Notoriety And What It Is-Dan Schneider
January 31, 2008
Notoriety and What It Is
By Dan Schneider
Kate Topps always seemed destined to be the kind of person whose career would be involved with helping others. Granted, this was technically true, now, as she had become a collections team manager at a large telecom company, after several years as a phone rep. She had never even worked on telephones before starting at the telecom, but had found that she enjoyed talking to others. She would have preferred working in customer care, or even sales, but the job she started at was in collections. It was a truism in the phone business, or even in telemarketing, that women make the best salesmen, but worst collectors. The reasoning, and truth, behind this, is fairly simple. Women excel at sales because when they are speaking to a woman, there is that sort of connection on an emotional level that women can speak of without seeming strained. If the customer mentions a child, or a divorce, or even some minor accident in the kitchen, a woman can relate, while a man is likely to seem insincere. Even when listening to a female customer rail on and on about her louse of a spouse, Kate would just try to tune out, for too much of it reminded her of her own life. Her own husband had cheated on her, a few years ago, and although Kate had gotten over it, there were still the self-doubts and queries, wondering what she had done to drive him away. There was also the feeling that she had been a fool, herself, for one time, at another job, one of her male co-workers, after many months, confessed to her that he had fallen in love with her, and Kate did not know what to do. She was very attracted to him, but even though her marriage was not going anywhere, she felt a loyalty to her promise. It was what her would be lover said to her next that stuck the longest with her, especially after her husband’s later infidelity. Her co-worker had said, ‘Kate, always remember that you could have.’ It was the kind of thing that he probably said offhandedly, yet it stuck with her almost like guilt does. She felt that he and she could have had far more in common than she ever did with her now ex-husband, and every time a woman digressed into something personal, Kate found herself back at that utterance by her former suitor, pining over her choice, and wondering how much a difference a momentary lapse of ethics would have wrought for her now.
Yet, never did her voice quaver on such recollections. This was a key to her success, even as a collector, where usually that fact handicaps. Women’s voices are naturally smoother than men’s and betray a vulnerability, which usually allows a customer to feel they have the upper hand, even if they do not, and perception, on the other party’s part, is everything in collections. Women’s advantages over men, however, when selling to men are obvious. Especially if the woman sounds young and sexy and perky, she will immediately have an in because, even on a subconscious level, most men will want to appear like they still are virile, to impress the woman, even if they will never meet her, even if they are married, for the man will want to feel that he ‘knows’ that he could have bagged the woman on the other end of the line, if he really wanted to. The best way to show his masculinity, in such a situation, is to show a willingness to buy, thus impress the woman, whom he has impossibly long odds of ever bagging sexually.
Yet, these very qualities, which give women superiority in phone sales, also work against them in collections. Kate knew that the best collections rep in her office was a man who came from New York, had a weird and deep accent, and who spoke in a staccato monotone. These factors would have made him a very bad sales rep, but were the very things that made him a great collector. He was impassive, stuck to the facts, and did not budge. He almost seemed to revel in having the most foul mouthed customers call in and playing his little mind games on them- to castrate the men, especially. A well placed, ‘Well, let’s look at your account and….well, well, what is this?’ and then a good five or ten second pause, would send most customers, even those who started the call on a tirade, into meek and submissive silence. Or a strategic, ‘May I put you on hold?’, followed by a couple of minutes of Muzak, would again totally deflate a customer. This rep especially liked initially denying that anything was wrong with the account, when he got back to the phone, because he knew the more he denied the more the customer was worried and the more likely they were to want to actually resolve the problem. The fact that literally ninety percent or more of the problems were mostly or wholly the fault of their company didn’t really matter, because that rep just liked playing the game, especially knowing that he had the power most of the time. It was a way of controlling a small portion of life when most of life was never able to be put under control. Then, if he conceded even a little bit, the person he was speaking to could feel that he was a reasonable person, even if firm and business-like. Women, on the other hand, were often too malleable, and that went beyond mere perception. That quality, which allows for flexibility when selling, is seen as a weakness by those avoiding to pay what they owe, and if they feel that a collector is weak they will feel they can fluster them, or obfuscate with facts, and perhaps even delay payment until a ‘superior’ at the company investigated. With a man, the Harry Truman edict applied more often than not. The buck, and the deal, stopped with him!
