Bait and Switch (4 page)

the test in ten minutes or less, but it's not as easy as it looks.

Our half an hour is drawing to a close, I note with relief.

Am I
special?
From whose vantage point? What about
looking
She thinks I will need three months of coaching, meaning she
good,
which certainly depends on how mu c h e f f or t h as g o ne will need $1,200. This will be a lot of work for me, she says, i n t o th e p ro je c t? O r
what's the difference—how
can that because she practices "co-active coaching," which is "very col-describe anyone? Most of the terms are adjectives like laborative." "I want you to design me as your best coach," she
judgmental,
but there are plenty of nouns like
fantasy
and even a says, perhaps forgetting that she has already been not only designed scattering of verbs like
move against.
Could I describe myself as but "branded." If I were "designing" her, I'd throw in a major almost never, occasionally, or almost always
move against?
Am I serotonin antagonist to damp down the perkiness, and maybe sometimes, never, or always
wow
or
no big deal?

at some point I will find a tactful way to suggest that she chill.

Even where the syntax fails to offend me as a writer—or, as I The session has left me drained and her more excited than should now put it, a "communications" professional
14
—the answers ever: "We'll dance together here!" is her final promise.

14 The corporate disability with language is now an acknowledged problem, with some companies paying for writing courses for their executives. See Sam Dillon,

"What Corporate America Cannot Build: A Sentence,"
New York Times,
December 7,2004.

are by no means obvious.
Harmonious,
for example: sometimes, but a style I recognize as middle-class Catholic, circa 1970—prints of it depends on who or what's around to harmonize with.
Avoid
nineteenth-century pastoral scenes, a teddy bear on a child-size
conflict?
If possible, but there are times when I seek it out, and in rocking chair, a Madonna overlooking the armoire. In other words, fact enjoy nothing better than, a good table-thumping debate. How perfectly normal—at least until we arrive at the dining room about
powerful
or
happy?
I am, I realize, not the kind of person table, on which three foot-high dolls are perched—a scarecrow, a who, well, ever speaks of herself as "not the kind of person who..."

tin man, a lion, and—what movie is this?—a plastic Elvis.

The very notion of personality, which is what we are trying to I decided in advance to lead off with my criticisms of the test, get at here, seems to have very limited application to me and quite because if I give them after the results he may think I'm using possibly everyone else.
Self
is another dodgy concept, since I them to deflect any criticisms of me that have emerged in his am, when I subject this "I" to careful inspection, not much analysis. How in the world, I ask him, could I say whether
marketing
more than a swarm of flickering affinities, habits, memories, and (that's one of the test terms) applies to me? It's a noun, for predilections that could go either way—toward neediness or heaven's sake, and while I may be "good at marketing," I am not, independence, for example, courage or cowardice. The best by any stretch of the imagination, "marketing." I tell him there's strategy, I decide, is to overcome
hesitant, worrying,
and no excuse for such sloppiness, and that I realize that in saying so I
correctness seeking
and give what seem like the right, or most may well be revealing something about my personality: something admirable, answers. I check "almost always" for
disciplined, high
rigid and unforgiving.

ideals, independent,
and
principled,
while firmly rejecting
lazy,
Completely unfazed, Morton picks up the Elvis doll, whose
abrasive, procrastinate,
and
laid-back.

legs are sticking out at a right angle to his trunk in some A week later, after Morton has had time to "grade" my per-hideous form of rigor mortis, and tells me that he uses it to sonality, we meet at his home to go over the results. It's a modest make the point that "there is about as much similarity between the ranch house in a residential area I have never visited, decorated in doll and the real Elvis as there is between you and your personality type." I want to object that the doll does resemble the real Elvis, intelligence."

in his youth anyway and before his unfortunate weight gain; at It turns out, though, that my Original, Effective, Good and least anyone could see that it is not a Barbara doll. But that Loving traits are not the point. The point is to understand my misses the larger questions of what I am doing here if the test

