Company - Max Barry [3]
“What?” Freddy says. “You think she doesn't deserve it?”
Jones's business shoes squeak as he and Freddy cross the lobby. It sounds as if he is conducting a mouse orchestra, and he feels the eyes of the two receptionists, Eve and Gretel, swing onto him. “That's him,” Gretel says to Eve. “His name is Jones.”
“Ah.” Eve smiles. “Welcome to the Titanic, Jones.”
Corporate humor! Jones has heard about this. He would like to respond in kind, but is too self-conscious about his shoes. He settles for: “Thanks.”
They reach the bank of elevators at the lobby's rear and Freddy pushes for UP. “People say she's Daniel Klausman's mistress.” Klausman is the Zephyr CEO. “But that's just because she's hardly ever in reception.”
Jones blinks. “Where does she go?”
“I don't know. But she's not his mistress. She's not like that.” The elevator doors slide closed. “So anyway, Catering's on level 17. When you're done, come on up to 14.”
“You mean come down to 14,” Jones says, but even as the words come out, he sees the button panel. The floors are numbered top down: level 1 is at the panel's apex, marked CEO, while level 20, LOBBY, is at the bottom.
Freddy snickers. “Reverse numbering. It throws everyone at first. But you get used to it.”
“Okay.” Jones watches the numbers click over—20 . . . 19 . . . 18—while his body tells him he's rising. It feels unnatural.
“They say it's motivational,” Freddy says. “As you move into more important departments, you rise up the rankings.”
Jones looks at the button panel. “What's so bad about IT?”
“Please,” Freddy says. “Some of them don't even wear suits.”
On level 14, Elizabeth is falling in love. This is what makes her such a good sales rep, and an emotional basket case: she falls in love with her customers. It is hard to convey just how wretchedly, boot-lickingly draining it is to be a salesperson. Sales is a business of relationships, and you must cultivate customers with tenderness and love, like cabbages in winter, even if the customer is an egomaniacal asshole you want to hit with a shovel. There is something wrong with the kind of person who becomes a sales rep, or if not, there is something wrong after six months.
Elizabeth doesn't rely on the usual facades of friendship and illusions of intimacy: she forms actual attachments. For Elizabeth, each new lead is a handsome stranger in a nightclub. When they dance, she grows giddy with the rush of possibilities. If he doesn't like her product offering, she dies. If he talks about sizable orders, she feels the urge to move in with him.
Elizabeth's love affairs are purely internal: no one else knows about them. But they're real enough to her, which is why she's so stressed: she's currently involved in eighteen long-term, on-off, hand-wringing relationships and last Thursday she spied somebody new across a crowded meeting room.
On the phone now, her customer is trying to scale back an order. Last week she sold him two hundred staff hours of training, but now he's trying to backpedal. As she sits in her cubicle, her back to the other two sales reps, the phone growing slippery in her hand, Elizabeth bites down on her lip. Why can't he commit? she wails. What's wrong with me?
“It's no biggie, Liz,” the customer says. “I just checked our schedule and found we don't need to do so much at once. We'll take the package, we just need to scale back the numbers.”
“But we talked about two hundred hours. That's what I thought we were talking about.”
“We were, Liz. I'm just changing my mind.”
“I . . .” Elizabeth's throat thickens. She fights to keep her voice steady. Men don't like clingy, needy women; she read that in one of the relationship books she owns that double as sales manuals. Men like to be challenged, so long as—so long as!—you never show disrespect. You have to set the challenge and at the same time imply that he is up to it. “But Bob, we had a commitment. You're not one of those guys who makes promises he can't keep. You're my