Sometimes one story leads to another that would be better served on another day. Today is that day.
This story emerged while reviewing a year of photographic resolutions, when I realized physical markers of past achievements spark memories of success and provide motivation to succeed.
Always in the uncomfortable purgatory of working while hunting for work that actually matched my training, goals, and would cover the bills, I found myself in between film gigs and searching for a TV producing role, but still needing to pay the rent. In New York City, the rent was double what I paid in San Francisco. I had moved on the heels of rumored SAG and WGA strikes, and a few months before 9-11, a story for another day. Work and money were thin, but bills were not.
I signed up with a temp agency to bridge the gap and get healthcare benefits, which the agency later reneg on, also a story for another day.
The temp agency and I were often at odds. They had clients such as A&E, a company more in line with my degree and experience, but it kept sending me to investment banks, because while still in college, I had worked at Dean Witter Reynolds. If temping was supposed to “get you in the door”, a tired and manipulative trope, the agency was consistently sending me through the wrong doors. I advocated for myself. Repeatedly. Yet week after week, the wrong doors opened anyway.
Office environments were never my jam, and these extra-starched corporate settings made me uncomfortable in my own skin. So, a three-day assignment at a boutique bank in Midtown felt like another assignment to endure, not an opportunity. The offices were beautiful, and the kitchen was fully stocked. But this was yet another detour that still wouldn’t pay enough to cover the basics.
A low twitter serenaded the work floor, humming inferences that most staff were afraid of the banker I was assigned to work with. He was gruff, not cheerleader-friendly, but I didn’t see the drama. Each day I did what needed to be done, then enjoyed the calm of my apartment set against the soundtrack of East Village nights. Then came day three, my final day.
More comfortable in my surroundings now, I lifted my eyes from the workspace and spun around in the pivoting chair. Crammed on the shelves behind me were hundreds of deal “toys”, more fittingly known as tombstones. I was facing a graveyard of transactions.
As I swiveled back around, a beam of fluorescent light clipped a Lucite block. I leaned in. My breathing started to shallow.
Did I read that correctly?
If one could actually get hot under a collar, I was there. I commenced deep breathing to stay composed.
Just then, the banker came out of his office.
I spun around like the swivel chair was on fire.
“Did you do this?” I demanded.
“What?”
I pointed to the offending tombstone. “Did you do this?”
He leaned in to read the deal information: KRON/BayTV, $823M, Young Broadcasting, June 2000.
“Yes.” Moment of silence. “Did you lose your job?”
“Yes, and a lot of my friends did, too!”
“Sorry.”
He turned and went back into his office for the afternoon.
Three years after and 3,000 miles away from the event, I spent three days sitting in front of a Lucite memento marking the demise, or at the very least, the hobbling of my first employer in my field. (That’s a lot of threes!)
I continued to stare at this ugly hunk of plastic mounted on a tacky base – a relic celebrating a transaction that ended careers, scattered colleagues, and hollowed out a local institution.
NBC was angry that it lost the bid. Some station survivors escaped to other stations. Friends who remained said the place was never the same.
The deed was long done, and I was already gone by the time of the sale, an early casualty of pre-sale trimming. But I felt the anger and anxiety as deeply as the day I received my pink slip.
“It’s not personal; it’s just business” is the specter that haunts most work cultures. This Lucite marker was one such specter.
Physical markers matter, though. They remind us of past goals achieved. Diplomas, awards, photos, scripts, and published works are our own personal cheering squad, rooting for us, “You did this, you survived this, and you can do it again.”
Not all markers are good. Like commemorative plaques and statues documenting histories, this Lucite tchotchke boasted, in spirit, that people lost jobs, careers were cut short, a local institution diminished; but hell, a handful of people made a lot of money. Yippee! Lucite tombstone, indeed.
We should display physical reminders of our achievements. Mine are buried in boxes, hostages of frequent moves and rented walls. I imagine having a library one day with a wall of artifacts serving as reminders of what was accomplished and what could be yet to become.
The KRON/BayTV sale tombstone, though, deserves burial in the unhallowed ground that birthed it. A relic of success built from someone else’s end, a Lucite bad dream.