208: Office Politics

Jacob's, and the other guys did not like their boss, man-right.

“Man-right was full of himself, he took credit for things that they did, he was already”

deal with, and they set out to sabotage him. Sociologist named Calvin Morrell, watched how they did it, is part of a study of office politics in different companies. These guys are worked for an old-line banking firm that he calls old financial, all the names in this story have been changed.

Additional companies like this one, Morrell says, "All the politics happen in secret." It's all sub-defuge, here's how man-right was destroyed by Jacob's. Man-right used to rely on this fellow Jacob's, to prepare him before he would go before the senior executive committee meeting, and Jacob's was very good, very smart guy, and he could anticipate some of the questions that his boss would be asked of these meetings.

So when he prepped him, he would just neglect to tell his boss about some of the key questions that he could anticipate being asked, and there his boss would stand at the committee meeting, naked, without the information that he needed. And eventually he was removed as a result of this.

“Now did Man-right understand that he had been sabotaged?”

He didn't, when he actually got back each time, this happened to him over the course of several meetings where he was misprept, if you will. And each time he came back, he was firmly convinced that his subordinates were incompetent, because how else could this have happened?

It never dawned on him that they were so competent that they might actually be intentionally

engaged in sabotage. Another multi-billion-dollar company that Morrell studied is one that he caused Playco, in the toy and education product business. Unlike off financial, where bosses were bosses and underlings were underlings, and so all the scheming had to go on in secret.

At Playco there was no real hierarchy, it wasn't clear who was in charge of him, and while

“that might sound like a kind of nice place to work, with no big bosses, it turns out”

that with no one absolutely in charge to make decisions and keep people in line, all the fighting was right out in the open. At meetings people would try to humiliate and at argue each other, they'd form alliances. The executives at Playco would talk all the time about honor and respect, as if they were medieval knights or maybe mob figures.

But I even witnessed violence in this firm between executives, one of the incidents I talk about was about two executives actually getting into a fist fight in front of the world headquarters of this multinational firm. Yeah, just tell what happens between those two. Yeah, well one guy was called, I call him Greer, and the other guy actually had a nickname

called the Terminator, and he was called the Terminator because this one guy said he liked a hunt big game, I like to look for executives who he could best in arguments and meetings. So these guys were parking their cars in the parking lot, and they called each other out, essentially, Greer accused the Terminator of playing around with women at a local health club and embarrassing the corporation.

Meanwhile the Terminator accused Greer of being a weak executive. This thing escalated, and after a few minutes one of them had the other over his load of sports cars. There's this idea in capitalism that companies are making decisions and products and strategy based on rational evaluation of the market and their customers to what degree, to what degree

is that true, based on what you saw, and to what degree are decisions being made based on office politics and not a rational evaluation of where their company is in the market.

There is some rationality, but thinking about the bottom line is sometimes a myth that

outsiders tell each other about how decisions are made, and it's not always about the bottom line, it's about politics with one another, maneuvering with one another. Given all that, given all the conflict, the careful morale, so it all kinds of offices. The surprising is not how many fist fights there are in offices, but how few. I know I've been in one.

This happened years ago on a public radio show that was just starting up, and I do not think of myself as much of a fighter, but here's how it went down. The guy who raised the money to start this show had this vision. And what his vision was was he said, what if there were a radio show where you could turn

Stephen Hawking's the physicist sitting down together and just talking about the things that interest them in common. So this show was two hours a day.

This guy had never worked on a daily program, he had done other stuff and never a daily

program. I and a number of the other people who worked on the show had worked on daily shows. At the time, by the way, it was not on the arrows, it was just a producer. And so we're trying to start this show and every day we come in and we'd work and work and work and work and work and work and work.

And every day we would have this experience of we would say, okay, here's what we think we can do. It was a very, very small step, very small step. And every day we would say, okay, here's what we think we can do this week and we would lay out the programs and this and this and this and this and this and this, and at the end

of the whole thing, all this work had gone into the end of the whole thing, the guy who would raise the other money and was our boss would say, you know, that's really very nice. But you know, it's, it's just not our original idea, it's not Spike Lee and Philip Glass and Stephen Hawking, you know, sitting down and talking to each other.

And those are sort of worked on daily programs that always said, I'm, you know, like, well,

this is, that is a perfectly good idea, there's a very valid idea, perfectly good idea.

“But you have to remember that you're on for two hours a day.”

You know, you have like two people making phone calls and booking this, you have like one or two tape cutters, one or two other people is very, very small step. And so, so even if, you know, you could get Spike Lee and Philip Glass in Stephen Hawking's into a room and you could figure out what in the world they actually have to say to each other, which would take a certain amount of research and time on someone's part.

Even if you can make all this happen, you know, that's only one hour, that's only going to be one show. And so we have to think about what's going to happen in all these other hours. And so that's a very good idea, very, very fine idea. But here are all these other ideas that we're going to do to fill all this other time too.

And this one on for day after day and week after week. And people working very, very hard and sort of burning out. And finally, after weeks of this, we're all standing around. And we've just finished our first five shows and it's been grueling, it's been really, really hard. And we're evaluating what to do next and how we should change the form out of the

show and all that kind of thing. And we get to the end of this long, long discussion. It seems like we're all on the same page.

