THE CULT OF NORM

As it turned out, moving from world of all-night study sessions to the world of 8-to-5 workdays wasn't nearly as traumatic as I thought it would be.

I don't know whether it was the sudden sense of discipline, or whether I was just thankful to have a job, but the sheer normalcy of showing up at the same place each morning, sitting at the same desk for nine hours and picking up the same paycheck every Friday felt like a relief, at first. Of course, I would later regret how easily I allowed myself to slide into this state of inertia, but for those first few months at least I was strangely satisfied by the sudden lack of a horizon in my life.

As jobs went, this one had about all the glamour of, well, working as a inside sales representative for AIN Plastics, which is essentially what I was doing. The company has changed ownership hands a few times over the last decade. That, in itself, should provide first hint of what it was like to work there. I don't know about Dustin Hoffman and the 1960s, -- and believe you me, I heard plenty of Graduate jokes from friends and family -- but selling plastics is a tough, cut-rate commodity business. Even in the early 1990s, it ranked somewhere in between selling cars and receiving unemployment insurance in terms of growth potential and upward mobility.

It would be easy for me to dismiss the nine months I put in at AIN Plastics as a mistake. I've always felt that my career, in retrospect, has followed a fairly straight course -- except for that first job at AIN. Still, like a first girlfriend, your first full-time job always carries a certain added emotional significance. If it isn't the standard against all which all future jobs are measured, it's probably the one that fucked you up so bad that you haven't been normal since.

Personally, I think AIN Plastics falls into both categories. In a weird Ward Cleaver kind of way I loved working there. I loved the fact that I was actually making a living. I loved the feeling that came with closing a sale. Psychologically, it was like acing a test and convincing a girl to pull her top off at the same time. Best of all, I loved how evil I could be in pursuit of the sale. As far as I was concerned, customers fell into two discrete categories: TWA's -- time wasting assholes -- and potential orders. As much as I tried to shun the former, I had even less empathy for the latter. To me, they were like patients in a hospital. Sure, they paid my salary, but that only made me resent them more.

Such sentiments, however, only served to conceal the growing erosion of self-esteem. In truth , I was playing completely against type. Anybody who knew my record prior to working at AIN Plastics always got a good chuckle out of hearing me describe my work.

"You? In sales?" was the typical response. Even people who had only known me for ten minutes would sort of cock their heads and look at me in a quizzical fashion, as if I'd just told them I wasn't really a white kid from the East Bay but an Eskimo shaman who'd just come in off the ice. When this happened, I would just smile and rattle off a few of the items I used to sell: Acrylic sheet, teflon rod, industrial grade adhesives and fifty cent plastic trinkets. "If it's made out of plastic, I sell it," I would say, proudly.

To tell you the truth, I still get plenty of good mileage out of that line -- although now I have to say it in the past tense. Since leaving AIN, I've learned that sometimes the best jobs aren't the ones that pay you the most or add the most bullet points to your resume but the ones that give you enough comic material to last the rest of your life.

Working for AIN Plastics was just such a job.

Simply put, AIN Plastics was the first encounter I'd ever had with a living, breathing cult. The Cult of Norm, I called it. I used to laugh when I said it. Little did I know, but I would spend the next three years of my life trying to reverse its negative effects on my soul.

Norm, for those of you who've never heard of him, was the president, founder and third initial in the holy AIN acronym. The other two AIN initials belonged to Alex, Norm's dapper New York underboss, and Irving. Nobody really knew what happened to Irving, and frankly, nobody asked. As far as we were concerned, the AIN pantheon contained only one deity, and Irving was sort of like a pagan god whose memory still pops up from time to time, an embarrassing reminder of the company's polytheistic past. We knew he existed at one point, of course. The evidence was right there on the company letterhead. Still, like Jews taught to keep the sabbath sacred even though it starts on a day named after the Norse goddess Freya, we all basically knew to put the questions about Irving on hold.

I throw out the theological references in jest, but I have to admit there were times when Norm lived up to his jealous god reputation. As sales reps, we were told, like children, that no order -- no matter how small -- occurred without Norm's full approval. Personally, I had no idea how this could be true. I wrote up orders and sometimes even shipped them, before Norm ever got one look at the Berkeley sales report. Over time, however, the word would filter back to me. Norm had been pleased by the profit I pulled out of that acrylic tubing order last month. Or Norm had been displeased by my eagerness to waive the freight and wanted me to call up UC Berkeley and tell them they needed to cough up an extra $20 for drop shipping.

