“B” – The Swinger

“B” installed his South American girlfriend—who claimed to speak no English—as a senior graphic designer in his marketing department. During the 18 months that she and I were both members of this department, she did no work for nor answered to anyone but “B.” During that entire time, she produced one fantastically elaborate brochure that was promptly rejected when the production estimate came in at a whopping $50K for 500 pieces. That’s right: $100 per brochure. At about the same time, a charming handsome young European man joined “B’s” department on secondment. Unbeknownst to me, “B” reassigned all my work and all my internal clients to the new guy, something I learned about through the weekly assignments sheet. I was demoted to “floater”, no explanation provided. HR refused to get involved.

“B” began to aggressively court the young man with daily invitations to private meetings, lunches, dinners, pub-crawls, and most interestingly, night and weekend work at “B’s” Upper East Side apartment. At first, the young man was visibly flattered by all this attention but after a few months, became increasingly uneasy with the suspicion that something else was going on here.  He began to turn down the invitations and eventually secured a transfer out of the dept. I know this because I shared a cubical wall with the young man, while the South American girlfriend was installed two cubes away. In those days, I was putting in a lot of evening hours and loud conversations were going on all around me. No one realized I was there.  I learned about the girlfriend arrangement over the course of several evenings that included shouted arguments about a sofa delivery (she actually spoke rather colorful English); the costs of the brochures; “B’s” need to spend the holidays with his family; and one extended row that included the sound effects of slammed drawers and objects being thrown. Truth is, I sometimes stayed later than I had to, not because I wanted to hear more but because I was too embarrassed and afraid to let anyone see me leave. I feared they’d realize what I’d heard and either fire me or beat me up, so I’d wait until the coast was clear. Conversely, if I heard something brewing, I’d make a big show of shutting down and leaving as soon as possible to avoid getting trapped again.

Lesson learned: When working in these “open office” environments, i.e., cube farms, never assume you are alone.