And at last, like we're all in a cord, here's what we've been, here's what we've going.

And our boss says, we, you know, there's one thing that we haven't gotten to.

“And that is, I think we're forgetting the original idea of the show that really what it”

needs to be is, I think every hour needs to be more like, just imagine Spike Lee and Philip Glass and Stephen Hawking could sit down together. And, you know, just chat about whatever. And it had been a really hard few weeks. And as Nelson Mandela said in a very different context, you know, we had tried reason.

But reason had failed to reduce the solution. And so violence was our only option. And I didn't really see anything else to do. But to say, I didn't see anything in pies, a kind of thinking that really wasn't exactly happening.

It was just straight, pretty much got instant, and I walked over and I punched him in the stomach. And his reaction, I have to say, was not really satisfying as I was hoping for. It was like, he was sort of, he was sort of cushiony. I didn't feel like I was making much of an impression. And we're standing very, very close now and closer, I think that we'd ever stood to each

other. And he looks me in the eyes a little bit sweaty and he doesn't get mad at all. The whole thing just makes him get really, really sincere and he says, you know, I really

“think that you should think about what you're doing for a second.”

Which I have to say, you know, just made me mad or like, if you're really mad at somebody and they just start to talk to you like they're your therapist, you know, it just makes you mad or and so I punched him again. And again, not terribly satisfying and sort of a cushiony kind of feeling and you know, punches don't make as much of a sound in real life as you think they might.

And again, he sort of like, looks me, our face is very close to each other. It looks me in the eye and he says, you know, I think you're really having some feelings here that maybe you might be expressing a different way. Which of course, may be punch him again. At this point that the third punch pretty much people had gathered around us and I was pulled

off by the public radio staff of this show, which included a guy in a wheelchair, which gives you a sense of the top kind of fight that was going on here. And I say all this now, just to illustrate that even in the offices of an outfit known for its calm, voiced, let us also down together and reason together kind of reasonableness.

And the office where I speak to you from right now, feelings are so extreme that they

can lead to hit it. Our relationships at our jobs, I think, contain all of the feelings, you know, we have an all of our personal relationships. You know, there are people you like, people you don't like, there's gratitude, there's resentment, there's jealousy, it's all there, all the feelings are there, except in the workplace.

We can't express it, you know, because it's a workplace.

“You have to keep it boudered up inside and then it ends up seeping out in all these other”

ways. Well, today on our program, office politics, we bring three stories of conflict and high drama from our nation's workplaces, at one, hanging there kitty cat at some most Friday, in that act of lowly office worker gets in a jam and discovers that in times of trouble, when all else has failed, when all hope is gone.

Companies in her industry turn to one woman, one woman in my friend in a suburban home

in Long Island, who sells their corporate problems, without ever turning off the TV that plays in the background. Act two, she kicks in the conference room, whiskey after dark, David Rackoff discusses the world of birthdays and other holidays, as they are celebrated on the job. Three, when the job to get you off the streets is on the streets, in the act we hear stories

of the intricate office politics that take place in a location where you might not suspect there is any politics, because there is no office, stay with us. This is American Life.

“Today's show is a rerun from Long ago, at one, hanging in their kitty cat it's almost”

Friday. Starley kind tells the tale, in this act of an office problem that refused to be solved by ordinary means, and so extraordinary means had to be employed.

Kelly worked for a small startup.

There were only by a dozen people on the staff, and the office was just one big room with no walls, like in a classroom. And a lot of the same office politics that happens behind closed doors and other offices happened in this one, except without the doors. It didn't take long before the employees took on the established roles.

There was a cool kid, the flirt, the gossip, the nice boss who would really mean, the mean boss who was really nice. There was even the person who functioned at the unofficial psychologist. Every office has one. The person who is everyone to confident, who listens to your problems and gives you a shoulder

to cry on. And this office, though, the politics were so extreme that even she can be trusted. Our person would come in with a person who was crying and the person who was crying might be like, "Thanks. I'll buy you a beer sometime.

I really need you to get that off my chest." And that the psychologist would be like, "Oh, it's okay, you know, any time. I'll be right back." And literally walk over to the person who the other person had just been saying is torturing them, making no IPL, and that they think might want to kill them.

“And then go over and be like, "You see that person sitting right there?”

Yeah. She thinks that you might want to kill her." Since it was a start-up, the company was having trouble even staying in business. Pressure was high. hours were long.

There was a lot of stress and breakdowns and tears in fighting, and of course, sex. There was one person in particular who was sleeping with one of the women in the office. And until the last day, I think that most of the staff thought he was gay. There was a woman who was heterosexual, but was obviously had a crush on the one lesbian. We had in the office, like a hot and heavy crush.

And also on the men too, like she wasn't, you know, discriminated. And I mean, a certain amount of sexual tension is great, you know, gets you get up, you know, to get up in the morning, to actually wash your hair. But in this office, it was flying at you from such strange directions. And there were a couple things happening within the office.

From Kelly's perspective, the creepiest coupling was between her two bosses. There are three of them working super closely on a new project. The two bosses had both pretty much already hated her, and they've been hard enough to deal with them as individuals. But together, they formed this sort of invincible, two-headed monster of hate, and Kelly

with her number one target. When you're working with a very small staff, it's like being stuck on a ship with people. That's your only existence at all. So let's say you're stuck on this boat. You're out at sea, calm waters in the beginning, a lot of those celebrating.