"nonresourceful" side, which seems to be my bad side, because is meaningless and what it has to do with finding a job anyway.

this is what I need to do something about. Some people, Morton Besides, he's putting Elvis down on a side table now, leaving us says, addressing the brown and wintry lawn outside the dining alone with the Oz crew.

room window, resist hearing about this side. One woman, a We move on to the results. It turns out that my scores "could schoolteacher, broke into tears when she learned about hers. In fit almost any personality type." I'm highest in Original and my case, the nonresourceful side includes being overly sensitive and Effective, and when you plot that out on an Enneagram, the prone to melancholy and envy, not to mention the bad traits that diagonal lines connect me to Good and Loving. This come up when you draw diagonals from Loving and Effective. What makes me a tin man with a little lion thrown in, he says, finger-this comes down to, in a practical sense, is that, given my highly ing the appropriate dolls. Next, he brings out the baffling emotional and artistic personality (where did
that
come from?), I transparencies, which have been sitting here all along in a file probably "don't write very well." The "suggested activity," in my folder. This time I resolve to get to the bottom of things, but case, would be "intensive journaling workshops" to polish my when he flashes the transparency labeled "The Enneagram writing skills.

Symbol," with its nested triangles, all I can come up with is, There is nothing to do but mumble my thanks, write out the

"What is the circle doing here?" It's there, he explains, "for check, and leave. I think of my father, whose personality graphic unity"—meaning that he just likes the look of it?—and also traitsincluded brash, cynical, bombastic, obnoxious, charming, to show that "we are talking about a whole person." And the big kindly, and falling-down drunk, yet who managed to rise from the triangle? I continue, losing heart. "Those are the three centers of copper mines of Butte to the corporate stratosphere, ending up as vice president of research for a multinational firm. Did he bond at once; she is the anti-Kimberly, noninvasive and utterly ever take a personality test or submit to executive coaching?

down-to-earth. Although I'm not sure whether their functions Or were things different in the fifties and sixties, with a overlap, I decide it's best not to tell Joanne about Kimberly or vice greater emphasis on what you could actually
do?
What would he versa.

have made of Morton, the dolls, and the ancient wisdom of the Of my three coaches so far, Joanne is the first to give me some Enneagram? I drive home with his deep guffaws echoing in my real reason for hope. She picks up on the word
speech-writing
head.

buried in my first, feeble attempt at a resume, and tells me to ramp it up as a salable skill, and I realize, yes, that's something I can actually do. Up to this point, crisscrossing my contempt for MORTON DOES HAVE one useful tip to offer: if I want Morton and Kimberly's psychobabble, has been a deep strain of help with my resume, I should see Joanne, whose e-mail address anxiety that I may, in fact, have nothing to offer, no skills of any he will e-mail me. Joanne turns out to be available at the same fee relevance to the wide world of moneymaking. My PR and event-as Kimberly, and meets me at a coffeehouse only ten minutes planning experience is, after all, derived from the more easygoing from home—not the ideal venue since I've been to it before end of the nonprofit world and may not fully apply to the corporate and there is a remote chance of encountering someone who setting. But speechwriting is speechwriting—from the initial joke or knows me. I am expecting an impeccably dressed southern-anecdote, through the marshaling of facts, to the exhortatory lady type, not the rumpled, makeup-free, fiftyish woman who finale—and I've been doing it for decades. What no one needs to greets me. She's done "development" in the nonprofit world, know is that all the speeches I've written were delivered by myself.

she tells me, but has shifted—she says nothing about the cir-Joanne has other useful advice: Take I and
my
(as in "my re-cumstances prompting the shift—into executive coaching and is sponsibilities included . . .") out of the resume, which, I'm beginning just coming from "a strategic planning meeting at Pepsi." I to see, should have an odd, disembodied tone, as if my life had been lived by some invisible Other. Break everything I claim to have greetings on my home and cell phones; I buy new glasses frames, done down into its smaller, constituent, activities, so that, for striking dark ones, chosen solely for their difference from my example, I didn't just "plan" an event, I "met with board to ordinary dull ones. I start cruising the business section of the develop objectives" and went on through the various other local Barnes and Noble.