Never mind the fact that all known copies of the invoices in question were tucked away safely in the branch file cabinet. Norm knew. After 30 years in the business, he knew how much plastic sheet, rod and tubing was sitting in our warehouse at each and every moment. More importantly, he knew how much it was worth, because it was all paid for with his money.

As deities go, Norm wasn't quite a Yahweh, everywhere at all times, but he sure as hell knew everything that was of any importance. I pictured him more as a Wotan, ruling the universe from some far off acrylic Aasgard, waiting for his pet ravens to return with news of the daily sales. As long as his horn of plenty was continually stocked with fresh orders and 40 percent profit margins, Norm was a happy camper.

I wasn't alone in building up the Norm mystique. Of the 10 people who worked at the Berkeley branch, only one had actually seen Norm's face and lived to tell about it. That was Rick, the 38-year old chain-smoking sales rep who knew more about plastic than anybody in the entire company -- excepting Norm, of course.

Rick had put in five years as the Berkeley warehouse foreman before moving into the sales office. To hear him tell it, he wasn't too pleased by the relocation. Moving into the sales office meant moving closer to Norm's line of fire.

Rick still shook his head when he recalled the one time Norm paid a bodily visit to the Berkeley branch.

"I was standing out in the warehouse doing a huge job for UC Berkeley when all of a sudden this guy walks by, a fat guy wearing a sweat suit and smoking a cigarette." Rick said "I'm thinking to myself, 'Who the fuck does this guy think he is, smoking in my warehouse?' Then I thought to myself, 'Wait a minute. That guy looks like Norm.' I figured if anybody can smoke in my warehouse Norm can. He paid for it.

"Norm doesn't even look at me. Just walks right past me: head down, heading straight toward the sales office. Didn't even grunt 'Hello.' About two minutes later, he comes walking back out again. This time, he's got a smile on his face. 'Hey, Rick,' he says. That was it: 'Hey Rick.' Just kept on walking toward a limo waiting outside the front loading dock." Rick would then lick his lips, momentarily.

"I go into the office to see what happened, what had Norm so jolly all of sudden. When I go in there, everyone is in tears. It turns out Norm had fired the whole staff, even Sharon the receptionist. He gave them their severance checks and 15 minutes to leave the building."

Like the lone survivor of an Apache raid, Rick was the man Norm spared to provide living testimony to the newer sales reps who weren't quite schooled to the Norm mystique. Listening to him speak, I quickly got the message: Norm could appear at any moment, clutching a handful of fresh severance checks, so it was a good idea to look busy at all times.

Anyway, this was the environment I walked into as a fresh-faced college kid. I didn't know it at the time I got the job, of course. All I cared about then was the $480 a week I would be making just for showing up. For a guy who never made more than $8 an hour, I felt like I'd pulled off the ultimate scam. Never mind the fact that in the world of business-to-business sales, inside sales was the lowest notch on the totem pole -- a place reserved for the people you didn't want, or trust, to let out of the office.

For the most part, we were just like those Time Life operators you see on TV: Standing-by, waiting for your call. Some days the phone rang from 8 a.m until closing time, 5 p.m. More often than not, however, they stayed painfully silent. On those days, we were supposed to call around to the local machine shops and sign companies and gently remind them of our existence. Fairly wimpy cold calling when you compare it to what my classmates at Merrill Lynch or Salomon Bros. had to do, but for a guy like me, it was pretty grueling stuff.

Like all companies, AIN adhered to the "carrot and the stick" school of sales management. We never received a percentage commission on our sales -- that would have cut into Norm's money -- but we did get a quarterly bonus if we hit our sales target. That was the carrot. For rookies like me, the bonus started out at 60 orders a month. The total then moved up, incrementally, adding five new sales each month, until you finally reached the 120 sales mark. At that point, you had to hit 120 just to qualify for a bonus, at which point you would be paid an extra dollar for every order you booked that month. Orders over the $1,000 mark earned an extra dollar for each thousand in the order. A $6,000 order, something the Santa Clara branch processed all the time, could earn the sales rep who booked it $7.

