1990, San Francisco, California

By Deborah Abrams Kaplan

I was young. I was naïve. It was my first job. And I worked for Satan.

My first day of work, my boss Dawn pulled me aside to say, “The boss is manic. There’s something going on in this company.” She offered to let me quit with no hard feelings. Though she had only been at the job one week, Dawn already was planning her exit.
There was no need – she was fired a week later and my job was to hire and train my supervisor. As half of a two-person editorial department, I quickly learned the importance of employee retention – and realized why the company’s record was so low. The venture was financially and morally bankrupt.

We claimed to produce advertising books for trade groups. But with high staff turnover and lack of funds, these annual books were already two years behind schedule, with no publication date in sight. The clients, mostly small businesses, often spent their entire advertising budgets buying space in these books. They called me daily, demanding to know when the books would be ready. Satan taught me to lie to clients, telling them the books were almost finished.

While Satan should have been raising funds for his company, he instead took time management classes. This lead to the “15 minutes out of the building” mandate for every employee at 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. The salesmen headed to the first floor bar, gulping down three scotches before heading back up. The other employees smoked cigarettes in unison, commiserating about their miserable jobs and miserable lives. I stood silently, wondering if this is was what the real world was really like.

I soon learned that this was not a normal work environment. Satan was rumored to have a cocaine addiction, and he often didn’t return after lunch. If he did come back, his personality was Jekyll and Hyde. Routinely he wouldn’t show for scheduled interviews, leaving the prospective employees sitting for hours in the reception area. Staff was repeatedly warned not to talk with them, for fear that we might relay our experiences.

Agencies no longer sent temps, since Satan stiffed the agencies out of payment. Instead, he’d hire prospective employees for a few days and then fire them without pay. He made racial and sexually explicit cracks about the female staffers. When one new female employee refused his advances, he spread rumors that she was a “dyke.”

Money was an issue, since we were in bankruptcy proceedings. Creditors often sent what looked like world-champion weight lifters to the office to collect from him. They’d wait in the reception area all afternoon. Satan constantly received calls from an effeminate and lispy “ballet instructor.” And word was that Satan’s leg was broken by a thug just before I started working there. (Satan told me it was a car accident).

Satan tried to turn employees against one another by telling false stories behind our backs. He took us out to lunch individually on restaurant bartered script to ask our opinions on firing colleagues, which he did at random. At least two of the 15 employees quit or were fired each week.

It wasn’t only Satan who didn’t pass the ethics test. Salesman Frank left the job to spend six months in jail for evading $300,000 in taxes over 13 years. Salesman Todd landed in jail for beating his girlfriend, who incidentally took him back after his release. Office manager Samantha embezzled money, stamps and office supplies. She lived with Todd and his girlfriend. Public relations coordinator Lolita slept with Satan, unsuccessfully attempting to wrestle the company from his grip.

It’s no wonder I was chosen as employee of the week after only five days on the job.

While initially naïve, I did toughen up. As the youngest staffer, and a female to boot, it was my job to buy the coffee beans and brew the morning java. As a decaf gal myself, I decided to play a trick on the staff. When buying the beans, I had the salesman put decaf in the bag, slapping on the regular French Roast label. The morning headaches began, and soon I was relieved of my coffee-making role.

Payday was a joyous yet challenging event – Darwin ’s survival of the fittest. The first two or three employees to cash their checks had the best chance of actually receiving payment. Yet we weren’t supposed to leave our desks unless it was the official break time. The challenge was to find the most creative excuse for getting out of the office – my favorite was to claim “feminine problems” and dash across the street to the bank.

My first bounced paycheck arrived only two weeks into the job. Since Satan was out of the office, we went en masse to the bank, only to find that the cupboards were bare. A third of the staff quit that day, and I jumped from 15th to 10th in seniority. This was not the original way I planned to move up.

I lasted three months, during which I hired and trained two supervisors and became third in seniority. My last supervisor ended up in therapy. It was then that I decided to quit. Satan was secretly running an ad to replace me.

I knew too much.

Deborah Abrams Kaplan decided she wasn’t cut out for corporate life and is now a freelance writer. She tried Googling her former boss last year and her computer crashed. She took it as a sign not to look him up again.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Tuesday, February 13th, 2007 | Email This Post

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