I like you. Do you like me? I like you too. Yeah. And then things start to get rougher, things start to get rougher.

You now know things like things that you don't even want to know about people.

“You're forced to know in those environments.”

So imagine that, and then imagine the two people that I need to work with on a daily basis not talking to me, and not liking me, and sleeping together. So imagine we're all in that boat, and we have to make room for them to sleep with each other. Like, okay, move over on the cots.

They just wouldn't make eye contact with me. Wouldn't talk to me for the entire deadline that we were on. And also this person is only sitting six feet away from me. So if they could be uncomfortable at that, it was through the roof. And then slowly they should begin to sink.

They were running out of money. The buses grew paranoid and started picking off their employees one by one. A person entered the phone incorrectly and was fired that same day. Malay said in, employees started coming in later, not at all. No one believed in the project anymore.

And then one day, some irreplaceable photographs that Kelly was in charge of went missing. I looked everywhere.

“I looked in the bookcases under my desk.”

I looked in other people's offices on our floor. I looked in the drawers that were public. We had public drawers that were people could store stuff. And then we had drawers that were private, which I didn't go into when people were there. But I did get so desperate that I went through everyone's stuff.

Like I was getting irrational. Kelly suspected that one of her bosses had stolen the photographs. They knew that she had to return the photographs to the photographer and that her reputation was on the line. It would be a huge embarrassment if she had to actually call the photographer and tell

him they were gone. In her office, sabotage was becoming trendy.

Kelly had taken other examples of it, it just had never happened to her.

She thought all was lost. Until a friend told her what other companies in an industry did when objects like this couldn't be found.

“If this situation arises, they will hire a psychic to help them locate the images.”

A girl gave me a number of someone who she said was certified by the state of the New York, was a crime, psychic. I called her. She said, "Okay, I've got to have an hour for you to do it from now. Come." Apparently, once you've accepted the notion that your bosses are actually trying to sabotage you, the idea of going to a psychic just doesn't seem that crazy anymore.

It's even appropriate. Kelly called the psychic from a desk and plain sight of everyone, including this suspected boss. She didn't even bother lowering her voice. And then she said about following the psychic's instructions.

She took Polaroid photos of the office and all the people working there. And then she got in a train to the psychic's house along Island. She was hoping that the psychic could be able to tell her something, anything, but where the photos were. What she got was a whole lot more.

The psychic lit a cigarette while Kelly laid out the Polaroid she'd taken. Then the psychic started describing the subtlest nuances of her co-workers' personalities. So, no, she would just say, like, words, like, "Oh, she's so insecure!" As if she was having like a whole nether conversation that wasn't with me. And she'd be like, "Oh, she's not pretty."

Like, and she would start to feel sorry. Then, and then she'd be like, "Oh, okay." He doesn't like women. He's not like he's gay.

He just won't never think that women are worth that much.

Of all the reading rooms and all the homes of all the psychics among Island, Kelly walked into this one. The home of Anne, the office politics psychic. Anne and Kelly drew a little map of her office, was lined indicating where everyone sat. The psychic went from desk to desk to desk, describing the office politics between

Kelly's co-workers. These two are always gossiping with each other, don't trust them. This one was your friend, but they didn't like her, so she got fired. He's sweet. You can tell them things.

Then she got to Kelly's two bosses. And then she said, "Oh, okay." The person who sits here talks to the person who sits here all day long. She actually drew a line between the two bosses who were sleeping with each other. She drew the line.

She started, well, she would draw a little stick person, like, behind the desk, and then she would join another little stick person, and she'd be like, "Oh, this area to this area, like, my two main bosses, she were saying we're constantly talking to each other all day." She went into things that I didn't even know happened, that later I found out happened.

Like, they went on a trip.

She knew basically that he was living at her place.

The same amount of information with added psychic phenomena, as if she'd been sitting next to me the whole six months.

I've never called Ms. Cleo.

I've never had a terror reading or had my tea leave thread. I've never crossed over. But when I heard there was a psychic along Island who could tell who was lying about breaking the office fax machine, I had to go. I called him made an appointment.

She'd one stipulation for letting me come, no debunking. Anne lived with her elderly mother in her seven-year-old daughter. When I get there, grandmother and granddaughter are nestled in easy chairs watching golden girls. Anstring and reading in the back and her mother turned to me and asked if I'm there for

reading too. I tell her I'm not. We watched TV together in silence for a few minutes and then Anne and mother turned back to me and asked if I'm there for a reading. This pattern continues for the rest of the show.

I finally give it and say yes, I'm there for a reading.

Then she gets up and shuffled off to the kitchen and I can hear her muttering under her breath in gypsies. Then Anne comes in and takes me to a reading room. Well, we kept the red carpeting. It's root chakra and it gives me a lot of energy because I'm actually in a beta-level

sleep state.

“So I'm kind of groggy in the best thing to wake you up in the morning is that nice red carpeting.”

Um, and reading room looks like a suburban guest bedroom. There's a day bed that she likes because it makes the feel more like a therapist's office, pictures of her family, and a TV clutter with chuchkas, like a jar-labeled, ashes of problem-customers. And prefers to be called a clear-audient trans medium, which means that she can hear stuff

that isn't there as opposed to seeing stuff that isn't there. She goes into a trance and then her three-spirit guide to feed her the information. When I talked down on the phone, she told me she'd be in a trance when I got there. In fact, she'd been in a trance when she told me that.