As incentive plans go, it wasn't exactly Enron, but it was enough to make things competitive. Since most of the sales staff at Berkeley were relatively new, Rick included, nobody had to worry about pulling down 120 sales a month. Still, we knew it was possible. Some of the top reps down in the Santa Clara branch pulled in 200 plus points a month. That translated to somewhere around $40 K a year once you factored in base salary. Not bad for the early 1990s and especially not bad for a job that only asked that you sit by a telephone all day and take orders, which is pretty much all they had to do down in Santa Clara. Looking back, I still can't believe how envious I was when I saw their daily figures come over the late-afternoon fax.

The stick came in three forms: Joe, Jeff and, worst of all, Norm.

Of the three, dealing with Joe was by far the easiest. Joe was Berkeley branch manager. As personalities go, he was the kind of guy who always appeared put-upon, and he knew how to get maximum mileage out of other people's sympathy. When people didn't respond accordingly, he tended to rely on outrageous temper tantrums in order to get his way. Fortunately for me, the two usual targets of these tantrums were Jerry, the top sales rep and my soon-to-be arch-nemesis at the Berkeley branch, and Bernie, Joe's ex-wife with whom he continually seemed to be reworking his child-custody agreement over the phone.

Jeff, meanwhile, was the California general manager. In the mafia-style management structure of AIN Plastics, Jeff was the equivalent of the capo. His power came from the fact that he knew Norm personally and had made his bones working directly under him at the Mt. Vernon home office.

Jeff could be a pussycat some times and a complete ballbreaker at others. A native of Long Island, he spoke in a New York accent so thick I could practically smell the bagels and cream cheese whenever he chewed me out over the phone.

"Whaddaya doin' givin' away the half inch cast for a dollah twenny a foot, Sam?" he would say, the words coming over the phone so fast I could barely register them. "You shoulda got at least one-fifty for that ordah."

As a California kid whose only experience with New Yorkers came from television sitcoms, I had to make an effort to stifle my laughter between sentences. Jeff and I got along well. Both he and Joe saw me and my Stanford education as key assets in turning around the woebegone Berkeley branch.

Oh yeah, I should also mention the fact that besides having a cult, AIN also had a curse. We called it the Berkeley curse.

According to company legend, Norm had purchased the Berkeley branch from another plastics reseller. Since then, the branch sales numbers had been in steady decline. There were reasons behind this, of course. Before AIN took over, the Berkeley branch had been a mostly retail operation. Norm, who regarded the retail customer as beneath contempt, absolutely forebade his sales reps from serving the dozens of customers who walked in each day. Instead, he ordered them to institute the same sales system that had worked so well at every other AIN branch. This system included: a $50 minimum on all phone-in orders, a product catalog with no fixed prices and a credit accounting system that put clients in the C.O.D box as soon as their payment cycles exceeded 30 days. Strangely enough, clients who had enjoyed a friendly relationship with the former proprietor suddenly started going elsewhere.

No one could figure it out, especially Norm. That, more than anything, is probably what made it a curse. If Norm, the man who held the entire Eastern Seaboard in his polycarbonate grip, couldn't dominate a piddly little market like the East Bay, something else had to be wrong. Despite Norm's proven eagerness to step in and stimulate staff turnover, nobody had come up with the magic bullet or voodoo spell that could lift the hex.

I got my first indication on the Berkeley curse while putting in a quick week of training down at the larger, and richer, Santa Clara branch office. In between lounging around the warehouse and running out to buy sandwiches for the office, Stan, one of the younger Santa Clara sales reps gave me the quick rundown on what my duties would be once I moved over to the East Bay "I gotta warn you, Sam," Stan said. "Berkeley sucks. It's always sucked. That's why they sent Joe up there. And that's why he wants you up there. They figure you went to Stanford, so you must be a smart guy. Up until now, all they've had up there are a bunch of losers."

I remember laughing as Stan told me this. "Losers, huh? Well wait'll they get a load of me," I smirked. Inside, however, I was already starting to feel a little uneasy -- like Marlowe getting ready to head up river in search of Kurtz. Something told me it wouldn't be long before I got the other side of the story.

