his first kill. Yes, I am filled with self-loathing and disgust. Slime oozes from my hands onto the steering wheel; the white noise of the road is filled with muffled denunciations and curses brought down on my soul. But I did it, didn’t I? I tried selling myself, and for an hourlong stretch I wasn’t half bad. I have blooded my sword.

  five

  Networking with the Lord

  I come home to the realization that my trip, which cost me more than $1,000, airfare included, netted me little more than a lip pencil, a tube of foundation, and a handful of business cards. In fact, I am almost four months into my search—a point at which I expected to be running from interview to interview. The daffodils are fighting their way up in my tiny front yard and my cash reserves have sunk by almost $4,000, but I am not noticeably any closer to employment than when I started back in December.

  I have applied to at least fifty pharmaceutical and health-related companies and, following Kimberly’s advice, have even begun proactively approaching companies where no appropriate jobs are posted. For example, I leap on a startup called Extend Fertility, which was brought to my attention by a fellow journalist in a context unrelated to my job search. For a considerable price, the company offers to freeze women’s eggs for implantation at a convenient, but reproductively over-the-hill phase of life. My cover letter to this firm enthuses over its mission and my extensive experience with women’s health issues. I follow up with more e-mails and a phone call—only to be told that ExtendFertility doesn’t need a PR person just now. Again playing the feminist card, I discover and apply to a company called Frank About Women, which is “dedicated to helping companies create enriching and enduring brand relationships with women,” but to no effect.

  On the darker side, I approach a “neuromarketing” firm called Brighthouse, which I find listed in an article called “The Ten Worst Corporations in America”—its aim being to apply neurological research to advertising, bypassing the conscious mind to appeal directly to the brain’s pleasure centers. Obviously, whether the folks of Brighthouse know it or not, they need my help. The beginning of my cover letter has an extortionary ring:

  A recent article posted at zmag.org lists Brighthouse as one of the “ten worst corporations in America.” You may want to ignore the slur, which, in my reading, was highly ideologically slanted against the kind of neurological research you are involved in.

  Or you might want to reevaluate your public relations strategy.

  But this fails to strike fear into their hearts; nor do any of the Brighthouse functionaries whose names I track down on the web bother to take my phone calls.

  Aside from my cybersearching, the only thing to do is to keep on networking—more intensively, though, and in repackaged form. If I learned one big lesson from my encounters with Prescott and Patrick, it is that I have to become softer, more feminine, and “approachable.” So I head for Ann Taylor in the mall two miles from home, which I trust to know far more about the corporate look than I do, and zone in immediately on a tan—not black—pants suit with an accessibly curved, rather than straight-lined, lapel, which is on sale at half price, about $160. Our local department store supplies $15 gold earrings, and although I know there should be a gold necklace “to pull it all together,” none comes to my attention. The message should be more like what Prescott recommended: approach me, please, I’m perfectly harmless.

  But where to network? The answer has already come to me in a curious way. At Patrick’s boot camp, I was heading for the bathroom on one of our
breaks when I was intercepted by a short man whose head formed a perfect triangle from pointy bald pate to lushly padded jowls. He was a successful graduate of Patrick’s individual coaching program, who had moved from a corporate layoff to managing a fried chicken franchise. “If you’re looking for places to network,” he said, “you’ll want to go to Godel.com,” and he wrote the URL on the back of his business card.

  For a moment I reeled, feeling like a character in an early Pynchon novel who has just been handed a major clue in a plot that will never be resolved, that will only grow in ever-proliferating complexity. Every science nut is aware of Godel’s Theorem, which states that no mathematical system can ever be both consistent and complete. It’s a kind of postmodernist warning—just when you think you’ve got everything sewed up into one beautiful theory, you’ll find you’ve left something out—and has always filled me with a thick sense of defeat. I thanked my informant as warmly as I could and stuffed his card in my pocket.

  Now at home I come across the card when I am preparing to wash my slacks. The home page of the Godel web site features a brief tribute to our troops in Iraq, and in a few clicks I come to a calendar in which every day, weekends excepted, is filled with regularly scheduled networking events for the Atlanta job searcher. On most days you can find a 7:30 or 8:00 A.M. breakfast meeting at a Shoney’s or some similar venue as well as a lunch meeting and an evening get-together in an area church. Here it is, laid out for me. There is no escape from another bout with Atlanta.

