AT ONE motion picture studio (my favorite poor, beleaguered example of how not to run a company), one of the executives used to send his teen-age children and a pack of playmates to the studio commissary for lunch on Saturday; then movies would be run for the moppets in Projection Room A. These outings involved roughly six employees on golden hours, but management never complained. That’s the way the movie mogulled, and that’s just one example of the pleasurable extras some companies allow top management.
I think a degree of trickery or misrepresentation or even outright thievery is “expected,” which is almost to say “proper,” on lower levels too. One girl I know was telephoned by the comptroller about an item on her expense account listed as “$43.84—marble-base Empire lamp for office.” Employees were not allowed to buy furniture, but the comp said, “Look, honey, forty-three bucks for a fancy doo-dad lamp we aren’t paying this week. Put it down as a couple of extra lunches and cocktail dates.”
High-level or low-level, I sincerely believe that most companies are not stolen blind. They are stolen with their eyes wide open.
This is quite, quite horrible! If you don’t overreach a litde bit, you are probably a silly and a sucker—yet stealing is stealing. If you say that the lunch cost ten-seventy-five when it actually cost five-fifty you are lying, and lying is bad for you. When you operate like a South American dictator, it hurts inside, and that takes some of the fun out of it. Yes it does! Even the most outrageous grafters say they get this funny little twinge near the kidney every time they go too far. (It doesn’t stop them. It just pains them.) The thing to do, I think, is work out a code of ethics you can live with. (Never mind what the company can live with. They can five with just about anything, I’ve decided. They’re miserable paranoids about raises and indulgent sugar daddies about expenses.)
When you have arrived at a professional level which allows an expense account at all, I think most managements permit it to be stretchable. In other words, they expect you to pad a little. It’s a ghastly state of affairs but a true one.
When certain executives seem to be getting away with murder—Christian Diors for the wives, trips to Jamaica for the mothers-in-law, chinchilla for the mistresses—I think the company is usually collaborating. Supplying super-luxuries may be a company’s way of giving an executive more money without his having to pay taxes on it. (Don’t bother to get in touch with me, Internal Revenue Service. I’ll never tell which companies!)
I think people who profiteer most outrageously (without management sanction) are sick, of course, and expense account cheating is only one of the symptoms. The kindest thing you can say of them is that they’re children . . . with an overweening need to be taken care of. Sometimes they fit the Robin Hood syndrome—lifting from the rich to help the poor. One chap I know smuggled his less-fortunate boy friend to Phoenix for a week as excess luggage and miscellaneous telegrams.
I can’t impose my own expense account code on you, of course (I’ve got enough on my conscience); but I’m going to tell you what it is, because I believe this code is more or less subscribed to by many “reasonably honest” people.
As I’ve broken it down, and already mentioned in terms of travel, there are two ways to profit (we won’t use that distressing word “cheat” again) on an expense account. One is to live it up and have the company pay. The other is to say you lived it up, have the company pay and pocket the money.
I used to favor the latter method. What could be smarter than steering a docile client into a health-food kitchen for marrow-bone sandwiches and putting in a tab for eighteen dollars at Le Chauveron. (Or skipping dinner entirely with the suggestion you both have a big bowl of corn flakes when you get to your respective homes, then putting in a bill.) Then I married somebody of a different fiscal faith, and he said, “Putting down a grassburger as a steak dinner is not only immoral, it is unthinkable! Whatever lavish meal you provide for a bona fide client is okay because your company is getting the benefit of the client’s good will. But when you drag the client to a fourth-rate joint or don’t feed him at all in order to pocket the money, you are sinking pretty deeply into the mire.”
Very well, my revised expense account moral code (and switching over was no hardship really—the grassburgers were awfully grassy) is: Entertain whomever your company will let you entertain and as lavishly as they will allow, but do what you said you did and with the real person. To Le Pavilion (that’s a verb) with someone not your client (or whatever makes him a legitimate business expense) is off-limits. As for exaggerating what you actually spent and pocketing the difference—though I often wonder how you can exaggerate a New York restaurant tab—that’s okay if you only up the bill two or three dollars. No trying to work in a new beaded evening bag from just having had cocktails. (Isn’t it handy how my moral code dovetails exactly with what you can get away with!)