Sure enough, on my first day at the Berkeley branch, I sensed that I wasn't far off with the Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now motif. Compared to the huge Santa Clara branch, with its aqua carpets and matching wallpaper, Berkeley looked, smelled and felt like a forgotten outpost on the edge of an overconfident empire. To help drive the feeling home, one of the walls had a large faded mural of a jungle scene painted on it.

As for the rest of the office, it looked like a half-dozen different designers had tried and failed to come up with a solution to covering the walls. One corner featured fake wood paneling, another, torn wall paper. Lucite borrowed from the warehouse served as partitions between desks. The carpet was filthy and ripped, and the phone and fax lines were secured to the floor with duct tape. The ceiling tiles were water-stained in some places, smoke-stained in others. The windows to the outside world were covered with black paper, and a layer of dust covered every surface except the sales reps' desks. All told, it made the sales offices in "Glengarry Glen Ross" look like the Taj Mahal.

Suffice it to say, my first day at AIN Plastics of Berkeley was one prolonged case of culture shock. Joe pointed me to my new desk and handed me a copy of the Yellow Pages. I quickly learned that my job was to call every company in the book, pet shops, hair salons, grocery stores, hardware stores -- whatever -- and convince them to buy their plastic items from us. After stumbling through the first 30-40 calls, I gradually hit a rhythm. I didn't sell a single piece of plastic, but I certainly erased whatever previous inhibitions I had in picking up the phone.

After three days of non-stop calling, the awkwardness started to wear off. It was about this time that I made my first order. It was late afternoon, typically a dead time for Berkeley, and the other salesmen had left the office to go smoke outside. When the phone rang, Joe ordered Nichole, the receptionist, to forward the call to me.

The order was fairly simple: one 48 inch by 96 inch sheet of quarter inch acrylic -- a $75 order. By the time the other salesmen had returned from their break, I was already signing my name into the black binder. As I looked up, I could see the smiles on their faces evaporate. Like adult hyenas watching a young pup dining on a fresh kill, they no longer saw me as the harmless new kid. I was now one of them -- a competitor.

This was the environment of AIN Plastics. Every sale I booked was one less sale for the other guys, and we all knew it. Whenever the sales reps tried to be civil to one another, it always felt like a couple of gamecocks shooting the shit in between bouts. As much as Joe tried to encourage us to beat the bushes in search of new business, we all knew there was only so many new customers to be had. The only solid leads were the ones that called in.

That's why each time the phone rang, everybody made sure to put a quick finger on the phone receiver. No sense in making a cold call if a customer was already on the line. We also made sure to stay on the good side of Nichole, the office receptionist who kept track of who was up next on the incoming call rotation.

On the days when Nichole didn't show up -- which turned out to be distressingly often in my case -- the phones were open season. At times, I felt like a gunfighter, flinching at the tiniest sound. The analogy disturbed me, however, since Jerry, the Berkeley branch's top sales rep, was always faster than I was. When it came to picking up the phone, Jerry was like Billy the Kid. The thought of squaring off against him in a Hollywood-style duel was enough to raise my blood pressure a good 20 points.

I preferred to think about working at AIN in the context of a major league baseball team. Orders came in streaks. On Monday you could write five. On Tuesday: zero. If the branch booked only 10 orders, but you had half of them, you waited until you got to the parking lot before you smiled. If the branch booked 20 and you only had two, you waited until you got into your car and away from the office before letting out a refreshing primal scream.

Like baseball players, we also developed our own superstitions to explain the baffling variations in our daily order counts.

Jerry was especially susceptible. "Hey Sam, Rick, one of you guys come over here and fill out your order," he would shout when his first order came in, usually around 10 a.m. By far the most superstitious of the three sales reps on staff, Jerry believed that whoever filled out the first order was usually jinxed for the rest of the day.

As Jerry and I began to compete for the top order count, I learned the fine art of sandbagging. When an early order came in, I made sure to drop my voice, fill out the order sheet in a discreet fashion and save getting Joe's sign-off until later in the morning. Jerry did the same thing, of course. By 11 a.m., it became a grudge match over who would enter their orders first.