phases of the job to "facilitate post-event evaluations." What can I Besides, I have already learned from Kimberly the necessity of say? It certainly fills up space. And then her most ingenious tip of being "proactive" and also a "self-starter." My resume is too much of all: go to the professional association web sites for my a work in progress to warrant posting on the major Internet job putative professions and pick up the buzzwords, or search sites like Monster and HotJobs, but there's still no end professional lingo. If she doesn't know I'm a complete fake, of things to do on the web. I go to the event planners' professional and I don't think I've given her any reason to suspect that I association web site and pilfer it for event-planning jargon to pad am, she nonetheless has a remarkably clear idea of how to out my resume. Way beyond just planning events, I expand perpetrate the fakery. Which may just be the essence of resume into "providing on-site management" and "evaluating return on writing.

investment."

I am not, of course, pinning all hopes on my coaches. For Looking for advice and, better yet, company, I Google all one thing, I have been fleshing out my new identity: opening a possible combinations of
unemployed, white-collar, professional,
checking account for Barbara Alexander, ordering her a credit card, and
jobs.
These are not the best keywords, I discover. First, having business cards made up for her at Kinko's. She already, of jobless white-collar people are not "unemployed"; they are "in course, has an e-mail address. As for clothes, she will have to share transition" or perhaps engaged in a "job search." Only the lowly—mine, and at this point I am still clueless enough to imagine the blue- and pink-collar people—admit to actual "unemployment."

that the outfits I use for lecturing on college campuses will pass Second, avoid the word
job,
which, unless carefully modified, will muster in the business world. I expunge
Ehrenreich
from the lead to numerous sites in which it is prefaced by
hand
or
blow.

The time I spend on the web has a dank and claustrophobic and event-planning people. I search for an answer and come up feel. After traversing a few links, I forget where I started and with: "My thorough research on whatever topic or theme I'm am lost among the pages full of advice, support groups, networking on . . . My goal is to be thoroughly conversant with working events, and coaching opportunities geared to various the major issues and trends in the field, to the point where I can salary levels. I join something called ExecuNet for a fee of participate in substantive decision making, like picking a keynote $150 and decide that's what I am—an executive. I throw
exec-

speaker."

utive
in among my keywords and start up the searches again,

"Conversant!"
Joanne exclaims in a rare show of enthusiasm, leading to still more support groups, networking events, and so

"I love that word! We'll use it in the resume or maybe the cover forth. Is this a total waste of time, job-search-wise? I might as letter." So Barbara Alexander is not an airhead at all but a well be hacking through thick jungle undergrowth with a towering intellectual of the event-planning field.

bread knife instead of a machete.

Meanwhile I have homework from Kimberly. First I have to fill in At my second session with Joanne, conducted by phone, the questionnaire she included in my "Client Discovery Packet,"

Barbara Alexander begins to earn my respect. I had initially asking me, among other things, to list five adjectives that describe thought of her as a stay-at-home wife who didn't have to work me at my best and five that describe me at my worst. For the best I for the money—just enjoyed her little dabblings in PR and choose
energetic, focused, intelligent, compassionate,
and
creative,
while event planning, sort of as an extension of her busy social life.

for my dark side I choose
anxious, compulsive, disorganized,
Her husband must have been pretty well-heeled, and I suspect
distractible,
and
depressed—all
true at various times except for that his contacts provided her with most of her clients. Di-distractible, which was simply a way of filling in space.

vorce has confronted her with the need to earn money, an en-What are my three major fears? I offer "too old to find terprise for which she is sorely unprepared. But now Joanne work" and "likely to end up in poverty," but cannot think of a asks me what has distinguished my work from that of other PR