Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

  The word cunning seems to catch their attention, and I wonder if it’s something I should use again. Donald suggests I do some networking through the PR professional association, which I have so far known only as a web site. Ron promises to e-mail me a contact.

  Finally, it is Tim’s turn to speak. He has not been just a run-of-the-mill HR guy; he’s a union buster, though that’s not his phrase. His résumé lists unions he has gone up against and defeated, and he stresses these victories in his “commercial.” Neal, who has been largely silent since revealing his problems with getting up in the morning, asks Tim whether, if he can’t find another HR job, he would consider working for labor instead. I mumble insincerely that Tim’s experience might be really welcome at the AFL-CIO, right here in Washington. A beat goes by before Tim says, “Yes.” Then he thinks for another few seconds, swallowing hard and blinking repeatedly, before saying, “Probably not. That would be a big adjustment.”

  So Tim has principles, which, under the circumstances, is almost shocking. No matter what the temptation, he’d remain loyal to the managerial class, just as, I suppose, Ron would reject an overture from the Democratic National Committee. I, on the other hand, have none. If Wyeth, the manufacturer of the hormone replacement drug that probably contributed to thousands of cases of breast cancer, offered me a job doing damage control in the press—well, under the terms of this project, I’d have to take it. But the way things are going, that is beginning to seem as unlikely as an AFL-CIO bid for Tim.

  four

  The Transformation

  Ron instructed us to devise a “Winter-Spring Plan of Attack,” and I find the military metaphor oddly reassuring. This is not just a matter of “attitude,” or hope, or the projection of winning force fields; no, everything hinges on the cool logic of strategy. I will need a three-part plan, I decide, because in Western culture important things come in groups of three. Every public speaker knows this: two points are unconvincing; four are long-winded and superfluous; it takes exactly three to suggest roundedness and completion. And the first part of the plan is, once again, as emphasized by Ron, networking—sustained and furious, skilled and highly targeted, relentless and dogged.

  My major takeaway from Ron, now that I have a chance to reflect, is that getting a job is like gaining acceptance into an eighth-grade clique. There exists an elite consisting of people who hold jobs and have the power to confer that status on others, and my task is to penetrate this elite. Since my actual eighth-grade status never advanced beyond that of loathsome pariah and nerd, I have no practical experience of elite crashing, but it makes sense to include a ruthless scrutiny of the “product” I am trying to sell. My résumé was finally judged “great” by Joanne, perhaps only because we ran out of sessions. It’s the wrapping, so to speak—my physical appearance—that concerns me now. Sociologist Robert Jackall observes that in the world of corporate managers, “appearances—in the broadest sense—mean everything,”1 and, if it is to keep up with the standards set by the résumé, mine needs a careful reevalulation.

  Fortunately, I discover on the web, there are companies that will do this for me, and I call one of them, Image Management in Atlanta. The man who answers the phone asks whether I am interested in “body language or colors.” Both, I say, the whole package, and am told it will cost $250 for a three-hour session. Call this part two of the Winter-Spring Plan of Attack: product enhancement.

  But what about part three? An upgraded persona will not help without upgraded marketing methods, and to this end I read Nonstop Networking by Andrea R. Nierenberg, described in large print on the book jacket as “the Queen of Networking.” The book seems to be addressed to the same market as the antidepressant that is advertised as a cure for “social anxiety.” “Standing in the doorway,” Nierenberg acknowledges, oblivious to the dangling participle, “a networking event can seem scary.” The trick is to break the networking process down to “baby steps,” such as “establish[ing] eye contact” and “ask[ing] an open-ended question.” If you are still nervous, you can “use a script,” rehearsing it “until it comes across naturally.”2

  Sample icebreaking questions are offered: “Why did you come to this session? Where do you work and what do you do? Where do you live? What other sessions have you attended?”3 I study the photo of Nierenberg on the book cover—the gray jacket and thick silver necklace, the dark lip gloss and the excessive eye shadow, which gives her a slightly loopy, half-asleep look—and imagine myself approaching her with the incisive question “What other sessions have you attended?”

