Snow days in New York can be magical or hell on Earth. Every time a storm hits, the city is surprised anew and, without fail, more than two inches of accumulation stymies city services, delays schools and halts traffic in its tracks.
Winter Storm Zeus was all anyone could talk about as Ashley and Imogen were leaving the office later that night. Would the mayor call off school the night before or would they have to wait until the morning? Predictions varied depending on the meteorologist. The Weather Channel promised Manhattan would be buried beneath a foot of snow, whereas CNN reported a mere light dusting, nothing really to worry about.
Sixteen inches of powder blanketed the city by six thirty a.m. and it showed no signs of stopping. Parked cars perched like igloos on the sides of the street with nowhere to go. When Imogen opened her eyes, Johnny was already sitting cross-legged on the foot of her bed.
‘No school?’ he said, his blond curls spilling over onto his thick eyelashes.
‘What’s it look like outside, little man?’ Imogen said, pulling him into her body.
‘Gimme your phone,’ the little boy demanded. Imogen grasped toward the nightstand to retrieve it. He padded over to the window and expertly opened up the camera to take a picture, then padded back to climb up closer to her head. Alex let out a grand snore into his pillow next to them.
‘See, no school,’ Johnny said pointing at the piles of white coating their street.
Imogen nodded in agreement. ‘Yes, no school. Probably no work either.’ She checked her email. Nothing new. No word on whether the offices would be closed, but last time a snowstorm like this had hit, three years ago, Robert Mannering Corp. closed their entire office for three days. At the end of the day, it was up to her. She didn’t want employees out in this kind of mess, rushing to get in, possibly driving in hazardous conditions or getting stuck in a crippled public transit system. They worked online now. Wasn’t the beauty of the Internet supposed to be that anyone could work from anywhere? After she and Ashley returned to the office the night before they had gone through all of Mack’s pictures and agreed they would make an amazing feature, but it wasn’t set to run for a few weeks. They had time.
Imogen sat up in bed and straightened her back against the headboard, pulling Johnny into her lap.
From: Imogen Tate (ITate@Glossy.com)
To: GlossyStaff@Glossy.com
Subject: Snow Day
The gods have decided to grant us a snow day. Work from home today. Obviously check in with your direct supervisors ASAP and make sure that you are meeting all of your regular deadlines, but right now it’s safer for everyone to stay put.
Keep warm and dry.
xx
Imogen
Alex let out a groan when she nudged him. Johnny ruffled his father’s hair.
‘Daaaaaaaady, is time to wake up!’ their son’s voice boomed.
Imogen leaned in to brush her lips against Alex’s scratchy cheek. ‘You might want to check in to see if the courts are going to be open today.’ Her husband moaned a little again and then rolled right on top of Johnny, unleashing a torrent of tickles that made the little boy wail with laughter. He expertly and modestly wrapped the sheet around his middle like a toga as he strode over to the window.
‘Nothing in this city is going to be open today,’ Alex remarked.
Johnny leaped up and down.
‘We should make pancakes.’ His tiny cheeks flushed with excitement. ‘We should definitely make some chocolate chip pancakes!!!’
‘Beignets,’ Imogen said, feeling inspired and having a sudden, mouthwatering urge for the comforting, powdered sugar-coated New Orleans-style doughnut. ‘I’ll make us some beignets.’ Her husband glanced at her with a healthy dose of skepticism, but smartly kept his mouth shut.
There was no way Tilly could make it downtown from her apartment on the Upper West Side. The snow continued to blow in drifts down Jane Street and up against the front door. Imogen could see some resolute neighbors, the ones with the kinds of jobs where a snow day would never be an option, bundled against the ice and the wind, fighting for each footstep as they slogged to reach the subway. No plows had reached the West Village and not even the most dogged taxi would make it down the road.
A few emails trickled in over the next six hours, but nothing earth-shattering. It seemed that everyone had taken her advice to have a lazy day. The content producers could obviously still post from home. It was nice to be able to give the girls a break.