"Aw man, you guys. Don't be stockpilin' on me now!" Jerry would shout whenever he encountered a pristine page in the order book. That the cry usually came when Jerry had three orders of his own made it all the more humorous. If nobody answered and the phones were rining, Jerry's favorite last resort was to start recording the orders in the No.2 slot, leaving the No. 1 slot for some sucker (usually me). It wasn't until Joe bawled him out one day that he grudgingly put his name in the first slot.

Then again, it's safe to say we were all a little intimidated by the order book: a simple three ring binder that spent the day sprawled atop a hanging customer file. Each page had enough slots for 30 orders, an optimistic target we only hit once if I remember correctly, and left an embarrassing expanse of white space on the days we barely managed to crack 10.

After a while, I started to dread the first-order jinx myself. Lord knows I experienced enough early morning surges that dissolved until afternoon-long order droughts. Most of the time, however, I avoided the superstitious mumbo-jumbo, replacing it with growing collection of compulsive habits and obsessive quirks which helped me ride out the rough patches. Orders, I decided, could only be filled out in all caps. Quotes could only be filled out in in lower case. Every day at 4:45, I charted my monthly sales total, adding a new histogram to the daily sales count and compiling a secondary index of dollar amount, average daily sale and standard deviation.

The compulsive habits tended to be liquid. I had a drink of water every half hour, and took a piss at the top of the hour. At lunch, I went out and bought the largest soft drink I could find at the local convenience store. Forty-four kidney-busting ounces of Coca Cola kept me flying high until 5 p.m. when it was time to head out.

It took a while to build up such a finely tuned routine. At first, I tried not to believe I was the master of my own destiny. As long as I picked up the phone and stuck to Joe's cold-calling lists. The orders would come.

That attitude lasted until my third month, the month I missed my first bonus. As the months wore on -- and my monthly bonus minimum grew -- I quickly realized that in order to stay on as AIN employee I was going to have to find new ways to prove my worth to the AIN management. Unfortunately, AIN Plastics didn't operate that way. For a company whose sole raison d'etre was to sell plastics, there wasn't a whole lot of analysts and middle management types. If you didn't sell, you were dead weight as far as Norm was concerned.

As much as I tried to buy into Norm's dictum, the AIN treadmill was starting to pick up speed, and I could already feel myself drifting backwards. I abandoned my call out sheet to better prepare myself for going head-to-head with Jerry on the incoming calls. It was too late. Jerry had already sewn up many of the most regular customers, and as much as Joe would have loved to see him fail, Jerry was miraculously hitting his seventh and eighth month bonuses.

I have to admit, I seriously underestimated Jerry in those days. The lone black employee in the Berkeley branch -- in the entire company for all I knew -- Jerry conducted his sales like a Richard Pryor routine. He use a different voice for each person he spoke to. First, he would start with a woman's voice, then the voice of a Hindi 7-11 attendant, then a Slavic jewelry salesman. When he finally reached the person he wanted to talk to he would suddenly drop into his best Barry White baritone.

"Hello this is Gerald M. Jackson with AIN Plastics of Berkeley. I'm calling to inquire about your company's current plastic needs," he would croon. It was pretty funny -- for the first ten minutes. After that, it got really old really fast.

In any other environment, a guy like Jerry wouldn't have bothered me. In the stagnant atmosphere of the Berkeley branch, however, his ceaseless patter was like an icepick jabbing into my ear. The only thing that made it worse was the fact that it often worked. He consistently booked two more orders a day more than I did, and he did little to hide his glee when it came to beating out Joe's golden boy.

Searching for an ally in my struggle against Jerry, I developed strong friendship with Nichole, the office receptionist. In an office where incoming calls accounted for 90 percent of all orders, Nichole was be a powerful friend and an even more formidable foe. She always seemed to take pleasure in saving her most troublesome phone calls for the sales rep currently at the top of her shit list. Fortunately for me, that sales rep was always Jerry.

"Yo, Jerry! You got a call on line two. Some muthafucka says he wants to buy some 'plastic' but doesn't know what kind. Good luck G!" She would shout across the room, revealing a sinister smile as Jerry reluctantly reached for the phone.

