Subject: Octopus Hands
Please note that touching, hugging, and caressing other employees, unless specifically permitted, is a breach of one’s own personal space. Regardless of how things have been done in the past, regardless of this being tribal knowledge, employees need to know that just like in preschool, hands are to stay by one’s side until recess.
Who was stupid enough to send this? I’m infuriated. It will be so easy to trace this email to this “Metis” even though the sender is using some obscure ISP that I don’t recognize. Who would crash her career like this? I instantly think of Amanda. She means so well but is so na?ve.
“About time your girls are getting organized. It’s nuts the stuff you put up with,” Gibbs says as he saunters ahead of me, and I, because I’m afraid to lose him, toss my phone in my purse and run after him. “So you actually notice this stuff?”
“How could anyone not notice? I mean, it could be worse. You could be in venture cap, where a whopping two percent of directors are women.”
I’m practically hyperventilating. “I didn’t think men were all that aware.”
“People are aware, Belle. I’m an analyst, for Chrissake, I observe stuff, crunch numbers, watch for trends, but I’m not an activist. I don’t actually do anything about the stuff I observe. Glad to see someone doing something. Clever.”
“Wait up.” I’m not sure what I want to say first. “Venture cap professionals are ninety-eight percent male?”
“And ninety-two percent of venture cap funds have no professional women working for them at all.”
“So assuming most men in the venture cap world are numbers guys, how do you think they justify the fact that the opinion of half the human race simply doesn’t matter? That women who probably outshone them in business school, who control eighty-six percent of consumer decisions in this country, have nothing worthwhile to add? It’s the same with us. Our board has no women. Compensation committee? Zilch. Risk committee? None.”
“Yes, I would say that’s a big mistake. But again, I’m a market analyst, not a sociologist, but if I were a sociologist, I’d agree with Metis and call this tribal knowledge. Everyone’s aware it goes on but we never address it. It’s like a family secret, and maybe this Metis, this memo writer, is trying to have some sort of intervention, so good for her.”
I’ve forgotten how mad I was with Gibbs.
After dinner I slip to the restroom to call Amanda on her home phone.
“Is this Metis?” I ask sarcastically.
“Wasn’t that funny?” she responds lightly.
“A little juvenile and not something that won’t have retribution,” I answer. “Why’d you do that?”
“What? I didn’t do it,” she says.
“Was it Amy?”
“Belle, it wasn’t any of us. We’ve all spoken to each other. It was someone else. We aren’t the only women in the place who are tired of this stuff.”
I shut off my phone and head back to the table. I’m so sure it’s one of them.
By 11 p.m. I’m finally checking into the Breakers hotel in Palm Beach. The enormous buckets of elaborate flower arrangements make me mentally genuflect. The opulent lobby is filled with what appears to be South American drug lords, Russian tourists who buy clothing right from the runway, and an army of Wall Streeters wearing the casual-Friday uniform of khakis and golf shirts. I just want to get past the bar without someone asking me to get a drink. I want to take a bath in a clean tub.
It’s been a full evening with Gibbs as he charmed commission dollars out of every manager we met with. They hung on his charismatic and whip-smart words and then made golfing plans that I know Gibbs won’t keep. I supplied all the stock ideas that would benefit from Gibbs’s economic and market theories. Lower oil prices? Buy some airline stock. Strong holiday sales of luxury good items? Buy some Tiffany stock. He and I make a great team, yet all evening I mostly focused on not losing him. Each time he went to the bathroom, I watched the front doors. When I filled the car with gas, I locked him inside. Substance abuse rumors swirl about him and I feel like I have a front-row seat to a guy at the tipping point between having it all and crashing and I don’t know how to help.
It’s here in the hotel lobby that I reluctantly spring Gibbs free, releasing him smack in the middle of the land of temptation. We hug and I sigh and say, “Please take care of yourself.”
“It’s hard,” he says, knowing exactly what I mean, but he’s already looking over my shoulder, seeing someone he knows, someone to have a drink with, and I’m not even on the elevator before he’s circled by people wanting a piece of his magic.
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