It turned out and almost always in a trance.

At her house, I saw her receive payment for her services, recommend a good restaurant, and I saw her client to the door, all while on a trance. This seemed to be a complete abuse of the word trance. Not to be debunker anything. Appointments with Anna are hard to get.

She'll take anybody, but she's usually booked months and in advance. She'll come for the usual stuff like channel and dead relatives, but she does a big business of finding lost objects, and a large percentage of her client come about problems at work. If you think about it, that's where you spend most of your waking time during the day in most cases is in offices.

“That's why there's so many issues that people live right of issues I could begin to count”

or measure. I mean, you name it, I've had them all. I watch the end client drift in and out of our home from morning till night. And when I learn as this, it doesn't matter that the people work in different kinds of jobs, all their stories are the same.

There's a cop with a crap boss and 10 ton making his life hell. You know, you could be sitting in a room with five people he would walk in and say hello to the other four, and just like it normally, like I wasn't there. There's a woman from the car rental agency with a boss who didn't like women, and he had already been responsible for firing with two other girls at the office.

I was the last remaining female. There's a woman from the phone company who's working with a lot of people younger than her. There was a few managers that had a problem with it. She's was to type that laugh in your face, but she actually liked, did you read, behind

your back? Talking to Ann about all this, every office is a little fellow, full of jealousy and greed and intrigue. Kelly's story wasn't surprising to her at all. Surprised me?

“Not much of it, honestly, because I find it very common in the workplace.”

Um, and very often, times and nights, there's a lot of backstabbing. At some point, I'm guessing, you've worried about investing too much emotional energy in your colleagues, your boss, your work, at least we're all doing it. In fact, we're Kelly, one of the best things about going to Ann about to missing photos is that Ann didn't view her freak out as excessive.

Up into that point, you know, I would be calling my mom saying, like, they've taken them. They've taken them. I know they have, and she would be totally freaked out as any, like, all of my friends were, and they're like, let it go, you're gonna find them, and I'm like, no, no. This is bad.

This horrible place, you know, and I'd be going on these ramps and on my friends and my family were trying to be okay about it. But she was the first person that was like, oh, yeah. This is bad, and you're right, and that's unfortunate.

to show her the different places in the office.

“And she basically looked at the first one, which was the Polaroid of all the guys in the”

office and said, oh, that's him. He was really mad when you were taking that photo, because he knew that you were coming here. The man she pointed to was Kelly's boss. He, he's red in the face in this photo, glaring at me.

His veins on his neck are sticking out, and it looks like he could probably hit me. How much actual clairvoyance was involved in this is anyone's guess. And clients all swear by her, love her, actually. But and her clients all say that a part of what Anne does is confirm what you already know.

Kelly suspected her boss's and told her she was right, too. Armed with this new knowledge, Kelly did absolutely nothing. She didn't confront her bosses or go over their heads to the head of the company. She didn't do anything. She didn't need to.

She felt better. I felt totally vindicated. I felt like released after Anne.

“Yeah, I totally felt released because before I went to her, I kept waiting for them to”

break. I kept thinking that maybe they'd tell me or that they'd admit to it or that they'd just like put them on my desk at night. And I'd come in in the morning and they'd be there. I've had fantasies about that a lot.

And then afterward, I just, I didn't have to worry anymore. I had no suspicions. I knew that everything that I had thought she had told me was true. And I stopped caring. I felt like I could look at them from a different angle.

And it wasn't personal anymore. It was just more like, wow, that's pretty pathetic. You know?

The lost photos were never found.

Just like Anne said, they wouldn't be. Kelly now works somewhere else. Anne is booked through next summer.

“The problem with office politics is it never really makes sense of how the office.”

Your friends and family will never fully understand what it is you hate so much about the girl down the hall. With Anne, not only does she seem to understand, you don't even need to tell her about it. Starley Hine, cheers to Bruce and our show when she made that story.

In the years since we first broadcast today's show, she went on to create this beloved and short-lived podcast called Mystery Show. If you like this story, you might want to check that out, wherever you get your podcast. At two, she kicks in the conference room, whiskey after dark. Americans are, there's everybody knows, spending more time on the job, which means more

people's social lives are organized around their work lives, and more holidays are celebrated more intensely and mean more on the job site. David Rackoff wrote this next story while we at this American Life took our show on the road, doing our show before live audiences around the country. It is a parable of three such holidays as celebrated on the job.

All day the first national secretaries day. At least we consoled ourselves, we were assistants, not secretaries. In the world, we were in the world of New York publishing these titles meant everything. It's a loadsome distinction, the almost meaningless difference between field and house-slave. Overall, we all of us, secretaries and assistants alike, had much the same duties, filing,

photocopying, taking dictation, and making reservations for meals we would never get to eat.

There was one glaring discrepancy between us and the secretaries, specifically their salaries dwarfed ours. But our peniary came with the promise that we were bound for better things. We would be mentored, promoted, and one day raised to our rightful stations as book editors are faith in the East Coast Maritocracy restored.