So, getting in at the collections end was a challenge for her, but, as the months and years passed, she became quite good. Never a top collector, but someone with a great knowledge of the processes and computer systems, and a good ability to work with, and teach, others. Since she had only a little bit of a college education, and obviously no degree, when the offer of being made a team manager was made, by the manager of her center, she, mostly for the increased paycheck. She wondered if she would have the stomach to discipline others, but she looked forward to being there to help others maximize their talents. She especially enjoyed helping out others achieve good results, as she felt that she served some purpose in the cosmos. She realized it was not some grand thing, but how few people were ever capable of such grand implications from their presence and work? This was all especially good for her ego as she had still not gotten over the break up of her marriage of eleven years, a few years before she took the job at the telecom. Then, she had been a bright, effervescent woman, who was sought out by a number of men. She made the wrong choice, in retrospect, and when looking in the mirror, at her wider hips and crow’s feet, she wondered if she would ever find the sort of joy that she had felt would inevitably come when young. When she was younger, and more idealistic, her idea of a job where she could really help people consisted of working in the Peace Corps, or even Greenpeace. But, reality intrudes on all aspects of life- personal, professional, and elsewhere, and such flights of fancy often fade and crumple to reality’s siren call like so many other dreams, such as there being a Prince Charming out there for every girl, or even there being a plain old decent guy.
It’s not that her ex-husband was really a bad guy, he was just not the right guy for her, and not even at the right time. They had been in love, but, the truth was that that love, in those days, was just another word for lust, and as Kate was a girl with morals, she would not consent to sex until they were married. It said something for her ex- that he never pressured her, but such a flawed reason for a lifelong pairing is never a recipe for success. If the world had a meter to gauge how appropriate sexual pairings were to their participants, then she knew that her marriage would have been doomed from the start. How simple it would be, if people could gauge just such a thing. Now, some people might go ahead and get hitched anyway, and they might even prove the exceptions to the rule, but that would not be so for the majority, and maybe people would delay marriage and kids until they were older and wiser. Given modern life, that could only be a good thing. In retrospect, she even felt that a similar gauge could be used to most effectively pair people up with prospective jobs. Most people spent more waking time at work than they did at home, anyway. And, after all, the two sources of most people’s misery, she determined, was their choice of lover and their choice of job. Emotion and finances were at the root of almost all forms of human misery. Yes, it was not necessarily the cause of war, famine, nor the like, but most people did not suffer under reality’s grand ills. Most people squirmed uncomfortably under the thumb of little vices and pains that they did not want to acknowledge lest be mocked as being weak. Kate saw, that after she had re-entered the workplace, after her divorce, how few people really even understood the fundamentals of life, and how they could be used to derive happiness. It saddened her that a word that she might say to help someone at work might end up causing them to veer off into a depression. At the other end of the spectrum, there were people who, no matter how hard you tried to guide them, they would just let what you told them waft in one ear and come out the other. Yet, she found it interesting and helpful to learn how to tell the difference between those two types of people.
Such small things interested her. The very ideals and concepts over what constituted a good and a bad job, for example, were always changing, and usually for the worse. When she was young, and just entering the workforce for the first time, there were expectations of a good pension, and benefits that the company would provide, in exchange for hard work, so that a catastrophic illness to the person, their spouse, or child, would not forever send a family into debt. Companies that had these sorts of safeguards, and paid well, were considered good companies. How this change in perception took hold she could not figure out. Just as she could not figure out what young people found so fascinating about electronic gadgets, while she preferred reading a good book. Then, one day, it clicked. The very thing that made people so fascinated with I-Pods, cell phones, and other such devices was the same narcotizing factor that turned them off from realizing how badly they were being treated by companies. If someone could while away their free time playing the latest video game, then why would they care if a quarter or more of their paycheck went for basic health insurance that wouldn’t even cover certain illnesses that they may get, or if they had a recurrent condition. How little it took to lower people’s expectations, and demote what was once thought of as a ‘right’ to a mere ‘luxury’.
While her telecom was till one of the companies that could be classed as providing decent benefits, she noted that they refused to provide pens, paper, scrap paper, and often ran low on toilet paper and paper towels in the bathroom, even as they were making record quarterly profits. The CEO always whined about his company’s outrageous expenses in disability and healthcare, but never seemed to mention that his stock option bonuses, paid quarterly, were worth millions, even though the company floundered under his leadership. Still, there were worse places to work, and Kate had worked at them, and even if the telecom did routinely do things that were questionable on an ethical scale, and definitely do some things that were illegal. Kate resolved that as long as she never actively nor knowingly violated the law, she could live with the compromise. In a sense, she knew that this very malleability was why she was offered the managerial job, and not the New Yorker, who was a far better collector. Yet, she did not want to be a mere ‘puppet’ nor figurehead.
