Alan Lennox and the Temp Job of Doom

by Brian Olsen

  No.

  Dakota put her phone in her purse, took one last mouthful of rice, and carried the plastic bag with the remains of her lunch out to the garbage can in the hallway. She was trying to to set an example for Sandra, one of her officemates, who was always throwing her food out in her wastepaper basket and stinking up the whole office. So far, the lesson hadn’t been learned.

  She returned to her desk and sat. Her monitor was filled with the default company screen saver, a scrolling block of text reading, “YOU are a crucial part of the Amalgamated Synergy family!” She stared at it, dejected. If only that were true.

  On Dakota’s first day of work as a Junior Assistant Marketing Analyst at Amalgamated Synergy, her boss, Richard Mullins, had shown her to her office, introduced her to the temp assistant she would share with seven other Junior Assistant Marketing Analysts, and told her to familiarize herself with the company until he gave her an assignment. That was three months ago. He had yet to give her an assignment.

  For the last three months, Dakota had followed the one and only directive she had been given – to familiarize herself with the company. She had learned the organizational structure of her own division fairly quickly, moved on to the other divisions in New York City, then the divisions elsewhere in the world, and had finally branched out into Amalgamated Synergy’s numerous subsidiaries. She had tried to find some kind of chart laying out its holdings, and when she was unsuccessful she had started her own. The task had proved inordinately challenging. It wasn’t difficult to delineate the company’s largest subsidiaries – even the average person-on-the-street could list which cable networks, film studios, food manufacturers, and retail outlets, for example, were a part of the AmSyn “family.” And it only took a little digging to find out which lesser-known companies were owned directly by AmSyn – she had discovered that Jumpa, a games site she and her roommate Alan were both addicted to, was one of them.

  What was harder to dig up, and what was a constant source of fascination for her, was the sheer number and diversity of companies Amalgamated Synergy either had a share in or owned outright. For virtually any industry she could think of, there was some company with a chain of ownership that eventually led back to AmSyn. It wholly or partially owned airlines and truck stops, movie theaters and streaming video web sites, shopping malls and local chain stores, cattle ranches and grocery markets, global banks and small venture capital firms, luxury hotels and sleazy motels, heath clubs and fast food restaurants, and manufacturing plants of everything from aircraft carriers to novelty pens. Even in the not-for-profit world it was the major backer of an astonishing breadth of causes, from the world’s largest breast cancer research foundation to a regional theater in Chicago to a clothes-making cooperative for women in Tanzania. Dakota knew AmSyn was a big company, one of the biggest in the world, but she hadn’t realized how complex and ever-changing its organizational structure was.

  After three months of this, Dakota was close to her breaking point. She was about as familiar with the company as she could get – she suspected she was as familiar with it as anyone could get – and she was aching to do something productive. She had no problem with starting at the bottom, but to advance she needed someone to notice what a good job she was doing. That wouldn’t happen if she didn’t have a job to do.

  Her officemates had no such concerns. There were four offices on this side of the floor, each filled with four Junior Assistant Marketing Analysts. Sixteen in all, and fifteen of them were perfectly happy to be given nothing to do. None of them were all that bothered about using their work computers for personal tasks, so Dakota had gotten used to glancing up from her self-assigned duties to see screens filled with games, gossip blogs and social networking sites. Julio spent all day writing plays and laughing about AmSyn’s generous patronage of the arts.

  At the end of Dakota’s second week she had shared her concerns with her officemates. Sandra had just stared at her blankly, slowly chewing a mouthful of tuna fish. Mei, missing the point entirely, had suggested she play some online games to relieve her tension. Julio had been a bit more blunt.

  “Honey, I am going to say this once. Do NOT fuck this up for us. We all love it here, okay? Good pay, good benefits, and our boss leaves us alone. If you start complaining that you don’t have enough to do, Richard may wake up and realize he’s paying sixteen people to sit with their thumbs up their asses for forty hours a week. If you don’t like it, quit, but I have a play going up in the Fringe Festival in August that needs a complete rewrite and if you screw with my subsidized writing time I swear to the baby Jesus I will cut a bitch.”

  The other Junior Assistant Marketing Analysts felt similarly, so Dakota had kept quiet and waited to be given something worthwhile to do. She was still waiting.