Leaving Alex to do his own work remotely for a few hours, Imogen walked the kids over to Washington Square Park, where a giant snowball fight was in progress. At the far end of the park some older kids had built some of the biggest snowmen that Imogen had ever seen. Still, the snow was coming down so hard, both of her children lasted only thirty minutes outside before they begged to go back into their warm house for hot chocolate.
For a moment, walking home, with one child’s hand in each of hers, Imogen was lost in the contentment of it all, dreaming about her life as a stay-at-home mom. She quickly dismissed the notion. This was nothing like what her life would be like. If she didn’t work, both of her kids would be in school all day and she would be bored silly.
Snowflakes caught in her eyelashes, giving everything a fine layer of shimmery sequins. A deliveryman passed them on foot, his head hung low, his weatherproof poncho flapping in the wind as he dangled six bags, three in each hand, like the scales of justice. His gait was at least twice as fast as theirs, determined to reach his destination while the food was still warm. It reminded Imogen that some people didn’t have a choice about going to work and that it was a blessing to be able to work from home when it was like this outside.
As the kids changed, Imogen signed into the TECHBITCH page.
My boss has an MBA, but no real work experience. Sometimes I think he was actually created in a lab … like a cyborg.
The other day we got $50 million in funding and the next morning pictures turned up on the Internet of our CEO rolling around naked in the money. I can barely pay my rent.
Does anyone post things about their jobs on Glassdoor.com?
I LOVE Glassdoor almost as much as I love this site!!!!!
What is Glassdoor.com? Imogen clicked the link. It looked like a place where companies could post help wanted ads for jobs. As she poked around she saw that employees could also post reviews of the places that they worked. She entered Glossy into the search box. Nothing appeared. Then she entered Glossy.com. The rating system was based on stars. Out of five stars Glossy.com received an average of two, with twenty-five reviews. The first one Imogen read gave it only one star. The headline was: When Mean Girls Grow Up, They Work Here.
Pros – Lovely location in midtown Manhattan in the very fancy Robert Mannering Corp. office tower.
Healthy snacks provided (also some not-so-healthy snacks
).
Cons – Crazy hours
Very cliquey, like high school.
Does not act like a publishing company.
Editorial director frowns if you eat the ‘unhealthy’ snacks and makes you go to Spirit Cycle with her. Someone was fired for not going to Spirit Cycle with her. I mean SERIOUSLY!????? Who wants to go to Spirit Cycle with their boss?
It’s hard to get work done when the girl next to you is crying all the time.
Horrible office morale.
Advice to Senior Management – Management needs to learn to treat people like human beings. We aren’t your worker drones. Maybe don’t go on a juice cleanse if it makes you so mean you fire people.
No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I’m not optimistic about the outlook for this company.
And another one: A Lady Techie’s Worst NIGHTMARE
Pros – As if!
Wait, sorry. There are good places to eat lunch by the office.
Cons – There’s absolutely no innovation in the technology here. It’s all about mimicking website designs and functionality from other websites.
The tech team is looking to jump ship. Someone in management (why hide it on here, the Editorial Director) actually told me I could benefit from a juice cleanse, then she started calling me the Tubby Techie … to my face.
The same Editorial Director is always asking the product team (ME) for people’s passwords so she can fuck with their email, their accounts, their documents and their social media. SHE LIKES TO PLAY GOD! She is terrifying. When I said no, she said she would fire me. I think she got someone else to do it.
Advice to Senior Management – STOP SENDING US SEXY SELFIES OF YOURSELF. YOU KNOW WHO YOUR ARE. Also, it’s bad for the company when you’re in the press for all the wrong reasons. Keep your personal life personal – not in the public spotlight – although you pretend you don’t like it … it’s obvious you do.
One more: THE JOB from HELLLLL!!!!!
Pros – Maybe I’ll get hired by Vogue after this? Working with Imogen Tate is wonderful.
Cons – My boss is making her staff be in her wedding because she has no friends. It is so awkward. Too bad Imogen Tate won’t be working there much longer.