  BACK AT MY $59-a-night hotel, I decide to confirm my first networking destination before setting off on another wild-goose chase through the suburbs. No phone numbers for the various networking groups are listed on the Godel web site, so I call the Godel accounting firm, which is listed, and am soon talking to Mr. Laimon Godel himself. He apologizes for the web site’s deficiencies and boomingly invites me to “a real networking event”—a lunch meeting tomorrow—where I’ll be mingling with the local business community and no doubt collect a handful of leads. In fact, he says, “You can come as my guest.” I take this as a real networking triumph on my part, or at least evidence of a winning telephone manner.

  The site of the Norcross Fellowship Lunch is a suburban Shoney’s just off the highway, where the restaurant host ushers me into a side room labeled “NFL.” “Is this the National Football League?” I inquire gaily of a gray-haired fellow who is so far the sole other occupant of the room. No response; he must have heard that one a few times before. So I try again, more soberly, with my name and mission: relocating to Atlanta, seeking a job. This at least elicits his name, Larry, and the information that he owns a car wash.

  “Would you be needing a public relations person?” I inquire, trying to regain my come-hither tone. The narrow look he gives me raises the possibility that there’s something off-color about “public relations,” maybe the “relations” part. Or it could be my outfit, which may be too dressy, given that Larry has come in good-old-boy casual. But I am saved by the arrival of another, more outgoing, Larry, who suggests we move on to fill our plates at the buffet. We all do, and I am struck by the first Larry’s choices: a mound of lettuce, covered with canned fruit salad, topped by a desiccated gray hamburger patty and dripping with Thousand Island dressing.

  Now the chairs, which are arranged at long tables facing in the direction of the buffet, are filling up, mostly with white men, but there are a handful of women—none of them wearing even a splash of black. I try a conversation with Mac, an older man who is sitting next to car-wash Larry, and is introduced to me as an author. “What have you written?” I ask, and he hands me a thin, pamphlet-sized volume titled Mega Values: 10 Global Principles for Business and Professional Success —WRITTEN IN STONE. The ten principles, he explains, are the Ten Commandments, which he has translated into practical guidelines for businesspeople.

  As Mac turns away to greet new arrivals, I open the book and discover that the first commandment—“You shall have no other gods before Me”—is rendered as “Show proper respect for authority,” such as one’s boss. This would seem to contradict the original, since the secular authorities may not always be in tune with God, may in fact be serving the false god Mammon.

  With Mac engaged and the dour Larry occupied with his hamburger salad, I turn to the fellow sitting to my right, who looks noticeably more upper-middle-class than most of the crowd—an IT specialist, it turns out, who also runs a weekly morning session for job seekers. Any tips for me? He tells me to study the local business newspaper and, echoing Kimberly, to avoid wasting time with my fellow job seekers. Surprisingly, he also advises against using career coaches—“there are plenty of free sources of information.”

  “You mean on the Internet?”

  “Mmm,” he says, without elaborating.

  “Why is it almost all men here?” I venture to ask.

  “Most of these groups started out all male. It’s a religious thing.”

  I want to ask what religion this might be, but settle for a coy “You’re sure it’s OK for me to be here?” I am wishing my “host,” Mr. Godel, would show up and somehow identify himself.

  “Oh yeah, anyone can come now. And for you, it’s a perfect place to network. You’ve got a lot of the real business leaders here.”

  He returns to chewing, but the word network reminds me of the advice in NonStop Networking to keep the conversation going with some item from the news. “So, uh, has the outsourcing of IT to India had any effect on you?”

  “No, and I think it’s a good thing too. Let the Indians do the easy stuff. Americans should be learning to do something new.”

  I cannot think of a response that will fall within the accessibly feminine framework I have set for myself, so I make do with an appreciative “hmmm” and ask him if he would recognize Laimon Godel. “Over there,” he says, and points out a round-faced fellow who is back-slapping his way around the room. I rise to introduce myself to Laimon, but the get-together suddenly comes to an official start with the affable Larry, who is introduced as the owner and operator of several mobile home parks, going to the lectern and shouting, “Praise the Lord!”