  She wiggled her mouse to dismiss the screen saver. She closed the section of the organizational chart she had been going over before lunch and opened a new, blank document. She sat and stared at it, hovering her fingers over her keyboard as if that would somehow summon a useful task. She checked her email again, but her inbox still only contained the weekly Human Resources newsletter, the most recent informing her of an employee blood drive next week and offering tips on how to deal with stress without slowing your work output. She reread the email for the twelfth time: “Type faster! Getting your work done more quickly means extra time to strategize your next assignment, which means less stressing over deadlines!” Not particularly relevant.

  Fuck this, she thought. She’d be damned if she was going to keep her career on hold for fear of pissing off a bunch of lazy slackers. She threw her head back and brushed the tight black ringlets of her hair away from her eyes. She stood up and marched out of the office, approaching the temp seated at the desk just outside.

  “Derek?”

  Derek looked up from his computer, where he was logged on to Jumpa and playing a game of Work It. Dakota wasn’t normally interested in video games, but she was hooked on this one – the workplace simulator was right up her alley, and she let go of a lot of frustrations with her own career by building a vastly more successful one for her online avatar, who was already CEO of a highly profitable, entirely fake corporation. She suppressed her irritation that Derek didn’t even bother to try to hide the game he was playing when she approached. Derek had been late for work that morning, but they had barely noticed his absence. If the Junior Assistant Marketing Analysts had no work to do, the Assistant to the Junior Assistant Marketing Analysts had even less.

  “Oh, hey, Dakota. What’s up? You need me to print out that chart thing again? I used up my color print allowance for the month copying my headshot.” He smiled vacantly at her, his shaggy bleached blond hair obscuring his eyes.

  “No, thanks. Can you see if Richard is free to meet with me?”

  Instantly, Julio appeared in the doorway of their office. “What’s going on? Everything okay?”

  “Everything’s fine, Julio. Thank you ever so much for asking. I’m just trying to get a little face-time with my supervisor. Nothing to do with you.”

  “Are you sure, Dakota? Are you absolutely sure it has nothing to do with me, or with my livelihood?”

  Dakota responded through gritted teeth, “Absolutely sure, Julio. Don’t you worry your empty little head about it. Go back to changing the face of the American theater.”

  Julio stared at her for a moment, then stalked back to his desk, muttering “pendeja” under his breath.

  Dakota turned back to Derek. “So...Richard?”

  “Richard, right. Hold on.” Derek picked up the phone and typed in an extension, then waited a moment. “Marisol! Hey girl, heeeeeeyyy!...Oh, I’m good, I’m fine, it’s not skin cancer, it was just a rash. He gave me some cream and it cleared right up...I should have listened to you...I just needed to clean under the rim better. I bought one of those disposable brushes, where you drop the head in the bowl when you’re done, and the rash hasn’t come back...Girl, believe me, it was hella hard on my social life.
I met this guy at the Pit last weekend...The Pit. It’s a bar. You’ve never been?...OH MY GOD girl you have to come with me some weekend! You have lived too sheltered a life...Well, you’ll meet some theater people at my party on Friday, they’ll loosen you up.” Derek noticed Dakota glaring at him. “Hold on a second, Mar.” He covered the receiver with his hand. “Hey, Dakota, can I help you with something?”

  “Richard, Derek. I need to talk to Richard.”

  “Oh my god! I’m so sorry, I totally forgot. That is hysterical.” He took his hand off the phone. “Hey, Marisol, is your boss in?...Does he have any time to meet with one of the analysts?...No, I don’t know what it’s about.” He looked up at Dakota. “What’s it about?”

  “It’s...” She looked back into her office. Mei had returned from lunch, and she, Sandra and Julio were huddled together, whispering and shooting glances at Dakota. “It’s private, but it’s important. I don’t need a lot of time.”

  “She says it’s private and important but she doesn’t need a lot of time,” Derek said to Richard’s assistant. He paused. “It’s Dakota...I don’t know her last name.”

  “Bell. Three months we’ve worked together. Last name hasn’t changed.”