Still, every April and national secretaries day rolled around, many of us took sick days, genuinely nauseous with worry, that we might be mistook for them and their on our assistant desks would be the asparagus fern and baby's breath surrounded long stem roses. If the heart felt note from the boss who just couldn't do it without ya. Instead of national secretaries day, we assistance had our own folk traditions with our own

holidays, one of which we celebrated often, almost nightly, in fact. We called it drinking. With disturbing regularity, the end of the work day found us at the old monkey bar, the door sit bar, the warric bar, all of which were attached to serviceable in somewhat

Midtown Manhattan used to be full of just such comfortably shabby establishments where

“career weighters with brilliant-teamed co-movers and shiny elbow jackets served marvellously”

cheap, albeit watery drinks, along with free snacks. Either telleries, sticks, unironic faux Asian poopoopplatters, pretzel nuggets accompanying a cheese spread of a color that in nature usually signals, "I am an alluring yet highly poisonous tree frog, beware, dinner and forgetfulness all for ten dollars. Youth is not wasted on the young.

It is perpetrated on the young." Hooch, happily, was one luxury we could afford.

Our drunkenness was two-fold, first, there was the liquor, but there was also the intoxication

brought on by the self-aggrandizing conviction that we happy few, we cheery booze-hounds were the new incarnations of that most mythic bunch of sources, the Algonquin round table. This pipe dreams to stain not just us, but I suspect countless other tables of publishing menials all over town. So desperate were we to assume the mantles of Parker, Benchley, and their ilk that we weren't

going to let some silly thing like a "dirt of wit" or the complete absence of a body of work on any of our parks, to tell us. With enough $4 drinks sloshing through our veins, even the most dunder-headed school yard jepery qualified as car-skating repartais.

“What do you want, a repost might begin, a medal or a chest to pin it on?”

"Oh, to shay, we cried merrily as we clutched our martinis!" That represented the high point of the discourse. Naturally our tongues thickened, and our moods darkened, unpleasantly, as the evenings wore on a hostile, gin-centred pole fell over everything, and our glittering aphorisms were reduced to the wishful and direct, I hope my boss is dead right now.

Paying the bill, we stumbled out into the street and back to our apartments, where we spent the rest of the night jellously reading the manuscript of those who actually wrote, and didn't just drink about it. Rising on refreshed we would return to the office and rubbing alcohol and cotton balls in hand, get down to work, swabbing leaf by leaf, the potted plants in our bosses' office,

“a vain attempt to stop the outbreak of white fly that was going around the floor.”

Pressing the higher-ups became our constant purpose, we spent an inordinate amount of time attaching disproportionate significance to our message-taking skills, our co-nating acumen, no small feat from under a hovering cloud of job hatred. How sad to realize from the vantage point of years later that the answer to the question that was perpetually on our minds, "What do they think of me was, they didn't?"

That all, realistically, we were the help, and it was best not to forget it.

Holiday the second Christmas.

Those three weeks or so of midtown Manhattan Christmas are an assistance dream. No work gets done, and all is romanticized melancholy. It was precisely why so many of us had moved to the city, so that we, too, might gaze misunthropically at the corporate Christmas tree and the lobby surrounded with gift-wrapped empty boxes that fooled nobody.

And in the institutional fluorescent lit sadness of it all feels something approaching depth. The phone's idle, we spent our days going to the movies during lunch, returning hours later to troll the holes of the office, faraging through the gift baskets like a raving pack of voles, subsisting on cars, water biscuits, individually red waxed dip balls of baby gooda, butternut, toffee, popcorn, smokehouse almonds, and fancy fruit preserves eaten directly

from the jar. A diet that had our faces peppered with blackheads and glistening with oily sebum as unto the shining visitors of the apostles. Our bosses were away with their families at country houses, having real lives. We wondered how they might greet the site of the empty food baskets upon their return,

such anarchy, such transgression, as usual they never even noticed.

We, on the other hand, could not even conceive of a world wherein we did not know the exact quantity and location of our giant cashews.

After any moment of extreme assistance, subjugation, say, a morning wherein one might

“innocently open an unsolicited manuscript only to find that someone had made the publishing”

house a jiffy pack full of human feces, or one might be sent to the corner to pick up a cappuccino for an author who had just been given a million dollar book advance, a coffee for which I was not reimbursed.

After such moments, we would make our way to Sheila's cubicle, where we could always

be guaranteed clear-eyed advice and cigarettes. Sheila was our bad girl, leader. A poet unwriter herself, she despised her job and didn't care who knew it, smoking openly at her desk and standing on ceremony for no one. These would be my pajamas that I slept in last night.

She would say indicating the black-long sleeve t-shirt and black workout pants she was wearing. This, she would add fingering a crusted, right, smear on the hem of the top. This would be spilled food, nice.

“Well they say, dress for the job you want, not the job you have.”

So of course it was immediately to Sheila that I went when I received my birthday card. It was late November, opening the envelope my eyes fell upon it, a reproduction of one of those tinted B movie stills from the 1950s. A woman in a smart, worsted business jacket wearing a pair of glasses at which men seldom make passes and a switchboard operators headset out of which were shooting tiny lightning bolts

were shown to be thinking, "Someone needs coffee." Above her head, in screaming sci-fi acid yellow type, was the title of this card's

purported movie, the amazing tale of the psychic secretary.

