Mr. Softee's Soft, Soft World . . .

Startup Beatdown, Chapter 9 -- Leaving Early

2009-01-21T11:40:00.000-08:00

Startup Beatdown, Chapter 9 – Leaving Early

The rest of my week went like this: On Thursday, I tried my best just to get through the day, spending most of my time there staring at the little clock in the corner of my screen, wishing it were 6:00. Though, technically, I was supposed to work from 9:00 to 6:00 every day, leaving on time was often a crapshoot (and leaving early was an impossibility). Basically, it all came down to this – if Sean Etin made it in to his office before 6:00, I could count on staying at least an extra half hour (though it was not uncommon to stay an extra hour or two). If he didn’t arrive at 6:00, I could slink away. Sometimes, I heard the door that separates the home part of his house from the work area where we were situated slam open, the heavy, quick-paced sound of his footsteps, and his barking orders for those unfortunate to be in his sight to stay – while I quietly tip-toed down the spiral staircase and out of harm’s way. There was one time, in particular, when I heard him scream my name through the walls of his house as I was getting into my car (needless to say, I jumped in and gunned it out of there).
Other times, I was not so fortunate, with his entrance coinciding with my turning off my computer or putting on my coat. “Stick around. I’ll need to speak to you for a minute,” he’d say, brushing past me and getting back to the phone conversation on his bluetooth earpiece. “You too,” he’d tell whomever else he happened to bump into.
At times like these, I would follow him into the senior staff room and then wait with the other unfortunate souls, as Sean Etin continued with his phone conversation and stepped into his private office. And so, we’d wait, standing around like cattle in a pen. Sometimes we’d wait ten to fifteen minutes, listening to him bark about “destroying that piece of shit,” orchestrating some power play to deal with some troublesome board member, or tell an off-color joke. Usually, though, it would take much longer, and we’d all stand around, literally with nothing to do but grit our teeth and silently wish him harm.
Once his call had ended, he’d call one of us in – usually one of the senior staff members like Flo or Joel. The rest of us would continue to wait, leaning against the office desks and quietly chatting to ourselves. This would usually last another half an hour or so. Oftentimes, Flo or Joel would come out of the office after their meeting, look at their watches and say, “you guys can go,” as we hear Sean Etin back on the phone.
It might seem like a frustrating occurrence to stay an extra hour or so every couple of days without any overtime benefits and then leave without being told why you were asked to stay, but the alternative was much worse. Sometimes, Sean Etin was insistent on speaking to one of us and then the process would be much more arduous. For one thing, the waiting involved was about twice as long, as we had to wait in turn to meet with him, and these meetings were almost always sandwiched in between more phone calls. In these cases, I would usually be the last person called into his office, but finally, at 7:30, or 8:00, or 8:30, I would be beckoned and take a seat across from him, his cluttered desk thankfully keeping me out of arm’s reach. It was extremely rare for him to bring up the progress of a project I was working on, or asking me to do something that needed to be done that night. More often, he would call me in just to babble at me. I can’t tell how many times I’ve heard him say how “the wheels are spinning” or “the pendulum is swinging” and how “we’re about to exit the startup phase.” He would continue to spew his stream-of-consciousness platitudes until he receives his next call, at which point he’d say, “I have to take this. You got everything I said, right?”
“Yes,” I’d lie, briskly stepping out of his office and heading home before the call ends and he calls me back in. It was once in the blue moon where I was asked to stay late for the purpose of doing actual work that could not wait until morning.
Occasionally, Sean Etin would also call impromptu staff-wide meetings. This was the case on Thursday evening. At 5:58, as I was packing up to go, Sean Etin lumbers in and tells everyone to meet him in the senior staff room. So, we all gathered together as Sean Etin began, the senior staffers sitting at their desks while the rest of us (consisting of myself, my three buddies in the creative department and the omega wolf, Hempstead) stood.
“I called you all in because I have some big news,” Sean Etin began. I briefly wondered if this was related to some of the things we had discussed on the day I was locked in his car (was it only two days ago?), or if he had heard about my “power play” the day before. These thoughts were only made in passing, as I stopped caring. I just wanted to leave. “The pendulum is swinging and we’re about to exit the startup phase.” I felt stupid for wondering what the meeting was about, as I should have known. It wasn’t about anything.
Sean Etin continued to ramble, hitting on a wide range of topics, such as his upcoming trial with a certain large internet corporation, his previous battles in court, playful (and uncomfortable) jabs at his sister, Rita, and how much money we were all going to make – but he elucidated us with no new information.
When I got to know Flo a little better, she told me about a game she and a former employee used to play at meetings like these. As Sean Etin conducted the meeting, they would take a piece of paper and start drawing circles. Every time Sean wandered onto a new topic, they would create a new circle, but they were not allowed to complete a circle until he came to a definite conclusion to a topic. If he meandered on any topic for an extended period of time without getting to a point, they would draw a spiral. At the end of the meeting, they would count how many spirals and incomplete circles they had and compare them to the number of spirals and incomplete circles from previous meetings. It sounded like a good game, but I never played it. The symbols seemed too sobering a metaphor to play with.
Back to the meeting, Sean Etin would continue his oration, spewing words that seemed designed with the sole purpose of killing time. I imagined tiny, microscopic letters – assorted ‘g’s and ‘k’s and ‘e’s – coming out of his mouth and attaching themselves to the hands of a clock, destroying it like a virus destroys a healthy cell. He spoke for nearly two hours, only stopping when his cell phone rang. “I have to take this,” he’d say every time the phone would ring. “Nobody go anywhere.” Still standing and having not moved from the spot where I stood when the meeting began, I was now swaying in place, relieving pressure on one foot and then the other. While I only gave my watch discreet, furtive glances during the first hour, I was unashamedly staring at it for the second, thinking “end now, end now, end now . . .” for every second that ticked away. Towards the end of the meeting, Sean Etin got to what I could only assume was the point of calling us together, talking about stock options and how there was only a limited time for us to invest at the ‘startup price’ of something like $30 a share. I didn’t really understand much of it, other than the fact that he was asking us to pour money into a company that we saw was failing on a firsthand basis everyday, and which I personally wasn’t exactly sure I wanted to succeed. I stored this information under ‘crap I’ll never need to know’ when Rita began pushing Sean to wrap it up. He thankfully did, with the only bit of information that was worth anything to me – he announced that the next day, Friday, we would only have to come in to work for a half the day.
To me, having gone through the week I went through, this was perhaps the sweetest words I could hear, besides perhaps, “Joel and I have contracted a rare form of anal warts that cause us extreme discomfort and will keep us from coming in to work for the next year or so. Here is a big pile of money for all of you.”
So, I left work relieved at the prospect of not having to be there for a full day tomorrow. I called up my friend and arranged to go to Best Buy with him in the early afternoon. There were some good sales and I thought I deserved to treat myself to some DVDs from the money I earned from work, which I was not really spending.
Even with the news that I would only have to suffer through five hours of work instead of nine, I still didn’t feel like interacting with anyone. I didn’t speak to my parents since the night after I got locked in Sean Etin’s car, even though we were living in the same house. I felt combustible. Unstable. On edge. The idea of the half-day relieved some of the anger I felt, but I didn’t know how much. For the last two nights, I went straight to my room, without speaking to my parents, without checking my email and without having dinner. I would lock the door and watch the extended editions of the Lord of the Rings movies. That night, I watched all three and a half hours of The Two Towers and went to sleep.

The next day, I went in to work and once again watched the little clock on my screen, waiting for 2:00 to come. At around midday, Sean Etin made a rare pre-6:00 appearance, but only to get something from his office and announce he had to leave somewhere. “Great,” I thought. With Sean Etin gone, I could leave early on time.
As 2:00 approached, and I began packing up, a call came through. “SeaShel Productions, this is Danny,” I said, as one of my many unofficial job functions was as the office receptionist.
“Put Flo on the phone.”
My heart sank. It was Sean. I transferred the call.
A few moments later, Flo came into the hallway and announced, “nobody leave until Sean gets back.”
“When is he getting back?” I asked.
“He said very soon.”
As 2:00 hit and I found myself trapped in my seat, a sudden wave of anger washed over me. I was more angry than when I was stuck in his car for five hours. I was more angry than when I was “put in my place” by the senior staff. I was more angry than when I stood for the two hours after work and listen to Sean Etin prattle on about nothing. I had looked at leaving early as a karmic reward for the horrible week I had, and for every minute of freedom that was denied to me, I increased in vitriol.
An hour had passed and I had to call my friend and tell him that our trip to Best Buy was cancelled. “I’m stuck at work,” I said. I couldn’t bring myself to say anything else. I felt like screaming. I hung up and stared daggers at the little clock.
Usually, in the call of office-related injustice, my first inclination would be to join my three friends in the back room (or, if it were lunchtime, the basketball courts where we usually played quick pickup games) and bitch about it. The bitching would turn into joking and I would feel better. I couldn’t do it this time. I was afraid, once I started complaining, I wouldn’t be able to stop. I felt that if I tried to release some of my anger, it would all come out in a maelstrom of unbridled rage.
At 4:00, I found myself unconsciously clenching and unclenching my fists and toes. By 5:00, I was surprised to find that I was breathing much heavier than normal. I don’t know what it was. Surely, not being able to leave early wasn’t nearly as heinous an injustice as anything else I had to go through that week (or, really, any week), but somehow, this bothered me more than anything else I had to go through up until that point. Maybe it was a buildup to everything I went through. Maybe I hated my job so much that being denied leaving at the only time it seemed like a sure thing put me over the edge. Maybe it was that this seemed to be an outright lie as opposed to the duplicitous equivocation I was used to.
Perry came to my desk.
“Hey, man.”
“I am so angry. I am so goddamned angry,” I mumbled to him as quietly as I could. “He lied to us. He lied.”
Perry looked at me incredulously. “Are you really surprised? Did you really think we were going to leave early?”
“I did.” I don’t know why I did, but I did.
“I never believed it for a second. He’s promised us half days before and never once delivered. In fact, he once said that every Friday would be a half-day. I really can’t believe you believed him.”
I couldn’t really either. I felt even angrier.
Perry left and I went back to clenching, staring and breathing heavily.
At 6:05, Sean Etin came charging into the hallway.
“Nobody go anywhere,” he said, as he rushed by us to his office. I stayed in my seat and turned off my computer. There was no doubt – we were staying for no reason. I sat there and waited.
Twenty minutes later, Flo stepped into the hallway. “All right,” she said. “You guys can go . . .”

At home, I went straight to my room, locked the door and put in “Return of the King.” Some time later, my mom, who had not seen me in days, knocked on my door. “Danny, can I come in?”
“No.”
“Danny, what’s wrong?”
“Leave me the hell alone!” The second it came out, I regretted it. I ran to the door, unlocked it and apologized. I told her about the rest of the week. My mom listened and said, “You need to quit this job.” My dad, who came in as I was telling the story, put in his opinion. “Don’t you dare quit until you have another job lined up. You can’t just sit around and do nothing. Don’t be stupid about this.”
I recognized the sense my dad made. I had already gone through long periods of unemployment, and that wasn’t very fun either. Besides, my health and dental insurance kicked in in a matter of days. (I actually wondered if I was treated so badly this week because they wanted me to quit before my benefits kicked in…) I was determined to stay, at least until I took advantage of my insurance, but I needed to find a release to my frustration or I would go crazy. I didn’t want to yell at my mom again for no reason, or do worse (I later found out that this was a comparably light reaction as compared to what a former employee in a similar job situation did . . .). At any rate, I knew that I had to find a way to make my job more bearable. I had already stopped caring about the work done there. Now I needed to find the time I spent there tolerable, which was difficult, since the only thing I learned to look forward to was leaving . . .

On Saturday, I called up my friend and we ended up going to Best Buy. As opposed to the $20-$30 I was planning on spending, I ended up spending over $200 on DVDs. I felt a little better. It didn’t solve my problem of what to do at work, but it at least gave me something to do when I got home . . .

Transylvania Part 3 - Beyond the Revenge

2008-12-17T00:13:00.000-08:00

Transylvania Part 3 – Beyond the Revenge

I wrote this a long time ago, about my trip to Transylvania, but never posted it. There's probably a good reason why . . .

*****************

I learned something about myself . . . I have tremendous difficulty distinguishing between ‘gay’ and ‘European’. My ‘gaydar’ was going off all the time in Transylvania and needed to be recalibrated to ‘Europe.’ Men are a lot more touchy-feely there. It’s kind of weird. America is such a homophobic culture, but, thankfully, people have the choice to be open about their sexuality. In Romania there is no real homophobia, because, as far as I can tell, there are no openly gay people there. I imagine it’s like it was in the olden days. Not until recently did people identify themselves as ‘gay.’ Back then, men who had gay proclivities married a woman, and sort of buggered on the side. It wasn’t really a ‘lifestyle’ thing. Romania seemed to be that way. Maybe I’m wrong.

Speaking of which, the night before I left Romania, I was nearly convinced I was being hit on by Tommy. I spent an extra three days in Romania after the symposium was over (due to a scheduling flub more than anything else), and for two of those nights, Tommy showed me around. The first night, he took me out to a bar (which will be a later story), but for the second night, hours before I was to leave for my flight (which will also be a later story), Tommy took me up to his family’s land on the woody hill outside the town. As we were walking along the path to Tommy’s bungalow, he was pointing out his family’s land. He showed me his family’s strawberry patch, grape vines, cherry trees and pointed out the boundaries of the land. It was actually pretty beautiful. “How long has your family had this land?” I asked. He had trouble understanding. “We always had it,” he answered, as if I asked the stupidest question in the world. Forgiving my stupidity, he further explained, “for thousands of years. This has always been my family’s land.”

We reached the family bungalow. It was a little wooden shack with a beautiful view of the town. We went inside and he pointed out three gigantic wooden barrels. “Wine,” he said. “We will drink some.” He removed the bung from the bung-hole (this is real terminology, people) and inserted a rubber tube into the hole, putting the other end in his mouth and sucking. He siphoned the wine like someone would siphon gas from a car, and once the wine was flowing, he grabbed two filthy cups and poured some for us. I was kind of getting weird vibes from him the entire time, but by this point I was more used to the culture, and just accounted for it as ‘European.’ “He’s just being nice,” I thought to myself. “Taking me into the woods, all alone, to share some wine on his family’s bungalow overlooking the town. Nothing wrong with that.”

“I will build a fire,” he said, grabbing a hatchet from the bungalow and going outside. “It will be very nice.”

I followed him outside and soon a ‘very nice’ fire was burning.

“Ooof. I am hot,” he told me, and took off his shirt. “I have American music on my telephone,” he said. He started playing Rihanna.

“Wow,” I thought to myself, “this is getting really gay . . .”

The sun was setting. “Do you have a girlfriend?” he asked me. “What? I, uhh, no. Not at the moment.” I immediately kicked myself, thinking that I should have said that I did. My gaydar was going off the charts. Tommy smiled. “You know what mistake people make in beginning of a relationship?” he asked, “you need to fuck on the first date or is no good.” That line of macho bullshit reminded me of the US, but the feeling that he was hitting on me did not dissipate. When guys hit on me in the US (and it does happen occasionally), I’m fine with it. In fact, it’s flattering, even though I don’t have any similar feelings. But here, in Romania, all alone with a young man who, by the look of the flab on his exposed chest and stomach, easily outweighed me by a hundred pounds, without anyone else in hearing distance – not knowing how to get back to the town, not knowing the language and not being able to get back to my hotel without his help – I suddenly got a little frightened. Moreover, what if he thought this was a first date? (Plus, I noticed, he still had the hatchet . . .)

As I was thinking of possible escape routes, Tommy’s mom and sister came up the hill. Tommy quickly put on his shirt and we got ready for dinner. He seemed a little embarrassed. For dinner, we had fire-grilled pig’s fat. Basically, it was like bacon, only a hundred times thicker, and with no actual muscle in it. Also included were raw onions that they just plucked from the ground. The mood had changed with his family there, and I was no longer in a worried state. I began to think about what he asked me. He was a younger guy at about 18 or 19. Maybe he asked me if I had a girlfriend because he needed advice, and he simply doesn’t know me well enough not to ask me. After dinner, his mom and sister left, and I asked him if he had a girl. “I am just in a break-up,” he said. “The father, he is a priest.” “Oh, that’s rough,” I told him. “Yes. But the father is not the reason. He and I just broke up.” “You mean, ‘she and I’,” I absent-mindedly corrected him. Then I finally realized it – in this case, my gaydar probably wasn’t malfunctioning. Tommy probably just needed to share –with a stranger from a land that is possibly more tolerant than his.

I learned a couple of things about myself. First, though I think of myself as a socially conscious liberal, I am possibly more homophobic than I thought I was. Second, though I always imagined myself exceedingly empathetic to the problems of others, a kind soul in a sea of selfish brutes, I found myself surprisingly indifferent to his troubles. “I, uhhh, am sure somebody else will come along,” I told him, brushing him off like so many people have done to me in the past. Then, I changed the subject, telling him that I needed to get back to my hotel soon . . .