Advice to Senior Management – Please just let us do our jobs. PLEASE!!!! Can someone help me get a contact at Vogue?
The other reviews were more of the same. One mentioned Eve specifically, calling her the Cruella de Vil of e-Commerce. ‘We are all her puppies, expected to sit, stay and shit at her bidding.’
Imogen wouldn’t be there much longer? What the hell. What did that disgruntled employee know? Who was that disgruntled employee anyway? For a second Imogen wondered if it could possibly be Ashley.
Her iPhone began vibrating on the tabletop with a blocked number.
‘What the hell, Imogen?’ spat a livid woman’s voice on the other end of the line.
‘I’m sorry. To whom am I speaking?’
‘It’s Alice.’ Why was Alice Hobbs screaming at me?
‘Alice, darling. Wonderful to hear from you. What on Earth is wrong?’
‘I know we lost the photographs I took on my phone for you yesterday and I am delighted that my assistant saved the day, but putting his pictures on the website for the shoot without crediting me when I spent weeks with you planning the concept, directing the shoot and setting up the majority of the photos that you used is just shitty. It’s really shitty. Beyond getting the credit … I wasn’t even given a heads-up that anything would go online today. I assumed I would have some say in the photo selection process and the retouching and postproduction. What kind of an operation are you running over there?’
Imogen scrambled for some device that would get her on the Internet. She tried pantomiming that she needed a laptop to Alex and the kids over on the couch, but they raised their hands in confusion and then just waved at her. Finally she spotted an iPad lying on the floor and grabbed it. Out of juice.
‘Alice, darling. Please hold on just one second.’
Imogen ran downstairs to grab the laptop, which took its sweet time whirring to life.
Imogen could hear Alice release a long sigh from the other end of the phone. ‘I thought that we had a certain level of both trust and professional courtesy. I’ve never, in all of my work with magazines, with websites, with commercial brands, been blindsided like this.’ Why was it taking the website so long to load?
‘Imogen, are you there?’
‘I’m right here, Alice.’
Imogen gasped. Oh shit. Alice was right. Who posted the pictures? There it was, the main splashy story on the first page of Glossy.com .
IT’S TECH, BITCH! screamed the headline. ‘Photos taken by Mack Schwartz,’ read the byline. It was really just a gallery of the photos overlaid with the BUY IT NOW! graphics. That wasn’t what they had planned. The whole point of doing the shoot was to turn it into a beautifully laid out aspirational spread. These weren’t even retouched.
Imogen clicked through.
‘You could have given me some kind of warning.’
‘Alice, I’m so sorry. This is a mistake. I never approved any of this. I swear to you, I never would have done this without talking to you. Let me get to the bottom of this?’
‘You’re supposed to be the editor in chief. That’s why I signed on to do this project in the first place. You think I agree to work with every blogger on the street? If you don’t have control over this, what do you have control over?’
Imogen went to interrupt her, but realized she didn’t have an answer.
‘I’m sorry, Alice.’
‘Kill it. Issue a correction. Make sure my check is in the mail and make it out to me and not my assistant.’ The phone went dead. Imogen tried to figure out what to do next. Who was posting these pictures? Who had access to them? Ashley had them. She wouldn’t have posted them without speaking to her.
Who was in the office anyway?
She dialed Ashley. As the phone rang Imogen sank down onto the hardwood floor of the downstairs family room. They renovated this basement two years earlier and it was now the most lived-in room in the whole house besides the kitchen. Imogen gazed over at the bookshelves stuffed with children’s books, young adult books and family photos.
After five rings it went to Ashley’s voicemail. ‘Heya. It’s Ash. Are you seriously leaving me a message right now? You’re so old-school. Text me if ya want to hear back from me.’
Imogen stood and began pacing across the sitting room, trying to work out what to do. Should she just log on and try her hand at removing the photos from the site altogether? Alex, finally finished with his own work, called out to her: ‘Babe, are you in for a game of Monopoly?’
‘Start without me.’
