A Taste of the Corporate Life

My first jobs after grad school each deliver memorable lessons, including when to fight the grammar police.

One Friday afternoon at work, I was obsessively watching the clock. I left work early every Friday to get ready for Shabbat–this had been an accepted condition when I accepted the job of publications editor at a Fortune 500 healthcare company. This was a mighty plum job, one that I had learned about through a former colleague at UCLA who was now a coworker in the same department. I charged business lunches at will with my company-issued American Express card, shared a secretary with a department colleague, and had travel arrangements made for me when I had to attend meetings out of town. I could settle into this place for years, I thought.

Nervously, I had shown Tony, my future boss, a list of the days off I’d need for religious reasons, plus the non-negotiable condition about ducking out early on Fridays—in the winter when sundown can be as ealy as 4:30 p.m., quite early. I assured him that I’d make up for any work time necessary. Fortunately, Tony was a religious Catholic who kept a card of Saint Jude, patron saint of lost or impossible causes, peeking up out of his shirt pocket every day. He was on board.

But one fateful Friday, an earthquake had rumbled through a small town in northern California, damaging one of the hospitals owned by my employer. In situations like this, media relations departments like ours start revving their engines.

His eyes naturally bulged out just enough to give him the permanent appearance of having suddenly stumbled across a crime scene.

Fortunately, there was no loss of life and this relatively minor temblor would not make the national news. Still, many patients needed to be evacuated to other facilities—and there weren’t a whole lot of them in this remote area. The damage to the hospital would thrust the company into the public eye. Members of the media, company shareholders, and state politicians would be watching to see how they managed it.

Frankly, I didn’t see why this should affect me at all. My job was to produce a monthly newsletter for the 70,000 employees who worked in our hospitals worldwide, and to also produce a quarterly magazine for nurses in our acute care hospitals. Occasionally I also drafted speeches for the top brass and polished the messages they wrote for employee consumption in the newsletters. I had plenty of time to report this story before my next deadline.

But when I poked my head into Tony’s office to tell him I was leaving, his face wore an expression even more startled than usual. His eyes naturally bulged out just enough to give him the permanent appearance of having suddenly stumbled across a crime scene.

“What? You can’t leave now! We may need you to draft a statement for the media,” Tony said.

I liked to be a team player and enjoyed working hard. In my first few months on the job, I had begun to reverse the embarrassing slide in the newsletter’s publication dates, tightening the entire writing and production schedule. I was gaining a few days each month and on track to have my newsletter in readers’ hands at the very beginning of its dated month, and not at the end. I also had a major design makeover of both my publications in the works. But my commitment to keeping Shabbat was inviolable.

“Tony,” I said, “If there’s anything I can do for you now, I can stay another twenty minutes, but that’s really the absolute latest.” Time-sensitive media releases weren’t part of my job, and besides, Tony was a seasoned PR guy twenty years my senior. Couldn’t he rustle one up on his own?

In the world of corporate communications, no one ever “kvetched,” “slammed,” “complained,” “seethed,” “huffed,” “accused,” or “cried.”

Tony relented that Friday when I put my foot down about leaving, and overall he was a good guy, but he drove me crazy with his linguistic idiosyncrasies. For example, even though I was the publications editor, I was not allowed to use the word “said,” as in, “’We expect the new facility to open on March 10,’ Mr. Zober said.”

So when I quoted people, they didn’t “say” anything, but they did “recall,” “observe,” “explain,” “acknowledge,” “comment,” and when appropriate, “muse,” “hope,” or “reflect.” Since this was all corporate communications, no one ever “kvetched,” “slammed,” “complained,” “seethed,” “huffed,” “accused,” or “cried.” Oh, to think how grand and colorful my arsenal of quoting words would have been had I worked for some sort of whistleblower organization!

Tony also didn’t like the word “is.” I appreciated that using “is” or “are” too often reflected passive voice, and it’s healthy to root out as many of that form of the verb “to be” as possible in one’s writing. Bumping verbs higher to the lead of a sentence usually did the trick. But sometimes, eradicating “is” simply proved impossible no matter how many ways I tried to redesign a sentence and lead with an action word. When I occasionally tried to slip an “is” in an article because it made plain sense, Tony would circle it in red.

Well, this mania of Tony’s over “is” and “are” began to really stick in my craw. With the onset of morning sickness—a real misnomer because pregnancy nausea doesn’t arrive and leave politely in the morning hours exclusively—I had even less patience for what seemed an over-the-top control issue. One afternoon, reeling because I smelled something horrid and metallic that no one else smelled except for me, I felt ornery enough to strike back at Tony.

My belly hadn’t begun to give me away yet, and I knocked on his door, barely waiting for him to say, “Come in!” when I all but stormed his executive throne room. I threw a copy of an article down on his desk where he had circled one itty bitty “is” in red ink.

“Tony, I’m doing my best and you know I’m doing good work here, but not everything is a ‘reflection’ or a ‘representation’ of something else. Some things just are.” I tried to pronounce the word “are” so that it sounded more like “ROAR!”

I was pleased with the look of terror I saw on my boss’s face, so I continued.

“And another thing, Tony,” I said, winding up for the final pitch, “I can’t take this stress anymore because I’m pregnant.”

I waited as this news sank in, watching those protuberant eyes in fascination. If they extended any further, I’d need to call an ambulance to take him to our nearest hospital with an ophthalmology department.

“Oh. Okay. I’m sorry,” Tony conceded. (Or possibly: declared, commented, observed, admitted, sighed, mewled, surrendered, confessed.)

It had been a safe bet that I’d get him to ease up, at least for a few weeks. His religious convictions rendered him very enthusiastic about both my new marriage and my status as an expectant mother. And he may have also been slightly spooked by my outburst and was willing to cut a deal to forestall another one.

I interviewed a paraplegic artist who had learned to paint through a company program, and I watched in utter fascination as he painted fine strokes with a fine brush that he held in his mouth.

My job was secure if I wanted to keep it after having my baby, but Jeff and I had agreed that unless we had no choice, I would work part-time while our children were young. I would miss my job. This was still PR, and the stories I wrote were cherry-picked to put the company in a good light. Surely there were negative stories roiling around in our hospitals and rehab centers under the radar. But I loved interviewing people like Sam Clover, a 6-foot 3-inch-tall African American man and Air Force veteran who became known as the “gentle giant,” an RN in one of the company’s psychiatric hospitals, caring for children traumatized by abuse. Male nurses were still an anomaly in the late 1980s.

I enjoyed touring the company’s first facility for Alzheimer’s patients, designed so that patients could safely walk a large circular path within the facility grounds—something this patient group tended to enjoy. I interviewed a paraplegic artist who had learned to paint through a company program, and I watched in utter fascination as he painted fine strokes with a fine brush that he held in his mouth.

A few weeks before I gave birth, several of us from Corporate Communications attended an awards ceremony for healthcare PR professionals. My newsletter won first prize in its category, and I waddled, smiling, from our table to collect my etched trophy. The awards dinner was held on the Queen Mary, which I found amusing because I felt almost as big as the cruise ship itself.

Just days later I packed up my office belongings, including my trophy, and welcomed my replacement, Patty, to her new office. Patty had already agreed to give me a few assignments a month in my new roles as mother and freelancer.

I was copyediting a client’s newsletter when I went into labor. I couldn’t get very far with the work before the contractions became too intense for me to concentrate. I called my client and told him I was sorry, I was in labor, and couldn’t finish the job. He asked me if I could take the work with me to the hospital, and I laughed.

But it felt good to be asked.