Book
Reviews
|
|||
|
Go to Executive Times
Archives |
|||
|
You Look
Nice Today by Stanley Bing Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
|
||
|
Click on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
|
||
|
|
|||
|
Worklife Fortune columnist Stanley Bing presents a
dead-on portrayal of real office life in his new novel, You Look
Nice Today. Add this dose of realism to a pinch of exaggeration for
pleasure, and the combination is a story that’s a joy to read. Here’s an
excerpt from Chapter 7, (pp. 51-55): New
Year's came and went, and with it the level of energy and resolve that always
attends beginnings. The Quality Process was in full cry. Meetings took place
across the nation. Meetings and meetings and meetings, and still more
meetings, then meals that were nothing more than disguised meetings, then
more meetings to plan subsequent meetings. Anyone who endured this at its
height lost forever his taste for meetings. One afternoon, after a truly grueling and stupid
day where we quite literally saw each other over and over again for a
sequence of gatherings whose discrete purposes were increasingly unclear)
Blatt posted a humorous sign she had retrieved from a business magazine. "Are you lonely? Hold a meeting," said
the sign. Under the headline there was a graphic of people sitting around a
conference table drinking coffee and yakking. The text then went on:
"You can see people draw organizational charts, feel important and
impress your colleagues, eat bagels, all on company time. Meetings, the
practical alternative to work." And that was it. I thought it was pretty
clever, actually. "What's this?" CaroleAnne said to me
somewhat later. She was looking at the sign and scowling. "It's a joke," I said to her. "I don't think it's very funny," she
replied with surprising asperity. "I wonder at the things people do
around here sometimes." I disregarded this tiny outburst. We all get on
each other's nerves on occasion. You can't pay attention to everything. The
sign, it turned out, stayed up for many years, with certain consequences that
will later become apparent. The
work went on, and with it the travel. Month after grueling month, back and
forth and back and forth again, weaving through the great, chaotic tapestry
of America, Harb traveled. Sometimes I came along for the ride, in conditions
both good and less so. I feel about travel the way I feel about Sambuca. At
first, it's sweet. After a while, it becomes sticky and disgusting, even when
it has a coffee bean in it. Most of the time, Harb was crushingly, amazingly
alone. Perhaps that is why he began to take CaroleAnne with him with some
regularity. On his own or with her help, he led hundreds upon hundreds of
Quality conclaves, exhorting wary employees, fearful of noncompliance, to
achieve the appearance of ever-greater levels of Quality, Customer
Satisfaction, and Productivity. At night in the fine hotels, whisper quiet and
bathed in luxury, Harb lay awake, the flickering of the pay-per-view movie
playing out across the room on a television too small for the space it was
intended to fill. CaroleAnne was not next door. No, she was on another, lower
floor, as befit her standing. But he could feel her in the hotel . . . almost
smell her in his room. Why shouldn't he be able to smell her? He had been
with her without interruption for more than eleven hours, from the first
morning meeting to the end-of-day wrap-ups over dinner to drinks and salty
trail mix at eleven P.M. And what about those drinks? For Harb, it was
martinis, mostly, although sometimes, to minimize the effect of the constant,
daily onslaught of road life upon his liver, he switched over to beer over
ice. It was hard to escape the end of the day without
these semi-informal nightcaps. Often they were conducted with a group of
chattering, garrulous wahoos, with Harb at its dead center, the guru, the
magnet, the best friend of everybody. But a fair amount of the time,
particularly on the last day of a three-day Quality bender, it would be
getaway night, and Harb would find himself unwinding with just a few trusted
subordinates, and more often than not, only one, and that one would be the
kind of person with whom you could truly drop all pretense and, for a few moments, be
yourself, and generally, if that one person was there, in that city, at that
time, that person would be CaroleAnne. It is difficult to measure the significance and
importance of this rite to those who don't have to work in costume for a
living. The day is done. The tie is down around the sternum. The collar is
open, as is the well-traveled path to a posh and blessedly silent space
upstairs. There is, quite literally, nothing at all on the agenda. The drinks
are on the table. The other individual is opposite, all yours. Between that
moment and the instant of unconsciousness when you fall into the sleep that
immediately precedes the horrible moment of awakening the next morning, a
yawning chasm of opportunity beckons. More than any corporate activity, this
ceremony of the nightcap is perhaps the most frightening in its lack of
structure, its terrible, fierce purity. It is very possible that nothing but
friendly human interaction will happen. But everything, for a few moments, is
possible. And that makes it special, and different. Consider it for a moment. You are Harb. A lovely,
powerful, well-dressed, mysterious woman toys with her beverage on the bar
that stretches like an unmade bed before the two of you. Nobody is counting
how many drinks have crossed its scarred mahogany surface in your direction.