  “Yeah, THAT one,” he continued. “Okay, thanks, Marisol, I’ll tell her. You’re coming Friday! I’m not taking no for an answer...No!...No, I’m not!...Yes, you are! I’m hanging up! I’m hanging up before you can make up another excuse, bitch!” He hung up, laughing. “She’s hysterical. I’m so glad I took this temp job, she is like my new BFF.”

  “Derek.”

  “Yeah, hun?”

  “What. Did. She. Say.”

  “Oh! Right. She said Richard is about to leave for a meeting across town and won’t be back today.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

  Dakota took off down the hallway, zoomed past the elevators and burst into the stairwell. She ran one flight up, taking two steps at a time, and came out in the lobby of the fifteenth floor. She ignored the questioning smile of the floor’s receptionist and rushed back to Richard’s office.

  Marisol, Richard’s assistant, stood up from her desk outside his door. “I’m so sorry, you just...”

  Richard’s door opened and he appeared. He had his briefcase in hand, his suit jacket draped over it. Richard was in his early forties, with a recently acquired enthusiasm for self-tanner, and muscles earned in his youth just beginning to turn to flab. He saw Dakota and froze, staring at her from beneath the trendy expensive glasses he couldn’t quite pull off.

  “...missed him,” Marisol finished.

  “God damn it, Marisol,” Richard muttered.

  “I’m sorry, I thought you were going to wait for me to tell you the coast was clear.” Marisol slunk back into her chair.

  Richard turned to Dakota with a large, fake smile. He set his briefcase down and begin pulling on his suit jacket. “Dakota, hi, I am so sorry, I have a meeting at our Maiden Lane office and I’m already...”

  “Richard, please. It’ll just take a minute.”

  “I really can’t...”

  “Richard, I can take a minute with you now or I can keep going upstairs, floor by floor, until I find someone who will listen to me.”

  His fake smile was replaced with a real scowl. “Fine. Marisol, please call Ms. Dorret’s assistant and inform her I may be a little late for our meeting.”

  Marisol picked up the phone, then hesitated. “By Ms. Dorret’s assistant, do you mean the reservation agent at the spa?”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Marisol, you...just call the spa and push my appointment back a half an hour. Come on in, Dakota.” He snatched up his briefcase and stormed back to his desk.

  Dakota followed him in. The corner office was spacious and packed with personal items. The bookcase near the door was topped with family photos and drawings by young children. She stepped around a practice putting green laid out on the floor to take a seat in front of his desk. A “World’s Greatest Dad!” coffee mug sat cold next to his computer.

  Richard sat in his thickly-padded swivel chair and leaned back. “Well?”

  She took a breath. “Richard, I’m...confused.”

  He sighed. “How so?”

  “I was very happy, overjoyed even, to join the Amalgamated Synergy family. I felt that a large parent corporation like AmSyn, with such a broad and diverse assortment of subsidiary holdings, would be a perfect fit for a young, eager MBA with a specialization in organizational behavior such as myself.”

  “Cut to the chase, you’ve got the job already.”

  “Yes, well, that’s the problem, I suppose. I don’t really know what my job is.”

  “You’re a Junior Assistant Marketing Analyst. It’s on the door of your office if you forget.”

  “Yes, but...I’ve been here three months and there hasn’t been anything for me to analyze. I gathered from my interview that I would be doing market research, but there doesn’t seem to be anything like that going on in the whole department. I mean, I don’t think I’m betraying any great confidence by revealing that my fellow Junior Assistant Marketing Analysts don’t seem to be spending their time doing much analyzing, or marketing, or even assisting. I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but...why was I hired?”

  Richard stared at her, silently, for a long moment. He started to say something, then reconsidered and started again. “HR recommended you to me, I interviewed you, you got the job. There’s no big mystery.”

  “You know what I mean,” she pressed. “Why does the job exist in the first place? Why was anyone in this department hired?”

  He squirmed in his seat a little, not meeting her eyes. It was obvious to Dakota that there was something he wasn’t telling her.

  “Richard,” she continued softly, “I’m not trying to cause trouble. I want this job, but I can’t spend my life doing meaningless busy-work. I’m not going to stop asking questions until I understand.”

  He considered for a moment. “Fine,” he said. “Fine. It’s been nagging at me too, if I’m perfectly honest. Why were you hired? I have absolutely no idea.”