But, nowadays, companies that provided such were considered dinosaurs, and mocked for their lack of business acumen by Wall Street. Employees and their hard work were devalued, stripped and codified into units. They were just shy of being labeled with UPC bar codes, she felt, and she thought back to her days in high school, and reading books like 1984 and Brave New World. Had that actually come to pass, but with the even greater horror that no one even took note that it had? Had she just become a management cog in a faceless machine- part of the problem she knew plagued society at large? There were reps, on her team, that Kate knew were excellent with customers, retained much business, but by the modern metrics of sales per hour, and time spent on the phone, were considered liabilities, even though Kate knew their contributions were invaluable. She resisted the subtle and not so subtle pressures of the management forces above her to downgrade such employees in her reviews, and this sometimes got her a rebuke from upper management.
No matter how much she tried to explain the intangible value that such ‘old time’ ethics brought, the pimple faced kids who were now running most of the company simply could not understand. It was like trying to explain the penny wise but pound foolish IVR phone systems that the company used drove away customers. The management reply was that, since all the telecoms, and even non-telecom companies, used such systems, the consumer had no place else to go. Kate countered that that left a perfect opening for their company to brand itself as ‘the company that cares’, or ‘the company with a human face’, or some such easily marketable slogan that could boost the company’s standing in the industry. But most of the young managers were only obsessed with the transitory, the metrics by which their own paychecks were gauged, and the rest of the company could go to hell. Even her own paycheck was calculated by billable dollars in revenue that her team handled, not in actual dollars they brought in. Thus, she had an incentive to lie and ‘cook the books’ on a weekly basis. While Kate never did so, she knew that many of her fellow managers did, to ensure they made as much money as they could as long as they could, but Kate simply could not bring herself to lie. Not only that, but she knew that if the FCC or FTC ever started looking at things she did not want any personal liability coming her way.
Kate had been concerned with such ethics for the longest time. Little things affected her more than she cared to admit. One day, while going to the bathroom in the women’s restroom, she was in the process of defecating, when she noticed, in the corner of her stall, by one of the metal supports for the stall, there was a large brown insect lying on its back. It may have been a roach or a waterbug, she could not tell. What she could tell was that it was in its death throes. Perhaps it has eaten some strategically place poison, whose effects were only now being felt. That it had flipped itself upside down fascinated her, as she saw its translucent bottom twitch, and its slower and slower moving legs slowly open and close until, after a few minutes, and by the time she was ready to wipe herself clean, the sic little spindles had locused themselves shut, and down upon the body. From a distance, she blew a bit its way, but the creature was still. It was dead, but in the wince of a pause a chill ran through her, as she stood up, pulled up her clothing, and walked out toward the sink to wash her hands. Such moments always touched her too deeply.
Perhaps her sensitivities went all the back to her early childhood. She became obsessed with Vietnam after her father, who was shot down in a helicopter over one of the dozens of rivers in that country, had sent her a letter detailing the country’s beautiful landscapes and how the military was destroying it with chemicals like Agent Orange. There was that famous photograph of the naked little Vietnamese girl, running down a road, after being burned by napalm. It stuck in Kate’s mind, for the girl was about the same age as she was. Then, years later, she recalled when they built that memorial to the war in Washington. She wanted to visit it, put a piece of paper against its blackness, and trace the name of her father, but found that she could never do it. Something about that act would make it true, that her dad was really gone. Even to this day, in a part of her mind, daddy was still at the war, and would come home. It was silly, for she had been married, divorced, had kids of her own, and was now looking at the rest of her life as if the bulk of it was over. All she had was the future and taking care of her kids. There was not much in the future for her, so this made her past all the more powerful and cogent.
Yet, there was one more thing from her youth, and that damnable war, that she could never get over. While she never visited the Vietnam War Memorial, she did read up on the monument’s maker, Maya Lin, and was moved by that woman’s story. Then, she recalled a magazine article, many years after the fact, where the little naked napalmed girl was interviewed. She too had emigrated to the United States after the war. But, the incident that stuck the most in her head was the film, by NBC News, of the South Vietnamese general who shot a captured Vietcong in the head. The image on film was shattering, but even more devastating was the still photo by Eddie Adams that appeared in the newspapers afterwards. It was an Associated Press photo, and it was taken right at the second of impact, as the dying Vietcong’s face contorted as the bullet ripped through his skull. In the film, he would instantly fall to the ground, and a pool of blood would quickly form, but in the still photo the instant of his death, and contorted face, was permanently etched in the minds of millions, including Kate Topps.