It's all but deserted. The bartender is giving you looks. It's time to take
the party someplace else, if it's going to continue at all. Funny how you
never noticed the little flecks of green in the bottom of her deep black
eyes, the way the corners of her mouth turn slyly upward when she's thinking
about something funny you just said. And what was it you just said? You
can’t remember! Oh, good. She can't remember either. And look! Her blouse,
which began the day all crisp and bright white and frisky, has, throughout
the course of countless assaults of heat, wind, conditioned air, a couple of
spilled condiments maybe, lost all its starch, and the top button that
concealed her clavicles from view is open now, and she is leaning forward to
get a light from you, and you smell the collected experiences of the day on
her, and how easy it would be just to lean into that and touch her cheek, and
what would happen then? Alcohol clouds the judgment, buddy. Fatigue clouds
the judgment. Distance from home clouds the judgment. Who declared judgment
to be the be-all and end-all anyhow! Whoever he was never found himself at a
Ramada Inn someplace in middle Iowa while the snow is falling on the silent
one-stoplight town. And the country music is playing low, and you're not a
job description anymore, not a role that has to be fulfilled, you're just a
little person at the edge of the great big universe, Charley, and wouldn't it
be nice to have a kiss now, just a little kiss, and after that little kiss
perhaps a big one, a big old wet one you could fall into and never come out
of again?
I'm just speculating, of course. But these are
perhaps the thought that might be going through a person's mind in just such
a circumstance. And yet, virtually all the time, in spite of this
and that, we still go back to our rooms, read the hotel magazine, drop off to
sleep. Frankly, and this is just my editorial comment here, you don't have to
listen to it, I think that continual, daily renunciation of bad action represents
a form of heroism in this sorry society in which we live. You won't read
about it anywhere, this form of heroism. But it exists, unknown and unsung. And Harb? Friends, if I may call you that, Harb was
the greatest hero of them all, at least the greatest I have known, because,
as I have noted, he often found himself seated stool-to-stool, knee-to-knee
with a slightly tipsy Nefertiti, the only barrier between them their mutual
discretion, together battling the fact that, at bottom, they truly, at that point
in time, adored each other on virtually every level it is possible for two
adults to love each other without touching. For yes, indeed, it is true—and it must be made
clear before any erroneous ideas are permitted to flower—that, after that
first chaste kiss in the office at holiday time, CaroleAnne and Harb did not
kiss again ever, not even in friendship. They did, however, enjoy ongoing,
massive amounts of opportunity to reevaluate that status. And they always
passed with flying colors. There are many places where two determined people
can kiss, and even more locations where those with equal determination can avoid
kissing, and in each of both locales, I must report, Harb and CaroleAnne
resisted temptation. Which is not to say that the avoidance and ultimate
rejection of oral intercourse eliminated the inappropriate feelings between
them, if such they were. No human power can do that, although many have
tried. And as anyone who has ever avoided kissing when a simple, affectionate
exchange of that nature would be the most natural thing in the world will
tell you, resistance is the ultimate aphrodisiac. I cannot relate what the
effect months of such exemplary behavior produced on CaroleAnne, for her
feelings, as it will become apparent, were a mystery to me and others as
well. But Harb, I can tell you, was a Roman candle waiting to erupt into the
sky. What wouldn't I give to experience that feeling again! And didn't he pay for it! Neither CaroleAnne nor Harb are particularly
appealing characters, but chances are if you’ve spent at least a dozen years
working in office, you’ve met versions of each of them. Relax and be glad
they’re not in your office as you read You Look
Nice Today. Steve Hopkins, October 28, 2003 |
|||
|
|
|||
|
ã 2003 Hopkins and Company, LLC The
recommendation rating for this book appeared in the November 2003
issue of Executive
Times URL
for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/You
Look Nice Today.htm For
Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins
& Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
|||
