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THIRTY
Blindsided
Ouop lqeg gs zkds ulv V deds zq lus DS urqstsn’t wwiaps?
B
y the late spring of 1994, I was still using my Eric Weiss identity and
still working at the law firm in Denver. It wasn’t unusual for me to spend
my entire lunch hour on my cell phone. This was long before the landscape
became littered with people enjoying the freedom of gabbing wirelessly:
these were the days when airtime still cost a dollar per minute. Looking
back, I’m sure it must have seemed extremely suspicious that I spent so
much time on the cell phone, especially since I was making only $28,000 a
year.
One day all of us from the IT Department had a luncheon with Elaine
and her boss, Howard Jenkins. During our idle chitchat, Jenkins said to me,
“Eric, you went to college in Washington. How far were you from Seattle?”
I thought I had done enough background research to cover myself,
having memorized the names of professors who were teaching at Ellensburg
during the appropriate years to match my résumé and so forth. But I
couldn’t even come close to answering this question. I faked a coughing fit,
waved an apology, and, coughing all the way, hurried to the men’s room.
From a stall, I called Central Washington University on my cell phone
and told the lady in the registrar’s office that I was thinking of applying but
wondered how long a drive it was from Seattle. “Two hours or so,” she said,
“if it’s not rush hour.”
I hustled back to the lunch meeting, apologizing for running out, saying
some food had gone down the wrong pipe. When Howard looked at me, I
said, “I’m sorry, what did you ask me before?”
He repeated his earlier question.
“Ah, about two hours without a lot of traffic,” I answered. I smiled and
asked if he had ever been to Seattle. For the rest of the lunch meeting, no
other pointed questions were directed toward me.
Other than my concerns about my cover, the job had been going
relatively smoothly for more than a year. And then I got blindsided. While
looking for some paperwork on Elaine’s desk one evening, I ran across an
open folder containing the layout for a Help Wanted ad for an IT
professional. The description of duties was a perfect match for Darren’s job.
Or mine.
That was a real wakeup call. Elaine had never mentioned that the firm
was looking to add another person, which could mean only one thing: she
and her bosses were getting ready to fire one of us. But which of us was
headed for the guillotine?
I immediately started digging for the answer. The more I uncovered, the
more complex the backstabbing became. I already knew that Elaine had a
huge issue with Darren, having to do with his being overheard consulting
with an outside client on company time. And then I discovered another
smoking gun in a Ginger-to-Elaine email that read in part, “Eric is here all
the time, working intently on something but I don’t know what.”
I needed more info. After business hours, I went down to the HR
manager’s office on the 41st floor. I had scoped it out days earlier. The
janitors were in the habit of starting their rounds by opening up all the
doors: perfect. I waltzed in, hoping I could still count on my lock-picking
skills.
The wafer lock on the manager’s file cabinet sprung open on my second
try—great. I pulled my personnel file and found out that the decision had
already been made: when everyone returned to work after the Memorial
Day weekend, I was to be told I was being fired.
The reason? Elaine’s belief that I was doing freelance consulting with
clients on company time. What was ironic here was that this was possibly
the only questionable activity I
wasn’t
engaging in at the time. She must
have been basing her conclusions on my cell phone use during lunch or
office breaks, and she was totally wrong.
While I was at it, I pulled out Darren’s file, as well, and discovered he
was also going to be fired. Except that in his case they had hard evidence
that he really had been doing consulting work for other clients. Worse, he
had been doing it on law firm time. It seemed like I had been painted with
the same brush. They
knew
he had been breaking the rules, and apparently
assumed, even without any hard evidence, that I probably had been, too.
The next day, fishing for information, I hit Ginger with, “I hear they’re
looking for a new IT person. So who’s getting fired?” Within minutes she
had laid my question on Elaine, and it wasn’t more than an hour before I
was told that Howard Jenkins wanted to see me in the office of the HR lady,
Maggie Lane, right away.
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