Moral Hazard Read Online Free PDF Page A

the time but was not as visible as Bart, who ran the press group. A flack as opposed to a hack.
    Above Hanny, above Bart, was Chuck. The head of our department, Chuck had been a college basketball player, an all-American golden boy. His alley-oop glory days were still discernible underneath encroaching flab and adult worries, like pentimento in a painting. He lived to please, loved to schmooze. Heads of Communications keep their positions by either knowing where the bodies are buried or jumping in the laps of executives and licking their faces. Chuck did a bit of both. Whatever might be said of him, he was expert at placating our senior executives, at whose pleasure we served. He was hard to dislike, even if he managed his department by hiring people with ingrown personalities like Hanny and Bart and letting them loose.
    This, of course, was the stuff of Dilbert or
New Yorker
cartoons. But it wasn’t funny, not living it. Hanny and Bart seemed to me as sadistic as prefects at an English boarding school. As a result, the path from our group to the company psychiatrist was well trodden. Only one of us—a woman from New Jersey who cheerfully referred to herself as a Polack and who supervised the production of brochures—was immune. “What do they think I am? Chopped liver?” she’d say, laughing with her entire body and picking up the phone to resume her talkathon with her vast network of Niedecker pals. When I asked her how she remained sanguine, she said, “Hey. I’ve seen a lot of Hannys and Barts come and go.”
    Our group was not unique. I had gained a whole different view of New York’s skyscrapers. I looked at them and didn’t see architecture. I saw infestations of middle managers, tortuous chains of command, stupor-inducing meetings, ever-widening gyres of e-mail. I saw people scratching up dust like chickens and calling it work. I saw the devil whooping it up.
    To find my way, I asked questions. In their eyes, I questioned. I probably did that, too, but more out of naïveté and, I must admit, incredulity. In the normal course, I would have been expelled immediately for the foreign organism that I was, but I had a “connection,” so instead was labeled “high maintenance” and ignored, with the occasional attempt, in the form of team reviews and dressings-down, to re-educate me. After one review, Hanny informed me with absolute seriousness that my sense of humor was such that people thought I wasn’t taking the job seriously. Dear reader, with effort, I kept a straight face. Another time, he told me I was their diversity challenge: age, gender, nationality, lack of corporate experience. Shades of the Cultural Revolution.
    In time, I settled for an anthropological approach. I was in the belly of the beast: observe, listen, learn. After all, the job was serving its purpose. There was money for the rent and to buy Cognex, the new Alzheimer’s drug. Not only that, to survive the quicksand at Niedecker, I had to give the job my full attention, leaving me less time to dwell on Bailey.
    That first summer, after work, I took to wandering the aisles of Century 21, not shopping, only relieved to be where nothing was demanded of me. I was commuting, it seemed, between two forms of dementia, two circles of hell. Neither point nor meaning to Alzheimer’s, nor to corporate life, unless you counted the creation of shareholder value.
    That first summer, once or twice, instead of worming my way uptown on the Number 5 subway, I splurged on a taxi home. The route was along the FDR Drive, by the shouldering waters of the East River, its bridges and their mastodonic spans, by the Lower East Side playing fields and their antiquated stadium lighting banked in uneven clusters and resembling graying dowager diamonds. If the traffic allowed, and the rattle of the straining taxi ignored, you had the illusion of swooping, soaring, above the clogged confusion of the city.
    That first summer, when I came home, Bailey was always to