  There was another long moment of silence. Dakota opened her mouth to speak, closed it, then opened it again. “Excuse me?” she said at last.

  “I don’t know why you were hired. I don’t know why the fifteen other Junior Assistant Marketing Analysts I have working for me were hired. I don’t why the eight Senior Assistant Marketing Analysts, four Junior Marketing Analysts, and two Senior Marketing Analysts I have working for me were hired. I don’t know why the fifty-three other non-analysis-based Marketing staff members I have working for me were hired. I don’t even know why, right before the Christmas rush, I was promoted from Head of Marketing for the Women’s Leisurewear Department at Fantastic Fashions to Vice President of Marketing for its parent corporation.”

  “But...but...YOU hired us!”

  “Yes, I did. I was given a new position with a huge salary and a corner office and a budget to spend and line items for the salaries of a slew of new staff members. So I went out and hired them. I had fuck all else to do, and it killed a few weeks. I tried to only hire people who would be happy to be paid to do nothing. Sorry, you slipped by. I could tell you were too ambitious for the job but HR really pushed you on me.”

  “But WHY are we doing nothing? Why aren’t we doing any actual marketing?”

  “And what should we market?”

  This stopped Dakota cold. “Well, we...”

  “AmSyn doesn’t make anything. We don’t produce anything. We buy and sell other companies.”

  “But, there are so many subsidiaries...”

  “All of which have their own Marketing Departments. That’s where I was poached from, remember?”

  “Then what about Amalgamated Synergy itself? Its image, its interactions with the public sector. And there must be some kind of reportage from the subsidiary Marketing Departments to the corporate level. “

  “Sure, sure. Absolutely. But AmSyn alread
y has Branding, Public Relations and Corporate Giving Departments, and about a thousand-and-one Corporate Subsidiary Oversight Committees, including several devoted entirely to Marketing, all of which report directly to the Director of Subsidiary Governance, not to me. Anything a Marketing Department would do was already covered in the existing corporate infrastructure. AmSyn didn’t need a Marketing Department because it pretty much already had one, just under different names.”

  “Then...” Dakota was dumbfounded. “Then... why? Why hire...how many people report to you?”

  “About eighty-five or so.”

  “Why hire eighty-five people to do jobs that are already being done?”

  “It’s more than the eighty-five who work for me. I’m just the Vice President of Marketing for this division. There are six other Vice Presidents of Marketing in New York City alone, each with an identically-sized staff. And many more in our other offices around the world.”

  “But it’s...it’s...it’s completely absurd! Why would AmSyn throw all this money away?”

  He laughed. “And we’re back where we started. I have absolutely no idea. Why do we have seven buildings just in New York City? We only had two a year ago. Seems like a waste to me, but it’s not my call. Neither was this.”

  “Didn’t you ask? Who hired you, who gives you your budget?”

  “Budgeting comes from the CFO’s office, and I don’t have the clout to get a meeting with him. Human Resources arranged my transfer, but they either couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me who authorized it. I report directly to the Senior Vice President of this division, but if she knows why this department was created she isn’t telling me. I kept hitting walls, and eventually I stopped asking.”

  “But...but...”

  “Dakota. Relax. Take a breath. Amalgamated Synergy is an absurdly huge corporation. Bureaucracy has a life of its own, and sometimes weird stuff happens. My guess is somebody on the top floors made a ridiculous mistake and doesn’t want to own up to it. Eventually, some numbers person will realize that money is being flushed away and the department will be eliminated. The higher-ups, like me, will be transferred elsewhere, and most of the jerks you work with will be canned.” He saw her expression, and hastily continued. “But not you! You’ll be fine. I’ll put in a good word for you, you clearly want to be here, you’ve somehow been working hard even though I haven’t given you anything to do, plus you’re...you know...” He paused. “Sorry if this sounds prejudiced, but...you’re black, you’re gay, and you’re a woman, and while those three things together make it virtually impossible you will ever rise to the C-suite in your lifetime, in the early stages of your career they’re a boon. Stick it out for a couple of years, you’ll be heading your own department and get your picture on the cover of the annual report.” He leaned back in his chair and smiled reassuringly at her.