Any way you put it, Nichole was a striking individual. The child of an Indonesian mother and a Dutch colonial father, she stood over six feet tall with exotic Asian features. She'd spent most of her life growing up in Concord and spoke in the brassy, 500-word urban patois of the East Bay. "Yo, Joe, you got a call on line three. You better tell this bitch to stop trippin' before I have to get on the phone and tell her myself."

Aside from her mean streak, Nichole's most attractive quality was her raunchiness. Working in an office full of men, she was an eager participant whenever the conversation devolved into a contest of sexual one-downmanship. Of course, this fact only helped to lower the intellectual level of the sales office. More than once, an outside customer poked his head through the door only to encounter Nichole in the middle of a five minute monologue on super absorbency tampons.

Unfortunately, Nichole's sense of humor couldn't conceal her bad attitude, which grew with each passing week. She and Joe finally butted heads over the issue of her meager salary. I can still remember the look on her face as she stormed out of the building for the last time. Transforming her face into a cold mask, she flashed the peace sign to me as she passed my desk. "Watch your back," she said.

Up until that moment, I felt immune to the Berkeley curse. But as I watched Nichole's backside slip through the front door, for good, I knew she had passed it on to me with those three simple words.

With her gone, I no longer had an ally. The phones became open season, and my six month transition from meek college student to cynical burnt-out salesman was complete.

Every afternoon on the way home from work, I rolled up my windows, threw on the loudest tape in my music collection and let out a piercing scream just to cleanse myself of the anger building up inside. Something, clearly, had to give.

Fortunately, Norm was way ahead of me on that one.

Two months after Nichole's departure, Jeff paid one of his surprise visits to the Berkeley office. Jeff's visits always made everyone a little edgy, but today seemed like a natural day for him to visit. One of our factory reps was in town, plugging a new line of machine-grade plastic. Since outside sales reps had hefty expense accounts, they usually provided us a free meal as compensation for sitting through their boring lectures.

Today's meal was pizza, and I assumed Jeff had come up simply as an excuse to cop a piece of our pie.

I was busy finishing off my third slice when Jeff poked his head out of the new office he had installed behind Joe's desk.

"Sam, can you come in here for a minute," he said.

The office had been part of Norm's promise to upgrade the Berkeley branch once he saw an improved sales count. Indeed, since Nichole's departure, branch sales had averaged more than 15 orders a day, and we were quickly closing on the mythical 20 order mark. Unfortunately, I usually accounted for less than five of those daily sales -- barely enough to make my bonus back in December, much less May.

Joe and Jeff had spent most of the morning in the new office, pausing only to steal a few slices of pizza on their own once the Westlake presentation had finished. The phone rang as I got up from my desk. I flinched like a gunfighter, but Jerry already had the phone by his ear. There went another missed sale, I remember thinking to myself. Jerry made sure to smile innocently as I walked by. This meeting better be good, I thought to myself.

As I approached the room, I slowly peered through the doorless threshold. The interior was gray and empty. The concrete floor was bare except for a few torn scraps of sheetrock waiting for the shop vacuum. Joe and Jeff were sitting in the middle of the room. Joe's eyes met mine as I walked through the door. He had a pained look on his face, almost like the look of a co-conspirator who had just revealed too much information to the police. I sat down. Joe didn't look at me, so I turned to look at Jeff.

"Sam, the Berkeley office hasn't been doing to well lately," Jeff said. "The New York office says we're gonna have to make some cuts."

With those words, he handed me a manila folder, containing two large forms. He handed the top form to me. I looked at it. The title read, "Termination of Employment."

"I'm sorry," Jeff said -- or words to that affect. My mind was already swimming as I skimmed through the legal-looking document.

Jeff paused briefly to let me read and let the true meaning of what was happening to me sink in. Having never been fired before, I was a bit curious about why I needed a document to explain the procedure to me. I started reading it in detail, partly because it helped me keep my eyes off Joe and Jeff.

"We're gonna need you to fill these out for us," Jeff said, handing me a pen. I obliged. As I filled out the sheets, I glanced over at Joe. His eyes were red, and he covered his mouth with his hand, trying to conceal a frustrated sigh.