I slid the card back into the envelope, walked over and showed it to her. Get her coat, she said, "Her voice business like, her face unreadable. We went to the warric bar," don't talk for a while, just smoke, she said. And then as an afterthought she added, "But you knew I was going to say that didn't a psychic secretary."

Across from us in the darkened booth, a couple sat a man and a woman. They'd clearly been there for hours because the woman's head was lolling about on her neck, as she alternately whispered lubriciously or laughed too heartily at her companions' jokes. We had a clear view under the table where we could see her rubbing ever higher up his thigh. I knew where this exchange was leading.

Psychic. Not long after that evening, I sat in a movie theater packed to the rafters. Just before the lights went down, a woman marched up the aisle, looked at me and asked, "Is that seat taken? I was nowhere near the end of the row, but trying to be helpful.

I asked which seat, looking directly into my eyes, she said that seat. She pointed. She was pointing to the center of my chest to my very heart."

"Well, I'm sitting here, I managed, finally."

As if I were her college-aged daughter who had suddenly announced that I was a vegetarian, she shrugged in a kind of suture self-indulgence of my fantasy of existence and moved on. I looked up and down the row for some sort of laughter, some eye-rolling commiserationer, just plain corroboration that this had just happened, but I got no response.

To this day, I cannot explain it. Was this an emissary sent from on high at that time of year, not to trumpet the birth of the son of God, but to proclaim with heavenly proof my complete and utter insignificance? She's right. I thought this seat isn't taken.

It was the perfect moment for that time in my life.

“I mean that, of course, in the worst way possible.”

The theater went dark. Up on the screen, the camera zoomed past a huge close-up of the Statue of Liberty swooping down to find the Statue Island very scutting along the water, transporting our working girl to her office job, where we already knew she would triumph, thank wish the heartbeat boss, and win the love of the man.

Sheila taught me a survival technique for getting through seemingly intolerable situations, interminable lunches, stirren lectures on attitude or time management, being trapped by

Maintaining eye contact, keep your face inscrutable and mask-like with the faintest hint of a smile.

“Keep this up as long as you possibly can, and just as you feel you were about to crack and”

take a letter opener and plunge it into someone's neck, fold your hands in your lap, one nestled inside the other, like those of a supplicant in a priory. Now with the index finger of your inner hand, right on the palm of the other, very discreetly and undetectably, I hate you. I hate you.

I hate you. Over and over again, as you pretend to listen. You will find that this brings a spontaneous look of interest, and please engage into your countenance, continue and repeat as necessary. In the dark of the theater, I write my message pressing hard into the flesh of my hand,

although I don't know who I'm writing to, I'm just glad to feel that it hurts. Thank you.

Keep it a version of the story into his first book, which is called "Froud, Coming Up,

“Bill Glass, Spike Glien, Stephen Hawking, set around an avocatial conversation about, you”

know, whatever, that'll be the day." In a minute, I'm going to juggle up a great deal when our program continues. The American life from our glass, each week on a program, of course, we choose some team, bring your variety of different kinds of stories on that team. Today's show is a rerun from many, many, many, many years ago, office politics, high-drama

and our nation's workplaces, we've arrived at Act 3, Act 3, when the job to get you off the streets is on the streets. So it's a time in New York City, it's six avenue and eighth street in Greenwich Village. We're pretty much any day you would see tables on the sidewalks, manned by graphic-looking man.

These days, we're just a handful of tables like this, but back in the early 2000s, when

we first made this episode and put it on the air, the table was extended for two blocks,

one after another, selling magazines and books. Most of those magazines and books have been pulled from the trash, found in dumpsters. Joey Snyder reports on the politics of this particular business. After spending a couple of days on the corner of sixth avenue and eighth street, what strikes me is not how different street vending is from other businesses, but how similar.

As if the rules of business are so deeply encoded in us that as soon as anyone starts to sell anything in any setting, the rules and hierarchies of a company start to gel around them, even if what they're doing is selling other people's trash. On the corner, you've got your entry levels and you've got the people who have worked and clawed their way to the top.

That's more or less what Ishmael Walker did. When I visit, he is the best spot on the block, right on the corner in front of the Barnes and Noble, and what got him there was simple ambition. At one time, I was down the block, and I was just sitting out of the damn, all of my knees up there and everybody up there.

“You can see that bookstore people going by a bookstore, right?”

And I got books on the table, I got married, I just got what they want. There are other reasons Ishmael went into the corner. Right across his grave's papaya, a hot dog restaurant with plate glass windows that looks directly under the corner. When it rains, he can sit inside and eat and still keep an eye on his stuff.

Also, there's a small alcove that's right in front of Ishmael's table where he keeps the chair and can relax or nap during the day. To understand how you rise to the best space on the block, or how you get demoted to the worst, consider Ron's story. I told you one time I had this whole block from the lightposts of the lightposts.

This was when I first came out here.

Ron's at the very end of the blocks, in what is arguably the worst location. Years ago, before Ishmael made his move to the top, Ron controlled the entire block, including the area where Ishmael is now. Now, our guy control of this whole block was that I was living here, I was living right here on the sidewalk.

There was no way anybody was going to get here before me. I didn't understand, and I used to sleep over there, me and a few other guys used to sleep over there and packed my stuff up in a dumpster post office thing and I would push it over there. And it's that if I wanted, I could be up 24 hours if I wanted to.