  This exhortation is echoed by several people among the about fifty now assembled in the room, along with “amens.” “We’ve been meeting for fifteen years now,” Larry goes on, “and I know God’s been present every time because scripture says wherever two or more of my followers meet, there am I.” Now a man in a boldly striped sweater steps forward to give a blessing, which includes a request for prayers for an Atlantan who has gone to work as a missionary in Czechoslovakia—a country, I cannot help but note, that hasn’t existed since 1993. Well, wherever the missionary has gone off to, a large white-haired man in the audience raises his right hand, palm to ceiling, and shuts his eyes in a gesture of prayer.

  The fellow in charge of the blessing goes off into a long, meandering anecdote about a dying man, a doctor, and a dog, which is attributed to the last e-mail sent by “coach Venable” on his deathbed. As far as I can tell, the message is that we have nothing to fear from death, but I cannot be sure, since this is one extremely shaggy dog. Larry reclaims the lectern and, to my complete surprise, launches into the most incendiary part of the New Testament, the part about the rich man and the eye of the needle. Will the meeting come to a sudden end as everyone empties their pockets and rushes out to minister to the poor? No, the point seems to be that the disciples were “afraid of what they might have to give up” and that Jesus taught them that they didn’t have to give up all that much after all. “Praise the Lord!” concludes Larry.

  Maybe I should have guessed from the word fellowship, although that had sounded pleasantly secular, as in “fellowship of the ring.” But here it is, right on the blue sheet of paper that serves as a program: the “mission” of the NFL is to “provide a platform for Christian businessmen to share their story of how God has touched their lives both personally and professionally.” Awkwardly enough, I am sitting in what is now the front of the g
athering, just in front and a little to the side of the lectern, where any inappropriate facial expression could be visible to a good half of the assemblage. As for leaving—say, with a quick glance at my watch as if recalling some simultaneous appointment—that could only be interpreted as a statement, and surely a heretical one.

  Besides, we have come to the moment for new people, like myself, to stand and introduce themselves. I give my name and the information that I am considering relocating to Atlanta and am looking for a PR job. A handful of other job seekers identify themselves and their desired jobs—chiefly in accounting and IT—though most of the new arrivals are established businessmen. A man in suit and tie gets applause for his announced intention to set up a similar fellowship for downtown lawyers—a mission no less risky than proselytizing in darkest Czechoslovakia to judge from the “oohs” and “ahs,” which are mixed with a few jeers at the very notion of lawyers. Back to Larry, who has “just a few more words.” “What a mixed-up world!” he observes, “where we can have a debate over whether a man can marry another man [chuckles from the audience] . . . Where we have a presidential candidate who says we shouldn’t be over there [I assume he means in Iraq]. Whaddya do with people like that?”

  There is an expectant silence as he scans the room before answering his own question: “Whip ‘em!” Somehow the prospect of a whipping gets him going into a digression about how maybe it isn’t politically correct to say that, because there are people today who want to tell you that you can’t discipline your own children, but in some cases that’s what you’ve got to do—whip ‘em. This sets off general laughter and some self-satisfied buzz, enhanced by Mac, who calls out, “Whup ’em, as we say in the South!” to hearty applause.

  What would Jesus do?—rise up and denounce the folksy sadism advocated in his name? I settle for a stony-faced silence, not that I have much choice without making a scene. Anyway, now that we are all presumably feeling cozy and bonded, it’s time for the speaker, John D. Wise, whom Larry introduces as a real estate broker and “recovering attorney.” Wise is a tall, strikingly handsome, white-haired guy in a visibly expensive suit, leading me to anticipate a polished delivery on the subject of real estate opportunities. He begins by asking God to give him the words he will need, but sadly this prayer goes largely ignored. In a stumbling manner, and with reference to a large number of handwritten sheets of paper in different sizes and colors, he sets out to narrate “three ways God’s been working in my life.” The first has to do with his conversion experience in 1981, when he was “moved to get on [his] knees and accept God.” Such humility does not come easily to him, on account of his being a Texan. “Being from Texas is like being born red-haired, bald, or Jewish. Everybody notices, and you never grow out of it.” The audience chuckles at this apparent witticism.