She was about to dial Eve when her phone rang. Ashley’s photo popped up on the phone. A selfie, her blue eyes wide and head cocked slightly to the side. How did that get there? Ashley must have programmed it herself.
‘Hi, Ashley. I was just trying you.’
The girl’s voice was muffled, as though she were holding her hand over the mouthpiece.
‘I saw. That’s why I am calling you back. What’s up?’
‘Where are you? I can barely hear you. Can you talk louder?’
‘I’m at Eve’s with everyone else.’
‘With who else?’
‘With the whole office.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Eve told us that we all had to come to her place to work from there because of the snow.’
‘I didn’t hear about that.’
‘She told us not to say anything to you. She said you probably had to take care of your kids so it wasn’t worth it for us to bother you.’
‘How did you all get there? Everything is shut down today.’
‘Most of us walked. Sabine’s dad has a big SUV, so he let her take that out and she picked up some people on the Upper East Side, but they ran into a snowbank so they got here real late.’
Imogen didn’t know what to say. There was no way that Eve was being kind and giving her a snow day with her children. She wanted to make a fool of her for not being there working with everyone else.
‘I emailed the staff this morning. Did you get it?’
‘Eve wrote back to all of us two minutes after you did and told us to ignore it and find a way to her apartment. She said’ – Ashley let her voice slip into Eve’s nasally one – ‘we can’t let productivity slip just because of a few flurries.’
Furious didn’t begin to describe the way Imogen was feeling, but she tried to shelve it for a few minutes to get to the bottom of what happened with the photo shoot.
‘Ashley, why is the photo shoot online?’
The girl’s voice rose a little before she caught herself and realized she was meant to be whispering. ‘Ugh. Yeah. I know it sucks. Eve made me post it this morning.’
‘What?’
‘Eve said we needed original content up today since everyone on the East Coast is stuck home in the snow. We are running snow-day specials and getting heaps of people to buy from it. That’s good at least, right?’
‘I organized that shoot. I was meant to have editorial approval. Alice wanted to retouch the photos. It was in her contract. They weren’t ready to be published.’
Now Ashley sounded confused and slightly defensive. ‘Eve gave us approval. The two of you are, like, the same, right? If she tells us we can do something, then it’s okay.’
‘Ashley, we are not at all the same. I worked hard on that shoot. You know that. You worked hard with me and the way it looks on the site is not what we planned. My relationship – and Glossy.com’s – with Alice is now over.’
‘Shit. Imogen, I need to go. Eve is screaming about something.’ She lowered her voice even more. ‘She says we are going to have a snowed-in pajama party here. I don’t think she’s letting any of us go home … not that we could get home if we wanted to …’
The line went dead.
What good would it do to email Eve now? The entire office was there, probably sprawled across the floor of her one-bedroom apartment. Imogen would look foolish calling over there now.
She stared at the phone.
Too embarrassed to call Bridgett or Massimo, she scrolled down through her contacts and finally landed on R. She’d never made an emergency call to Ron before. It rang through to voice mail. What was the protocol for this? Did she leave a message? When did people just stop picking up their phones?
Still sitting cross-legged on the floor, Imogen received a text from the therapist.
>>>>Hold on. I’m going to Skype you.<<<<
She paused before writing back.
>>>>Ok.<<<<
He replied with a smiley face emoticon. Skype therapy? Of course. Why not?
She added a smiley face to show she wasn’t in truly dire straits. People in truly dire situations didn’t use emoticons.
Her cell phone flashed. She accepted the call and her therapist’s beard loomed large on the screen.
‘Imogen? What did you want to talk about?’ It was the first time she’d tried to use the video function on her phone. She didn’t know where to put the device. Farther away looked better, so she stretched her arm as far from her body as it would go. Ron had no such compunction about how he appeared. She could see directly up both his nostrils.
‘I’m so sorry, Ron. You must think I’m a complete nut for calling you like this.’
‘Imogen. My business is nuts.’