More than half the guys on 6th Avenue were homeless, so it's easier for them to stay with their stuff and keep their spaces on the street. Eventually, Ron moved in with his aunt and Harlem. He lost control of the block, and now he doesn't get as much business as Ishmael does.

Because I'm not going to steal here all night, all out in spot.

I gotta place the lift now. You understand, I'm a part must of up at night and go home. The way Ron started here is the way all the guys start. He was a panhandler, but you're lucky if you get any of the guys to admit that because for the most part, the vendors are embarrassed about their panhandling pass.

The panhandlers mean wow, look down on the vendors, saying they have too much pride to sell someone else's trash. Ron remembers panhandling, it's just being humiliated.

“I was like a panhandling over there on a nine street, and I remember one day I walked”

up to my brother in law. I did walk up to him, I was panhandling like my back was turned, and he walked up and

turned around and said, being some change that he was my brother in law, and he looked

at me like, "I've got a wife on kids to support, and he kept going." Now, one time I was really embarrassed this time, I was working at this job, I was working at this job at the time, and I was getting a good money, and I ain't even that job because I'm a drinking, and one of the workers, one of the co-workers, that didn't really get a long way that good, was a girl, and she had a boyfriend, her boyfriend was a police

police, a New Jersey cop, and I remember one day I was panhandling up town, and she walked up and she looked at me like, "She was real startled, and she was with the guy and, you know, I remember I was really embarrassed that time." So I'm actually glad that I was able to start bending, which is more respectable. When he spent time on the corner, what it looks like is there'll be 20 or 30 guys all

“around the tables, and it seems like they're just hanging out doing nothing, but it turns”

out they all have different and distinct jobs with different responsibilities and pay scales. There are placeholders who camp out overnight on the sidewalk, holding a space that they sell to vendors in the morning, that usually pays around 20 to 30 dollars. Guys called storage providers have places either in their apartments or under the subway tracks or an empty store rooms, where they charge $7 to $10 for the vendors to keep their

tables and crates and magazines during the night. The movers help the vendors haul their stuff on and off the sidewalks, they generally make $5 to $10 a move. If you were to show up on 6th Avenue tomorrow to start in the business, even with a high school or college degree, even with other job experience, you'd have to work your way up

same as anyone before you'd make bender.

When sociologist Mitch Denier came to the block to write about the vendors, he was first

put to work getting coffee and helping out in little ways for months before getting his own table, he ended up spending years with the vendors.

“Not anybody can come out here and set up a table, but you have to work your way through”

the system because there's only a certain number of legal spots on the street. The city regulates how many spots they're facing. And so some guys show up in the morning and their whole job is just to be a mover. In fact, that's how Conrad got started out here. He was originally just a mover and now he moved up to getting his own table and there

are many people who start out as table watchers, watching a table all night while someone else goes to sleep or watching a table while people go to the bathroom and, you know, they may wind up having their own table one day. Mitch introduced me to everyone on 6th Avenue and explained that excessive drug use is pretty much what brought all of the guys out here.

Most times a person's position on the sidewalk correlates to their level of addiction. If you smoke a lot of crack and aren't too trustworthy, a placeholder is about the best job you can get. If you're pretty clean, you're probably a regular table watcher or a vendor. So there are clicks on the sidewalks and mutual snobbries between the panhandlers and the

vendors. But like in any workplace, there are people who side step those trivialities, ignore the politics. BA is one of those people. Some people say that BA stands for bad attitude, but BA prefers business administrator.

It's an appetital forum because he's sort of a floater on 6th Avenue, one of the few guys who jumps from job to job during the day. On this afternoon, BA is table watching. He's also placeholding a space next to him for a vending joe and elderly white guy who sells rare and out of print books but only comes to the sidewalks on weekends.

And then on top of all of that, at four in the afternoon most days, he goes down to the path train station to Panhandle. Today he isn't going. Yeah, I got somebody down there working for him. At the train?

Yeah, the path train is. You pay somebody to go down there for you if you can't go and then. Hey, me, when they come off, they pay me. Because you have a spot down there too.

You know what I'm saying?

My town was from 46th, so if they want to get on my town, I tell them to give me half. So right now, you're making money down at the train station. And then you're also making money right now on the table. Of course. That's how I go.

And then you'll also make money tonight by holding the space for joe for tomorrow. God. What would you do if they went, if somebody like just went down there from 46th and

“started panhandling and you didn't know them and they didn't pay you?”

Like, isn't that possible? No, no. They got to go.

Because I go like 3.30, I check out my spot.

You know what I'm saying? I go like 3.30, I go make sure everything is clear. I'm saying I go sell myself up, I'm going to creep down there, get my cup ready. I'm saying my clothes and they're like a bomb. Wait.

At the risk of making homeless advocates cringe, I want to make sure you caught that. Right now, B.A. is wearing a polo shirt from the gap, khakis and indidas. But when he goes down to panhandle, he says he changes his clothes to look like a bomb. I change my clothes and it's like a bomb. You change your clothes to look like because right now you look really nice.

That's how sad.

I told you I had to go change everything.

“You have to go down and go panhandling, then what do you wear?”