Startup Beatdown, Chapter 8: Riding With the Devil, Part 2

2008-07-21T23:00:00.000-07:00

Startup Beatdown, Chapter 8 – Riding With the Devil Part 2

In a way, the drive back from DC was worse than the ride there and the five hours I spent boiling in his car. This wasn’t because something horrible happened on the way back. No. The ride back was worse because it gave me hope, which at SeaShel Productions, was much worse for my long-term well-being than merely being yelled at, or fearing for my life while Sean Etin recklessly bruised his way down the road. Even being stuck in the man’s car, not being allowed to use his air conditioner in near deadly heat for five hours had no long-term detrimental effects (hopefully . . .). No, the great carcinogen in an environment where misery is reality and all good things are will-o’-the-wisps, is hope that things will improve.
Of course, when Sean Etin first came back to the car, I was still burning with rage and absorbed heat, having just minutes before learned that what I thought was an important business meeting that kept me locked in his car for five hours ended up being a dentist’s appointment. For some reason, one which I still can’t fully explain, I was willing to “take one for the team” (even though I hated the team I was on . . .)if it meant something positive for the company, but the fact that Sean Etin was wasting my time and putting me in bodily harm for his personal business filled me with palpable anger, which I could taste in the back of my mouth and caused my vision to blur. (The anger I felt when I was forced to perform these personal tasks comes into play in later stories to a much larger degree . . . so look forward to that . . .).
“Well, that was hell,” Sean Etin said, getting into the car and turning on the ignition. “They pumped me full of pain killers, but I think I’m good to drive.” I was happy to hear him say that, as I did not want to do anything for this man and honestly did not trust myself to hold his life in my hands by driving him home. I didn’t respond. He peeled out of his illegally parked spot and began driving out of DC. As opposed to the ride there, and all the other times I was a passenger in his car, I didn’t fear for my life. The sun had fried my brain and my anger supplanted my survival instincts. I was no longer clutching the upholstery of the passenger seat, or darting my eyes back and forth for signs of oncoming collisions. It just didn’t matter. All that mattered was rage.
I think that Sean Etin sensed my anger, because after a few minutes of driving in silence, he said to me, “the reason why I had you come with me today was so I could talk to you.”
“You fucking liar. The reason why you brought me here is so I could wait in your car of your illegally parked spot, you selfish pig,” I thought to myself. “Yeah?” I said.
“Yeah. I want to know what you think we could be doing to make this company more productive. Things just aren’t getting done and time is fast approaching when we’ll be making the move from being a startup to a real corporation. You’re my only employee with actual experience in children’s cartoons with your work at Sunbow. What do you think we need to change around here?”
I was shocked. In all the photocopying, driving his children, moving boxes around, caring for the company chameleon and all of the other piddling tasks that took up my days at SeaShel, I thought he had forgotten that I had actual experience in the field of his business, and that everyone else that worked there didn’t. I was beginning to forget myself . . .
“I, uhh . . . there are a number of things that I think can make the company more productive.” I thought back to my time at Sunbow Entertainment. Things weren’t perfect there, but things were so much less chaotic. I told him about the bi-weekly development meetings and the general accountability that people had for each project. I told him how they utilized interns and diversified their creative slate by constantly scouting for new projects.
As Sean pulled over for gas, he said to me, “You know, the things you’ve been saying are dead on. I’ve been telling Flo to get us some interns for over a year. I have no idea why she hasn’t gotten on it. But look – if you’re willing to take the bull by the horns, you can spearhead all of the initiatives you mentioned.
“Okay. That sounds good,” I said, actually meaning it. The prospect of doing real work excited me. Seeds of hope, long since buried and seemingly asphyxiated in the untillable soil that was my job, began to sprout, seeking out the surface for sunlight, water and air. I felt that the worst of my job was over – that the five hours baking in his car turned me to dust and from the ashes, I was reborn with a fresh start. I felt energized and, for the first time since I began working at SeaShel, was excited about coming in the next day.
When we returned to his house and I got into my car to go home, I found that I was no longer angry about my tortuous day (in fact, I was already finding it kind of funny). I didn’t mind the fact that we had returned over an hour after work was supposed to end (which really just meant that the rest of my co-workers got to leave on time, since if he were actually at the office at six o’clock, there was a good chance he would have us all stay late anyway) and I didn’t mind that Sean skimped out on treating me to lunch like he had promised. I didn’t even choke my usual mixture of revulsion and amusement when Sean told me about his ‘other’ idea (‘idea’ should probably be in quotes too . . .) for a show – an animated series of Romeo and Juliet, but with the Montagues as dogs and the Capulets as cats (or, as I believe he called them ‘Catulets’) – which ranks, now that I can think more clearly, as the worst show idea I’ve ever heard in my life. I was just excited to implement the plans we had talked about.
***
The next day, I found that my excitement had not abated. I came in to work and immediately wrote two emails. The first one was to Flo, stating that I wanted to meet with her regarding the possibility of getting interns through the local colleges. The second email was addressed to Joel and regarded the implementation of creative meetings. I knew there was a chance that Joel, whose draconian mind was convinced I was after his job, could interpret this email as overstepping my bounds, so I was very careful in what I wrote. I constructed it as submissively as I could, and tried to make two points crystal clear – that he would be in charge of the meetings and that the request for these meetings came directly from Sean Etin.
Finishing my emails, I next went about mapping the planned creative meetings. I thought of the different subjects we could go over during the meetings. The only actual creative property SeaShel ever seemed to work on was the atrocious Googles From Goop, but there were a lot of different projects in the works milking this horror of an idea. In the time I had worked there, I heard many, many projects mentioned in passing – a new music album, a cartoon show, a live-action show, a live show (possibly on ice), a web-only show, an interactive children’s website, video games, children’s books, novellas and, of course, the assorted merchandise and advertisement tie-ins (who wouldn’t want Googles American cheese?) Joel was in charge of overseeing all of these projects, and I knew the progressions of none of them. I wrote these projects down as a list, making room under each topic for writing notes. The idea for creative meetings would be very simple. The creative staff would get together for fifteen minutes or so, every two weeks, and we’d simply go down the list, marking the progress of each project. I also made space for new projects, hoping that someone would pitch an idea that would steer us away from the Googles and on to a project that doesn’t make me imagine toddlers burning their TVs in protest. I would even settle for astoundingly bad, but hilariously entertaining show ideas. I imagined Sean Etin pitching his Romeo-and-Juliet-as-cats-and-dogs idea and the rest of us trying, for the sake of our jobs, not to burst out laughing. I imagined, after meetings like this, having a second meeting, this time just my friends at work, on the basketball court during our lunch hour, making fun of the bad ideas of our employers. “If you liked my Romeo and Juliet idea, you’ll love this!” I imagined one of us saying, imitating Sean Etin. “It’s an episodic show about the Titanic, only – get this – with dolphins instead of people!”
A flashing icon on my computer snapped me out of my (kind of lame) daydream. I had a new email. I was half-expecting this. A letter from Joel, stating I had no authority to organize a meeting like this – that my experiences at Sunbow means nothing here and that, in between the lines, there was no way I was going to take his job or tell him how to do it. “Try to stop me, asshole,” I thought to myself as I clicked open my email program. The devil himself (Sean) was behind me, and Joel, for all his slimy, bullying, conniving ways, did not want to tangle with a more powerful, smarter and more underhanded version of himself.
The email wasn’t from Joel, though. It was from Flo. I opened the email. Like all of her emails (and, really, everything she did in the office), this letter was professional and to the point. The content, however, surprised me. It read:
“Danny – You do not ask to have a meeting with me. You request it. I am a senior level employee and certain protocols must be adhered to. Please keep this in mind for future reference. – Flo.”
In thinking about my plans on changing the company and the best way to deal with Joel, I did not give any consideration to Flo. I checked the email I sent to her and, sure enough, I didn’t request a meeting. I worded it as “I’d like to meet with you about . . .” Flo was the one member of the senior staff that I did not want to disappoint. As opposed to Sean and Joel, she didn’t delegate by intimidation and bluster. She was professional. I didn’t know whether or not she liked me as a person (I heard rumors that she was one of the people most put off by my student films (see Chapter 2)), but she always treated me with respect. Over half of the work that came my way was under her jurisdiction, and I would have wished her to by my sole boss if not for the fact that her tasks were always clerical, always mind-numbingly boring and not at all related to my interests or skill sets. Plus, if there was a way to be bad at photocopying or collating, I somehow managed to find it . . .
Flo was an interesting lady. She was a Southern Dame. A lady of the land. She rode horses and went on a vacation to small towns in Canada to take in various rodeos. She spoke in a heavy Southern twang, and had a propensity for saying colorful colloquialisms like “this is stickier than fly paper in a glue factory” (that was one I made up. Hers were better . . .). It shocked me when I later found out she grew up mere miles from where I did, because even though Maryland is technically below the Mason-Dixon line, I didn’t know a single person who spoke with a Southern accent or considered themselves to be a Southerner. She was petite and in shape for a lady of about fifty, with cropped brown hair and beady, squinty eyes. Though she never complained, there was an air of frantic stress about her, but because she was always so professional, she would never say what was bothering her – which I always assumed, due to the nature of her job as Office Manager, was her having to deal with Sean Etin more than everyone else. She also never talked about politics or religion, but I could tell she had strong Republican leanings and was devoutly Christian. Because she never pestered people about religion and, from what little she revealed to me, acknowledged a high-and-mighty hypocrisy in some of the more fervent followers, I was never put off by this. She once told me at lunch that her ex-husband was extremely religious and a pillar of the community. “He’d go to church and was about as anti-abortion as you c’n get, but what do you think he asked for when he found out I was pregnant?” she’d ask. “A cigar?” I responded, being a smart-ass. I sometimes wondered how she felt working for a Jew, but I later found out that before she had this job, she worked for a Jewish non-profit. She was also, at one point, a cop. Like I wrote – an interesting lady.
I hit the reply button on my computer. I wanted to patch things up with Flo as soon as possible. This was a simple misunderstanding that came out of careless writing – though, the more I thought about it, the more it seemed that her response was uncharacteristic of her and a little bit petty. It smelt of a power-trip, which wouldn’t have been so surprising if it had come from Sean (though his response would have been more explicitly cruel) or Joel (his would have been less professional and coherent). Maybe I didn’t understand Flo after all, but I still didn’t want her to be angry with me. I wrote, “Flo – Please excuse the careless writing in my last email. I did not mean to put your authority into question and I will be more careful in my choice of wording in the future.”
With that done, I tried to concentrate on the sweeping changes I was planning to make, but before I could get too far into my fantasy, Joel came out of the senior staff room and into the hallway where I worked.
“Danny,” he told me, “you need to do more stickers.”
“Oh God no,” I thought.
On the first day I worked at SeaShel, I spent most of the day ‘doing stickers.’ The employees at SeaShel, before I started working there, printed out a bunch of colorful, four-page advertisement booklets for, say, when they had a booth at a children’s industry convention and wanted to give out a short, punchy keepsake of who they are and what they do. Since their only property was the Googles From Goop, most of the pamphlet was about them. But, the back page enthusiastically promised work on many other colorful characters and creative properties – the Frizzles from Flooze, the Woozles from Wooze, the Floogles and other similar-sounding names that I never once heard anyone ever mention at work and just assumed didn’t exist. The only problem was that one of the names was already copy written by someone else and had to be taken out. Apparently, at this point, thousands of booklets were already printed and instead of throwing them away, they decided to make sheets of one-page corrections that needed to be cut to the right size and pasted onto the pamphlet in a way that made it look like the original page. So, the original back of the pamphlet, which read like this:
“The Googles™ will soon be joined by a whole stable of other, colorful characters kids will love – including the Frizzles from Flooze, the Woozles from Wooze and the Floogles – a wacky group of aliens who are truly out of this world!”
To this:
“The Googles™ will soon be joined by a whole stable of other, colorful characters kids will love – including the Frizzles from Flooze, the Wozzles from Wooze and a wacky group of aliens who are truly out of this world!”
Yes – they got rod of the potentially troublesome name and didn’t replace it with anything else. Yes – they kept the description of the characters that they removed. Yes – it’s stupid, but I didn’t bring it up with Joel because by the time I noticed the stupid, stupid sentence, I had already changed over 100 pamphlets and didn’t want to redo them. ‘Doing stickers’ was an extremely horrible task and the less I did, the better. It involved grabbing a pile of long, glossy sheets of paper, which had eight ‘corrected’ copies of the last page printed on them and carefully cutting each out. If the cuts weren’t exact, they had to be thrown out. The next step was applying glue from an aerosol adhesive spray can. The can shot a toxic spray of aerosol chemicals and glue particles. I would turn over each cut out sheet and evenly spray the backs with the glue spray. I then carefully put the glued sheet to the offending page in a way that made it look like it was a part of the original booklet. Because the sheets of paper were so numerous and delicate, and could not risk being blown by the wind or sullied in the dirt, I had to use this glue spray indoors, by an open window of the kitchen. My fingers would be caked with glue that wouldn’t come off until I shed a week’s worth of skin, and the fumes would make me headachy and dizzy. Though I was not asked to do this often, I was still the only person who was ever told to perform this task. I hated it.
“How many do I have to do, Joel?”
“Sean said we need ten thousand.”
The process of ‘doing stickers’ is extremely slow and profoundly boring. That, exacerbated by the fact that I can’t ‘do stickers’ any time anybody else needs to use the kitchen (because it’s bad for their health . . .) means that, if I’m lucky (and I use that term loosely), I can do about one hundred stickers a day. That means it would take me one hundred full work days to get this done. I don’t know how much they think they saved by reprinting only one page of the pamphlet, but I’m pretty sure that it was not equal to one third of my yearly paycheck. I needed to change the subject.
“Joel, did you get my email?”
“No. I’ll read it later.” And with that, he walked away.
There was simply no way I was going to spend my time ‘doing stickers’ on the day I was charged with fixing the company. To pacify Joel – to show him that I still respect his authority (even though I didn’t), I decided to ‘do stickers’ for an hour. So, I went into the kitchen to pay my sacrifice to the god of office politics . . .
***
I was just finishing up my hour of ‘doing stickers’ when Rita, another senior staff member (and little sister to Sean Etin) came in to the kitchen.
“The chameleon looks hungry,” she said.
Another task that I, and only I, was asked to do was feed the office chameleon. I had to feed it because the thought of feeding disgusting-looking creatures alive to another disgusting-looking creature was icky to my fellow employees. It was icky for me too – but when I noticed that absolutely nobody else fed it and it would literally get as thin as my finger, not to mention turn a sickly yellow color, it became one of my regular job tasks. I was also in charge of going out and getting food for the chameleon. This usually consisted of going to the pet store and having an employee there scoop crickets from a crate to a plastic bag like they were bulk food to be weighed by the pound. Occasionally, for the sake of variation, I was asked to purchase super-worms. Super-worms were like regular worms, only more disgusting. They were shorter and fatter than regular worms and jet black. (Apparently they are not worms at all, but actually some kind of gigantic beetle larvae given a snappy new name by some marketing genius . . .) The reason I was given for not feeding the chameleon super-worms too often was that if the chameleon was not careful, the super-worms would try to eat his eyeballs. Not that I needed an excuse for not buying super-worms. Those things grossed me out big time.
The ‘creature’ (as I simply called the chameleon) was totally out of ‘food.’ I was actually going to go to the pet store the day before, but got side-tracked (and heat stroke) by my adventure in Sean Etin’s car.
“So go to the store and get food for the thing,” (which I guess is what Rita called it).
I didn’t know much about Rita, beyond the fact that she was Sean Etin’s sister. She looked to be in her early forties and, like Sean, was ‘big-boned.’ By that, I mean she is the kind of person who, if she lost the weight she probably wanted to, she would look grotesque and diametrically opposed to the nature of her being. Her large bone structure simply needed meat around it. She was fairly tall for a woman (perhaps five foot nine or ten), had shoulder length, blond hair and always wore heavy, dark mascara around her eyes. Her main feature, though, was her expressions, which were always dour and a little malicious (this was probably a family trait). When I first started working at SeaShel, she seemed to regard me especially coldly and was a part of the meeting in which I was accused to being a rapist (again, see Chapter 2). Since then, she never did anything to make me have any feelings for her one way or the other, but we never engaged each other in pleasantries and the great majority of our conversations began and ended with ‘hello.’ She seemed to be good friends with Joel, which put her in the category of ‘enemy,’ but on the other hand, she was the only member of the staff who would stand up to Sean. During his long-winded, meandering, I’m-keeping-everyone-that-works-for-me-here-late-because-I’m-on-a-total-power-trip speeches that he would often stage, Rita would be the one to try and break it up. “Sean, we want to go home,” she would say. Sean would usually counter with something cruel, like, “Why? What do you have to go home to, huh? When was the last time you were even on a date?” To which Rita would respond, “if we’re staying, then I get to tell everybody about summer camp in 1972. Remember, I have dirt on you.” This back-and-forth had a kind of nasty naturalness that can be found between a brother and sister, but I honestly couldn’t tell if they liked each other or not.
Rita was the head (and only member) of the HR department and had no jurisdiction over my day-to-day activities – but, she was a senior staff member and if she ordered me to do something, I had to do it. So, I left to pick up crickets from the pet store.
***
“This is exactly why we need interns in the first place! I can’t keep doing this shit!” I fumed to myself as I thought back on my last two job tasks. I powdered the crickets with some sort of flour-like nutrition supplement and dumped them into the creature’s cage. I then checked my email. Joel still hadn’t gotten back to me, but I had a new email from Flo. It read: “I am free to meet with you at 4:00. Be prepared to discuss interns with me in the kitchen. – Flo.”
Since nobody but Sean Etin had a private office, all private meetings were held in the office kitchen with the door closed. My job interview was held in that kitchen. That should have been my first hint that this was not a professional company . . .
***
At 4:00, I was sitting in the kitchen, waiting for Flo. I had done my research, looking up all of the area schools and the contact information for their internship departments. When Flo came in, I quickly told her about my conversation with Sean Etin the day before, and ran through some of the universities I thought would be the best to get interns from. “I figure we could have an administrative intern, and entertainment intern and maybe even an intern for legal. We could even have multiple interns for each department, since they’d only be working 10-20 hours a week.”
Flo listened to my presentation without word. After I was finished, she stayed silent for a moment and narrowed her tiny eyes as if to gather her thoughts. Finally, she spoke.
“You know, Sean asked me to get interns a long time ago.”
“Yeah, he mentioned that.”
“I never did, because . . .” she paused. “It just wouldn’t be fair to them. First of all, where would we put them? I mean, we already have you working out of the hallway. More importantly, the kind of work we’d be asking them to do, the office environment, the nature of a start-up, Sean’s managerial style . . . well, let me put it this way – if you were still in school and you interned here, how would you feel?”
I thought about it. If this were my very first job, and I thought that all work was like this, AND I didn’t get paid for it, I think I’d spend all my money on lottery tickets and if I didn’t win, jump in front of a bus.
She continued. “You and I get paid for being here, but they’d be working for free.”
“Actually,” I interjected, “they’d be paying to work here, since they have to pay their school for each credit they ‘earn’ here.”
“There you go, then.”
It was weird. I think I wanted an intern as much as Sean did. Of course, not for the same reasons – he wanted someone to take his abuse without having to pay him or her for it, and I wanted someone else to be the office bitch – but for this brief moment, he and I were on the same page. It disgusted me. Of course it wouldn’t be fair for an intern to work here . . .
“So, what do I tell Sean?” I asked.
“You don’t tell him anything. He shouldn’t have put this project on you to begin with. I’ll take care of it.”
Flo then looked over my shoulder. I turned around in my chair. Joel and Rita were standing in the doorway.
“You done with him yet, Flo?” Joel asked.
“I suppose so.”
Joel and Rita came in and Joel sat down next to me. He held a piece of paper in his hand, tick-marked with numerous little highlighter swatches.
“Danny, we need to have a talk.”
“Oh God,” I thought.
“This place is a team,” Joel explained to me.
Silence. He expected a response. “Okay.”
“And in order to survive here, you need to be a team player.”
More silence.
“I am a team player.”
“A team player wouldn’t have written this.”
He put the damning evidence on the table. It was a printout of my email, with each time I used the word “I” highlighted.
In my efforts to be as submissive as possible, I littered the email with phrases like, “I was wondering” and “I wanted to ask you.”
“Look at how many times you used “I” in this letter,” he ordered.
I looked. It was disproportionally high, compared to some other letters, like ‘q’ and ‘z,’ but, I felt, not high enough for a sane person to bring attention to it.
“You’re . . . kidding, right?” I asked, knowing full well he wasn’t.
“If you want to survive here, you’re going to have to learn that this isn’t all about you,” he told me.
“This isn’t all about me! Look at the letter and ignore the ‘I’s. Look what it’s about! It’s asking for biweekly progress meetings so everybody is on the same page. It’s for strengthening the team. The very idea that I – Look,” I said, trying to cut to the heart of the topic, “I want to make this absolutely clear – this was NOT some mad power-grab by me. I’m not gunning after anyone’s job. I’m just trying to do my own. These tasks I was given came straight from Sean. He wants these things done, and he’s the boss.”
“Sometimes, Sean doesn’t know what’s best for the company.” I turned my head, shocked that those words came from Flo.
“You can say that again,” Rita said.
“You see, Danny,” Flo said, “Sean is the idea man, but when it comes to the day-to-day stuff he’s – “
“Insane,” Rita added. “And we don’t need someone reporting every little thing we do to him or we’ll go insane.”
My intern plan was already shattered, but the creative meetings – the only way I could think of to find out what this company was actually doing, and have a chance of using my experience and skills and do something that was worthwhile – this I was willing to fight for. “I’m not going to be some kind of spy for Sean. I’m not going to be his – “
“Gestapo,” Rita said.
Did she just call me a Nazi? I tried to move on. “Having creative meetings is a good idea. We did this at my old company. It works. People get together, find out what everyone is doing, and come up with new ideas. I really think that if we give it a chance, it will be really good for us.”
“We DID give it a chance,” Joel said. “Before you came here. It didn’t work.”
“Well, maybe you didn’t do it right.” The words escaped before I had a chance to stop it. “What I meant to say, is that I have experience in these kinds of things, and I really think I can make it work.”
I then played the last card I had. “But, I’m a team player. If you guys don’t want to do this, who am I to say we will?”
“Good to hear,” Joel said. “We’re not doing it.”
And with that, my hopes of changing the company into a tolerable work environment came to a puttering end. It took less than a day. The phoenix, which had risen from the ashes in Sean Etin’s car, was immediately shot, bludgeoned, eviscerated, burned with acid, chopped up into a million pieces, and scattered across the vast reaches of outer space. It would not be returning again. I knew then that no matter what I did to improve my chances at happiness, this job would make me totally miserable. I was there for not quite three months at this point. In a little more than a week, I would have medical and dental insurance. “Take advantage of them like they do to you,” I thought to myself. “Don’t do anything stupid. Get a checkup. Go to the dentist. Find a new job. Then walk away.”
Clarity washed over me. I looked at Flo, Joel and Rita. I felt like I finally understood them. They hated Sean Etin like I hated him. They hated me like I hated them (actually, I didn’t hate Flo . . .). We were all very much alike – trying to find comfort and stability in an uncomfortable and unstable place. The major difference between us was that they had found a measure of comfort with their jobs, and they weren’t going to give up an inch of it for me. Not if it meant more work. Not if it meant more Sean Etin. Not if it meant a change in their habits. Not if, in the case of Joel and Rita, it could possibly reveal that they did nothing to earn their paycheck. This, to them, wasn’t about making the company better. They couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the progress about the company. It was about making their lives easier and a steady paycheck.
“It’s six o’clock,” I said. “May I go?”
I stood up and walked out of the house and to my car. After being triple-teamed by the senior staff and having my hopes for improving the company dashed, my thoughts turned to how things would resolve themselves with Sean Etin. A smile surprisingly crept across my face when I realized I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything.