I glanced back at Jeff. His face refused to move. Somehow I preferred this to Joe's pained melodrama. I finally completed the forms and gave them back to Jeff, keeping my eyes locked on him. Jeff handed me two envelopes. The first contained my final paycheck. The other: two week's severance pay. I thanked him out of reflex, just like I did the day he handed me the slip of paper reading "480/wk" and stood up.

"You can clear out your desk," he said. I stood up. We stood up. I shook his hand, again acting reflex.

"If you need a recommendation, give me a call," Jeff said. I smiled and turned to Joe. Joe let out another painful sigh. I really thought he was going to break into tears at this point. Then again, I'd worked 10 feet away from him for the last nine months. I knew his ways. This mood would pass. Still, I shook his hand.

"I'm sorry, man," Joe said.

Just like that, it was over. If I'd had time to reflect on my situation a little bit longer, I might have had a chance to appreciate the irony of it all. Since Nichole's dramatic exit, I had contemplated quitting my job but could quite summon the courage to pick a date. Now, I was unemployed -- free to do and go as I please, so long as I cleared my things and got out within the next 15 minutes.

As I turned to leave the room, I had to pause for a moment. I wondered how the other sales reps would react to my leaving. Would they react? When I did re-entered the office, I found all the sales reps on the phone, completely oblivious to the scene that had just unfolded less than ten feet away. I felt like scuba diver developing an acute case of the bends. The change in pressure was too much. I could already feel tears welling in my eyes.

Silently, I approached Rick. As the chief conservator of the Berkeley branch annals, I figured he deserved to be the first to know. He was on the phone, trying to close a sale -- or in his case: a fucking sale -- so he threw me an angry look when I shook his hand. The look quickly turned to realization as he looked into my eyes.

Da-da Dum Dum Dum. . .Another one bites the dust, he must have thought. He shook his head and let out a long sigh, before returning to his phone call. The last person I approached was Jerry. As usual, Jerry was on a roll. The factory rep's 45 minute sales presentation had done little to cramp his style. When I got his desk, he was busy trying to sew up his seventh order of the day. If anybody would be pleased by the news of my departure, Jerry would.

I gritted my teeth as I held out my hand. Since Nichole had departed, I'd lost the ability to conceal my dislike for Jerry. In fact, I'd lost the ability to sit next to him. After six months, I'd finally begged Joe to let me move to a desk across the room, so I wouldn't have to listen to his manic prattle and thinly disguised gloating. Jerry may have won, but I sure as hell wasn't going to let him have the last word.

Unfortunately, Jerry would not be denied. Seeing my outstretched hand, he cupped his own over the phone.

"No, man. No," he said, sounding indignant -- but not so indignant as to attract the attention of Joe and Jeff in the other room. "That's really messed up. Really?"

I nodded silently, thankful for once that Jerry had a sale on the line. He smiled and shook my hand before returning to the call.

When I returned to my desk, I stared blankly. Clean it out? What could I possibly need? Two hundred scraps of scribbled-on scratch paper? Twisted paper clip sculptures? I had worked at AIN for ten months and had nothing worth taking home with me. I scanned the desktop and finally decided to grab the clipboard Rick had given me on my second day at the branch. With the clipboard tucked under my arm, I slipped out the door.

Another dramatic change in pressure. Suddenly, I didn't feel on the verge of freaking out anymore. The sun was out, birds were chirping. If I had to pick a day to get fired, at least I picked a good one.

My mood went dark again, however, as soon as I heard Jerry coming behind me. I turned around to face him. Apparently, he'd had just enough time to close his sale, enter it into the binder and light a cigarette before chasing me down.

As usual, our conversation was abortive. Did I have any idea why it happened? He asked. Not really, I replied. Had anybody said anything to them? He asked. No. I responded, just suspicious enough to put Jerry off balance for a moment.

"Well I just wondered, you know." he said. "Just wanted to make sure nothing funny was going on. You know."

He wanted to know what I was going to do for work.

"To tell you the truth," I said, "I really hadn't had much time to think about it."

Jerry smiled, exhaling smoke into his blinking eyes. I was now starting to get uncomfortable. Either Jerry was trying to be sincere or he was wasting a lot of effort in rubbing my nose in the disgrace of my departure.