I'll put on my old laws of sound, change my sneakers up, and I'll just dust it up, dust it up. I'll do ragged sound like that. You know, it should be down to the corners. And then two hours, how much can you get? It's 68,000.

That one point in the corner, Ishmael's friend Shorty pulls up on the sidewalk and gets out of a cab carrying several cardboard boxes, so I want to clean out their apartment and give him Shorty a bunch of old books. The guys gather around and evaluate the books, most of them seem pretty old with titles nobody's ever heard of, but there are a few known sellers.

The babysitter's club, these are self-love, and I don't know about each other, like a pros and old self books are magazine, don't know, not the vibe. Some of these guys have known each other for over 20 years, and the mid-80s they lived

“together in Penn Station before the city cleaned it up.”

After time and jail and treatment programs, the guys regrouped on 6th Avenue, and their clothes, and a way that makes it nice to hang out with them. They joke around, they get in the little arguments that last a day or two, and then blow over. "There's all good prices on the ground, how much of the service of this guy who has

got a piece on him, and a good deal for them." Starting around 4 in the afternoon, the sidewalk started in busier, the music it's turned up on the stereos, and what's known as the power hour begins. Each table has about 150 to 200 magazines laid out. The sellers, Vogue vibe, GQ, Martha Stewart-Living, Architectural Digest.

There are foreign fashion magazines like Italian, Vogue, and the occasional specialty order. "Well, I got a girl right now, and she wants to Drew Barrymore playboy issue. She said on an internet, they actually $60, I don't have that book many times. I'm waiting on it now. I'm going to just charge at $35."

The losers, any weekly magazine, the new Yorker, Sports Illustrated, Newsweek, neighbors will often donate stacks of weekly magazines, like people, to the vendors. The vendors will take them just to be polite and later, quietly throw them away. It seems that smut sells the best, and there's a surprisingly large stock of gay porn that everyone is completely matter of fact about.

In fact, it's all pretty relaxed, no hard sell, except for Ishmael, sitting in this premium spot at the top of the block. At one point, a cab driver who Ishmael has apparently dealt with before pulls up next to the tables and asks Ishmael, if he has any computer books or software. "Yeah, they right there, the whole session of the whole food, come on out to cab.

You got to get up out of the cab and come on by the table, bro." The cab driver is reluctant to leave his cab parked, sitting in the middle of a lane of traffic, on the side of a busy New York City street. "You got to come on out, you got to get up out of it, but we ain't going to have that accident on the wall like we did last time."

"And you don't worry about the tick, I want you to see the books, man."

He sells the computer book for $10.

“"Now on the star, are you going to see that, you're going to go around and take what”

you can see what's in front of." Ishmael to the top of the block is pretty much what gets someone to the top of any business. He just wanted it more.

When he first started on the sidewalk, there was a guy named Scotty sitting at the corner

by the bookstore. So Ishmael made a plan. He says he stayed inside and rested up for a week and got ready to make his move on Scotty. "So, they come, he had come yet, so my table is in there. That's minute, he had he come.

Oh boy, I've fought for three months, three days straight, physically bite, tables in the

“street, common books in the street, books in the street, he kicked mine and I took it.”

For three days straight, eight o'clock till about 11 o'clock on afternoon, morning." When Mitch first introduced me to Ishmael, Mitch said he'd met a few people in his life with a determination that Ishmael has. And I know it's weird that the path to triumph will be kicking the ass of your opponent for three hours every morning, but if Coke and Pepsi could do the same thing, don't you

think they would? "Ishmael, I have seen you in 30 below zero weather at 4 o'clock in the morning. I've seen you preserving this space out here when everybody else was gone." "Because it's like they said the ghost come out at night." "Well, and if you're not there for leaving, somebody is willing to slip up in there."

On a good day, when the weather's nice and lots of people are out, Ishmael makes about $150, but he works seven days a week, and a lot of days it rains. "Toly Snyder was the senior producer of our show back when we first broadcasted his program. She went on to co-create the serial podcast, thanks to Mitch Deneer for acting as our guide to this story. His book, documenting several years in the lives of the vendors, is called Sidewalk.

That book became a documentary film with the same name. The Mitch still visits the vendors every few months. B.A. and Shorty have since passed away. Ron was supported to make up. But Ishmael still hangs around the neighborhood, which retired now.

Well, people started looking on their phones on this subway, and stopped buying books and magazines to read there. The vendors from Sixth Avenue took a big hit. Thanks today to the medical hall and Chris Neary, production help on this rerun for Michael Kamate,

Molly Marcello, Stone Nelson, and Ryan Rumory.

“This American life is a little bit of public radio stations by PRX.”

The public radio exchange, thanks as always to a program's co-founder, Mr. Tory Malatea.

You know, and Spike Lee walks in on Tory, and me and Trilap Glass is deep in Hawking. This is what happens. He would walk in and say hello to the other four. And just like, you know me, like, I wasn't there.

I'm Eric Glass. Back next week, for Marcello's stories of this American life. Next week on the podcast of this American life, a busful people going to DC, only the driver doesn't want to go to DC. He's going to go wherever he wants.

And the passengers, strangers are never met till now.

Nothing like one rogue person to make everyone else unite, you know. Whatever is next, a real-life version of the movie's speed. Next week on the podcast, on your co-public radio station.