For some reason, years after it occurred, Kate saw the photo again, in a history book, and decided to find out what the real story was behind the incident. In her research, she was saddened to learn that the general who had killed the man had died some years earlier, of cancer. Kate had dreamt of asking the man how he could do such a dreadful thing, but now that opportunity was gone. What was not gone was her quest for a reason. Yes, she knew of the Nazis, and the Soviet Gulags, and the Japanese war atrocities, and the tens of millions murdered under Mao Zedong, and the Killing Fields, and countless other atrocities and genocides from time immemorial. Death became an odd sort of hobby for Kate- she even studied serial killers from Jack the Ripper on. But that one dead Vietnamese man was different. He had a face. And that face was known worldwide. That made a big difference.
But, Kate wanted to know not about him, but about the man who killed him- the whys and wherefores. Was he an inhuman monster, so cold that he was willing to brazenly kill on camera without fear of consequences? Did dying of cancer act as some sort of slow retribution for that atrocity, many decades later? Kate was not a believer in such things, and all her years in business had inured her to the reality that evil things go on every day and their perpetrators are never punished. To believe otherwise is to invite dementia into one’s life. Yet, Kate came to realize that the great acts of evil do not occur in a void; they are the end results of countless small evils that help the larger evils occur in the first place. There had to be some larger context for such a brutal murder, and Kate was determined to find out why. Not for some great project on human death nor evil, but just so that she could sleep more easily, knowing that a small part of the cosmos was now more explicable to her.
She started going to her local library, and comparing notes with what she had gleaned about the incident online. Slowly, but inexorably, a pattern emerged, and the incident which initially had seemed so inexplicable came into focus. The murdered man had, himself, been a killer, who had helped wipe out the family of one of the general’s underlings. There was a motive for his act, and it was one that could be understood, even if not agreed with. To the rest of the world the general was a symbol of all that was evil in Indochina, on either side of the war. Yet, this was not really fair to the man. After ‘the incident’, he was shunned by the American military establishment, and even his own government. After the fall of Saigon, some years later, American forces refused to help him escape, but he got them out on a South Vietnamese plane. The more Kate learned about the man, whose name she found out was Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the less she felt he was a monster, and the more she could understand him, if not forgive him. This was because there had probably been another General Loan type, on the other side of the war, who felt just as justified in killing her father. But she knew that if she could understand why such a seemingly good, if not average, man could do what he did, then she could make better sense of that whole damnable war and why her father had died in it. She read of efforts to deport the general from the United States, after he emigrated, for many Left Wingers considered him a war criminal- on par with the Nazi’s worst, but when it got out in the press that he was an amputee, the efforts subsided, and he eventually opened up a pizzeria in northern Virginia, in Dale City.
Yet, by the time Kate had found all this information out, Loan had been dead for several years, she knew that she would have to make do with the lingering hates and doubts about the war as best she could. Then, not long after that realization, 9/11 occurred, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq followed, and as more and more American men and women were senselessly wounded and killed for no apparent reason, Kate started having dreams about Loan, where she would ask him questions of things, things that did not make sense only unless they were in the context of killing. She asked him of why there were no attacks on oil fields, while thousands of Iraqi civilians died in senseless attacks. Loan could only reply that things are always considered more valuable than people in wars, and all wars are about things. After treading lightly on larger issues, Kate finally got around to querying the man about himself. She was surprised to hear him answer that he was not a killer, and did not consider himself such, even though he had killed, and was one of the few persons ever in war to have been documented as doing such. Instead, he felt that his job was to help others, and if by killing evil people he helped others, so be it.
As he talked and talked, Kate felt herself growing more and more awake, until, her eyes popped open, and the nebulous field that she was speaking to the general in gave way to her own bedroom, and a midnight sweat. There was no longer the general, and oddly, for the first night in the longest time, there was no presence of her father, either. Yes, in noticing his absence she was conjuring him, but it was not in the visceral way that she always had- the kind which impelled her to seek reasons for his lack in her life in the first place. Instead, she just lay in bed, and listened to the sound of her own heart, not racing in the slightest. It was normal, contented, beating faintly and calmly as it had millions of times before. But the best part was that there was no one but Kate to notice this change, and, after all, she was the only one who could have appreciated it anyway.
Copyright C. 2008 Dan Schneider
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[…] Notoriety And What It Is-Dan SchneiderBut, the incident that stuck the most in her head was the film, by NBC News, of the South Vietnamese general who shot a captured Vietcong in the head. The image on film was shattering, but even more devastating was the still photo by … […]