Now, what about areas other than food—putting in for theater tickets when you actually saw a movie, charging for parking when you found a place on the street, collecting for a gift you kept yourself? I’ve done all those mangy things in my past, but I do think they’re mangy. (Nothing is more sanctimonious than a reformed criminal.)
Though we know there is unbelievable cheating and stealing in companies, I think a “nice” girl knows where to draw the line. I believe it’s possible for her to “profit” in only the mildest way to make life more gala without developing into a Ma Barker. A secretary I know puts it this way: “When I worked for (and she named a famous man) in his suite at the Waldorf Towers, our hotel bill was several thousand dollars a week. I never thought twice about ordering up an extra bottle of Scotch for my personal use when we were ordering a case of bourbon. I could just as well have had them send up a sixty-dollar bottle of Ma Griffe while I was at it because I okayed the bills, but I wouldn’t have dreamed of it. That would have been stealing!”
In the actual making out of an expense account, I have just two suggestions: 1) Don’t wait too long after the event or trip. You won’t be able to remember what you did with the money, let alone make it sound convincing. 2) Make out everything in uneven numbers. Put down $5 for lunch, $10 for dinner and $2.50 for cab, and you’re likely to get the whole thing back in your lap. Items listed in $4.87’s, $11.02’s and $2.76’s will usually go unquestioned.
In taking a man to lunch, I suggest you not reach for the check with your limp little arm in his presence—unless you never had any intention of paying. Even if he’s deserving, there’s just hardly a man alive who feels comfortable while a lady hassles with money or even signs the check. Pick a restaurant in which to do your entertaining, tell the maître d’ you will often have men guests but don’t ever wish to pay at the table. Say you’ll rendezvous at the cashier’s just before luncheon is over, return later in the afternoon to pay or, better still, have them mail the bill, adding generous tips all around.
Elizabeth McGibbons says in her book, Manners in Business: “Often the most lenient management has to say, no personal calls except in an emergency.’ When this edict is put forth, it is usually because the youngest employees have been making dates on the phone, and the married women have been shopping, running their homes and often their children via the office phone.”
Can you imagine? Making dates on the phone! And taking care of household business from the office! Must be some kind of kooks!
Listen, if Miss McGibbons really knows managements that have no-personal-phone-call edicts, I think in the interests of the work output she ought to print the list so we telephoners can give them a wide berth. It seems to me that making full use of the company telephone is the only way a girl can really concentrate on her job. If she has to run down to the drugstore to make or receive personal calls, she’ll never get anything done!
The bills do run up, I’m sure. Since direct dialing has come in, I even feel a twinge of pity for the poor company. You see these pitiful little notes come around saying, ‘Will whoever placed the fourteen calls to Loganberry 7-3462 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, please report to the accounting department at oncer You know very well they have about as much chance of getting a confession as trying to get a senator-elect to admit he stuffed the ballot box.
Before you excuse yourself to go make your nightly call to Calcutta, however, I will remind you that some companies are not above having a representative call up the Wilkes-Barre number and ask questions until they find out whose relatives live there. (For the cost of the calls they can even fly a representative in to Wilkes-Barre.) Other companies place a “monitor” on each phone, some sort of device that causes a deafening siren wail when you dial outside the local area. I think this is the best honor system. If your company hasn’t cracked down yet and you want a litde trellis of morality to climb by, I would say normal toll calls are okay, long distance is out!
Sending out personal deliveries by company messenger service should be reserved for emergencies. (The fish people are outside your apartment with eight live Maine lobsters, and you forgot to leave the key under the mat.)
What about company stamps on personal mail? This is probably academic in most cases, because you’ve no more chance of getting into the mailroom unattended than of slipping into Fort Knox with a basket. I do know one darling firm that tacks a sign on its mailroom door—”Stamps Are In—Plan Your Theft Early”—but to my knowledge they’re unique. Maybe companies would be more lenient if it weren’t for our tendency to take the entire yardstick when given an inch. (I’m beginning to sound like Miss McGibbons.) Haven’t you noticed, though, when girls get to mail letters free, you rarely see a letter addressed to Maxwell, Kansas, Route 2, that isn’t slathered with three or four airmails and a special delivery? How would you feel if they were your stamps?
