When you entered the front door of CBF’s company headquarters, the first person you'd meet was Margaret. Margaret was a slim eighty-something, well dressed in a way that was popular when she started working, back in the era of Mad Men. Lest you get the wrong idea, she wasn’t dressed like the Marilyn Monroe-esque character. Margaret wore a conservative dress or skirt and blouse every day. Stockings (now called pantyhose) and low heels. A tidy necklace that matched her earrings. Lipstick, powder, and a tasteful amount of rouge (now called blush). A reddish blond wig with a practical cut completed the outfit.
CBF was on the small side, but not that small. Two hundred sixty characters populated the main office and another office in Texas that I soon discovered manufactured the star product. CBF had a small international presence, mostly in the form of distributors, that served customers in Asia and Europe.
The company wasn’t technically a startup. It had been formed as CBF about six years before, but had weathered a few previous incarnations. Most recently it had been an unprofitable division of a rather well known company, acquired for a dime on the dollar by CBF’s charismatic CEO. Before that it had been part of another company, and before that, another. Product lines had been acquired along the way, including the star division in Texas. A chart of the company's history looked like a carrot when you first pull it from the ground: one main root with hairy little roots off to the side.
Margaret had been acquired all four times. She had been employed for nearly fifty years by a six-year-old company.
I’d been hired as head of marketing to spiff up the external presence of the company and ready it for an exit event, i.e. an IPO or acquisition. During my two point six years at CBF I presented in board meetings, redesigned the website, worked with the engineers and technology staff on product roadmaps and coached and led the company through strategic planning. I shared the honor of highest ranking woman at CBF with the VP of Human Resources.
Or so I thought.
My office came equipped with the large wall-mounted whiteboard I had specified in my contract. I love working on whiteboards. There’s something about moving my arms around and drawing large circles and arrows that stimulates my creativity. On the whiteboard tray was an eraser and two dry-erase markers, blue and black. On my desk was a flimsy spiral notebook, wide-ruled and less than half an inch thick, the kind you use in the later years of elementary school.
On my first afternoon of work I went to Margaret and asked her if I could have an engineering notebook. That’s what I was used to using at the large, well-financed company away from which CBF had lured me. Engineering notebooks have stiff brown covers and large quadrille-ruled pages. They come spiral-bound, my preference because those lie flat on your desk, or you can easily fold them under when you're working on a plane. The pages are a soft yellow color, easy on the eyes. Each page is numbered, because engineers are not supposed to tear any pages out, in case they need to defend the date and time they came up with an invention that generated jillions of dollars for their company and a nice framed plaque for them.
Margaret said, no. And then turned away from me, back to scrutinizing expense reports for the possible presence of disallowed cups of coffee. I asked her why. She said, you’re VP of marketing. You’re not going to invent anything. Just use the regular notebook I gave you.
She’d been around the CBF block enough times to know that it was an engineering-driven company. She’d absorbed the lesson that marketing wasn’t a real thing. Certainly not worthy of an expensive notebook.
Dumbfounded, I went back to my office. A few months later I made friends with the head of engineering, who surreptitiously obtained an engineering notebook for me. I’m not sure how he managed that. Who did he say he was requisitioning it for? I am sure she knew which engineers had notebooks and which didn’t. In the meantime I used the regular notebook. Wide-ruled. Flimsy. Sure enough, I failed to invent anything.
My second day of work I asked Margaret for more whiteboard markers. I like to use different colors to separate ideas by relevance and importance as I’m sketching them out. I use bright colors to underline or draw boxes around the better ideas, as they’re taking shape. Colored arrows connect related thoughts that arose on different parts of my board.
I asked Margaret for purple, green, red, orange and yellow. She said, you can have purple and green, but not red, orange or yellow. I summoned the ovaries to ask her why. She said, red is not allowed because people don’t erase their whiteboards often enough, and red is hard to remove when it’s been there for weeks. Yellow is too light. You can’t really see it.
She didn't mention orange, but orange is obviously just red and yellow. Probably has the worst qualities of both.
Instead I said, what if I promise to erase my whiteboard regularly? I need yellow and orange to highlight. She said, no.
My workaround this time was to go to Target at lunchtime and buy my own freakin’ markers. I got a pink one, too. I didn’t dare expense the $9. Instead I mentally subtracted it from my sign-on bonus, which was starting to look inadequate.
Late November, when we returned to the office after Thanksgiving weekend, Margaret started putting up Christmas decorations in the lobby. I talked to the CEO, Israeli and Jewish. He said, She’s always done that. I talked to the president, also Israeli and Jewish, and he shrugged. We have more important things to worry about, he said. I went to the fierce-warm VP of HR, and she said, you talk to her. I tried years ago.
So I gave it a shot. By then Margaret and I had built up a little bit of a personal relationship. Turns out it was a lonely job to sit in the reception area, and Margaret really appreciated a pleasant exchange or two during the day. I started using the front door when I went to the deli next door for lunch, just to say hello to Margaret and chat for a few minutes on my way out and back in.
Here’s how it went. By the end of the day, the lobby had a full-sized Christmas tree, decorated with lights and ornaments. On the sideboard was a full-fledged crèche, with Mary, Joseph, all the relevant animals, and baby Jesus.
The next Monday she came into the office with her arm in a sling and bruises on her face, neither lipstick nor wig askew. Margaret, what happened? I asked with genuine concern. She said, I fell off the ladder hanging Christmas lights at my house.
By this time I knew through our lobby conversations that she lived alone, never married, no children or friends outside of work. I said, Why didn’t you wait for your brother to visit and do it together? She said, he won’t be over for another week. And besides, he’s old and shouldn’t be climbing a ladder. Margaret's brother was eighty-four to her eighty-two.
Still, we’d built up a bit of a relationship.
In January, I walked to the lobby one afternoon and said, Margaret, could I have a new pen?
She said, What happened to the one I gave you last quarter?
[CBF, not its real name, has been acquired twice since this story. No doubt Margaret is still there.]
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