  I decide to go to Atlanta for a session at the image management firm and, it occurs to me as an afterthought, a follow-up visit to Patrick, who has indeed called, though I was not home at the time, to inquire as to what further coaching I might need. On the same trip, I will make use of any networking events I find advertised on the Atlanta Job Search Network. No more shyness or prideful reticence; I resolve to be a networking fool.

  I make a reservation at the cheapest downtown hotel I can find, for an amazingly low $59 a night, secure a rental car, and pack every vaguely “professional” item of clothing I possess, which fortunately requires no more than a single small suitcase, even with the laptop thrown in. Just to be extra prepared, I spend one of my last nights at home watching Patrick’s video, which I purchased at the boot camp, on how to find one’s “career sweet spot.” It is shockingly bad, so bad it begins to fill me with a zany self-confidence. Patrick is shown addressing a classroom in which about twenty adults are seated at desk chairs with their backs to the camera. He wanders through his spiel, holding my attention only when he embarks on an anecdote I had not heard before, about how he once had $1 million, and then, well—his gaze wanders from the camera to the wall—apparently it got away from him. Occasionally the action is interrupted by a screen containing a text message, generally in the form of three bulleted points. I give up in boredom halfway through, only later in the evening realizing that I am a PR person, and what Patrick desperately needs is me.

  The plan takes form in my last day at home. Patrick will think I am coming for a coaching session, but I will in fact be coming to propose that he hire me himself. The best outcome would be that he does in fact hire me, and I exit the realm of the jobless just like that. In the second-best outcome, he will be sufficiently impressed to invite me to join his inner sanctum, the ExecuTable, in which he brings together the most promising of his job seekers with local business leaders. Or of course he could simply laugh me out of his office, but at least I would have gotten some valuable practice in “selling myself.” So the Winter-Spring Plan of Attack now has the necessary troika of elements, which I list as Network, Change Self (that’s the image enhancement part), and Sell Self. I cannot be sure, though, that the last two items are really separate and freestanding, since to “sell myself” I will need to transform myself into someone very different, psychologically speaking, from whatever I have been in my life up till now.

  MY FIRST NETWORKING session in Atlanta is a major disappointment. I check into my hotel, noting that it is cheap for a reason—dingy and with the only available food being some Stouffers frozen dinners in a freezer next to the registration desk. But at least I have a fridge and microwave, a TV, and a desk, plus there is a computer attached to a printer that guests can use in the lobby. It’s still light when I drive out to the networking event venue, the Roasted Garlic restaurant in a northern suburb. This event, which came to me via the Atlanta Job Search Network, is sponsored by the congenially titled Layoff Lounge and aimed at the executive job seeker. Between the garlic and the lounging, I expect a convivial scene and possibly something decent to eat.

  The Roasted Garlic occupies a site in a drab shopping center at which most of the stores are already closed for the night. It’s one of those dark, suburban Italianate places, where most of the action centers on the bar. I am directed upstairs to a room packed with about thirty people seated around long tables facing the inevitable PowerPoint screen
—a motley crowd, ranging in age from thirties to late fifties, mostly in studied business casual, and featuring a few black faces.

  No networking occurs, however, except furtively and on the margins. Instead we are subjected to two hours of lectures accompanied by PowerPoint slides, and in case these fail to get the message across, we also are each given notebooks titled “Mastering Executive Job Change” and containing the same PowerPoint slides in paper form. Look up and you see

  I. Managing Career Transition and Change Strategy

  A. Understanding Your Current Emotional Needs

  B. Gain Control

  Look down and you see the very same thing, unless, of course, you have been flipping ahead. But it’s probably just as well that our eyes are so fully engaged, since this is a sad, tacky place that we have come to, unenriched by even a whiff of the eponymous vegetable. Fake ivy on trellises lines the wall behind me, and I am facing a needlepoint rendition of a seaside town, possibly Italian, heavy on the burgundy and browns. Only a curtain keeps us from looking down on the bar scene on the main floor, but the curtain does nothing to dampen the familiar bar sounds of mumblings and the occasional squeal or hoot.

