Chapter One
What's the professional thing to do when you've been in line for five years to head up the department, and when your boss finally retires three years overdue, they go ahead and promote someone else - someone fresh out of college, someone who's only been at the company six god-damn-months?
Sit down and take it, I'll bet. Don't take it personally.
"It's just business".
Well, I didn't do that. I wasn't your right-on turn-the-other-cheek businessman, I was more the self-centered, arrogant prick kind. Bullish, self-absorbed, abrasive, chauvinistic, antagonistic - and all those other bad qualities that marked me down as a killer on the sales floor.
And who could afford to be a saint in this economy? It was dog eat dog. Pacing the office all hooked up to my wireless Bluetooth website, hands whirling with Lucas from CI Systems on the other end of the line, bullshitting me about how the circulation's down on our popular IT monthly, I needed to be fully confident in myself. Our company and others like it go down the tubes if it doesn't have me - and guys like me - pushing, pushing, pushing.
We couldn't be doing with co-workers who shrank from persuading grandma to part with her chocolate chip cookies for a smile and a song.
I had a somewhat huge sense of entitlement regarding my long years of service, so rather than sit back and feel happy for my wet-behind-the-ears new boss, I turned myself into a road block within the team. I continued to manage the 15 guys under me, but according to my own schedule, not the schedule of Ms Zoey Schoenberg of ivy-encrusted Brown University.
"Uh… Aiden, have we got the Hudson proposal written up?"
"Almost. Couple of tees need dotting, a few eyes to cross."
"That's what you said Tuesday."
"Couple of hitches in the pricing. Bob's on the case."
Sure, it was childish, I was sulking. I was gutted not to get the job that had my name all over it for so long. I mean, this was a girl who didn't hit a single sales target the whole time she'd been with us - and suddenly she's in charge of us all, supposed to make sure we all hit our goals. Quietly, the word got out that we were not going to play ball with Little Miss Ivory Towers.
Those initial six months, I could see my attempts frustrating our new vice president. We still hit most of our targets - there was commission at stake here - but we gradually took it down, so the numbers appeared to decline where it counted. Not so much that it ate too badly into our pay checks, but in a business that's supposed to be growing, we made it clear things were not going too well.
There were other things - paperwork didn't get done on time, invoices were temporarily misplaced or forgotten. Information she requested somehow failed to reach her until she'd asked three or four times. You get the idea.
My team was loyal, they knew how long I'd waited for this job. I made sure we were all in on it. We all got into work five minutes late, and left the office five minutes early. Meetings started late, and overran. Things that were not done well enough suddenly appeared to make the grade.
And nobody stopped for a friendly chat with Ms Schoenberg.
I know, I could see she was suffering. The way she massaged her temples when we came in for a meeting. The way those dark circles emerged under her big brown eyes. The little silent sighs she thought I couldn't hear every time I told her something wasn't ready, or a mistake had been made, or one of her big new leads simply was not going to happen.
She was always in the office first thing in the morning, long before anyone else got in, and judging by the time stamps on her emails, she always stayed late into the night.
"Aiden, this number's just too low - we can't offer full pages for this kind of rate."
"Hey, it's what they're willing to pay - we can't push them up any more. We'll lose the whole account."
"We're twenty percent below target on the issue."
"This economy? Not many people hitting targets."
I was being pretty awful to her, I freely admit. It was totally fueled by my crushing sense of injustice. I just didn't care. I'd seen young executives forced out before, having failed to cope with the stress. I was certain that if we carried on underperforming for long enough, our overlords on the Board would decide this wasn't working, and that nice big leather chair in that corner office would be mine.
Of course, I needed taking down a peg or two - but no one around me was telling me what a humungous piece of shit I was being.
"Does she really think we can sell to a bank the fed's just bailed out to the tune of $68 billion?"
"She's got this theory that companies in a shit storm need to advertise to get themselves out."
"That something they teach on her MBA course? Jesus."
My co-workers hadn't much noticed Ms Schoenberg when she was the quiet brunette at the desk by the overgrown pot plant, the lone woman in the office bucking the testosterone-driven trend for selling advertising in our specialist magazines and journals. Now she was our new college fast-track boss, they really weren't impressed. Many of them were older than my three decades, and felt even worse than I did being bossed around by someone so much younger. Her leads were wrong for our titles, her strategies couldn't sell fish to a sea lion.