DAD AND THE EXECUTIVE BLUES Published March 3, 1997 Previous columns by Harry Goldstein	My dad's business failed when I was a teenager, and for almost a decade he unsuccessfully searched for a job. Overqualified for most of the positions he applied for, his age slowly caught up to his impressive credentials and eventually surpassed them in the minds of corporate recruiters. Though only in his early fifties, my father was getting too long in the tooth for the jobs to which he was applying. His seniority and experience — to say nothing of his bills and his family — demanded much more compensation than some young turk twenty years his junior. As months turned into years, Dad found himself tumbling helplessly in the cycle of hope and despair brought on by each unsuccessful interview. Eventually he stopped getting interviewed at all, and pro forma rejection letters replaced personal phone calls. Several times he considered filing discrimination suits against potential employers whom he suspected had rejected him because of his age, but he gave up on that idea when he realized how much time and money a lawsuit would cost him — time and money he didn't have. Buoyed by the support of his friends and my mother, he kept plugging away, making phone calls to friends of friends of friends, eventually landing a job in Chicago, where he lived in a Holiday Inn for almost a year, driving six hours back home on weekends. Throughout the almost ten-year ordeal that preceded his employment in Chicago, he never lost hope completely, though he must have come close many times (the rest of our family certainly did), just as he must have doubted himself and his abilities. A profound shame, it seemed to me, forced him to keep those doubts to himself — but he remained reticent about what he was going through emotionally, putting on a cheery face and telling us everything was going to be all right.
G.J. Meyer screams out the inner turmoil my father repressed.	By contrast, G.J. Meyer, in his remarkable book, Executive Blues: Down and Out in Corporate America, screams out the inner turmoil my father repressed. He shows us that nothing is going to be all right, turning over the rock that is Corporate America to reveal worms writhing beneath. Meyer is our fly on the wall of the executive suite, the upper echelons of companies where all the decisions are made for reasons that people like me — a lifelong bottom feeder — can't fathom. While Meyer's observations about job hunting and office life aren't earth-shattering, they feel so familiar that you wonder if Meyer was looking over your shoulder all day as you sat at your desk, twiddling your thumbs. From his first job as a clerk in a drug store, where he observed the pharmacist shadow-pitching his way through a baseball game when he thought Meyer wasn't looking; to his boss at Meredith Publishing, who stared at a blank yellow pad all day; to Meyer himself, sitting in a fishbowl office at McDonnell Douglas waiting for the day and the crushing boredom to end — this is the Truth that hardly anyone writes about. Clearly, Meyer works to the beat of a drummer different from the one that drives his superiors. In fact, he is just as bamboozled by their decisions as any bottom feeder would be. Meyer's riches to rags story touches on each stage of his career, from his decision to change careers from newspaper reporting to public relations, to his struggle to find meaning in his work, to years of uncertainty as his career careens out of control, until finally Meyer finds himself at fifty, out of luck and out in the cold. When Meyer started out the working world was his oyster, and during his 20s he took advantage of all the opportunities that came his way: a fellowship to study at Harvard, jobs at prestigious Midwest newspapers. Lured by the promise of a challenging job and good money, Meyer hopped from journalism to PR, but not without a twinge of remorse. One bad move led to another, when he decided to go from a PR firm to McDonnell Douglas, the defense/airplane contractor, where he was groomed to take over as senior VP of communications.
The book will send a shudder of recognition through anyone who has watched the process devolve towards despair.	After a series of political intrigues and power moves inside the company, Meyer found himself looking for another job. He ended up in Racine, Wisconsin, working for a crazy chief executive hell bent on running Case, a con-ag equipment manufacturing company, into the ground. Two years after taking the job at Case and with the company on the brink of total collapse, Meyer, along with many of his colleagues in senior management positions, got the boot. He was damaged goods and he knew it: a highly paid professional overqualified for anything but the most senior PR position at one of the Big Boys. He was, however, perfectly qualified to write a book about his experience, one that echoes the stories of so many other people, including my dad's. Leavened with a generous measure of good — sometimes gallows — humor, Meyer's description of outplacement drones, endless résumé salvos, bizarre interviews and the struggle to maintain his dignity during a string of rejections is enough to send a chill down the spine of every employee, no matter where they are in the corporate hierarchy, and a shudder of recognition through anyone who has watched, firsthand, this entropic process devolve towards despair. "Resentment isn't a strong enough word for what I feel when I think about all this. What do you call resentment when it turns murderous? What's the word for what you're feeling when you daydream about killing people and decide that, no, killing isn't the answer because killing would be too good for them. Killing wouldn't leave them in this kind of pain.
Don't miss Harry's exclusive interview with author G.J. Meyer.	"There's fear too. It frightens me to see the kinds of corporations that used to hire people like me eliminating more and more of the kinds of jobs that people like me used to have. I'm afraid of what's going to happen to me, to Pam, to all of us. "The fact that I'm fifty years old scares the hell out of me. Not long ago I went to a seminar, supposedly about the subtleties of getting back into the workforce in today's strange job market. In some oblique way, in the midst of a discussion that bounced as aimlessly as a beach ball among fifteen or twenty of us out-of-work "executives," the age question came up. Somebody said that if you run into flagrant age discrimination you can always go to court. Sure, somebody else answered. Sure you can — if you're prepared to accept the certainty of never working again. File an age discrimination complaint the day you win the lottery, somebody said. We all laughed, some nervously, some bitterly." (p. 9) from Executive Blues: Down and Out in Corporate America by G.J. Meyer, Dell Trade Paperbacks, $12.95 US. This book is available on the Web from amazon.com. Harry Goldstein is a writer and editor living in Manhattan. His work has appeared in Utne Reader, American Book Review, Promethean, AltX, word.com, and other periodicals. ©; 1997 Harry Goldstein, all rights reserved.