Startup Beatdown, Chapter 7: Riding With the Devil, Part 1

2008-07-21T22:57:00.000-07:00

Startup Beatdown, Chapter 7: Riding With the Devil, Part 1

Sean Etin drove his car like he lived his life – with the pedal to the floor and a reckless disregard for everything around him. I had the terrifying displeasure of riding with him a few times, and each time I got out of the car, I would want to get on my hands and knees and kiss the ground (mixed with the need to throw up on it). Sean Etin would drive as fast as his car could go, no matter what the road (it was not uncommon for me to swerve to the side of the road as I came to and from work, as Sean Etin zipped through his own neighborhood, where his own children played, at 60mph). He would bob and weave his way through traffic, never using his brake and never EVER using his turn signal (which is a big pet peeve of mine). On one-lane roads, he would practically ram the cars in front of him, sticking to their bumpers like glue, even if he were already going way over the speed limit. He would then impatiently honk his horn as if to say, “Move out of the way! I’M driving. ME! Sean Etin!”
The first time I ever rode with him, I was sandwiched in the back seat with a bunch of other employees, as Sean Etin drove us to the train station, where everyone would travel to New York (except me and Hempstead, who had to drive the cars back). On the way there, Sean needlessly cut someone off, and at a red light, the woman in the other car pulled next to us and gave Sean the finger.
“Hey, Bossman, I think you made someone angry,” Joel said, as he pointed to the woman.
“Oh really?” Sean Etin remarked. “Watch me make a new friend.” And with that, he rolled down his window and began yelling at the woman. “Hey lady! You have something you want to say to me? HELLO? Don’t you want to be my friend? Roll down your window, lady!”
The woman did not roll down her window, and tried her best to keep her eyes forward as Sean Etin made cutesy (in this case, cutesy = horrifying) faces at her, tilting his head down, rolling his eyes up, pursing his lips and putting one of his sausage pinkies to a corner of his mouth. “What an asshole,” I thought to myself, as Sean swiveled around, looking at each of us for validation that what he just did was the funniest thing in the world, his red potato face beaming with joy.
Sean Etin drove an Escalade, which suited him perfectly. It was the biggest, heaviest, most-expensive SUV on the road. It’s 8-miles-to-the-gallon says to the world, “I can afford to piss my money away, and the environment isn’t my problem – it’s yours!” I have since noticed that, like dogs, cars can say a lot about their owners. Escalades are for the rich and extremely aggressive. To this day, I have yet to see an Escalade us its turn signal. Seriously.
The Etins, of course, owned two Escalades – one for Sean and one for Shelia. During my time there, Shelia’s Escalade was replaced by an Escalade of the same model and year, but a different color. They also owned a pickup truck and a two-seater Lexus sports car, which never left the garage.
Well, that’s not entirely true . . . the one time I saw it driven, I was in the passenger seat. It’s (surprise!) a crazy story. It goes like this:

It was lunchtime at Seashel Productions and, being the stingy person I am, I brought my lunch in a brown paper bag, which was waiting for me in the company fridge. I was on my way to the kitchen to eat it, when Sean Etin barged into the hallway from the private side of his mansion, which we worked out of. It was extremely rare to see Sean enter this side of the house any time before 5:30 (at which time, he would order his employees to stay late on most days) and any time he appeared before then meant trouble for the person he was looking for.
“Just who I wanted to see. Danny, you need to come with me to Washington.”
“When?” I asked.
“’When?’ Now!” he said, amazed at my stupidity.
Flo, who was going to join me in the kitchen, interjected. “Danny just started his lunch break, Sean.”
“Well, I have an extremely important meeting that starts in forty-five minutes, and if I miss it, I’ll never get another chance to meet with this guy. Danny, I’ll treat you to lunch on the way back, but we need to go NOW. Meet me outside in three minutes.”
He marched back to his side of the house and Flow gave me a “sorry kid” expression before she made her way into the kitchen. I sighed deeply and made my way down the spiral staircase and waited for Sean in his driveway.
I had to accompany Sean on a trip to DC once before. That time, he pulled me and Joel from what we were doing and threw us in his Escalade, where he harangued us on all the things that needed to be done. In the forty-five minutes it took to get him to his meeting, he didn’t stop listing random tasks (in random order) in the rapid succession of machinegun fire. “I need someone to write Marc Lasseter. We need to get round to titling the new Goo songs, and it needs to get done yesterday! Find the contact information to Colin. He’s a child actor. Maybe his name is Kevin. Nabulla needs to come in tomorrow and work on the phones. Enter into the Webby Awards, and me sure we win! Bring me the head of . . . “
I furiously scribbled down as much of what he said as I could, but I was only able to get about two-thirds of everything down. Later, I copied what I wrote in an email and sent it off to Joel, who, as far as I could tell, never got to work on a single thing Sean mentioned.
Sean’s upchucking of tasks wasn’t why we rode with him, though. He actually had us accompany him to DC so we could drive his car back (Shelia, who was in the city, would pick him up when his meeting was over).
So, with a notebook in hand, I was prepared to write down notes on the way there and drive his car on the way back. This plan was strengthened when Sean rumbled out of his house and asked me, “which car should we take? The Escalade or the Lexus?”
“The Lexus,” I quickly said. Riding in an Escalade was one thing, but driving one was quite another. I imagined myself in the driver’s seat, barreling down a steel decline, smacking old ladies and dogs and rolling over other cars like a monster truck, me slamming on the brakes to no avail. No, driving an Escalade wasn’t for me.
“The Lexus? How do you feel safe in that thing?”
“It’s your car!” I thought very hard, but did not say.
“Well, okay. If that’s what you want . . .”
So, Sean Etin and I got into his Lexus. He entered in the destination in his navigation system (with some difficulty – either mentally or due to the sheer size of his fingers) and we drove off. I had little hope that Sean’s comments on the Lexus being a less safe car would mean he would drive more carefully, and he did not exceed my expectations, peeling out of his neighborhood and making a left turn at a stop sign without stopping (and possibly speeding up).
Unlike the last time I rode with him to DC, I had no need for the notebook. From the moment he began driving until the moment we reached DC, Sean barked and honked on his cell phone’s bluetooth headset. He made about five or six calls in rapid succession. He would simply end his call and dial the next person without saying a word to me. This made the ride slightly more pleasant, though there were numerous times, as he swerved and sped and nearly rammed his car, where I thought to myself, “this is not how I want to die . . .”
It was interesting to listen to him work on the phone. On one call, he was the raging brute I knew so well. On another, he was charming and affable. On another, he played dumb. It reminded me that he didn’t get rich by bullying millionaires out of their milk money. He owned an ability that most successful people possessed – he could change his personality to suit the environment. This is an ability I sorely lack, owning only two basic personalities – the silly goose and the quiet creep. Neither have been terribly helpful during the course of this job (or in any aspect of my life, upon further inspection . . .).
Sean Etin didn’t get off the phone until we were already in DC. He probably would have continued his calls until he was opening the door to his meeting, but there was a situation. In addition to having trouble programming the navigation system, he also had trouble following its directions. Every time Sean Etin made a wrong turn, the machine would recalculate, only by the time it did, Sean (not a patient man by any stretch of the imagination) would already be making another wrong turn, and the machine would pause again to recalculate. “Stupid, fucking machine,” Sean Etin muttered. He looked at the clock on his dash and saw me from the corner of his eye. “Danny, you had better get me to this meeting before I’m late.”
Not being the one driving or a navigation system myself, I thought it was an odd threat to make, but I nevertheless took it seriously. I did not want to drive back with this man if he had missed his meeting. What was I supposed to do, though? I didn’t know the DC area and I didn’t know where we were going. What I did know was that not helping him meant trouble I did not want to deal with. I looked at the navigation system. While the screen was still frozen, recalculating (or possibly just giving up), our position on the screen was still there, as was the general direction of our destination. “Turn right here, Sean,” I told him with as much authority as I could muster. I didn’t know exactly where we were going, but I knew that our destination was to our north and west. I promised myself, as I continued to direct him to the general area of where he needed to be, that I would never sound unsure of myself and never have him turn around. Any sign of weakness and I was done for.
Fortunately, in heading him blindly in the right direction, I spotted the street we were supposed to be on. “Turn left here and just keep going ‘til we get there,” I said, feeling pretty good that my gambit paid off and that I didn’t give a crazy, violent, very large man a reason to take his anger out on me. I, of course, got no ‘thank you’ nor did I expect one.
Sean pulled his car to the side of the building, illegally standing his car in a yellow-marked loading zone right in front of the entrance. He was exactly on time.
I was set to drive his car back to his home, but Sean said something that changed my plans. “Stay in the car and drive it around the block if the police ask you to move. I have satellite radio. Feel free to check it out. I don’t know how long this meeting will be – fifteen minutes, an hour – but this should keep the cops from asking you to move the car for a while.” And with that said, he reached into the middle compartment of his car and pulled out a handicapped sign, which he attached to his rear view mirror. “I took it from my mom,” he explained. The situation and the wording of his explanation were so despicable that I have no idea how I was able to keep my contempt of him from reaching the surface. Perhaps it did, and he simply didn’t notice. At any rate, I couldn’t wait for him to leave the car so I could listen to some soothing oldies on his XM. In fact, I hoped to God that his meeting would take over an hour, and God, that irascible scamp, complied, but not before this happened:
“Uh-oh,” Sean said, as he was getting out of the car. “Looks like I’m running out of gas. You’re going to have to leave the car off.”
And with that, he was gone.
I remember finding it amusing at the time. I was nearly three months into my job, and was well used to the ridiculous abuse that I went through. Of course I’d be left sitting in an illegally parked car with no power in the middle of DC . . . “It’s just another typical day at Seashel Productions,” I thought to myself . . .
Within minutes, I found my situation to be much less entertaining. It was just past high noon, in late August. The sun was shining brightly directly above the car and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. It was over one hundred degrees out and for those of you unfamiliar with DC summers, the humidity is such that you feel like you’re constantly walking through thick spider webs headed by a blow dryer. Sean Etin’s tiny sports car soon became an oven, and without power there was no air conditioner. With no radio, I had no way of entertaining myself other than mentally counting the degrees going up.
I was suddenly wishing that Sean’s meeting would be of the fifteen-minute variety. That amount of time I could stand, but a solid hour in a baking car – I didn’t know if I’d survive.
Fifteen minutes passed. Then another fifteen. The heat and the boredom were getting to me. I searched Sean’s car for something to occupy my time, but the only thing I found was a novelization of the ‘Xmen 3’ – a movie I hated to begin with. I threw the book back, hoping that I wouldn’t become bored enough to read it, when it hit me – I still had my cell phone! With my spare time, I could call up some old friends and catch up. So, I called up some friends – people I haven’t spoken to in months or even years. Nobody picked up. Perhaps they didn’t recognize my number. Perhaps they did recognize my number. Most likely, they didn’t pick up the phone because it was Tuesday afternoon and they were at work (and probably at a job that did not trap them in cars). With the seventh call, I closed my phone and angrily threw it in the bucket seat next to me.
It was now a full hour since Sean had left me in his car, and my sweaty shirt was now acting as a bonding agent between myself and the upholstery. I had a brief moment of clarity and mentally kicked myself for not thinking of it earlier. I put the key in the ignition, turned it and rolled down the windows. Horribly hot air sucked out of the car, replaced by slightly less hot, but stickier air. It felt great, but I needed more. I stuck my arm out the window, letting the slightly cooler air dry some of the sweat on my forearms. I let my hand jut awkwardly out of the car for a few moments, enjoying the sensations, before I rested my arm on the outside of the car. I could swear I heard the sizzle of burning flesh as my arm made contact with the outside metal of the car. “Aaahgh!” I pulled my arm back in and rolled up my sleeve. A reddish pink welt was appearing where I contacted the burning metal. “Oh, that’s it,” I said, putting the keys back in the ignition, rolling up the windows, blasting the AC and flipping to the oldies station on his XM radio.
“You didn’t have to be so nice,” I sang along, “I would have liked you anyway . . .”
I enjoyed the cold jets of the air conditioner and the radio for fifteen solid minutes. The oldies had done the trick and I calmed down. The last thing I wanted to do was to have Sean come back and find that his car was out of gas. He had been gone for nearly an hour and a half and I figured he had to be coming back soon. I had decided, in case he didn’t, that I would ration air conditioning and radio. I’d leave everything off and open the windows for twenty minutes. Then, for eight minutes, I’d pull up the windows and turn everything on. It seemed more than fair, I thought.
So, with renewed vigor, I attacked my cell phone, calling every name in my address book. (If you were my friend at the time and I had your number, yes, I did give you a call). Nobody picked up, but my mom, who was at work.
“Guess where I am,” I said to her. My mom worked in DC and as it turns out, I was about fifteen blocks away from her. I told her my situation and silently wished that she could take care of everything. I imagined her marching over to my boss’s meeting, giving him a piece of her mind, grabbing me by the arm and taking me home. Sometimes, it sucks being an adult. “He left you in the car for nearly two hours without air conditioning? It’s a hundred degrees out! You wouldn’t do this kind of thing to a dog. I really don’t like this boss of yours,” she said.
“Me neither.”
“If he doesn’t come back soon, and you’re bored, give me a call.”
That was all she could do. “I will,” I told her. I hung up and continued down my list of people to call. Nobody picked up. Twenty minutes had now passed and I rolled up the windows and turned on the car.
“Georgia,” I sang along, “sweet Georgia . . .”

By the third hour, I found myself reading through the first few chapters of the Xmen 3 novella, which only reminded me of how much I disliked the movie. I hadn’t heard a word from Sean Etin since he left and I was growing more and more miserable. I had forgotten that I didn’t get to eat lunch, and my stomach was now strongly reminding me. I had considered getting out of the car and getting food. There was a hot dog cart in the far distance, but I decided not to leave the car. For one thing, I knew that the second I was out of the car’s sight, Sean Etin would come out, and drive home without me, teaching me a lesson about abandoning my post. Or, the police would come and write him a ticket, which I would have to pay. The point is, I knew my luck, and I knew leaving would cause me added grief. Besides, Sean Etin owed me a lunch and I was going to make sure I’d order as much food as possible . . .
As these thoughts were running through my head, a police car slowly drove towards me.
“Yes!” I thought. I’m illegally parked. They’ll order me to move. Then I can find a gas station. And find a nice shady spot somewhere. I threw the worthless book to the side and looked hopefully at the approaching squad car. As they slowly crept by, I looked into the window, trying to make eye contact with them – trying to connect with their minds and souls. “Ask me to move,” I silently implored them. “Help me! Save me!”
They averted their gaze and rolled past Sean’s car. “Arrest me! Come back!” But they were gone. I guess I could have celebrated the fact that had I left the car when I wanted to, there very well could have been a parking ticket written, but I’ve never really been a glass-is-half-full kind of guy. Instead, I cursed Sean Etin’s mother’s handicap sign, cursed myself for not being sharp enough to take it down in time, and gave an especially invective curse for Sean Etin for simply being the kind of man that he was. Then I turned back on the car.
“Hang on Sloopy, Sloopy hang on . . .”

By the fourth hour, I was seriously wondering if Sean Etin would ever come back. I was beginning to wonder if something had gone awry. Maybe his massive body gave out on him. Maybe he was murdered by someone he had wronged in the past (perhaps he had left this person in a car for four hours . . .). Or, maybe he had been the one to do the murdering. This seemed more likely . . .
I had decided to do some investigating. I called the office. Joel picked up (which was a very rare occurrence). I didn’t care that I hated him almost as much as I hated Sean – I told him about my situation, emphasizing the fact that I was stuck in the car for over four hours and that I wasn’t allowed to use the air conditioner (which I didn’t tell him I was using anyway). He had sympathy for me, and I hungrily took it. “That’s messed up, man,” he said, chuckling a little. “Wooo . . .”
I asked to speak to Flo, who had the best chance of knowing Sean’s schedule. Joel connected her and I immediately told the story again. Flo was too much of a professional to ever badmouth her employer over the phone and in front of other employees, but I could tell she sympathized. “Hang in there, Danny,” she said in her southern drawl. I asked if she knew when Sean would be out of his meeting. She didn’t. Sean did, indeed, state that he didn’t know how long his meeting would take, but by mentioning fifteen minutes and an hour, certain expectations were made – the main one being that I wouldn’t be in the car for over four hours. I asked Flo to call my cell and keep me informed if she hears anything, and hung up.
I then called my mom again. “You’re still in the car?!?” she asked in disbelief. I told my mom my situation. “Have you tried calling him?” she asked me.
“What am I supposed to say when he picks up? Where the hell are you? I’ve been waiting in your car for over four hours? He knows this. I think it’ll only get him mad, especially if I’m interrupting an important meeting.”
“Well, you yourself said that you don’t know what happened to him, and it has been four hours. You should call him and say that you’re concerned that something might have happened to him.”
“I guess that . . . might work.” The only thing I was questioning was my believability in pretending to care about him.
My mom ended up staying on the phone with me, keeping me company while I waited in the car. She told me about the legal cases she was working on and read me lawyer-related jokes that were forwarded to her work email. Forty-five minutes flew by with my mom on the phone, and when I hung up, I decided to follow my mom’s advice and call Sean Etin.
I took a deep breath and dialed his number. One ring. Two rings. Three—
“Hello, what is it?” Sean Etin barked.
“Yeah, Sean, it’s Danny,” I said, trying hard not to sound meek, but probably failing. “I’m calling you ‘cuz it’s been a while since you went in there, and I was getting . . . concerned.”
“You were getting ‘concerned?’” Sean Etin asked, contemptuously. “What do you think could happen at the dentist’s that would warrant concern? ‘You were getting concerned.’ Really.”
I was going into shock. He was at the dentist . . .
“I’m going to be done soon. Is the car still in front of the building?”
“. . . yeah . . .” He was at the goddamn dentist . . .
“Good.” He hung up. The phone stayed at my ear. He was at the mother-fucking dentist. He had me wait in a car for five hours with no power, in oppressive heat, while he was at the dentist . . .
I closed my phone and turned on the car. “Big girls doe-wont cry-eye-eye They don’t cry. Big girllls doe-wont cry-eye –“ I turned the car back off. I wasn’t in the mood for music and I no longer felt the heat (though, to be fair, the sun was beginning to set at this point . . .). He was at the dentist . . .

I later told my dad about my misadventure in the car. “Why didn’t you move the car anyway?” he asked. “Better yet, why didn’t you show some initiative and fill up his car for him, so you wouldn’t have to bake in there.” The answer to those questions are, “I don’t know.” It seems incredibly obvious now, but those thoughts never occurred to me while I was in the car. Maybe it was because my brain was pretty fried from the heat within a half an hour. Or, maybe, it’s just because I’m not the kind of person that thinks that way. This could be the reason why, in my opinion, I’ve taken more job-related abuse than anyone I know. Most people would have driven somewhere else and lied about it, or filled up the tank, or bashed Sean’s fat face in with a tire iron. Not me, though. When the fight or flight response is supposed to kick in, I simply take it, hoping only that, when all is said and done, that it makes a good story at the end.

Anyway, this was how my worst week at Seashel began. I still had the ride back to deal with and a couple of other bad things that happened to me, but that’s a different story (the next chapter, in fact). But, needless to say, I never did get treated to lunch . . .

Startup Beatdown, Chapter 6 - The Mexican

2008-07-21T22:50:00.000-07:00

Startup Beatdown, Chapter 6: The Mexican

Of all the horrible tasks I had to do at Seashel Productions, my least favorite, by far, was having to pick up and drop off Sean Etin’s kids.

During any given day, I would be asked to make runs in my car – to mail something to the post office, or buy office supplies, or even to pick up a shareholder at the airport – and usually I didn’t mind. In fact, I would usually jump at the chance to be paid while getting away from the office and whatever torture-inducing insanity that would be going on at any given day. I even managed to not be screwed out of my car mileage costs by printing out an IRS form along with my expense report for how much money they legally owe me per mile after the comptroller
suggested I should just fill up the car and give them the receipt.

There was something different about picking up and dropping off the kids. For one thing, I couldn’t delude myself that what I was doing was for the good of the company. It was one thing to be a gofer for a faceless company (no matter how evil), and it was quite another to be a chauffer for over-privileged children. The thin line between Sean Etin’s business and Sean Etin’s home life had been trampled over, and I was grabbed by the shirt collar and bum rushed over the other side. The fact that it was so obviously not a part of my job description (as it had nothing to do with the company) made me feel used. The fact that, during these car rides, I was essentially working under the eyes of children made me feel demeaned.

More of an issue was the fact that Sean Etin’s son, Gareth, was an insufferable, little shithead. At ten years old, I could already tell that he was a chip off the old block. The kid was a cruel-natured bully who delighted in causing pain in others. Unlike his father, whose cruel persona was masked in a crusader-like, pugilistic sense of moral evangelism and paranoia, Gareth’s cruelty was guileless and pure. He was a bastard because he liked being a bastard. Causing the greatest amount of discomfort to those around him caused him giddy joy. There was nothing more to it than that. I despised him.

Sean Etin’s wife, Shelia, was always the one to ask me to pick up or drop off the kids. When she asked me, she always did so with kindness. She treated it like I was doing her a personal favor, and that that’s what I took it as.

“Danny,” she would say, “I’m really sorry to bother you, but I need you to do me a big favor. I have an appointment that was scheduled at the last minute, and I won’t be able to pick up the kids from school today. Could you do me a huge favor and pick them up for me? I would really appreciate it.”

Because she treated me so nicely, I always agreed to help out. “It’s bad enough for her that she has the devil for a husband and a monster for a son,” I thought to myself . . .

So, I would pick up her kids from school. And take them to the dentist. And drop them off at friend’s houses. And send them off to assorted after school activities. Once, I was asked to drop them off at school. They went to an all-Jewish private school a few towns over (the same one I went to, in fact, from Kindergarten to the second grade). In morning DC traffic, it was a 45-minute commute each way, and I had to be at their house at around six in the morning. Besides the fact that I wasn’t being paid overtime for being at the office three hours early, I was not a happy man. I am not a morning person (as most of you that know me can attest to) and when my job makes sleep the best part of my day, I don’t want to wake up early to go to work. To their credit, they only asked me to do this once – possibly because I alluded to the fact that it was a miracle I was able to drive without getting into a sleepy, fiery car-wreck that early in the morning.

