I recited Robert’s corporate Amex number from memory as obnoxiously as possible.
Two seconds later the woman replied, “I’m sorry,” like she wasn’t sorry at all. “That card’s expired.”
“Impossible.”
I could hear her grinning through the receiver. “That card is expired.”
Shit. Fine. How could I be losing this battle of wills so terribly? I fished through my bag, found my wallet, pulled out my own credit card, and read off the number.
Titan didn’t allow assistants to have corporate cards, so it was my personal card that I had to use.
“One moment, please,” she said.
I listened to her breathing, which sounded like Darth Vader performing an anti-tobacco PSA, and then she came back with: “I’m sorry. That card’s also been rejected. You’ve exceeded your credit limit.”
I pretty much set myself up for that one. None of my credit cards had a limit over eleven thousand dollars. “Can I split it between two cards?” I flipped through my wallet.
“No,” she said.
“No?”
“No.”
“I would seriously like to speak to your manager immediately,” I said. “I’m not even kidding now.”
“Okay, fine. You can use two cards.” My nemesis was growing bored of sucking the life out of my day; I was obviously harshing her mellow disengagement. “But this isn’t customary. I’m doing you a favor.”
“I appreciate that,” I said, because at heart I’m a total weakling.
I read off the number to my second credit card, got “one moment”–ed again, but—at last—tragedy was averted.
I hung up the phone and took a deep breath.
Of course I filed an expense report the moment I received an e-mail confirmation for the fare. Twenty thousand dollars was half of my yearly salary.
People often assumed I made more as the assistant to one of the richest, most powerful men on the planet, and I let them. It was less humiliating that way. Maybe there was a time when “executive assistants,” also known as “secretaries,” were “taken care of,” but those days are long gone, at least in the media industry. They went out with lunches at the Four Seasons, smoking indoors, and the existence of the middle class. Every assistant I knew made under fifty K a year. But the new hires made only thirty-five K, so it wasn’t really my place to complain.
—
YOU KNOW HOW sometimes when you call to order something over the phone, like plane tickets, let’s say, a recording might come on just before a real person answers that says, This call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes?
Well, my call with the hater from the airline was one of those lucky calls. I’d never filed a complaint the way I threatened to; I’m way too lazy for that sort of thing. But a few days after the incident, I received a call from the airline’s head of customer relations apologizing for the “confusion” of the attendant on the phone. She’d been “let go,” I was told, also known as fired. The airline retroactively comped Robert’s flight and they were sending a gift for his troubles.
“Would Mr. Barlow enjoy a bottle of good red wine?” the groveling woman asked.
“Why, yes. Yes, he would.”
Things like this happened to Robert all the time. Before I worked for Titan, I never realized that very rich people didn’t pay for stuff.
(Let’s call that rule number four: Very rich people don’t pay for stuff.)
I was so na?ve. This sucking-up from the airline would have at one time struck me as shocking and unbelievably unfair, nonsensical even. Why wouldn’t a billionaire have to pay for something a poor person would absolutely have to pay for? But I’d grown used to it in the past six soul-crushing years, so it no longer fazed me. I immediately filed the whole incident under forgotten, went home, watched some Netflix, and fell asleep ignoring the unpaid bills piling up on my kitchen table, per usual.
A few days later I was g-chatting with Handsome Kevin Hanson from legal (that’s what every female in the office called him, or just Kevin Handsome for short) while shoveling spoonfuls of Pinkberry into my mouth. I was enjoying an intense brain freeze coupled with the rush I always experienced while chatting with Kevin, when Billy the mail guy (aka “Patchouli,” on account of his stinking to high hell of the stuff and dutifully passing it on to all of our parcels) dropped a white, hippie-infused envelope onto my desk that read: Travel & Entertainment Reimbursement.
Suddenly I remembered.
I signed off g-chat, made sure Patchouli Billy was at a safe distance, and then sliced open the envelope with my silver letter opener. And there it was. A crisp green check in the amount of $19,147 with my name on it.