  The content of the presentation attests to a major erosion of middle-class life: “Job change”—or, more accurately, job loss—has become inevitable, the speaker tells us, several times in a lifetime, and it is always accompanied by drastically straitened circumstances. How to manage? Much useful, but exhausting, information follows on preserving one’s 401(k) plan, health insurance, and credit rating when the income ceases to flow, as well as a host of small tips: Raise some cash by holding a yard sale, and use the occasion to network with your neighbors. Cut the kids’ allowances. Don’t eat out and, when networking, arrange to meet for breakfast, not lunch, or better yet for coffee at Starbucks. “Every twenty dollars you can save,” our speaker, a financial manager who resembles Alec Baldwin only without the sexual edge, tells us, “is a plank in the lifeboat you are building for yourself.”

  There are moments of bitter humor. On the subject of pensions, he asks, “You’ve heard of those?” to some slight snuffling sounds from the audience.4 On health insurance, he says, “COBRA: It’s not a snake, but it’s going to seem like one when you see the quotes.” The bright side, though, is that some trace of class privilege survives into the jobless condition. As executives, he reassures us, “instead of being laid off or out of work, we’re ‘in transition.’” This residual superiority can be deployed while asking the mortgage company for a few months’ grace period. “You’re executives here,” the Baldwin lookalike declares, so you can go to the mortgage company without “your tail hanging between your legs.”

  We are given a break in which we are encouraged to order some food, despite the prohibition on eating out. This Roasted Garlic, the speaker tells us, is “the best-kept secret in Dunwoody.” Having sampled a meal of tough chicken breast strips residing in a Campbell’s soup-flavored sauce, I can report that it is a secret I can be counted on to keep. I chat with Leah Gray, the blond, thirtysomething woman sitting at my right, who shares my disappointment that this has not turned out to be a networking opportunity at all. No discussion has been built into the agenda, nor any time for the informal sharing of stories and tips.

  Leah hands me a card that seems to be imprinted with a tiny résumé, in which most of the entries are undecipherable codes, like LINUX and SAP, and tells me she’s been looking for another IT-related marketing job for six months now, going to events like this almost every weekday night. When I ask her what seem to be the most helpful events, she says there are a lot of things to go to, but that many of them are “very religious” and not particularly useful for contacts. At one networking event, she was challenged by one of the organizers to reveal where she is “churched,” and walked out indignantly. She hastens to assure me there’s nothing wrong with networking events being “religious”; it’s just not what she goes to them for.

  Not all of the scheduled networking events pan out. The night after the Roasted Garlic gathering, I head out for a networking meeting at a downtown Episcopal church, where a kindly female pastor informs me that the meeting time was changed and looks prepared to offer me a free meal and a place to sleep. I rush back to the hotel and do a Mapquest search for Congregation Beth Shalom, where the “Career Mavens” are said to be meeting, but I wouldn’t get there till eight and the event ends at eight thirty. The next morning I’m up before six for the forty-five-minute drive out to a Golden Corral on the far west side, but the place isn’t even open and a guy who’s mopping the floor inside has no clue as to where the meeting might have migrated to.

  Even with these gaps in the schedule, my home life, such as it is, is busy enough. Clothes have to be maintained in presentable condition. Food has to be procured, which turns out to be more of a challenge than you might expect at a “downtown” location. Within a two-block radius of the hotel, I can get a burger at Checkers or a larger one, with salad, at a sports-oriented pub. A great deal of time goes into planning my next outings with the help of Mapquest and two maps I have purchased, one small and laminated, one vast and impossible to read in the dim light of my room. I know I should be networking with every human form that presents itself—the wan Eurotourists in the hotel, who may have confused Atlanta with Atlantis or some other more seductive destination, the happy-hour clientele at the pub. But when the day is over, I want nothing so much as to pour myself a beer and shut down, alone in my room. How I earned the E for extrovert in my Myers-Briggs personality type is a mystery that only deepens.

  IMAGE MANAGEMENT TURNS out to be located in a loft in what looks like a gentrified warehouse. I am greeted by Prescott, suavely outfitted in suit and tie, and introduced to his partner—a young Argentinian, as it emerges, who is dressed, more reassuringly, in nondescript urban casual. I barely get a chance to scan the loft space before being ushered into the windowless consultation room, but I note that it’s done up in boas and third-world crafts and practically screams Pride! I’m hoping their image-managing sensibilities are as gay as their interior decorating tastes—because gays have been practicing at “passing” for decades, and that is pretty much my current assignment.