******************************

In the first month I worked there, Shelia asked me what I was doing over the weekend. “Not much,” I replied, thinking, rather dully, that she was just making conversation.

“Oh good,” she said. “I was hoping you could do me a HUGE favor.” She smiled pleasantly.

Sean and Shelia were going out of town over the weekend, and Elka, their live-in maid, would be gone too. “I don’t need you to baby-sit,” she explained. “I just need someone to drop the dog off at the kennel in the morning, and take Gareth to his grandparents in the afternoon.” This was still early in my career at Seashel, and thinking that a willingness to do demeaning bitchwork would endear myself to my employees, I agreed. It was faulty logic. Somewhere, in the back of my mind, I thought, “Once they see that I’m willing to do whatever it is they want me to without complaint, surely, they’ll see how unfair it is and start asking other people to pitch in. Hell, they might even do the work themselves!”

Friday winded down, and she called me again. “Danny, I forgot to tell you. Could you drop Gareth off at the comic book store when you pick up the dog? He has one of those Yugi-Oh tournaments with his little friends.” It wasn’t a big deal . . .

On Saturday, I woke up early and headed to the Etin’s house. I gathered Gareth, Kathie, the Etin’s attention-starved rottweiler, bags of dog food, leashes and other dog supplies (you’d think they’d have this sort of things at a kennel, but whatever) and loaded them into my car. I dropped Gareth off at the comic book store and drove to the kennel, which was nearly an hour away. I waited there for a little while, holding the stupidly excited Kathie by a leash in the waiting room, and filled out paperwork. I then drove home, had a quick lunch, and went back out to the comic book store to pick up the kid. As I opened the door, I heard squeals of children’s laughter, arguing, and the assorted indecipherable noises that children make. Trying to rise above the din was the comic shop owner, Gus, whom I had known since I frequented the store as a dorky kid in high school.

“I swear, you kids better calm down, or I’ll kick you out of my store. Gareth, I want you to clean up the mess you caused, now!”

“One more game! One more game!” Gareth exclaimed excitedly, completely ignoring Gus.

“Goddamn it! When are your parents gonna pick you brats up? Gareth, I said pick up those damn cards!”

Gus saw me out of the corner of his eye and turned to me. “Hey man,” he said, looking askance at the kids and shaking his head a little in a way that perfectly communicated, ‘I’d-like-to-put-these-kids-in-a-sack-and-beat-their-parents-with-them.’

“What’s up,” he asked me.

“I’m, uhhh,” I paused. “I’m here to pick up Gareth,” I finally replied, sheepishly.

Gus looked at me confusedly. The last time I saw him, I was visiting home from New York, where I was working for a somewhat prestigious children’s animation company. I’m sure I casually mentioned that to him when we last met.

“He’s the boss’s son,” I explained.

“You become a babysitter or chauffer or something?” he asked.

I tried to save face. “No, I work for a children’s entertainment company. A startup. I was hired on to help with the development of their projects, since I’m the only person there with any experience in the field.”

He was silent for a few seconds. “Why do you have to pick up the boss’s kid on your day off?”

“I don’t know,” I answered truthfully.

At this point, Gareth, who sat in the corner of the store with hundreds of Yugi-Oh cards scattered around him and two of his friends by his side, saw me.

“Can’t you come back in an hour?” Gareth asked, looking annoyed.

“No. I need to take you to your grandparent’s house.”

“Daaaaaannny,” he said playfully, “there’s three dollars in it for you . . .”

I let his insult wash over me and said nothing.

“Fine! Two dollars!” Gareth said, finding himself highly amusing.

“Get your stuff together, Gareth.”

“Yeah,” Gus added, “it’s definitely time for you brats to go.”

“ONE MORE GAME! ONE MORE GAME!” Gareth squealed . . .

*******************************************

The ride to his grandparent’s was not as painful as usual. Gareth was still riding his high of winning the Yugi-Oh tournaments and taking assorted cards from his friends. I engaged him in conversation about Yugi-Oh, which, for once, kept him from his usual display of random screaming, kicking my car’s dash, and pleading to go into every store we passed by.

By the time I got home, it was nearly six o’ clock. I had spent an entire Saturday doing errands for the Etins, without pay.

The following Friday, Shelia approached me and asked what I was doing that weekend. I quickly told her I would be out of town. This would become my stock answer whenever anyone from work would ask what I was doing over the weekend. “Prove me wrong,” I silently challenged them. During the times the office called me during the weekend, I just didn’t pick up the phone. On Monday, I would tell them that I didn’t have cell reception where I was, and by the time I got their message it was too late to call back.

I was learning.

Of course, when I was at work, it was much harder to pretend I was out of town. In fact, it was near impossible to pretend that anything I was doing there was worthwhile. Asking if I was doing anything important was nothing more than a formality, especially when cornered doing such activities as shooting the breeze with my friends in the back room, or spinning around in my chair . . .

As my time at Seashel continued, I was asked to pick up the Etin’s kids with more regularity.
What was once a bi-weekly occurrence, I was now asked to pick up the kids two to four times a week, and little Gareth was becoming more and more of a pain. Once, while Gareth ran in some random direction in the parking lot of his school (for the sole purpose of pissing me and his older sister off), I finally decided to teach him a lesson. I was going to get in my car and run him down.

Eventually, I decided to take a slightly less drastic approach. “Get in,” I told his sister. “We’re leaving without him.”

Her eyes went wide. “Really?” she asked. “Cool!”

We hopped in my car and drove away. As we pulled out of the school, Gareth’s sister asked me if we were really leaving without him. “No,” I told her. “We’ll come back in five minutes and get him.”

“Oh. That’s too bad.”

Perhaps all Gareth needed was a hard lesson, I thought to myself. I pictured him back in the parking lot, all alone and crying unabashedly, the veneer of brattiness washed away by his tears, revealing a lonely little boy. I would drive back, roll down the window, and say, “Gareth, I hope you realize now that not everything revolves around you.” With his lesson learned, I would then proceed to run him down with my car . . .

Of course, when I drove back, Gareth greeted me with a wide, impish, close-eyed smile and began running away from the car again. His sister rolled down the car window and screamed at him. “Gareth, you little brat! Get in the car! I want to go home!”

“Ha ha ha!” he replied.

Eventually, we were able to corral him into the car. From his spot in the back seat, Gareth spent the length of the car ride kicking the back of my seat and barking loud, ugly noises.

“GRAHGGHHH!!” “Ba ba ba ba!” “REEEEEEE!” It was his own nonsense language, but it communicated what he wanted to say to me better than if he were saying it in plain English.

“You can’t bother me like I can bother you, and I’ll never, EVER stop.”

I already knew that to be true. Over the man y times I had to drive the brat around, I tried my best to keep him in control. I tried reasoning with him. I tried yelling at him. I tried ignoring him. I tried treating him like an adult and treating him like a kid. I even tried joining him once. Nothing worked. He looked past my methods and saw the real me – a grown man who despised a little boy. He loved it . . .

***************************************

One time, I was asked to drop Gareth off at his Pop Warner football practice. This was the only time I was actually looking forward to dealing with the little bastard. Why? Because, it was towards the end of the day and after some smooth talking on my part, I was able to convince Flo to let me go straight home afterwards. “By the time I get back here, it’ll already be 6:00, and I’ll have to go straight home anyway . . .” I pleaded. She saw the desperation in my eyes and gave me the okay, allowing me to get home a full half an hour early. This was the rarest of treats. Not only was I able to be home early, I would be ensuring I wouldn’t have to stay late, by totally bypassing Sean Etin’s usual 5:55 appearance in the office, ordering everyone to stick around for an extra hour or two (usually for no reason).

On the ride to his practice, with his pads, helmet and uniform bunched up around his legs, I tried to engage Gareth in talk about football – a subject that I actually cared about. “What position do you play?” “What’s your team’s record?” “Are you a fan of any pro team?” (I was hoping he’d say the Cowboys to this one, so I could have reason to hate them both a little more . . .) Unlike the time I got him talking about Yugi Oh, he wasn’t responsive to my scheme. The most I got out of him was that he didn’t much like football before he was importuning for me to pull over to a Starbucks and buy him an Iced Caramel Macchiato . . .

We had gotten to his practice field and I parked the car. I had made good time in getting there (no, I did not stop at Starbucks) and if I left now, I would just miss rush hour and be home with a little over a half an hour early. Gareth, however, didn’t move. I thought about why he wasn’t leaving. Was it because he didn’t see anyone he recognized? I scanned the field for any kids that were wearing Gareth’s uniforms. I saw none. “Do you see any kids you recognize, Gareth?”

“No.”

Crap. I may have despised the little shit, but I wasn’t going to leave a ten-year-old alone in a park. So, I waited in the car with Gareth, feeling my early freedom tick away. Every few minutes, I would ask him if he saw someone he recognized. A teammate. A coach. A celebrity.
I didn’t care. I just wanted him to be someone else’s problem.

After asking him for the tenth time, I noticed a bunch of kids congregating on the field, wearing Gareth’s team uniform.

“Isn’t that your team over there?” I asked him, pointing to the kids.

“No.”

“Then why are they wearing your uniform?”

“I meant yes.”

“Okay then.”

Gareth still didn’t move.

“Get out of my car, Gareth.”

“I can’t. I need to get changed first.”

“Then do it!”

I angrily wondered why Gareth didn’t put his pads on beforehand, but it soon became clear to me, as he continued to just sit there. He was keeping me here on purpose. I don’t know how, but he somehow knew that this was cutting into my free time.

“Put on your pads, Gareth.”

He gave me his best “I’m-a-little-fucker” smile and continued to do nothing.

“PUT-ON-YOUR-PADS, GARETH!”

“I don’t know how . . . “

Oh, God, how I hated him. The lying gremlin wanted me to dress him. I didn’t
know what game he was playing, and I didn’t care. I wanted him out of my car so badly.
As I picked up his shoulder pads, I was struck by a random image in my mind. I
saw Gareth, bursting into Sean Etin’s den, in tears. “Daddy, Daddy! Danny touched me on the way to football practice!”

“He WHAT?!?” Sean Etin would say, as he gets to his feet, throwing his glass of cognac into the fire. The flames grow and are reflected in Sean Etin’s murderous eyes. Gareth smiles impishly.

Cut to: my bedroom. I am sleeping in my bed, when I bolt upright, sensing the presence of someone beside me. Sean Etin steps out of the shadows. “You touched my child. Now I get to touch yours . . .” He would then grab my crotch with his giant, meaty fist, and squeeze it into a red paste. I howl in agony. “I’m also suing you,” he would say. “And I expect you at work first thing in the morning . . .”

I snapped out of it. The thought was far-fetched. Gareth wouldn’t have the forethought for a plan like that (though the evil intent would certainly be there), and Sean Etin wouldn’t break into my house while I was asleep. He would crush my balls when I was at the office. Still, I decided not to put my hands anywhere near his son.

I threw the shoulder pads onto Gareth’s lap. “Put this around your neck,” I told him. He gave me another stupid grin. It was now 5:50, and I had wasted over a half an hour in the parking lot with the little prick.

“PUT ON THE GODDAMN PADS!” I said calmly.

Gareth picked up the shoulder pads and gingerly put them around his neck. When finished, he looked at me again.

“Now put on the rest of your uniform,” I told him.

“I need to tie the pads in place first,” he said.

“Goddamn it, Gareth! You are really pissing me off! Put on the rest of your uniform, do it correctly, and get the hell out of my car!”

Again, Gareth got to work. He tied his pads in place. He put on his jersey, his socks and his cleats. It all seemed to go in slow motion – mainly because Gareth was moving at half speed, his movements exaggerated as if someone pushed ‘slow’ on a remote control.

“Go faster,” I told him.

“I am,” he assured me, moving at the same snail’s pace.

“You are such a goddamned brat.”

The second Gareth finished, I opened the door of my car, marched out to the passenger side, and opened his door.

“Get the hell out of my car!”

He took a glance at my dashboard and hopped out of the car, running towards his teammates on the field.

I slammed the door shut and got back into the driver’s seat. I looked at the clock. I was exactly 6:00.

***********************************

I had decided that enough was enough. My days of picking up and dropping off the kids were over. At this point in my ‘career’ at Seashel, I knew I would be quitting soon and wanted to gain some modicum of dignity before I did. So, the next time Shelia pulled me aside, wanting me to pick up Gareth from school, I asked to speak with her.

She and I walked into the empty kitchen. “I’m perfectly willing to pick Gareth up from school today, because I don’t want to leave you in a lurch, but I just wanted to let you know that I would appreciate it if you didn’t ask me to drive around your kids anymore. I’ve always thought of driving them around as a favor to your family, and I really don’t consider it a part of my job, and I would like to spend my time at work doing what I’m being paid to do. Again, I’m willing to pick him up today, but ask you to please not ask me to again,” I quickly spat out.

Shelia looked at me, her smile only wavering for a brief moment. “Sure, Danny,” she said. “Thank you for picking Gareth up today.” She walked out of the kitchen, and I went off to pick up Gareth, feeling good that it would be my last time.

I drove to Gareth’s school and came up to the curb. Gareth usually waited for me there, but today he was nowhere to be seen. I called Shelia on my cell and she told me that he would be waiting for me in the school library. In the shock of my telling her that I wouldn’t be her bitch anymore, it must have slipped her mind.

I parked my car and entered the school. It was weird being back in an elementary school. Back when I was a kid, school seemed so big, the cooler, noisier kids seemed so intimidating and the teachers seemed so old. Now, as I walked through the school, the hallways seemed narrow and the ceilings low. The “cool kids” (and I can tell they were the cool kids by the way they carried themselves) seemed so puny and ridiculous in their posturing. The teachers I passed, I noticed, looked to be my age or younger. I had come a long way . . .

I walked into the library and saw Gareth towards the other end of the room, chatting with some friends. I walked towards him as he called out, “Hey, Mexican! Get over here!” I stopped dead in my tracks. Did he just call me ‘Mexican?’ I didn’t understand. Maybe he was talking to someone else. I looked around. Nobody looked Mexican in the all-Jewish private school library . . . I was deep in thought. ‘Maybe it was a friend’s nickname, like Booger or Boner or Cockroach . . .’ ‘Don’t fool yourself. You know the little shit was talking to you.’ ‘Yeah, but what does he mean?!?’

He interrupted my train of thought. “Mexican! Get over here! Now!” He emphasized the ‘now’ with his finger pointing down in an angry staccato. He was looking straight at me. His two friends were looking at me too, with toothy smiles, alternatively looking back at Gareth.

I decided that the best thing to do was to totally ignore them. I casually walked in the opposite direction, examining the books as if I went to the elementary school to do some casual reading.

“Ahh, yes,” I thought to myself. “The Boxcar Children. I wonder what exciting mysteries they are solving this time . . .”

After five minutes, I saw in the corner of my eyes Gareth’s two friends walk past me and leave the library. Soon after, Gareth approached me.

“Why didn’t you come when I called you?” he asked. He, for the first time, seemed genuinely frustrated.

“Because you didn’t call me,” I calmly replied.

“Yes I did! I said, ‘Mexican’.”

“I’m not ‘Mexican’.”

“Yes you are,” he explained to me. “You’re a Mexican because you do everything I tell you to do.”

There it was. For some reason, I had trouble wrapping my head around the fact that it was a racial epithet (mainly because I was white and Jewish).

I thought about what to say next. Should I scold him for trying to bully me in front of his friends? Should I elucidate him on the evils of prejudice? Should I explain to him my confusion over what he was trying to invoke?

I breathed deeply. Much like my job in general, he wasn’t worth it.

“Come on,” I told him, as I walked out of the library and back to my car.

*****************************************

Shelia never asked me to her a favor again. No, the era of doing favors was now over. From that point on, I was ordered to pick up the kids. The very next day, a phone call came into the office. At this point, they had gotten a secretary, so I was no longer the one to pick up the phone every time it rang. About a minute after the call came in, Rita approached me.

“Sean needs you to pick up the kids,” she told me in her bored monotone.

A silent rage filled me. I was quiet for a moment, and, in as even a tone as I could muster, I asked her, “Can I speak to him?”

“He already hung up.” She walked away.

In the fifty or so times I was asked to chauffer his kids, Sean Etin was never once the one to ask me to do it. It was always Shelia.

I had oftentimes wondered how someone who could marry a monster like Sean Etin be such a nice person. The answer, the only answer there could be, was that she couldn’t. Like any successful marriage, Sean and Shelia worked as a team. Shelia was the good cop, and Sean was the bad cop. For nine months, the good cop; the carrot-approach; the preying on my kindness had done the trick. Now that it failed to work, it was time for the bad cop; the stick-approach; the preying on my ability to be bullied.

I was shocked at the gambit that the Etin’s had just played. Order the one person who specifically asked not to pick up the kids to pick up the kids, one day after he made the request, and outright refusing to communicate with him on the subject. They were literally willing to sacrifice their own children’s safety and well-being to make a point – that as long as I worked there, I would be a Mexican to any member of the Etin family, be it my boss, his wife, or his ten-year-old son. It was the ballsiest, most selfish thing I had ever encountered in my life. I thought of quitting on the spot. Let some other sucker pick up their brats. I thought of getting into my car and driving straight home without telling anybody, and smashing my cell phone with a hammer. I imagined the Etin’s, in the middle of the night, wondering where the hell their kids are, while Alia (their daughter) and Gareth waited at their school. I might have done it too, but I had a doctor’s appointment that week and I wanted to take advantage of my health insurance while I had it. Also, as much as it went against my favor, I was a nice guy. I couldn’t strand children, even one as evil and cruel as Gareth – even if their own parents could. So, I got up, got into my car, and once again drove into the heart of darkness . . .

*****************************************************

Throughout the abuse I took from Gareth, I had oftentimes considered telling his parents about his sadistic behavior (especially when I thought Shelia was a good person) – but I never did. This was because, as much as I hated to be tortured by a ten-year-old boy, I knew that I would only have to deal with him while I worked there, and that Sean Etin, who I hated above all people, would have to deal with him for the rest of his life. I imagined Gareth at fifteen, giving his parents hell in his angst-ridden teen years. I imagined him at twenty, fighting his very first statutory rape case. I imagined him at fifty, his father now old and decrepit, and in need of some love and care. I imagined, when his father asked him for help, adult Gareth replying, “What am I, your Mexican?” leaving Sean Etin alone and uncared for – and I smiled. And then I wished Gareth would have children exactly like him . . .

Startup Beatdown, Chapter 5: Joel Vs. Hempstead

2008-07-21T22:46:00.000-07:00

Startup Beatdown, Chapter 5: Joel Vs. Hempstead

The first person in the office everyday was a man by the name of Sean Hempstead. Sean Hempstead was the omega wolf of the office. Sure, I was given the shittiest jobs to perform, but most of the time, people treated me with at least some respect (to my face, at least). Hempstead, however, was treated like worm-infested shit. All bad vibes, baleful thoughts and evil juju were inevitably focused at this man like a beam. Perhaps it was because he would take it, when any normal person would have quit or killed everyone in a shooting rampage. . .

Sean Hempstead had a desk next to mine in the hallway. He was a tall, rather thin man, with a shock of blond hair, thick glasses and the demeanor of an uninvited houseguest who made himself at home. Oftentimes, I would find him stretched out in his chair, casually shelling peanuts and pooping them in his mouth, while surfing the Internet. Though he looked to be in his thirties, Sean Hempstead was in his fifties, a Vietnam veteran and a grandfather. He was also an incredible geek. He was Seashel Productions IT specialist, and would mention the Macintosh’s superiority to the PC so regularly that I thought he was perhaps receiving a second paycheck from Apple.

Nobody ever called Sean Hemstead ‘Sean,’ or even ‘Mr. Hempstead.’ Instead, everyone just called him ‘Hempstead,’ or, to be more precise, ‘HEMPSTEAD,’ as it was usually yelled. I would hear his name harshly invoked numerous times on any given day, usually followed by a vitriolic, “why haven’t you . . .” or “the goddamned machine is . . .” And Hempstead would shrug off the abuse with an “oh, what-would-you-people-do-without-me” attitude that probably only made people hate him more.

Hempstead arrived at work at 7:30, a full hour-and-a-half before everyone else. It took him over an hour to commute to the office every day, which mean he left his home before 6:30. When I found out he came in so early, I asked him why. “It’s in my contract. I come in at 7:30, and I get to leave at 4:30.” When I pointed out that I had never once seen him leave at 4:30, he added, sheepishly, “Or as needed. It says, ‘4:30 or as needed.’ They kind of got me on that one, huh?” True enough, Hempstead usually left after I did, and I averaged leaving between 6:30 and 7:00.