"Well good luck," he said, the last curls of smoke trailing skyward. His voice seemed to trail upward with them, as if it were asking another question rather than bidding me farewell.

"Thanks," I said. My voice cracked.

It was two years later when the Berkeley branch finally closed for good. Frankly, things had been going so poorly what with the recession and all that I marveled at the fact that Joe managed to keep it going for so long. Apparently Norm decided to pull the plug, however, and within a few months of the closing, he sold the entire company to some German multinational corporation whose name I couldn't pronounce -- or remember, for that matter.

I didn't find out all this, however, until I finally summoned up the courage to go drive by the old office. Up until then, I'd always intended to see if anything had changed since my departure, but every time I tried, some invisible force always forced me to turn away at the last second. I was afraid that Jerry or Rick or someone else I knew would be standing outside on a cigarette break.

This time for sure, I thought to myself.

I was on an assignment for a first semester class at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, and I was heading down to the Berkeley Marina to do an interview with an old boat captain. Before heading over the freeway, I moved into the right lane on University Avenue and headed towards Spengers' Fish Grotto, remembering how many times had I given those directions over the phone.

"OK, do you know how to get to Fifth Street in Berkeley?"

"Uh . . .not really."

"Do you know where Spengers is?"

"Oh yeah, Spengers. I've been there, sure."

"OK, make a right turn one street before Spengers. That's Fifth Street."

Fifth street was just like I remembered it: Factory outlet stores crowding out the Victorian homes. Japanese gardeners manicuring their half acre plot on the Kona Kai organic farm.

I felt the urge to turn grow, but I pushed straight through the Hearst Street intersection.. I was now past the point of no return. I suddenly felt like I was back in my high school days, driving past the home of some girl I had an immense, yet secret, crush on, half-hoping and half-dreading that she might see me pass.

As I drove up to the building, I could see the doors were closed. That eliminated the chance of them seeing me from inside, I figured. My anxiety slackened. I scanned the parking lot to see if I recognized any of the cars parked there.

That's when I noticed the parking lot was empty.

I rolled to a stop across the street from the building. The sign was gone too. A sign on the wall nearest the parking lot said the parking spaces were reserved for customers of one of the newer outlet shops on Fourth St. Whatever feelings of vindication I might have had at that moment quickly burned away as I tried to imagine the last days of the branch. Did they see it coming? Did Norm send the news via messenger, like he did with me, or did he save it for another one of his surprise drop-in visits?

Strangely, I couldn't help but feel a little bit sorry for Rick, Joe and the guys in the warehouse, even though they were a miserable bunch of illiterates who always managed to screw up my cut orders. And yes, I even felt sorry for Jerry.

Worst of all, I felt sorry for myself. For nearly two years, I had secretly hoped that maybe I too had become part of the mythology of the Berkeley branch: The blond hair, blue-eyed Phaeton who tried to play salesman but couldn't quite handle the pressure. I was depicted in my moment of supreme tragedy, hurtling earthward, in flames, with a thunderbolt piercing my chest.

I pictured Rick laughing wryfully as he recalled the look on my face when I got canned. I pictured them all passing the new office annex, murmuring in hushed tones about how no one who went in there came out with his job or salary still intact. I pictured Joe sitting in the chair he playfully dubbed "Old Sparky" receiving a fatal jolt from Norm after failing to deliver the 20 orders he'd promised. Most of all, I pictured the people I worked with during those nine short months trying to speculate on what I was doing this exact moment.

As a personal rule, I prefer to take my irony in small doses. Sitting there in my car, feeling weepy for a business that didn't exist and, truth be told, really didn't merit this kind of sentiment, was not exactly where the other sales reps would have pictured me at the very moment. It also wasn't exactly the way I wanted to spend my afternoon. I'd come looking for closure, and sure enough, I'd found just what I was looking for. It was now time to move on.

I stared at the unkempt graffiti that had grown over the building wall and laughed. Two years before, I felt like my life was crashing down around me in that very same parking lot, yet it took only five minutes of driving the freeway before I realized that I was really just at beginning. The Berkeley curse was over Norm didn't exist. And as for the Cult of Norm, well, according to Jeff and the two checks in my hand, I think I could safely consider myself deprogrammed.

I started my car and drove off.