‘Fair point.’ She laughed. ‘It’s just … I’m at a breaking point. I don’t know how much longer I can take her games and bullshit, Ron.’
‘It sounds so stupid to explain it. It sounds like some juvenile middle school prank, but that’s what my life has come to.’ She went on to tell Ron all about the snow day and how Eve had the whole staff, except her, over at her house.
Ron paused for a moment before replying very diplomatically, ‘Do you think there was any chance, any chance at all, that Eve actually thought, “Hey, Imogen has two kids at home, maybe she does need the day off … maybe I don’t need to bother her.”’
That couldn’t be true. If it had been, Eve wouldn’t have made the decision unilaterally. She would have offered Imogen the chance to work with the rest of the team or to stay home with her kids. Eve had the staff come to her house and left Imogen out specifically to undermine her. Eve was a clever girl who knew exactly what she was doing when she posted that photo shoot. She knew it would ruin Imogen’s relationship with Alice. Eve had dealt with enough Alice Hobbs photo shoots when she had been Imogen’s assistant to know what the photographer was like.
Ron’s arm must have been getting tired because the screen was starting to waver and fall. Imogen could see a giant patch of his white skin.
‘Jesus, Ron, are you wearing clothes?’
‘No, Imogen. I’m not. I’m upstate at this wonderful naked retreat. It’s incredibly freeing. I actually think it’s something you could possibly benefit from.’
‘Are you mad, Ron? I don’t want to go to a naked retreat. Keep the phone at eye level, please.’
‘Of course. Sorry about that,’ Ron continued. ‘You need to make a choice. Is this what you really want to be doing? You’re a woman who loves a challenge. You want to win, but you’re also a woman getting over cancer and a mom with two young kids and a wife to a husband with an incredibly stressful job. Do you want to kill yourself every day working with this girl you hate?’
She thought about it. Right now, the future of magazines was like a road that ended at a sheer cliff with a drop so steep Imogen couldn’t see to the bottom. But she believed she had no discernible skills outside of putting a magazine together.
‘Ron, are you saying this to me as my shrink or my psychic? Because if you know, like you actually know, something important about my future, now would be the time to tell me.’
‘I’m saying it to you as a friend. I am taking off my shrink hat and my psychic hat. Evaluate if this job is still worth it to you. Do you need it?’
Imogen’s voice grew small. ‘I’m scared.’
‘Scared of what?’
‘Scared that no one will ever call again. Scared I’m over.’
‘I can’t tell you what to do, Imogen, but I will ask you this: Do you want every day to be like this?’
She grew quiet again.
‘Life is funny, you know. It isn’t a running text. It has chapters. You might have a very different ending than the one you imagined.’
‘I know. I need to think.’
‘Okay. You know you can Skype me anytime. I’m here for you.’ With no clothes on, Imogen thought.
‘I know, Ron.’
She made an air kiss at the screen to say good-bye and sank into the cushions of the couch and into the silence. A vase full of deli roses purchased earlier in the week by Tilly and Annabel sat on the low coffee table in front of her. About four days old, the peach roses were beginning to brown around the edges and wilt in the middle. Without thinking about it, Imogen held up her phone to snap a picture.
Imogen posted it to Instagram. Why should you only post happy things to social media? Where was the Instagram for the sadness? ‘Dying rose’ was her caption.
The Monopoly game was in progress when she returned, but she didn’t have it in her to play.
‘I’m going to have to lie down for a disco nap before dinner.’ Annabel had hotels on both Boardwalk and Park Place. Johnny controlled all four of the railroads. They were so intent the three of them barely raised their heads.
She lay on the bed on her back, trying to employ all of Ron’s meditation tricks. Sending awareness down to her toes and imagining them relaxing. Moving all the way up her legs. She tried to let her thoughts float away on a cloud. Tried counting backward from one hundred. Tried breathing in for ten seconds and out for twelve. The hamster wheel in her mind kept turning.
She wasn’t sure how long she did the relaxation exercises before she actually fell asleep. She must have rolled from her back onto her side because she didn’t wake up until she felt Alex curling behind her.