I do have this slim advice about packages. If you have a personal package to mail that weighs at least eight pounds, bring about thirty-five cents in nickels, dimes and pennies to the mailroom. Say worriedly, “Chuck, dear, this is all the change I have; please bill me.” Usually you won’t get the bill.
What about out and out stealing? A recent article in the New York World Telegram and Sun said, “Management consultants estimate a fourteen-million-dollar daily loss by business through ‘shrinkage and shortage’ or internal loss of money and merchandise.” Kind of scary, huh? I’m not surprised, though. I’ve seen everything lifted in my time from bookends to Muzak installations. Two friends managed to get a very expensive desk out of the Music Corporation of America’s Beverly Hills offices in broad daylight a few years ago, and I mean the Brink’s and British train robbery people could have taken notes.
I don’t want to let any of us off the hook, but I think an employer’s attitude can sometimes be a girl’s ruination. The stingy president of a vitamin company drove one exemplary secretary I know right into a life of crime. In addition to his salary and profits, this joker had so many stock dividends flowing in that he never had to write a check. Whatever specific amount he needed—$11.34, $38.17, $6.09—he would just poke around in his desk drawer and come up with a dividend check for almost that exact amount. What he never poked around and came up with was his own cigarettes. He bummed from Miss Blue until she was sick to death of it and finally, in total disgust, she took home several pounds of amino acid.
I never thought I’d tell you this, but once a blabbermouth . . .
At the job I went to at double my previous salary, the day of reckoning came in two years. (Remember I said not to think that when you had made the deal of the century, you’d heard the last of it.) The office manager called me in one day and said, “Helen, love, we’re going to have to cut your salary by a third. It doesn’t have anything to do with your work (well, I should think not!), but what you make is really terribly out of line. We’re in a bit of trouble on the West Coast, and we have to cut expenses. We know your husband can support you and all that.”
‘What if I don’t agree to the cut?” I asked, fighting the tears and a very strong death wish for us both.
“I’m afraid it’s take it or leave it,” he said.
I thought it over overnight and decided to stay. There weren’t that many good copywriting jobs in Los Angeles even at my reduced salary. It was true that David and I didn’t need my income to live on. I even felt a twitch of sympathy for the company, so I continued to work hard and wasn’t even terribly miffed with anybody. Then one day by accident (she accidentally left it on top of her desk; I accidentally waited for her to leave and snatched it up!) I saw another copywriter’s salary check. She was making almost as much as my uncut salary. I knew this girl had always had an important friend at court, but I marched to the front office and demanded my original salary be restored. They said they couldn’t manage just then but would keep working at it. I didn’t stomp out—for the original reasons plus the fact that I was now writing a book and didn’t want to start a new job at the same time—but I began to burn, slowly, quietly and around the clock.
One day I took home four boxes of carbon paper, five packages of yellow second sheets and ten stenographer’s notebooks. When I got them in the house, David said, “What are you planning to do, open a stationery store?”
“No, I have a little work to do tonight,” I explained.
The following week when I arrived home with a quart of type cleaner, four boxes of stencils and three hundred file folders, David marched me back to the garage for my trouble. “Look, dear,” he said, “if you steal ten dollars worth of supplies every working day for the next two years, it won’t make up for your salary cut. (You see, he’d figured it out!) Either be a good girl or leave the company.”
I stayed and cut down to Lindy ballpoint pens and erasers. But I never forgave that place, although my salary was finally reinstated.
I’d just better say that as far as stealing is concerned, Tess Trueheart, you’re on your own! I think if I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t steal at all. My outright thefts in twenty-one years (excluding expense accounts, and we’ve closed that subject) probably didn’t amount to more than fourteen dollars—mouse stuff to a real carpetbagger, ultimate corruption to a goodskin. Anyway, I wish this minute I could just write a check and get it off my conscience.
But enough of fringe benefits—honest, semi-honest or outright larcenous. It’s now time to take out our curlers, put on our sexiest dress and find out what happens when lightning strikes in the office.