“As needed” also included being called back to the office in the middle of the night. One night, some co-workers and I were working late. Hempstead was excused to leave at around 7:00, but by 11:00, Sean Etin was bellowing for him. “Where the hell is Hempstead? Why isn’t he here?!?” Flo explained that he was excused and left. “Well, get that piece of shit back here. Now!” And sure enough, Hempstead was back in the office a little over an hour later. This apparently happened often . . .

One morning, something strange happened. I had just gotten in and was slowly sipping a Mountain Dew, in my usual morning stupor, daydreaming about still being in bed. As usual, Hempstead was already at his desk, next to mine in the hallway, and was trying to engage me in a conversation about the superiority of the Macintosh. “You read today’s article in CNET?” he asked me, oblivious to my mental state and lack of interest in the subject. “More viruses found in PCs. Windows is gonna need a patch. Of course, Macs aren’t affected . . .” As usual, I gave my nondescript grunt, symbolizing both everything I felt on the subject, and nothing, and usually the only way I could communicate that early in the morning.

In order to get to their desks in the morning, all Seashel Employees had to squeeze past me and Hempstead in the narrow, cluttered hallway. Joel, the second meatiest member of the Seashel staff (only Sean Etin himself out-massed him), sashayed past our chairs as we scootched into our desks, and went into the senior staff room. A few moments later he roared, “HEMPSTEAD!”

Hempstead swiveled his chair in the direction of where the ugly noise was coming from. “Yes?” he asked in a conversational manner that suggested he was quite used to Joel’s tone.
“My goddamned password won’t work! What the fuck did you do?!?”

Patiently, in his slight Southern drawl, he called back, “There was a security issue with the network this morning. You’re gonna have to create a new password.”

“No, Hempstead, no! I’m sick of this shit! Get over here right now and give me my old password back.”

Hempstead leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. “I can’t do that, Joel. Just make a new password.”

Taking a page from the Sean Etin book of intimidation, Joel charged out into the hallway like a bull, but unlike Etin, who would get right in someone’s face, his immense body hulking under his suit, while spittle and vitriol rained down upon his victim, Joel stopped short at the end of the hallway. In terms of intimidation, it wasn’t nearly as effective, even with his large build (he probably outweighed both Hempstead and I put together) undulating angrily with every breath.
“Hempstead,” Joel said in a controlled tone akin to someone speaking to a disobedient dog, “I want you to get up off your ass and do what I say.”

“Joel, listen, we can’t just –“

“Just do it! I don’t want to hear any of your idiotic excuses!”

To be fair, Hempstead always seemed to have a windy, circuitous excuse or speech handy for why we should or should not do something that it was simply too early in the morning to deal with, even with this exchange quickly sobering me up. What Hempstead said next shook off whatever sleepiness that still remained.

“You’re the idiot,” he mumbled under his breath.

“What did you say?!?” Joel was incredulous.

“I said you’re the idiot, Joel!”

The timorous, inured Hempstead was gone. The loud, bellicose Joel was still there, now enraged. Hempstead stood up from his chair, clenching and unclenching his fists. Violence was imminent. Two phrases were pounding in my skull – “Get away. You’re a witness. Get away. You’re a witness. Get away. You’re a witness.” I was with the company long enough to know that I did not want to be involved in any way with whatever insanity came from this confrontation. I needed to get away.

“YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT! I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU!” Joel screamed.

“Go ahead and try!” Hempstead countered.

“I’m, uhhh, gonna see what’s going on outside . . .” I mumbled weakly to no one in particular. I got up and left the house – down the spiral staircase and out the door. It was sunny and pleasant outside. I sat on a patio step for about 15 minutes, watching crickets*1 hop around, and listened for screams or crashes. With no noise emanating from the house, I came back in. The hallway was now empty. I peeked my head into the kitchen and saw Hempstead making himself a tea, mumbling angrily to himself, his fists still clenching and unclenching. I decided to leave him alone . . .

At lunch, I played basketball with my three friends who worked under Joel in the creative department (which I was sort of a member of as well). They secretly saw and heard the whole exchange from their room at the end of the hallway, and filled me in on what I had missed when I left. “They were yelling at each other for a while and then Joel went into the senior staff room and came with the time clock*2 and was like, ‘I’m gonna bash your fucking head in with this time clock!’” CJ said.

“So, Joel threatened him with something physical? He could get fired for this!” I said, rather excitedly.

Nobody else got their hopes up. “Not gonna happen,” Perry said. “If anything, they’ll fire Hempstead.”

I realized he was right. Knowing how this company operated, and how much everyone seemed to despise him, Hempstead was probably on his way out.

I didn’t want Hempstead to be fired. I didn’t necessarily like the man, but I didn’t hate him either, and in this company, that said a lot. Sure, he was annoying, but he wasn’t conniving or evil or needlessly cruel. With the abuse he took on a daily basis, it probably was best for him to leave, but I wanted him to do it on his own accord, not fired for being nearly murdered.

I went back to the office with the guys, not looking forward to what would probably happen when Etin bulldozed into the office at the end of the day – though I did feel confident that I had managed to sidestep any chance of being sucked into the insanity that would follow his arrival. Hempstead was now sitting at his desk, looking much calmed. “How’s it going?” I asked.

“Good,” he said. “I’m on my way out in an hour or so.”

“Oh?” I guessed the ax had already fallen.

“I have a dentist appointment, and I made it a month ago. If they think they can get me to cancel it, they can think again. I know my rights!”

Hempstead was still worked up. Without prompting, he added, “I wish Joel did hit me. I would have sued him and the whole damn company!”

For a moment, I wished Hempstead had been hit too. The idea that he would be the one to take down the company (or at least Joel) had a ‘Made-for-TV’ eloquence that I appreciated. Of course, this ignored the facts that Seashel Productions was in innumerable lawsuits already, that Sean Etin loved fighting them, and that he and Joel could lie better than Hempstead could tell the truth. Perhaps it was better that Hempstead wasn’t hit, and that he was leaving for the day. It would give everyone a chance to calm down and even delay whatever inquiry was bound to occur for another day.

Of course, I was wrong on both accounts. About an hour after Hempstead left, I heard the hoofs of Sean Etin, as he power-walked from his side of the house to the worker side. I scootched my chair into my desk just in time as Mr. Etin charged through. Thankfully, he didn’t acknowledge me, and I returned to whatever piddling task I was working on. About ten minutes later, Flo came into the hallway and spoke to me. “Danny,” she said, “can you please join us in Sean’s office? We’d like your account of what transpired this morning.”

As I walked to Mr. Etin’s office, I was weighing in my mind just how much testimony I was willing to give. Was the slim prospect of getting Joel fired worth getting myself entangled in whatever craziness they had going on? As soon as I reached the office, I realized that the answer was a resounding ‘no.’

Forgetting where I worked for a moment, I somehow expected this to be a private meeting between myself, Sean Etin and Flo. Instead, the entire senior staff was seated in his cramped room. Rita: Seashel’s HR person, Sean Etin’s sister, and a good friend to Joel. Jim Heff: Seashel’s roly-poly paralegal who often acted as Joel’s lackey. Mike Hahn: Seashel’s comptroller and former college and European basketball player, who, despite is towering height, managed to make himself invisible during the office conflicts and craziness (which I greatly respected and envied). Last, but not least, sitting mere inches away from where I was standing was Joel himself, looking smug and relaxed. Being in this room with all the senior staffers made me notice for the first time that Hempstead was the only worker above the age of thirty-five who didn’t work in the senior staff room. Throwing a kangaroo court where the defendant wasn’t even there to defend himself seemed horribly low, but it was nowhere near surprising that it would go down like this.

“Tell us what happened this morning, Danny,” Flo said.

I wanted out bad. Anything that I said that would disparage Joel (such as the truth, for instance) would cause me problems in the future. Everyone in the room hated Hempstead to begin with. My need to defend an innocent man and save his crappy job was superceded by my need to avoid any added discomfort at work. I wasn’t going to sell Hempstead out, but I wasn’t going to stick my neck out for him either.

“Joel and Hempstead had an argument,” I replied, trying my best to stay neutral.
“What did they say to each other?”
“They were arguing. A lot of things were said.”
“Did Hempstead really call Joel an idiot?” Sean Etin asked.
“I’m sure both Joel and Hempstead said things in the heat of the argument that they regret.”
“Did he call me an idiot or not?” Joel prompted me, impatiently.

My defense of Hempstead ended there. I wanted out. “He did, and I left immediately after, so I don’t know what happened after that. Sorry I can’t be of any more help, but I didn’t want to be around an argument. Am I free to go?”

They dismissed me, and I ran off, ashamed that I didn’t do more to help Hempstead. I realized as I left, that there were three other witnesses who saw and heard the entire conflict in secret, and could do a much better job defending him than I could – but forcing my friends to come forward, into the maelstrom of chaos if they could afford to avoid it was unfair to them and not my call to make. So, I just left for the day.

********************************************

I came in the next day, expecting it to be Hempstead’s last. During lunch, Joel invited me and my three friends to eat with him. Being our immediate boss, we decided to accept his invitation. Joel spent the hour badmouthing Hempstead, quizzing us on how much we disliked him, and ending the lunch by announcing that Hempstead won’t be with us for much longer. It was awkward, and thankfully, the only lunch we ever had with him.

Joel was wrong about Hempstead, though. The worst of the storm had passed, and Hempstead had weathered it with no punishment other than his usual dose of verbal abuse. Things were back to ‘normal’ that day, with Hempstead asking me if I had seen the new Mac commercial . . .

There are different kinds of survivors. Some, like Joel and Sean Etin, survive by kicking, clawing and gouging their way to the top, and using whatever means necessary to ensure that no one can take them down. Then there are those like Hempstead, who, like a barnacle, could withstand wave after wave of punishment and still hang on. I was later shocked to find out that Hempstead was technically the most senior worker at Seashel, having been there twice as long as the next most tenured staff member. He’s seen countless employees come and go, unable to handle the insanity of the workplace (even Mike Hahn, who managed to avoid all conflicts, left suddenly, shortly after this events took place). Hempstead would just, for the most part, simply keep his head down and take his daily beating. Had he stayed here for no reason, I would have felt pity or even anger at him – but he had a plan. Hempstead worked there for nearly two and a half years. After three years with the company, an employee can take advantage of profit sharing. I don’t know if he thought Seashel was due a huge monetary victory in their major litigation, or if he sincerely believed in their products eventually being profitable, but he was determined to stay. He would be the only employee to take advantage of this service, and, in this way, he could get his revenge on Sean Etin, who, for the most part, treated him worse than anybody else. Whatever success Sean Etin achieved from that point on, Sean Hempstead would get a cut. The idea of this must have made Etin furious (as many things did). I had actually wondered if Etin had consciously treated Hempstead so poorly in order to get him to quit, and if Joel’s argument (which really did come out of nowhere) had been an entrapment that didn’t go as planned.

Of course, it was hard to say. His shabby treatment could have just come from the fact that many of the members of the senior staff were dicks . . .

Either way, his stick-to-itiveness elicited a mixture of respect and repulsion in me. Certainly, it was something I could never do. In fact, I promised myself that the moment I was treated like Hempstead was, I would quit. They may give me bitch work, but I will not be treated like a bitch. And I’m happy to say, when was inevitably I treated like a bitch, I left . . .

*1 – The crickets that I watched were most likely put there earlier by me. One of my tasks was to go to the pet store a couple of times a week and buy crickets to feed to the company chameleon (which was the house chameleon before Etin’s kids lost interest in it). I would have to put the crickets from a plastic bag, into a cricket cage and from there, into a tube, where I would coat them with powdered calcium and feed them alive to the chameleon. Any time I had to transfer the crickets, I would do it outside, just in case they managed to get away. In the beginning, this was a good idea, since I was not very good at getting them smoothly from one place to another, and some managed to escape. When I finally got the hang of it, I still set one or two crickets free, probably to make myself feel better about causing so much death at work . . .

*2 – Every day, we had to time clock punch when we entered, left and ate lunch. This was to make sure that we worked a full nine-hour day, (though usually we all worked for much longer) and there would be hell to pay if someone came in late or left early. I was later told that as salaried employees who got no overtime, this was illegal.

Startup Beatdown, Chapter 4: How to Be a Corporate Spy

2008-07-21T22:41:00.000-07:00

Chapter Four: How To Be A Corporate Spy

Like many powerful people with questionable moral compasses, Sean Etin was a very paranoid man. Often, he spoke of crazy plots and conspiracy theories against him, whose authenticity I cannot aver to. I heard everything from catching a former employee wiretapping his house, to a daring act of corporate robbery, in which men in masks and business suits absconded with boxes of important legal documents. Of course, nothing so exciting happened while I was there.

Nevertheless, Sean Etin tried his best to guard against future acts of corporate terrorism. He had a systems expert, an African from the Congo (aka: Zaire) named Nabulla, who was often in the office, working on a security system of tiny cameras, located all around the outside of Mr. Etin’s house (and very possibly inside as well). Nabulla was a good guy, and we would often talk politics or about his home country.

“Being the son of a diplomat makes you very important in Zaire,” he once told me. “My friend, who was the son of a very important diplomat went to the airport with me, and demanded to be taken to some other city. So, the airport kicked everyone off a departing flight and flew us there immediately. We had a very nice time.”

He also once suggested I visit Libya. “People there treat you very kindly,” he said, not realizing I would probably be killed the second someone learned I was American. Or Jewish. Or (most likely) white.

Sean Etin also guarded against “revenge” plots from former employees (of which, I found out, there were many. In three years or so, they had about 100 employees, with no more than about 20 working at one time). Knowing how he treats people, I could only say that any safeguard was understandable. When I was first hired, I was asked to bring in my high school yearbook to prove I didn’t know three former employees that went to school there. “I had to fire them after I caught them snorting coke off the hoods of their car,” Mr. Etin told me. “Not that I necessarily have anything against drugs,” he added, in what I can only assume was an attempt to sound cool.

“It’s more likely they were fired for drinking coke inside their cars,” one of my office-mates, Perry once joked, knowing Mr. Etin’s propensity for (to put it kindly) bending the truth to fit his purpose. Not understanding how my yearbook could prove I knew these people (I didn’t), I nevertheless agreed to have my privacy invaded, instead of doing the smart thing by just saying that I didn’t own one.

My yearbook was promptly lost in the man’s giant pigsty of a house. “It got lost in the black hole,” Mr. Etin told me, motioning at the assorted boxes of crap littered around after I continued to press him on it. “I’m sure it’ll come up sometime.”

This was in stark contrast to whenever he couldn’t find anything for himself. “It’s GONE,” he would say loudly, and to no one in particular, whenever he couldn’t find what he was looking for immediately. “Yet ANOTHER object of my personal property SOMEHOW managed to walk out of my house.” He would then eye his employees as if we were filthy pickpockets from off the streets of Bangladesh. Of course, whatever it was he was looking for would eventually be found, as would my yearbook (months later).

The point, though, is that Sean Etin was paranoid, and no moment was more evident of this fact than the time I was thought to be a corporate spy . . .

It began during lunch. Everybody in the company was out to lunch, except for me and Perry, as we had brought our own. Perry, along with the other two members of the creative staff, worked in a secluded nook of a room at the end of the hallway that I worked out of. They had the best spot in the house, as they were often spared from the overall insanity of the office, and were, in fact, left alone sometimes for days at a time (besides my coming in multiple times a day to shoot the breeze with them). Oftentimes, I found them in there playing video games on their computers. Perry had recently broken his foot while saving ninjas from a burning car, and couldn’t really move around much. So, the two of us had our lunch in the back room, talking about video games and badmouthing the company. We were alone for perhaps a half an hour, and nothing out of the ordinary occurred, except for the fact that the Etin’s rottweiler snuck into the ‘work side’ of the house for some desperately needed attention and petting. Seriously, I’ve never met a more needy creature in my life (and, yes, I include myself in that statement).

The dog eventually left, as Flo and the rest of the employees began trickling in from their lunches. The muted echoes of a commotion came in through the walls, but at this point in our employment, both Perry and I knew not to get involved in anything that didn’t directly involve us in some way. As we were finishing our lunch, Flo poked her head in the door. “Did either of you boys go into the Senior Staff area while we were gone?” she asked.

The Senior Staff area was the large room at the end of the hallway where the ‘important’ people in the office worked (besides myself, the creative team, and one other person, this consisted of everyone else). I had been told at different times that due to the sensitive nature of the information kept there, I should never go in that room unless I had explicit permission, only to later be scolded for my constant asking to enter if I needed to speak to someone or get something. “Just come in!” they would tell me in exasperation. It was my general policy to stay away from this room (and most of the people that worked there) if I could.
We had answered “no” to Flo’s question. “Did you see anyone go into the senior staff area?” We told her that we didn’t. “Did you see anyone or anything out of the ordinary while we were gone?” I told her about the dog.

There was a heavy silence in the air. Perry and I knew that in the natural order of conversation, one of us had to ask the question, but we dreaded doing so, afraid of being sucked into whatever insanity that was happening on the other side of the wall. The need to ask this question hung in the air like a noxious, soupy fog, stifling me. It had to be asked, and finally, I did. “Why?”

“Because someone broke into Jim Heff’s computer and pulled some information. If you can think of anything to help us figure this out, let me know.”

Jim Heff, SeaShel’s paralegal, was a portly fellow and (I thought at the time) a nice enough guy. He was about my height, but outweighed me by at least a hundred pounds, and his face was piggish, with watery eyes and an upturned nose. For some reason, Sean Etin came to call him ‘the Heffster’ and soon, everyone followed suit, even though we could tell he didn’t particularly like it. Cruelly, some of us referred to him as ‘the Heffer’ behind his back, or simply as ‘piggy.’ I almost never spoke to him beyond pleasantries, mainly in order to keep me away from whatever litigation news he might feel free to share. In theory, Mr. Heff was the busiest and most important employee at SeaShel, as lawsuits seemed to be the only thing they produced, and the fact that it was his computer that was ‘hacked’ into sent everyone there into a tizzy.
I myself was pretty excited. This was certainly the most interesting thing to happen there since I joined. I was curious to know what happened and how it was done. Who could have snuck in, during the half hour in which there was the least amount of employees on the premises, knew which computer belonged to the paralegal, found whatever information he or she needed to get, escape, and do it all while Perry and I were there? I spent the rest of the day trying to figure the mystery out in my head. It was like those murder mysteries I used to attempt to solve as a kid – “A man was found dead from a stab wound, but no weapons were found. Next to him is a puddle of water. Nobody entered his house and he could not have hid the weapon. Solve.” I thought about the computer case, and quickly realized that I was the prime suspect. Perry, with his broken leg, never left the back room, and I told them so. In fact, the only time I had left the room was to go to the kitchen and microwave his food. Certainly, with Perry incapacitated and no one else in the office, I could have easily gone to Mr. Heff’s computer and took what I needed. Furthermore, I was relatively new there and was, at least in their eyes, a rapist, among other unsavory things. Lastly, I went to the same high school as the three former employees who were allegedly fired for doing drugs. Surely, I could have been a mole, implanted by them, waiting for the moment to strike . . .

Or, on the other hand, maybe the dog did it . . .

I reveled in being their prime suspect. It made me feel cool, and it kind of made me wish I actually were a corporate spy. I got a kick out of their pussyfooting around their thoughts of my guilt. “Are you sure you don’t have anything to add that can help us figure this out?” Their eyes implied other questions, such as “how could you be such a little shit?” and “why don’t you just confess already?”

And I didn’t care. Watching them squirm and follow false leads was cathartic. The idea that someone might have gotten their hands on something that could bring the company down was delicious. Plus, they might just fire me. This was the best day I had at SeaShel Productions . . .

This all changed with the thunderous arrival of Sean Etin. He stampeded in at 5:00 – a full hour before he usually stampedes in. “What’s this I hear about there being a corporate spy in my house? Flo, get everyone together. Now.”

We gathered in the Senior Staff area. Those employees who had their desks in there sat. The rest of us (excluding the hobbled Perry) stood.

“Okay,” Sean Etin said, “tell me EXACTLY what happened here.”

So, Flo told the story. Sean Etin asked me the same questions I heard all day, and eyed me suspiciously. Not getting the answers he wanted, he moved on. “Do we know what they got? Do we know how they got it?”

“The only way the data could have been purloined was, ostensibly, through an in-house manner,” Marcus, the company’s vice-president said in his needlessly verbose way.

The company’s IT guy agreed. “It had to be done in person, on the computer.”

Sean Etin faced Mr. Heff. “Did you change anything on your computer since you got back, Heffster?”

“I haven’t touched it since I got back from lunch,” he replied proudly, probably not realizing that his statement also meant that he hasn’t done any work since then either.

We all took a look at his computer, and I was immediately crestfallen. Jim Heff’s computer screen was totally blank, with no open programs except for the search bar on the upper right side. In the search bar, Mr. Heff’s cell phone number was typed in. What was once a cool mystery became incredibly lame.

“Why would anybody search for Mr. Heff’s phone number?” I found myself asking, which was strange since I no longer cared.

“Whoever it was may have thought it was the fastest way to search for important documents or emails.” It sounded like they were trying to convince themselves that this weak excuse for an explanation made sense, but quickly moved on to a different subject before anyone could think about it too hard.