‘Is it time for dinner?’
‘Not yet. The kids went back out to play in the snow for an hour or so.’
Her body remained rigid and tense. Alex moved his hand up to her neck to rub away the tension.
‘Baby, what’s wrong? What were all those phone calls? What did the Wicked Witch of the Lower East Side do now?’
That made Imogen smile just a little. They had started calling Eve the Wicked Witch of the Lower East Side when a mutual friend informed them she moved into the luxury high-rise above the Whole Foods on Houston Street between Bowery and Chrystie. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg supposedly kept a loft there, which is what made Eve so keen on it in the first place. Eve loved little more than proximity to fame.
‘Eve demanded that the staff come to work at her house today and didn’t tell me about it.’ Every time the words came out of her mouth, Imogen felt more and more immature. Thankfully her husband chose to take the matter seriously.
‘Have you spoken to anyone about this? Have you talked to HR? Have you gone to Worthington? Her behavior is out of hand.’
‘What can I say to them? Eve ordered everyone over to her house except for me. Come on, Alex. I’m not that petty.’
‘Not just that … even though I think there are serious legal issues involved when a boss forces their employees to come to their home. I am talking about the firings, the verbal abuse in the office. All of it. Someone else besides you needs to step in and deal with it.’
Imogen didn’t want to talk to Worthington about it. Doing that would be admitting defeat.
She rolled over to face him.
‘I have to.’ Her husband put both of his hands on her cheeks.
‘Why do you have to?’
Oh god, was he really going to make her say it? It was demeaning for her to say it. She loved him so much that she hated throwing this in his face.
Alex just knew. ‘You don’t need to be the breadwinner, Im.’
‘I do.’
‘You don’t.’
She squeezed her eyes shut in frustration at her idealistic husband.
‘Open your eyes, Imogen.’ She couldn’t. ‘I’m serious. Open them,’ he said.
‘There are twenty things we can change, not tomorrow, but things we can change about how we live so that you don’t need to make your big-time editor salary anymore. We can sell this house and move into an apartment … like everyone else in this city. I can go work at a big law firm. The kids can go to public school. We could move somewhere else entirely. We aren’t stuck. We’re well-educated people with great careers behind us. Nothing is more important to me than this family. We’ll find a way to make our lives work whether you have this job or not.’
Imogen didn’t know what to say. She knew Alex would support her, but she certainly hadn’t expected this.
They had good intentions to make love that night. And yet, once again, exhaustion, physical and emotional, overcame them both and, as usual, they chose delirious sleep over married sex.
Ashley learned fairly early on working for Eve that there was a direct correlation between how many flattering Instagram photos you posted of her and how much she liked you. And so, Ashley made it a best practice to post at least two well-filtered shots of her boss each and every day, always with flattering hashtags (#HauteBoss, #CuteorCutest?). This made her immune to much of Eve’s regular ire. Eve’s better side was her right and so during the snow day she posted pics of Eve from the right making guacamole in her sweats and pretending to meditate on her snowy balcony, her legs crossed in the snow, thumb and forefinger purposefully balanced on her knees.
‘Pissed’ wasn’t the right word; she just felt like she was being used as a pawn in Eve’s grudge match against Imogen and that was the worst. She got shitty service at Eve’s creepy apartment. Saying she needed privacy, Eve reluctantly pointed her toward a full bathroom off her bedroom, which was all white on white, like a room in a mental hospital, and it immediately became clear why Eve hadn’t been letting the women into the room.
The bathroom was small but clean and the stark white of the walls made the yellow Post-it notes stuck all around the bathroom surface stick out all the more. Written in Eve’s measured hand were reminders, most obviously meant for her to read to herself in the mornings: ‘Be nice.’ ‘Say thank you.’ ‘Be polite.’ ‘Remember to smile.’ ‘Make eye contact.’ They were instructions for how a sociopath should behave to seem human. Beneath them, in hot pink lipstick, cursive letters read: ‘You deserve everything!’