  Robert Jackall’s book impressed on me that corporate dress serves a far more important function than mere body covering. “Proper management of one’s external appearances,” he writes, “simply signals to one’s superiors that one is prepared to undertake other kinds of self-adaptation.”5 By dressing correctly, right down to the accessories, you let it be known that you are willing to conform in other ways too—that you can follow orders, for example, and blend in with the prevailing “culture.” But first I have to know what I am conforming to.

  Naturally, I have already read a couple of dress-for-success books and learned that the idea is to pass as a hereditary member of the upper-middle class. As the leading expert in the field, John T. Molloy, puts it in his New Women’s Dress for Success, “The executive suite is an upper-socioeconomic business club, and in order to get in you must wear the club uniform.”6 He advises a kind of preshopping ritual, in which you first scout out the expensive shops for clues as to appropriate textures and shapes, and only then repair to a more affordable setting for your actual purchases. I think I have the class thing pretty well in hand—muted colors, patternless fabrics, and natural fibers, for example—but my observations come largely from the academic and publishing worlds, which permit a dangerously wide latitude for personal expression in the form of flowing scarves, rumpled linen, and dangly earrings.

  Then there is the vexing business of gender. All of the books warn that it’s a lot trickier for a woman to pass than it is for a man, in part because the female “uniform” is not yet as standardized as a man’s, so it’s easier for a woman to go wrong. But the problem seems to go deeper than that, to the very biological underpinnings of gender: the features that make a man sexually attractive—handsomeness, tallness, a deep voice, et cetera—also work in hi
s favor at the office, while female sexual attractiveness can torpedo a woman’s career. Shoulder-length hair, an overly generous display of legs, or a “too busty” chest7 can all undermine a woman’s credibility. Beauty itself is a handicap.

  Very beautiful young women have difficulty being taken seriously, especially by men, most of whom refuse to even think of them as experts or authority figures. In addition, beautiful women are seen by both sexes as lacking in intelligence—or at least as lightweights.8

  I know I have no problem in the area of “too sexy,” “too busty,” or distractingly beautiful, but it is clear that for any woman, of any age or condition, being female is something to compensate for.9

  While Prescott fetches some coffee for us from the kitchen, I try to skim through the purple-covered notebook he handed me, titled “The Personal Image Enhancement Program for [and the last two words are handwritten] Barbara Alexander.” I’m distracted by the curious gizmo on the corner table separating our chairs, in which four small burning candles share space with an actual running water fountain, but I force myself to read, finding on page 1: “What motivates you to imagemanage!” Not a question but answered anyway, sort of:

  Your exposure in the marketplace, your dependency upon others to be successful and how often you come in contact with those dependencies, are three reasons why you should be motivated to develop and maintain a professional presence.

  Fair enough, since I have entered a world where people seem to be judged not only by performance but by “image,” and, the notebook states ominously, “You need to understand that you are in total control of the images others form of you.”

  Just as I would prepare for a visit to the dental hygienist with extra brushing and flossing, I have put unusual effort into my appearance today: mascara as well as eyeliner, lipstick enhanced with gloss, jacket and slacks, tailored pink shirt, and a muted gray silk scarf. Only now, as I await Prescott’s return—I can hear him taking a phone call in the other room—are the multiple defects in my ensemble emerging. My pant socks, which I had taken to be black in the gloom of the hotel room, are actually navy blue, although my jacket is black. My watch cost $19 fifteen years ago, and the band no longer matches the face. Then there is the problem of the slacks: everything else is Ann Taylor, drastically reduced of course, but the slacks come from the sale rack at the Gap, and, as I see for the first time, the zipper does not go all the way up. If I were wearing a pullover, as I usually do, this wouldn’t matter, but this shirt has to be tucked in. And what about the shoes, which are drably flat, and the “pearl” earrings, which I got at three for $10 at the Miami airport?