Her Corporate Fridays
The ten-year anniversary of my departure from corporate America passed without my giving it notice. My sojourn there was brief. When I hear of the efficiency of private business, usually in comparison to that of government, I suspect the writer or speaker has not experienced much of life in a large company. Small businesses are efficient, in a frantic way that’s hard to distinguish from desperation. But large businesses often differ from ‘big government’ only in that they are more openly autocratic and can quickly divert resources into what they don’t understand. Just as New York City and Paris resemble each other more than do New York City and, say, Saugerties, NY, so the cubicle farms of large corporations and government agencies differ mainly in shabbiness and in both it is sometimes difficult, so removed from where your paycheck comes from or what your efforts affect, to sense the value of any day’s work.
But I grew to enjoy Fridays in the office. Fridays differed from other days of the week. We were in Midtown, not a glamorous section, but a corner of the West 30s made almost sleepy on sunny afternoons. Wide brick buildings had shouldered away smaller storefronts a century before and kept pedestrians moving onto the next block, where photo shops were perennially holding going-out-of-business sales.
On Fridays the office was as still and quiet inside as out. Thursday night was—is—the big going-out night in New York; those who weekend elsewhere want to be well away before Friday rush hour. By Friday mid-morning, hung over, exhausted, baggy-eyed, we lifted our heavy feet from the subway to the lobby until upstairs we found our desks. Upper managers might not show until noon, if at all. Often I heard giggles and rounding the corner of a hallway would see the children of some chisel-jawed executive, the exec, like a War Of The Worlds alien, invincible against grown-up devices but worn down by the smallest things, imploring the children, “Mommy/daddy needs to work.”
On Fridays, no one expected anything to be on time; reports, videotapes—no DVDs then—all of them could wait, “as long you have it on my desk first thing Monday.”
Monday was an infinity of uncounted hours away. We thought in hours, not days. By four, most offices would be empty; word went cubicle by cubicle, which departments had no one in the driver’s seat. Cubicle by cubicle, the pervading hum of PCs dimmed. By five, even those of us who got to “play” for a living—designers, editors—had made our calls, knew who we were meeting. Finally sobered up on Bunn coffee, we wet our tongues. Friday night’s drinking was cozier than Thursdays, in side street bars where the bartenders or waitresses knew what you wanted without your asking, and had second rounds ready before you’d finished your first.
I was on my first and second groups of friends in the city, people I knew from college or my first several jobs. We’d known one another for as long as eight years. So much had been different before then that with our acquaintance a clock seemed to have stopped. So go the years of your twenties, as slowly as days go in grade school.
I was usually one of the one of the last to leave the office; a number of my friends worked in production, and their hours skewed later. Leaving the office, telling the lecherous doorman to have a good weekend, I merged into the pedestrian traffic. Twelve and fourteen stories up, the windows were poured from flame and the copper cornices were bright green. Down in the blue shadows I thought how Joan Didion and the Johns, Cheever and Updike, must have looked up just as I was looking up. I felt less badly about how I’d spent my day, and I remembered Harold Brodkey’s description:
It was menacing and lovely, the foursquare perspectives trailing down the fat avenues, which were transformed in the dimming blue light of the dissolving workday. Overwhelming beauty and carelessness, the city then—one of the wonders of the world.
I wouldn’t exchange my life now with my life then for any money—nor could I. My job was a creation of the dot com era, its technical constraints and faith. But neither would I have missed the way New York focuses and refracts longing; the way one looks down the avenues and sees no end. The avenues run parallel, and so with a few exceptions they do not lead to anything. But from most places in Midtown, that is over the horizon.