“Whomever hacked onto this computer was no neophyte. Knowing how to use this advanced search function proves that we were infiltrated by a professional.”

“Of course we were,” Sean Etin spat. “ knows that I’m the only person that can bring their evil company down. They know how close I am, and they’ll stop at nothing to stop me.”

It became obvious to me then that I was not the only one who used this event as an escape from the drudgery/usual insanity of work. The mystery. The intrigue. The feeling of self-importance. These things obfuscated any clear judgment. The idea that this was a prank, or a computer glitch, or that Mr. Heff accidentally pasted his number on the search bar was as impossible to them as it was for me to get excited about it anymore. Still, I tried. I don’t know if it was the disappointment of the supposed ‘mystery’ or if it was simply one of those moments where I felt the need to make an ass out of myself. Whatever the reason, I interrupted one of Mr. Etin’s spittle-flecked diatribes.

“I have something to announce,” I said, placing my fists on my hips dramatically. “I am the man you’re looking for. I am the corporate spy!”

Nobody expected this development. Sean Etin’s eyes bugged out as if I had just blown up a balloon inside his head, and his fatty face turned an even deeper shade of red. His natural inclination, to snap my head off my neck, was tempered with shock.

I continued, “Yes, I was hired by to infiltrate your organization after my three friends from school failed their mission. It was a simple matter of arranging to have Perry’s leg broken and waiting for everyone to go to lunch to strike. I knew that all I needed was Mr. Heff’s cell phone number to get everything I needed for me REAL employees! Bwa ha ha ha!”

I looked around the room. Most everyone was rolling their eyes or shaking their heads at my little display. Perry flashed me a look that said, “you are the stupidest person I know.”

Sean Etin’s expression did not change, however, besides his face now being tinged with a shade of purple. “You . . . you admit it?!?” he sputtered.

It took me a moment to soak the fact that he was still taking me seriously. “Sean, I was just kidding. I’m pretty sure real corporate spies don’t ‘bwa ha ha.”

His expression changed from shock to anger. “Well,” he snapped, “if you didn’t do it, maybe you can help us figure out who did. If this were a spy movie, how would you think this happened?”

“Sean, I’ll be honest with you. If I saw this happen in a spy movie, I would have walked out of the theatre and ask for my money back.”

“Well,” Mr. Etin blustered, “surely SOMEONE has something useful to say! We’re not going to leave here until we have this figured out!”

Though he wasn’t exactly true to his word, he did still keep us there until 8:30, trying to figure out in what way his enemies had gotten to him without outright accusing any of his employees of betrayal. I kept my mouth shut for the rest of the meeting. I had thought about making the suggestion to check the security cameras Nabulla had set up, but I remembered something from earlier in the day. For the first and only time, my dad drove to where I worked in order to take my car for an oil change. It was right before lunch. I pictured the grainy, gray footage from the security tape, showing me exchanging something small (my car keys) with a strange man, and decided to keep my mouth shut. By the end of the meeting, those of us who were standing were swaying in place, trying not to fall over. Sean Etin announced that anyone who didn’t lock the door after themselves would be fired on the spot. This meant, as the person closest to the door, I spent much of my remaining days there going up and down the thin, spiral staircase, opening the door for whoever needed to be let in.

***********

Months and months later, Perry called me to his computer. He had me sit down at his desk. “Press ‘control/spacebar’,” he told me. I did. The search feature came up. “Now press ‘control/V’.” I did and a set of numbers appeared in the search bar. “Now, imagine having tiny, chubby fingers that might actually press the ‘V’ and the ‘space-bar’ at the same time.”
I gave a little smile. “Case closed.”

Startup Beatdown, Chapter 3: A Steaming Pile of Goo

2008-07-21T22:36:00.000-07:00

Chapter 3: A Steaming Pile of Goo

Above my desk in the hallway, there was a picture printed on a loose-leaf paper of a middle-aged man, whose tanned, wrinkled face was distorted into a fake smile. He wore a Hawaiian shirt and his wispy, receding hair was pulled back into a ponytail – or possibly a rattail. In this picture, he was surrounded by stuffed animals of Seashel Productions creative property, the ‘Googles from Goop.’ One day, I asked who this man was.

“That’s Jerry Gold. He created the Googles,” Flo explained. “If you ever see him in here, call the cops.”

Having already familiarized myself with the Googles at this point, I would have been inclined to call the police anyway (but only if a pillowcase of batteries with which to beat him were not readily at hand).

The ‘Googles from Goop’ were SeaShel’s only creative property. Apparently, a lot of work (not hard work, mind you) had gone into developing this property by a long string of employees that had long since left the company. A huge character bible had been written, and about 20 half-hour scripts were completed. These giant notebooks were kept under the watchful and paranoid eyes of Joel, the Director of Marketing, and he didn’t allow anyone else in the company to see a single page of Googles-related text. Now, if I were in charge of a creative property like the Googles, I probably wouldn’t let anyone see it either – if nothing else but for humanitarian reasons (and shame). Joel, however, had a different motive. Joel was the type of manager who firmly believed that knowledge equals power. He practiced this concept in a very interesting way: Instead of gaining knowledge himself (as far as I could tell, he had no useful skills and did nothing), he instead kept basic knowledge from others. Joel was supposed to be the pipeline between Sean Etin and the creative staff, which consisted of three programmers/artists and (supposedly) myself. As it turned out, though, any and all information that came his way, either from his boss or his underlings, stayed forever with him. Numerous times, I have heard Joel berate a member of the creative staff for explaining to Sean Etin what they were doing when he asked.

“When Sean asks what you’re doing,” Joel would state whenever someone is ‘caught’ divulging information to the boss, “you tell him that you can’t tell him and that he should ask me.”

Yes. Tell the man who signs your paychecks – a man who has no patience and an enormous temper – that you can’t tell him what you’re doing on his time, and to consult someone who doesn’t know himself.

I had very much wanted to get a hold of the creative notebooks Joel kept from everyone. I was the head (and only) writer and was morbidly curious as to how the previous creative staff(s) expanded on and (hopefully) improved upon Mr. Gold’s original book, which I had the displeasure of reading during my initial interview. More importantly, I wanted to do something other than photocopying, which I had been doing nonstop, 9 hours a day, for the last month.
Eventually, I got my chance. Joel came up to me one day, with a look that said, “you’re ready for this.” He was holding the immense character notebook in his hands, which he plopped on my desk with a mighty thump. “I need you to photocopy this,” Joel said, and walked off. So, for the next week, I photocopied, collated, hole-punched and put together a new notebook. When it looked like nobody was paying attention, I read as much as I could.

The notebook was about one-thousand pages long and introduced about three-hundred characters. In addition to Stoogle Google, the character I was introduced to in Mr. Gold’s original (self-published) book, they invented five other Google characters. Their body shape, facial features and expressions were all used from the same cookie-cutter – they were all four-eyed, overweight aliens covered with two-tone, fluorescent fur, and the only way to tell the difference between them was their color. One was orange and iridescent yellow. One was pink and purple. All were hideous. They had thin, rubber-band-like arms that extended out of the bottom of their heads, where their necks should be, but aren’t. Like a Mr. Potatohead, their large feet seem attached to their butts, as they have no legs whatsoever. They wore no clothes, save a pair of sneakers that can, at the most kind, be referred to as colorful. But since I’m not kind, I’ll describe it this way: It was if God took a look at his monstrous creations, got sick to his stomach and threw-up rainbow puke all over their shoes. Attached to their shoes (I kid you not) was a compass. Mr. Etin planned on marketing these shoes to children when the Googles became a big hit.

“Imagine it,” he would say emphatically, counting the imaginary money in his head. “What kid wouldn’t want to be the first kid on his block to wear these shoes?”

“Probably the same kid who doesn’t want to be the first kid on his block to be beaten up,” my friend at work would answer after Mr. Etin would leave the room.

There were many other characters described in the notebook as well. About half of the binder was filled with character descriptions of woodland animals with such creative names as ‘Randy the Raccoon’ and ‘Tammie the Turtle.’ These character descriptions would be about eight pages each, and would go into minute detail about each animal’s family dynamic, favorite music, and even whether they drank, smoked or did drugs (surprise! – none of the woodland animals in a property for pre-schoolers smoked crack). The format of these write-ups was obviously from a template someone got from the Internet, as it seems unlikely a deer’s sexual orientation or menstrual cycle will come up in a story . . .
There were also a group of children introduced in the notebook, named the GooKids (I feel dirty just writing it), and hundreds of assorted aliens from many different planets. They basically expanded Mr. Gold’s concept into a sprawling, messy universe, where it was impossible for characters to interact in any way – but if I were to boil it down to one sentence, it would be this: Naked aliens take children to a secret place in the woods and teach them the ways of the world . . .

Even though they only had one creative property, Seashel Productions kept their fingers (or dicks) in a lot of pies. They had Googles music (look it up on iTunes if you feel like torturing yourself in thirty second intervals), websites, animations, video games, stories, merchandise, and even their own security technology (which might actually make them money someday . . .). To their credit, I would say that their scope of products is impressive, if only the Googles concept weren’t total garbage. It’s like starting a Disney-like multimedia company, but instead of Mickey Mouse being the creative heart, they instead used a rusty bucket of semen.

With all this potential merchandise and products, Seashel Productions put 95% of their energies on producing one thing – lawsuits. As I came to learn, Sean Etin loved suing people. I honestly think it makes him hard. One time, he told a gathering of employees his philosophy. He stated, “I don’t know about you all, but when someone tries to hurt me, I knock him down and do everything I can to make sure he never gets up.”

That would be all well and good, except his definition of ‘hurt’ included looking at him the wrong way and nothing at all. I had never met anyone more obsessed with ruining people’s lives than this man. He was the sort of person that derived pleasure out of confrontation, but more importantly, it gave him a feeling of power to be able to control men’s fortunes (or lack thereof). I had no idea how many lawsuits this man was fighting. I didn’t want to know. Lawsuits scare me, and I know the less I found out about the inner workings of the company, the less likely I would be asked to testify (and, most likely, told to lie) in any given court case.
There were two court cases that were inescapable if you worked at Seashel. One involved a massive Internet corporation that used a very similar sounding website name. Apparently, Jerry Gold bought the website googles.comm months before a certain multi-billion dollar Internet company bought their own similar sounding website address. When Sean Etin bought the rights to those horrible ‘Googles from Goop,’ he became the owner of the Googles website. I honestly have no idea if Sean Etin bought the property with the specific plan of suing the pants off that certain extremely rich Internet company, or if he really believed in the Googles as a merchandisable product. All I know is that by the time I joined the company, Sean Etin was taking the lawsuit personally.

“It’s my job to take down the evil empire,” he would say heroically. “And I’m going to burn them to the ground!”

The other litigious battlefront Seashel Productions was fighting on was against Jerry Gold. According to Mr. Etin, Jerry Gold served a couple of years for cocaine possession, and came up with the Googles concept in prison. Now, if I were stuck in prison and had to create a fantasy world to distract from the reality of unwanted anal trespass, I’d like to think that my fantasy would be better than the reality, but to each his own, I guess.

I don’t know if the prison story is true, as Mr. Etin had a tendency to make up whatever story was convenient to his present situation, so long as the person he was talking about was not in the room. I have heard obvious lies about co-workers come out of his mouth, and have heard secondhand lies about me (for example: my eventual quitting was an elaborate ploy to get more money from him, and that I later called, begging for my job back . . .).

Jerry Gold was suing Seashel Productions and Seashel was counter suing him (or is it the other way around?). I also heard that Jerry Gold has his own lawsuit with that giant Internet company. It is a complicated web of sewage, and I did my best to distance myself from the whole mess. Alas, this was not meant to be. An important court date was fast approaching and Sean Etin’s lawyers needed every single email Jerry Gold sent to Sean Etin or Seashel Productions. So, I was taken off photocopying duty for a day and brought to a usually locked storage closet, where I was told to organize an enormous stack of printed emails in chronological order. The sheer number of papers, strewn in foot-high piles, was astounding. Obviously, Sean Etin and Jerry Gold’s relationship had been much friendlier in the past (though, I was sure, no less demented). Flo left me alone with a warning:

“If you’re caught reading any of these emails, you’ll be fired on the spot.”

It was good to know I had an out.

“How am I supposed to organize the emails without looking at them?” I asked, more out of curiosity than anything else.

Flo softened. “It’s a kick in the teeth, ain’t it? Let me know when you’re done,” she said in her southern twang, leaving me alone to do what I wished.

So, I began organizing the stacks of emails. The first thing I noticed was the sheer amount of correspondences Jerry Gold could write in any given day. He averaged about three or four, but I sometimes saw days in which he sent around ten. These weren’t short emails, either; most filled the page. They were sent at all times of the day, many at three or four in the morning. I recognized the pattern from firsthand experience – this man obviously didn’t have a job. I became more and more curious about Jerry Gold. What possessed a person to come up with an idea as ill-conceived as the Googles from Goop? These emails were my best way of finding out, and I soon began scanning their bodies.

What I found shocked me. Jerry Gold, a man who, according to his photo, should be in his fifties, filled his emails with puns that would make a six year old shake his head in shame. This was an average email he would write (shortened, for your benefit):

Dear Sean,
Goo day! How are you? I hope you are goo! I read the notes you sent me and I thought they were goo. I think the Googles are going to be huge. Children need a show that will make them feel goo about themselves. I have to go now. Goo bye!

Sincerely,
Grandpapa Goo

Every single one of his hundreds (if not thousands) of emails contained the word ‘goo’ at least once (but usually much more), and every single time it was used as a pun on the word ‘good.’ There was never an “I have to ‘goo’ now,” or a “soon we will reach our ‘gool’.” It was a sad kind of insanity, and I suddenly felt very sorry for him. I also felt sorry for Sean Etin for the first and only time. He had to read every one of these emails, for years and years on end.

I continued scanning his emails as I put them in chronological order, and began to read the frustration in their tone, as the years went by. The last few emails read like this:

Sean,
What the heck is going on here? You’re not responding to my emails and nobody in your company is returning my calls. THIS IS NOT FUCKING GOO! If you don’t respond to me now, you’ll be responding to my lawyers later.

Jerry “Grandpapa Goo” Gold

Jerry Gold obviously cared and believed in the property he created (allegedly in prison). I could tell that he would never give up his lawsuit. Sean Etin would also not give up, because that was simply not the kind of person he was. It was like they were locked in an epic battle to the death, all over the ownership of a turd.

By the end of my job task, I was contemplative and frightened. A long-held dream of mine is to create my own creative properties. Is Mr. Gold a glimpse into my future if I continued to pursue this dream? Is it worth the trouble to spend your life fighting for your creative property when businessmen like Sean Etin will do everything in his power to take it from you? They are tough questions that I still struggle with.

I later told my friends at work about the emails and from then on, we would use ‘goo’ puns ourselves. We called where we worked the ‘goolog’ and our employers the ‘Goostapo.’ When I told one of my co-workers that I was quitting, he gave me some words of advice for when I tell Sean Etin: “Tell him to goo fuck himself.”

The Startup Beatdown, Chapter 2: The Next Jeffrey Dahmer

2008-07-21T22:30:00.000-07:00

The Startup Beatdown Chapter Two
The Next Jeffrey Dahmer

I came in for my first day of work, not knowing what I would be doing, or even where I would be sitting. All I knew was that, for the time being, I was to be reporting to Flo, the company's office manager. The problem was that Flo wasn't in. I didn't see Sean Etin either, which was strange, considering we were all working out of his house. I was lost – I didn't know what to do, where to go, or who to ask.

There were about 10 workers stuffed into the crevices and strewn about the hallways of the "office area" of Sean's house, but none of these people were exactly rushing to my aid. Nobody introduced themselves to me. Nobody asked who I was or why I was standing around aimlessly. All I got was a few furtive glances and a cold reticence that made me think I was not wanted. There was something else. Something in the air. I tried to attune my little-used empathic senses. Did these people . . . hate me?

I finally saw a familiar face walking down the hallway – Rita, the HR Director, who I met during my marathon interview a week earlier. She was a blond, middle-aged, somewhat heavy-set woman with gobs of blue mascara surrounding her steely eyes. I later found out she was Sean's little sister. I wished her a good morning, hoping my minor pleasantry could expand into more serious business – such as which desk I can sit at so I could at least pretend to do work. My greeting, however, was met with a look of unmasked repugnance and sheer hostility that I imagine would normally be reserved for a butcher of children and fans of certain reality TV shows. She walked on, eyeing me as if I was a piece of shit under her shoes.

I guessed she would not be the one to go to for questions.

I had decided to settle myself at what I hoped to be an unclaimed desk in the hallway, just so it would look like I wasn't milling around on my first day (-- that would come later). I opened up 'Indigo Children,' a hippie-dippy book about the auras of modern children (they're indigo!) that Mr. Etin gave me during my interview (and was later paraphrased for me by a fellow employee as "children are more spoiled now, and should be rewarded"), and put on my "I'm-doing-important-work-here" face, hoping to fool anyone who looked my way.

After a few minutes I heard, "You're not doing anything now, are you?"

The question was asked by Perry, a lanky guy, about my age, who was one of the programmers for Seashel's websites. He asked me to do some simple internet research on children's websites for him, and happy to have something to do, I quickly obliged. This hour of research would be the last time I did any work that involved me using an iota of brain power for the next several months.

Flo arrived at around noon, and started showing me my daily tasks. They included:
- Printing out Sean's daily horoscope and adding them to his horoscope folder.
- Feeding the company's pet chameleon crickets.
- Feeding the crickets yellow, booger-like crystals because (FUN FACT!) chameleons only eat creatures that are alive.
- Any bitch work nobody else wanted to do.
She then handed me two tall stacks of glossy papers and a can of aerosol spray
glue and brought me into the kitchen, where I was to spray one sheet onto the other. Nobody spoke to me for the rest of the day and I left work with sticky hands and a massive aerosol-induced headache.

After two days of "work," I still wasn't one-hundred percent certain if everybody hated me in particular, or if the place was just unfriendly in general. All I knew was that, as a former intern and someone who had oversaw interns at my previous job, I was doing intern's work. The fact that I was getting paid for this strangely didn't make me feel any better. I was willing to do this sort of work for a limited amount of time, but only because I was promised by Mr. Etin before I was hired, the opportunity to prove myself creatively. I didn't see Mr. Etin at all until the end of my third day, when he bustled in as everyone was getting ready to leave. He kept everyone there and began going on about how the "pendulum was swinging" and important litigation news that he couldn't talk about, spittle popping out of his mouth. Nobody looked impressed, and I got the feeling they had all heard this sort of speech countless times before. In fact, I had heard this same speech during the course of my interview. An hour later, when he finally ran out of steam and let people go home, he pulled me and Joel, the head of Marketing aside and told us to stick around.

"Joel, you've met Danny, right?" Sean asked.

"Yeah."

"Good. Danny here is a film genius and he'll be doing creative work for us."

Before I had time to feel good about that statement, Joel exclaimed, "What?!? No, Sean, you can't just put people in my department without telling me."

I felt uncomfortable. Sean obviously didn't tell Joel whatever ill-defined plans he held for me, which I guess was fair, since I didn't know them either. I was witnessing the beginning of a power struggle. Fortunately, before they got into it, I was excused and ran off.

The next day, I got called into the kitchen by Joel. Rita was sitting next to him, and my resume was on the table. They had me close the door and sit down.

"I don't know what Sean told you," Joel began, "but you're not going to work in my department without my okay."

"All right," I said, not sure what was going on.

Joel, only slightly shorter and slightly less stocky than Sean, began going down my resume, line by line. "What does it mean to 'provide coverage for new submissions?'" he would ask, wanting an explanation of every job task, degree, skill and hobby on my resume. I sat there and answered him.

"It says here, that you listed 'drawing' under hobbies. Are you any good?"

"No," I answered truthfully. "I like to draw, but I'm really only a doodler."

I pulled a few sketches that I happened to have in my backpack and showed him.

He took a quick look at them and said, "Yeah. You should have put doodling on your resume. Not drawing." He then took out his pen and crossed "drawing" off my resume, and wrote in "doodling."

Happy that he found something to embarrass me with, he continued. "Now, you do realize this is a children's entertainment company, right?" That was the one aspect of the company that I was sure of, having read about their creative property, the Googles, during my interview -- though I was confused on how they were going to entertain children if they would rather busy themselves with preferable activities such as rubbing their faces against the sidewalk, and eating paste. "I ask," he continued, "because the movies you made were very dark."

Things were finally beginning to make sense.

"You saw my movies?" I asked.

"Everybody here did. Now, I'm not saying they're badly made, or insulting your artistic talents, but we thought your movies were extremely disturbing and not appropriate for children. I just want to make sure we're not hiring the next Jeffrey Dahmer."

Now I got angry. I may be a mass-murderer and I may keep the bodies stored in my fridge, but I do NOT eat them! Perhaps I was overreacting. Maybe Jeffrey Dahmer made some movies that I was unaware of, and the comparison was apt. Nevertheless, I tried to defend myself. "Those films and videos were meant to showcase my experience in directing and editing, and not meant to showcase what I'd be bringing to the company content-wise. Those movies are not meant for children and I only sent them to Sean because he expressly asked for my reel."

My reel consisted of about 10 short films and videos I made either during or shortly after college. Every movie was a comedy (usually involving me making an ass of myself), and I never had to defend their "darkness" before (though they have been accused of being sexist . . .). In fact, compared to most of the student films I saw and worked on in college, my movies were marshmallow fluff. Out of curiosity, I asked what everyone was offended by.

"Where to begin," Joel said, seemingly shocked that I would ask such a question. "There's that movie about sock puppets being murdered."

It took me a moment to realize that I was supposed to defend myself at this juncture. "It's a slasher movie starring sock puppets," I said, thinking that was all that needed to be said. It obviously wasn't, since Joel and Rita kept looking at me. "It's a comedy."

"Okay. Then there was a film about a serial killer."

This one I really did need to explain. "A serial killer brings a date home and has to frantically hide all the bodies he left scattered around his apartment. I unfortunately ran out of film while shooting, and I never shot an ending. But it was supposed to be a dark comedy."

"Well, it just came off as dark," Joel said, and to his credit, I could agree with him on that one.

"What about the movie about rape?" Rita asked. This was apparently the big issue, which I thought bizarre since I had no idea what they were talking about.
"I didn't make a movie about rape."

"Yes you did," Joel said. "The movie about some woman being pulled over a bed and pounded from behind. This movie was so graphic that all of the women in the office had to leave the room."

I still had no idea what they were talking about. I searched my memory and finally remembered. There was movie of mine with a rape scene. "You mean my documentary on the making of someone else's movie?" I asked.

In college, I taped behind-the-scenes footage of the making of a friend of mine's film. His film was a dramatization on how women in abusive relationships usually don't leave the men that mistreat them.

There was a moment of pregnant silence. "How were we supposed to know it was a documentary?" Rita finally asked.

My answer came quickly, with mild exasperation in my voice. "Because it said so in the beginning of the doc and was filled with talking heads who talked about the making of the movie." Anyone who watched it for more than a few seconds would be able to see this. Then it came to me.

"Did you guys even watch it?" I asked.

There was more silence.

"Well," Joel said sheepishly, "some of it."

Perry and the other young co-workers that I eventually befriended later filled me in on what happened. As it turned out, the Friday before my first day of work, Sean called everyone in to his office to watch my reel. As is his custom, he called everyone in as they were getting ready to leave for the weekend, and promptly left them alone to watch the movies, with no explanation why, or an apology for making them stay late. My reel is made up of about an hour's worth of material, and for many months I believed they did what I would have done in that situation – skim it and leave as soon as possible. I had assumed that they had it on fast-forward and pushed play on the most visually jarring images – the sock puppets being murdered, the serial killer, the rape – which helped enforce in them a belief in my sick, twisted lust for violence and rough sex.

As it turned out, though, the events of that night played off a lot more sinister. I found out weeks before I left the company that Marcus, the (then) Vice-President of the Seashel, had seen my reel before the public viewing and for reasons that had nothing to do with me, did not want me hired. Marcus was in charge of the remote the night my reel was shown, and cherry-picked only the scenes that made me out to be a monster (or, if one were to think about it rationally, a guy that made 'rated R' movies). In fact, I heard he showed the rape scene three or four times, rewinding it before asking the gathered staff if they wanted to work with a rapist (confusing the author with the speaker and the speaker with the actor and the actor with the character – but whatever). One woman who worked there did not, and actually quit because I was being hired – though during the time she worked with me during her two-weeks notice, she was very nice to my face. Marcus, meanwhile, went on to show the shareholders my reel, trying his hardest to get me fired behind the scenes. Again, to my face he was very nice.

I knew now why everyone hated me. I was an ignorant pariah, unaware that the scarlet "A" was on my chest and the mark of Cain was on my forehead. I spent the rest of the week trying to repair my image the only way I knew how – by buying snack food for the office. It actually worked pretty well, and my co-workers, regardless of whether or not they liked me, would at least talk to me for pretzels and cookies. That was enough. Beyond the interview with Joel and Rita, nobody ever brought up my movies again, but I could tell that in the back of many of their minds, I would always be "the Rapist."

Sadly, this is not the worst thing I was called during my time working at Seashel Productions. Not even close.

Startup Beatdown, Part 1: The Interview

2008-07-21T22:26:00.001-07:00

I sat in Sean Etin’s cluttered office, reading what I thought was very possibly the worst thing ever written. It was the story of Stoogle Google, a furry, multi-colored, four-eyed alien that lands on earth and secretly befriends a little boy. Ignoring the always-dicey ‘secret-relationship with a minor’ plotline, there were numerous problems in the book, the most glaring being a syntax error in the first sentence (with more scattered throughout). The cover art, obviously drawn by the author, featured the pear-shaped alien posing awkwardly in front of a Photoshopped outer-space background. So, drawing and writing obviously weren’t this man’s strong suits. “Maybe he was good with animals, or something,” I thought as I tried to speed through it . . .

I looked up at the clock hanging in Mr. Etin’s office and let out a groan. I had been left alone for the last forty minutes, and was well into the third hour of my job interview. Had they forgotten about me? Did I get lost in the shuffle? It was entirely possible. The place was a chaotic maelstrom of activity and crackled with an intense energy. Something very important was happening in the company that I did not understand. Something to do with emergency meetings, lawsuits and replacing board members. Mr. Etin was in attack mode when I first met him, spitting out a dozen names and phone numbers from memory in quick succession, as he briskly walked through the hallway, West Wing style. Before that, my first of what turned out to be four interviewers, Flo, was called away two or three times during our meeting to deal with some crisis, leaving me alone in a tiny kitchen, with nothing to do but stare through the window at the hundreds of geese congregated on Sean’s lawn, decimating it with their feeding.

It could be that they were testing me. I had read that sometimes companies purposefully put their potential hires through uncomfortable or strange situations in order to gauge how they would react. It’s possible. Leaving me alone with a book whose very letters and words seemed flecked on with fecal matter, and, I thought, would probably make my ass dirtier had I used its pages as toilet paper, for seemingly no purpose seemed a little odd. Was I supposed to seek someone out and remind them I’m here? Am I supposed to wait patiently for Mr. Etin to return? And what about the book? Beyond its obvious test to my intestinal fortitude, was reading it a test as well? If Mr. Etin, God forbid, asked me what I thought of it, I could be in big trouble. He could be testing my tact, my honesty or my taste. Or, worse yet, maybe he didn’t know it was horrible. I began sweating under my itchy gray-brown suit as I tried to come up with the most diplomatic way of saying the book wasn’t fit to prop up furniture. I really needed this job . . .

****************

All of my life, I wanted to make cartoons. I grew up in the 1980s, the Golden Age of violent, cheaply-animated, but ultimately enjoyable cartoons. I avidly watched GI Joe, Transformers, He-Man, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Visionaries, Thundercats, Sivlerhawks, Challenge of the SuperFriends and even Go-Bots. Basically, if it was on TV, I’d watch it, and with great interest. Every day after school, I’d invite my friend over, dump out my box of GI Joes, and we’d make up new, violent adventures. These practices ended up having a pretty large effect on both of our lives, as I tried my hand at turning my love of children’s animation into a profession, and my friend later joined the army . . .

In college, I transferred into NYU’s film and TV program, where I studied animation, script writing, storytelling, production and editing. I stayed in New York for the summer and interned for Sunbow Entertainment, the company that made so many of the cartoons I loved as a kid. I continued to intern there until I graduated, and later, was offered a job as a Creative Assistant, where I scouted for new projects, spoke to agents, story edited scripts, and learned the ropes from a really great boss. It seemed like I was quickly climbing the ladder, and would soon fulfill my dream of developing and producing my own show.

As it turned out, I climbed the ladder too quickly. Shortly before I joined, Sunbow was bought up by a German conglomerate. This move confirmed what I had already suspected to be true: Germans and children’s cartoons don’t mix. The first thing they did was take a look at the bottom line: “Ach du lieber! These employees who have been making successful children’s shows for the last 20 years are costing a lot of money!” “Ja. Let’s fire them and get down to real business,” I’m sure they said, as they got ready to schizer in their secretary’s mouth. So, they fired all of the long-term employees that made the company great. The next move the German’s made was hiring the CEO’s childhood friend to be the COO. Here’s another helpful hint to those that are reading this and happen to own a company: Don’t put a known drug addict in charge of your company’s money. The COO, working out of the conglomerate’s London office, quickly proceeded to drive everyone crazy. The story goes that one of Sunbow’s properties drew interest from MTV. Contracts were drawn and everyone was ready to head into production. All they were waiting for was the COO to sign the papers, which he was too strung out on Codeine and Morphine to do. After two weeks of waiting, MTV took their business elsewhere. So did the creator of the property. So did many of the remaining employees, who knew a sinking ship when they stood on one, and jumped to another company. When I started as an intern, there were about 20 employees working out of the New York office. By the time I joined as a fulltime, paid employee, there were only four. Soon after that, it was just two – me and my boss, who I could tell was absolutely miserable working for the Germans and their drugged-out, incompetent moneyman. Within months of my hire, she left for a cartoon company in England, bequeathing me as the sole employee of the New York office, and in charge of all creative decisions.

I tried to make the best of my situation and do as good a job as a 23-year-old creative executive with no staff and no contacts could. I got in touch with creative folks and their agents, and tried to make cartoons that I would want to watch. Deals always petered out when the COO got involved. I stayed there for a year and a half and finally got so sick of the incompetence that I quit. As a strange coincidence, the day I left was the same day that the CEO of the German conglomerate stepped down from his post. It turned out that he got in trouble in Germany for major tax evasion and had to flee the country. The COO, whom everyone knew had a drug problem, was fired a short time later. Sunbow officially closed its doors about a month after that.

I had meanwhile moved to LA, ready to work for an animation company that wasn’t run by Germans. I thought with my unique experience and resume, I’d get a job in no time.

That turned out not to be the case. I sent out hundreds of resumes and used the contacts of my original, good boss to meet with some of the most important people in the business. Though they gave me their time and their advice, they could not give me a job. I didn’t gave up hope, though. I knew somebody would have to offer me a job at some point.

Again, I was mistaken. I didn’t get a single interview in the nine months I was in LA. I was quickly running out of my savings and decided enough was enough. If I were to be unemployed, it should be in an area where the air was clear, the traffic didn’t drive me crazy, and the people weren’t two-faced, image-obsessed scumbags. Furthermore, it should be a place where I knew my food and board would be free. It was time to move back in with my parents. So, I packed up my car and drove 3000 miles across the country, back to suburban Maryland and the very house I grew up watching cartoons. As a final ‘fuck you,’ I got a call on my cell phone as I was driving through Nowhere, Oklahoma. It was an animation company wanting to interview me, but only if I could make it the next day. I hated LA.

Things began to turn around in Maryland. I put a tourniquet on my cash flow problem, and continued to send out resumes online, changing my address to LA, New York and anywhere else that had a job that was somewhat related to what I wanted to do. My plan was, on the off chance someone would actually contact me, to fly, drive, or run to where the interview was to be held, and pretend to live there. Then, in the two weeks I said it would take me to quit the job I didn’t have, move there.

For some reason, my parents had a problem with their 25-year-old son and former creative executive living in his old room without a job, so I also applied to area jobs that I felt I could be somewhat competent at. Within a couple of weeks, I got calls for interviews, both in the area and in New York. It seemed like a matter of time before I was to get something. It was either going to be a cool job in New York, where all of the money I earned would be drained away towards an exorbitantly priced, miniscule apartment, or a crappy job in Maryland that would allow me to save my money. I thought to myself, “if only there were cartoon companies around my parent’s house. I could stay here, replenish my now nearly nonexistent savings, and get some more experience for my resume. I wish that were possible.” Incidentally, I think in a very unrealistic style. . .

I was ready to interview with Blue Sky Studios in New York, but it got postponed at the last minute. Strangely enough, I got a call on my cell phone that very day from Seashel Productions, a children’s entertainment startup company housed not 5 miles from my parent’s house. They wanted to interview me.

A higher being (God? The devil? Bob?) heard my wish, gave me just what I prayed for, and then laughed maniacally when I realized that I wasn’t quite being specific enough . . . But I’m getting ahead of myself . . .

****************

Sean burst through his office and rushed to his desk. “You finished reading yet?” he asked, as he power-walked to his chair.

“Yes,” I lied, praying there were no follow-up questions.
“A piece of shit, right?”

I breathed in a sigh of relief. “There were problems with it,” I replied, wanting to sound at least a little diplomatic.

Sean Etin was a big man. Tall, thick and wide, he had a classic ‘bodyguard’ build and kind of reminded me of that bull Bugs Bunny sometimes fought in those old Looney Tunes shorts. He had a barrel chest, and a barrel stomach to go with it. I had already pegged him as someone who used his intimidating stature as a tool to get what he wants. I probably would have hated him in high school. He was a top-of-the-food-chain kind of guy, and not afraid to stomp on a few throats. He was in his late forties, with neatly trimmed, short brown hair combed back, and wore an expensive suit that did little to hide his immensity. His large, potato-head was accentuated by pocket of fat hanging under his chin. He crossed his thick, sausage fingers and told me a little about himself.

This was his fifth startup company. He was a millionaire by the age of twenty and tripled his money with his second startup company a few years later. He lost all of his money in his third and forth startups. The point of the story, he said, was that he knew how to run a startup company. “Well, half the time anyway,” I thought to myself. He had just gotten out of the real estate and land development business and proudly stated that he developed his mansion, where we were interviewing and where his company worked out of, along with all the other mansions in the area.

What he didn’t tell me was what the company did, and what I would be asked to do if I joined.

“This is a startup company, and you’ll be asked to wear many hats,” he would say when I pressed him to what exactly I’d be doing.

He passed me back to Flo in the kitchen. I tried to ask more questions as to what the company did. I heard things about websites, music, technologies, TV shows and merchandise, but nothing in terms of a business plan. I asked about who was in charge of the creative decisions. That would be the head of marketing (which, for those that know, is never a good sign). She also warned me that Sean was a very difficult guy to work around, and if I couldn’t work in a high-stress environment, I should just walk away. “Sean can be gruff and sometimes verbally abusive. But he’d never hit anyone,” she said. I found the fact that she needed to say that worrisome. She continued, “If he ever hit me, I’d quit on the spot.” “No,” I thought, as I scanned her tiny body, “if he ever hit you, you’d be dead on the spot.”

I was into the forth hour of the interview, and was passed off once again, this time to Sean’s wife, Shelia. I was very tired and didn’t know why I had to be interviewed by the boss’s wife. I asked her what she did at Seashel, and she told me she didn’t work for the company. She very politely asked me for my resume and scanned it for a second.

“I didn’t know you also made movies,” she said.

Crap! I accidentally gave her my ‘production resume.’ In addition to the resumes with different cities on them, I also made a ‘production resume’ for when I applied to jobs like director or editor. This resume listed the assorted films and videos I made while I was in college and couple made just for fun. Most of them consisted of me making an ass of myself.

News of my production experience spread fast. Flo came back and asked me why I never mentioned I had video experience. I was pulled aside by Rita, the head of (and only member of) Human Resources and she asked me about the disparity between the two resumes I had. I was in trouble. I told her that I didn’t think my production experience was relevant to an office job and explained to her that I accidentally handed Shelia the wrong resume. Sean came in to the kitchen and told me he wanted to see my reel and to drop it off to the house the next day.
I was finally allowed to leave, five hours after the interview began.

I went home and cobbled together my assorted films and videos onto a DVD and delivered it to Mr. Etin’s home on Saturday, along with a spec script to show I could write for children’s television. On Sunday, I got a call from Mr. Etin. He was extremely impressed by my movies. Especially my music video to “Lady In Red,” a project I put together just for fun because the inherent sappiness of the song made me giggle. “Chris DeBurgh is my favorite singer of all time,” Mr. Etin explained. I didn’t tell him that the video was a contemptuous parody. “We’re going to need someone with your talents and experience very soon,” Mr. Etin spat into his phone. “We’re this close to being out of our start-up phase in the company, and we’re going to rush into production.” With what, I was still unclear about. “I’d like it very much if you were to work with us.”

And with that, I began working for Seashel Productions, the worst company in the world . . .

CatP.A.C.K.

2008-06-15T17:04:00.000-07:00

I hardly ever remember my dreams anymore. About ten years ago, I had a series of dreams that were so mind-numbingly dull (ie - a dream about drinking milk; a dream that factually taught me the proper way to make pancakes, etc.) that my brain simply made a decision -- if my dreams aren't worth remembering, I simply won't remember them. So, from then on, I'd remember perhaps a dream or two a year.

Last week, I had a very vivid dream, and it wasn't boring. I dreamt a TV episode. A pilot, in fact, to a TV show that doesn't exist. In its entirety.

Now, this wasn't a dream of me watching TV. And it wasn't a 'behind-the-scenes' making-of an episode. It was an episode itself, played (with no commercial interruption!), for sole purpose of entertaining my unconscious brain.

The show was starring me, my brother, my dad and ten talking cats. We were a crack squad of do-gooders who were all that stood between an evil zombie horde and total world domination. You read right (I assume) -- it's a show that pits the male members of my family and ten talking cats against zombies.

Since this was the 'pilot episode,' most of the time was spent establishing the situation and introducing the characters. My dad, brother and I were freedom fighters dedicated to fighting zombies, who, as far as I could tell, had already taken over much of the world. We were squirreled away in our base of operations (which happens to be my parent's house), and much of the episode was about stopping the zombies from getting inside. The zombies came up with many assorted (and somewhat complex) schemes to gain entrance to our base, but they all failed (probably because zombies are not known for their brilliant tactical minds . . .). They finally decided to send ten werewolves into my parent's garage to, I suppose, ambush us when we went out to do grocery shopping or something. But my dad and I (I have no idea where my brother went) somehow managed to turn the ten werewolves into ten talking cats (I think it involved scratching the werewolves on the chin . . .). The ten talking cats then decided to join our team in stopping the zombies.

Each cat had a different, one-dimensional personality and the dream took its time to introduce each one. There was the leader cat, the warrior cat, the prissy cat, the scaredy cat, the wise, old cat etc. When it came right down to it, though, they were just cats. Besides the fact that they talked and had 'personalities,' they had no special powers, and, I have no idea how, against zombies, they could possibly be of any help. Case in point, when my character had to later investigate the garage again. When I came back in to the house, I heard the cats hiding. When I announced that it was just me, they all jumped out of their hiding places -- the pockets of assorted coats, hung on a coat rack. They all had the same cowardly reaction, except for the scaredy cat, who made a point of biting my finger in fear when he jumped down.

Here's the best part -- in my dream, the show had a name. It was called 'CatP.A.C.K.' I know that the acronym stands for something, but I have no idea what it could possibly be (Protectors Against Cranium Konsumers? People and Cats Killing (zombies)? Profoundly Awful Crappy Kaka?). I think that maybe 'pack' was harkening back to the fact that they were once werewolves . . . I don't know. I also don't know if this was supposed to be an action show or a comedy . . . What I do know is that I woke up with this being my first conscious thought -- "What the hell was that?"

It's weird -- I'd think that the lesson to this dream is that I watch too much TV -- but I don't even own a TV anymore. So, maybe what this dream is telling me is that I need to watch more TV . . . Or, maybe, this was my brain telling me that I should actually make this show. Maybe I'll dream more fully written episodes of 'CatP.A.C.K.' and just make the series solely based on what I dream about. In any case, stay tuned . . .

Transylvania Part 2 -- the Revenge!

2008-06-14T17:45:00.000-07:00

Thursday, May 22, 2008

I'm still in Romania. It's still an interesting place. I'm still exhausted, but I'm trying to get the interesting things down before I sleep them out of my system. Here a smattering of the aforementioned interesting things . . .

- There are many, many peasants in Romania. I'm not talking 'poor people,' and I'm not talking 'pheasants' (though there are wild pheasants running around too). These people are straight-out-of-the-history-books peasants. They are exact replicas of the extras you see in movies such as 'Frankenstein,' 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail' ("I'm not dead yet!"), and 'Henry V.' They are people of the land, using the exact same tools and wearing the exact same type of clothes as their ancestors did a thousand years ago. I see some herding cattle across the street with a stick with a leather tail attached to the end. People with homemade pitchforks gather fresh hay and put them in horse-drawn carts. The most fascinating thing to see, though, is that they use actual scythes to reap grass on the side of the road. Honest-to-god Grim Reaper scythes. These tools have been around, unchanged, for thousands of years. The only difference that I can guess between these peasants and their great-great-great- great- great- great- great-grandfathers is that the newer models probably own cell phones . . .

- Speaking of cell phones, Romanian people REALLY like to use them. I know we Americans get a bad rap for being a 'rude' people (and maybe we are), but our cell phone etiquette puts theirs to shame (or at least should). Here are the cell phone rules for Romanians, as far as I can tell: 1. Your cell phone must have the most annoying ring-tone you can find and must be set to the highest possible volume. 2. Your cell phone must always be on. Always! Turning your phone off or setting it to vibrate will result in an immediate and agonizing death. 3. If your cell phone rings, you MUST pick it up, regardless of the situation. There are NO exceptions. On the first day of the educational symposium I was helping to film, schoolchildren were brought in to hear the stories of actual Holocaust survivors. During this three hour event, cell phones were going off left and right – and not from the students. From the teachers! One teacher excused himself from the room about six times, as his cell phone blared a techno beat with someone in a heavy accent screaming "HALLO? HALLO? HALLO?" It only got worse on subsequent days where there were only adults in the room. Every single symposium participant whose cell phone went off answered the phone. Most people quickly got up from their chairs and ran out of the room, putting the phone to their ears as they reached the door, and throughout the four day event, only one of participants looked guilty (she pulled the cell phone out of her purse, answered it, and very quietly, from her chair, whispered something to the effect of "I can't answer my phone right now . . ."). One of the helpers of the event, a Romanian kid of about 19 named Tommy, went with me and another American, Adam, to film a Holocaust survivor giving a tour of the city, talking about how things changed since the 1930s (Most of the tour went like this – "This house used to belong to the Long family. They were bakers. They had five children. They all died in Auschwitz. That house belonged to the Fried family. They made jewelry. I went to school with their daughter. They all died in Auschwitz . . . " (There were a few survivors, but not many . . .)). Anyway, Tommy had an expensive, shoulder-mounted video camera (the one I transported from the states), and whenever his phone rang, he would throw his camera off his shoulder and grab his cell phone, regardless of the fact that the survivor was in the middle of an interview. The American who was with me, one of Tommy's bosses, yelled at him. "Tommy, what the hell are you doing?!? Get off your damn cell phone!" Tommy would respond, "I cannot do this!" and looked at Adam like he asked him to castrate himself . . .

- Romanian radio is interesting. It seems like every station plays a random mix of Romanian and American music. The American music is a hodgepodge of songs that, for the most part, I haven't heard of in years. It's almost like we sold them wholesale to countries like Romania . . . I heard both Eddie Murphy's one-hit-wonder "Party All the Time" and Patrick Swayze's one-hit-wonder "She's Like the Wind" on the same day. I heard "Ice Ice Baby" and "What Is Love (Baby Don't Hurt Me)." I heard Abba and, what I think were the first few bars of an Elvis song, but the channel got changed. I obviously don't understand what the radio DJs are saying, but in what I assume to be a preview of the music played, he mentioned Britney Spears and Kenny Loggins in the same sentence. It's kind of funny how in the US, songs by Britney Spears and Kenny Loggins would be on totally separate radio stations (both of which I most likely would stay away from . . . ), but I think in Romania, there are absolutely no difference between a techno song, a rap song and an oldie. They're all just "American."

- It was sunny and pleasant every single day I was here (except for today), and thunderstormed every single night. The power went off in the town three nights in a row . . .

- One of those nights, Adam and I had the car we were using stolen. By Tommy. Here is the story: We had just finished the second to last day of the symposium, which was totally draining. Adam, Tommy and I decided to go to a restaurant and have some food before going back to the house and passing out for our 7:00 wake up the next morning. This was actually the first time I would be eating out since I have been here, and was looking forward to eating something new. At the restaurant, we met up with Daniel, the historian and curator of the museum, and a group of Israelis who were attending the seminar. We joined them for dinner. During the course of the meal, some of the Israelis mentioned that they never got to tour the museum and were leaving the next day. Daniel obliged them by giving them a tour after hours. So, Daniel and a group of Israelis got up and headed into his car for the tour. Tommy mentioned that he needed to get something from Adam's rental car's trunk and went with them. As we continued eating with the remaining Israelis, Adam looked out the window and said, "Is that my car?" I looked out the window too, and saw his blue Fiat leaving the lot. Tommy was a (more-or-less) trusted employee and we knew where he lived, so we weren't terribly worried. Plus, we had another group of guests to stay with, so we both kept calm. I assumed it was some kind of misunderstanding, and that, perhaps, they had taken that car instead of Daniel's. We finished our dinner and the rest of the Israelis left. We went to the lot and looked around. Both Adam and Daniel's cars were gone. The sun was setting and black clouds were forming overhead. We waited a few minutes outside the restaurant, but it soon started absolutely pouring, and we were forced back in. The power went out and the light from the bolts of lightning showed that the parking lot was becoming a lake. By this point, Adam was frantically calling Tommy and Daniel, but because of the storm, the phones weren't working (I know this because Tommy and Daniel are Romanians and would have picked up their phones no matter what if Adam had gotten through). Finally, after about 45 minutes of non-stop dialing, Adam got through to Daniel. "Daniel, what the hell happened? Tommy took my car and we have no way of getting home. Get back here now, and bring Tommy!" He hung up. We waited another half hour in darkness. Nobody showed up. Adam began to call again, and eventually got through. "Daniel, where are you? You're still at the museum! Get back here! NOW!" A short time later, Daniel and Tommy drove to the restaurant parking lot. It was still pouring. I got up to run into the car, but Adam stopped me. "For making us wait, they're going to have to come in and get us," he said. Daniel came in, sopping wet. "Where's Tommy?" Adam asked, angrily. "He will be picking you up now in your car," replied Daniel. "I now have to drop the Israelis at the hotel." And he ran off. He jumped into his car and drove off. Tommy followed him in Adam's rental. "What the fuck?!?" Adam cried. He tried to frantically call again, and eventually got through. Forty-five minutes later, they were back. I wondered what kind of excuse Tommy had for what just happened. The only thing he said was, "Daniel's car got stuck in the mud." I still have no idea what went on . . .

That's it for now. I'll probably write one more post about my Romanian trip, including my adventure riding a horse and a few other stories. Stay tuned!

Transylvania

2008-06-14T09:11:00.000-07:00

Sunday, May 18, 2008

My trip to Romania got off to an inauspicious start. I arrived at the Newark airport over two hours early and was past security and in my departure area with about two hours to spare. I purposefully packed everything into a carry-on bag and a camcorder bag because I had a transfer in Dusseldorf and didn't want anything to be lost or smashed, but my bag was three times the weight limit (and, according to the customs lady, too large anyway), so my bag had to be checked. Nothing I could do. So, I checked it in, and if my camcorder, or my boss's laptop was damaged as the assorted workmen of the three airports threw my bag around like a sack of potatoes, I left it to the fates to decide if it was lost or damaged. I kept my camcorder bag, which contained a brand new, professional camcorder, which my boss, Alex, received in the mail right before my journey . . . at least that would be safe . . .

At Newark, I decided to kill some time by going to the only restaurant that was in the area – a Sam Adams Lounge. I ordered a chicken sandwich and a lager. I drink beer about twice a year (I actually can't stand the stuff), but for some reason beyond me, decided to order a tall glass. I was going to Germany, then transferring to Hungary and driving to Romania. The heart of beer country. The idea of going to some American joint and ordering a beer right before my flight hit me on an ironic level. I need to work on curtailing this aspect to my personality . . .

Sitting in my seat on the waiting station, I was called by the intercom to the check-in desk shortly before the flight was to call passengers to board. Apparently, I was supposed to go straight up to the desk and get a new ticket, but (even though this was explained to me) I didn't do it because I didn't understand. So, with a few minutes until the plane boarded, I was called by intercom to arrive at the desk. I went to the desk and they said to me (in a thick accent that I didn't understand, but assumed to be Welsh) that because I didn't 'check-in' I was to be given the last seat available on the flight. The woman said, "I'm sorry, but it's going to be a 'metal' seat." She handed me my new ticket. I was confused. Why was I being given a 'metal seat'? What did that even mean? Was there a seat made of cold, rusted metal on the side of the plane for the last person that signed in? Why would any company do this? I stood at the desk and asked, "what does this mean?" There were four ladies at the desk, but they all ignored me. I stood there for another minute and repeated, "what does this mean? 'Metal Seat?'" Finally, one of the ladies looked my way. "What?" she said. "What does that mean? A 'metal seat.' What does that mean?" The woman (who was African-American and obviously not Welsh) explained. "She didn't say 'metal.' She said, 'middle.'"

"Ohhh," I replied. This was not a good start . . . If I couldn't understand someone who could technically speak English, how was I supposed to get by in Romania?

I got in the plane and sat in my middle seat. Not only was it between two people, but it was between two people who also happened to be in the aisle. In other words, I was the person as far from the windows of the plane as possible. It was okay. The people sitting next to me didn't' say a word to me (I prefer this) and there was not a single screaming baby on the plane. In the 8 hour flight, I probably got two to three hours of sleep, before I rushed to my connecting flight in Dusseldorf to Budapest.

It was kind of weird. The flight, much like the one from Newark to Dusseldorf, was in two languages. In fact, it was in the exact two languages as the previous flight – German and English. I wonder how the Hungarians on the flight felt about this – flying to their own nation and not hearing their language on the flight. Not my problem, I suppose . . .

I had time to kill when I arrived in Budapest. The guy who would be driving me to Romania would not be arriving for another few hours. I've heard a lot of talk about the 'Americanization' or the 'Capitalization' of the world and how bad it is, but let me tell you – when you're travelling to another country, totally exhausted, alone and unable to speak the language, you're damn thankful that everyone in the airport speaks English and that there are places to buy a coca-cola.

After a couple of groggy hours in the Budapest airport, the guy that was to drive me to Romania arrived from his flight and we went off in a rental car (a Fiat!) to Romania. The roads of Eastern Europe are exactly as I remembered them from ten years ago – terrifying. They are rickety, windy, one-lane roads with no speed limit. If you were stuck behind a car or truck you didn't think went fast enough, you could overtake them by going into oncoming traffic. There were a couple of times we were almost clipped by mac trucks . . . Fun!

Transylvania's an interesting place. The area is beautiful, with green, rolling hills, and there is lots and lots of open land. The towns themselves, though, are literally crumbling apart. I'm pretty sure there hasn't been a new building built in the last fifty years. Everything is dusty and in some places, if you touch a wall, it will literally crumble in loose concrete chunks. Everyone here is nice enough, and most people speak at least three languages – Romanian (which, I found out, is closely related to Italian), Hungarian (which is closely related to nothing), and (thankfully) English. Some of the younger people speak English fluently. I've gotten by, so far, knowing about three words of Hungarian. "Yes," "good" and "thank you."

Here are some other things I've noticed about this place – People don't smoke as much here as I thought they would. I'd say I see people smoking more in New York than Romania on any given day. Storks are common here and they build nests of about six feet in diameter on top of telephone polls. They make a weird clicking noise that sounds like a party-favor. The frogs here sound like ducks. I hear quacking at the nearby pond and there's nothing there but frogs (which, when we first arrived, a young man was firing at with an air rifle. This was seriously the first thing I saw when I got out of the car . . .). There are tons of stray dogs. Nobody owns dogs as indoor pets, and they would probably be kicked or shot if they were to enter a house. They are outdoor animals. There are stray cats too. And chickens. Lots of chickens on the side of the road. There might be a few stray people too . . . This is definitely not a wealthy area.

The town is made up of Christians and Gypsies. I think the groups keep pretty separate, but I didn't see any ill-will expressed from one group to the other. The Gypsies are exactly as you'd imagine them to be. The women wear bright, flowery muumuus with red babushkas. One of the men I saw was wearing a fancy top-hat with a wife-beater and had a salt-and-pepper handlebar moustache. He was driving his family on a horse-driven hay cart. This is a fairly common sight here. At parties (I've gone to two so far), Gypsies are hired as entertainment. A family of male Gypsies play the fiddle, bass and accordion, led by an old, snaggle-toothed man. A boy, no older than ten, was also in the band. They were excellent.

Every meal – breakfast, lunch and dinner – is served with a shot glass and a small bottle of slivovitz. I think if I stay here much longer, I'll get sick of the stuff . . .

Everything here is fresh. I am pretty sure there is no grocery store in town. The eggs come straight from the family's chickens. The chickens come from the family's eggs. In the afternoon, I walked outside the house, and two freshly-skinned lambs were lying on the table. Blood was literally dripping from the table's cracks and onto the ground. Later that night, we had lamb for dinner, served on that very same table . . . it was actually pretty tasty . . .

I guess that's it for now. So far, as far as I know, I have encountered no vampires . . .

The Return of Your Favorite Show

2008-06-10T07:59:00.000-07:00

Monday, May 15, 2006

The Return of Your Favorite Show

Today is a bittersweet day for many of us. One of the smartest, funniest, most heartfelt shows of all time aired its last episode not one hour ago. I am, of course, talking about The West Wing -- a tv show that brought the walk 'n talk to unparalleled heights of excellence.

I, for one, am very sad to see a show of this caliber go off the air. Especially when I feel that it ended prematurely. There was at least one more season of quality stories that could be told. So, to both honor the series and to offer a smidgen of hope that it can be reborn, I present the West Wing season-that-never-was:

Before I get into the synopsis, let me say when I feel this season needs to take place. Sure, we could look into the new Santos administration, but I feel that there was plenty of untapped potential in the original cast, who, in my opinion, is the greatest ensemble ever to grace the screen. So, this season-that-never-was will take place during the classic years of the Bartlet administration. Probably the perfect place would be when creator Aaron Sorkin left after season 4, especially since season 5 is generally considered to blow.

Here we go:

-Zoey, the President's daughter, has been captured by terrorists. President Bartlet goes undercover to rescue her, but is discovered by the cell. Now he and the terrorist leader must battle it out in a caged knife-fight in which there could only be ONE survivor. To make matters even more intense, if the President loses, the terrorist becomes the new leader of the free world!

-President Bartlet's mother-in-law is coming to visit, and we all know that means trouble! It seems that Abbey's mother always thought of the President as a good-for-nothing slug-about and that her daughter could've done better -- no matter what President Bartlet does to please her. It's just the President's luck when the country is placed in a national crisis with an impending transportation strike. To make matters worse, his mother-in-law took the bus to get to the White House, and won't be leaving until the mess is sorted out!

-While clearing out a long-abandoned room of the White House, Charlie discovers a magical mirror that is a portal to another dimension! Charlie gets sucked into the mirror, and out comes a mustachioed Charlie doppelganger. Nobody seems to suspect anything except for CJ, but can she figure out what happened before the red moon rises and Charlie is trapped forever?

-It turns out that the legend of Frankenstein's monster is true, and that Thomas Jefferson transported the slumbering beast in the basement of the White House as a scientific curiosity. Now the monster has awakened and has captured anyone who dares go down there. It turns out that there are a lot of brave people in the White House, as only the President and Margaret remain free. Can they figure out a way to put the monster back to sleep?

-In a very special episode, Toby is discovered to be addicted to opium! His friends in the West Wing band together to get him off the drug, but is their intervention enough, or will Toby's way with words convince them to join him in his sinful drug den?

-Here we go again! The President hit his head while reaching for a pen under his desk, and caught a bad case of amnesia! It's up to the West-Wingers to help him regain his memory before the State of the Union later that night, and keep news of his situation from falling into the hands of Rex Nutley, a newspaper reporter who has had it in for the President ever since Bartlet allegedly ran over his dog.

-A nuclear bomb is about to go off in the White House, and due to a gas leak that knocked everyone else out, only Josh can disarm it! The only problem is that his unique brand of wit is useless against the automated timer. Josh needs to find another way of saving the DC area against total destruction!

-At the West Wing's annual science fair, Dr. Farfenhosen's aging device goes haywire, and turns the West Wing staff into a bunch of toddlers! Now the President and Charlie have to keep those rambunctious rascals under control until a cure can be found -- and keep an eye out for a kidnapper who has been making the rounds in their area. They thought running a country is tough!

-Leo is alone again on Christmas and contemplates suicide. An angel appears and shows Leo what life would be like if President Bartlet were never born. Leo is confused until he learns that he is just a character in one of Josh's spicy-food-induced dreams.

-There is a traitor in the West Wing! Very important documents of national security have disappeared, and Leo is on the case to find out who sold out his country. He eventually narrows his list of suspects to Josh, Donna, CJ and the newly introduced West Wing character, Boris. Leo decides not to take any more chances and puts them all in front of a firing squad, until it is discovered that Boris' pet opossum was stealing the papers and using them to make her nest.

-Season Finale: The terrorist leader that kidnapped Zoey is back, and out for revenge! He's also become an unstoppable cyborg, and this time the President can't possibly stop him alone! The West Wingers must put aside the petty differences that has recently torn them apart, and band together to stop this un-American killing machine!

I have more ideas where these come from, but to find out what they are, you'll have to see them on TV. So, if anyone on the now defunct West Wing is reading this blog call me. Let's work something out. Okay.

Dogs Suck at Practical Jokes . . .

2008-06-10T07:44:00.000-07:00

Monday, April 03, 2006

Last Saturday, as an April Fool's joke, my brother's dog violently destroyed my sister's cat.
Nobody in the family found it very funny. I think that the dog was going for "funny on a cosmic level," but it just didn't work.

My sister, who has had some previous problems with keeping things that she loves alive around her (boyfriends, previous pets (who were also killed by dogs), etc) has been crying for two days straight. My mom isn't faring much better. My dad, who was the one to pull the dog away during the disembowling process, described it as the worst thing he's ever encountered in his entire life. My brother is very wisely keeping himself and the dog out of sight.

I'm not doing very well myself. I only knew the cat for two months, but it really, really grew on me. I'm not a cat person, but I really came to love it. It was, far and away, the cutest, most personable cat I'd ever come across. She made Tibby (my old roommate's cat, who I also like) seem like a Nazi taking a dump on a baby. She was just really, really adorable.

Unfortunately, my brother's dog is also really, really adorable (in that wolfish way). I love my brother's dog too. Only now, I don't know how to react to him. I know he did what he was genetically programmed to do: Attack, kill and eat anything outside of his gene-pool that's smaller than he is. In that way, he was a good dog -- but he was also a bad member of the family. Family members don't slaughter and consume other members of the family. It's rude.

So, I'd like to pour one out to my sister's cat.

Tzilla, wherever you are, I'm sorry we can't play anymore. You were a great cat, and I'll miss you forever.

The Danny Show

2008-06-10T07:27:00.000-07:00

Thursday, March 16, 2006

The Danny Show

This is my first time writing a blog, so please, as a reader, be gentle . . .

With that written, uhhh, hello. I've wanted to write one of these blog-things for a while now, but I've never felt that I've had anything important enough to write about. I read some of my friend's blogs and they're insightful and personal and passionate. They write about inner-growth and self-discovery, and I always feel a little inadequate in expressing these pontifications. The only inner-growth in me are tumors and I've discovered myself quite enough for my taste. Furthermore, the things I get passionate about are really superficial and don't seem to be important enough for other people to read about -- like my outrage that Fox cancelled Arrested Development, how much the new GI Joe sucks, and my belief that President Bush is what happens when the devil and a retard mate (you can choose which one is which with George Sr. and Barbara).

I feel like I finally found something important enough to write about: my feelings on God. Now I don't know if God really exists (and none of you do either) but IF he does, I think I figured out why he created us (if we didn't create him).

Here it is: We were put on this earth to entertain him. We're God's TV. Each one of us is a different show, and he checks in on us to see what wacky adventure we've gotten ourselves into this time. I'll say this for the human race -- we may be cruel and destructive, but we're very entertaining. What other explanation could there be? The wars, the extreme poverty, the abused children, the other crap -- this is not the will of a kind God. It is, however, the will of a God that wants quality entertainment. I can respect this. If we were put on this planet for any other reason, then God seriously screwed up.

I bring this up because I feel that my life occasionally receives a bit of divine intervention -- and I can understand why. I don't live an especially interesting life, and I feel like sometimes God gets bored. Fair enough (I do too). I swear, the timing of some things in my life have the hackneyed plausibility of an episode of Mr. Belvedere. Usually these instances of suspect timing or wacky misunderstandings involved women (specifically my inability to get any -- some of them are pretty funny), but recently, he's been interfering with my job. Apparently, me being unemployed is funny to God. After having a job in the field of my choice (cartoons) in New York, I decided to give LA a try. For 9 months, I sent out resumes and met with people to try to get back in the industry. For 9 months, I didn't hear a peep. I got literally zero responses from the hundreds of jobs I applied to. So, I decide to stop wasting my savings and head back to the east coast. Two days into my drive across the country I get a call. It's someone who wants to interview me. The position was perfect for me. It was exactly what I was qualified for, and was exactly what I wanted to do. Could I interview tomorrow? The boss will be on a trip for the rest of week, so that was the only time they could fit me in.

Ha ha. God, that's a good one. To end this little tale, I arranged speak with them next week with the plans to get on a plane and pretend I still lived there -- but when I called them at the planned time, I ended up speaking directly to the person they ended up hiring.
I probably sound bitter, but I'm not. It would just make me feel better to know that God, in some capacity, is interfering in my life and having a jolly old time. It'll hopefully keep me from being cancelled for a while . . .