Adding a Little Levity Read online

  One of the chairs at the conference table, for the Sweden Country Head, Lars Dahlberg, was always empty. I wondered why until I read that “Swedish parental leave … provides 480 days of leave per child. Sixty days of the paid leave are reserved for each parent, and the remaining joint allowance can be divided between the mother and father as they choose.”

  Over the last six years, Lars’s wife, Astrid, had blessed Lars with five healthy children, each one coming about a year and two months apart. Astrid, who enjoyed working, took her required sixty days, leaving the 420-day balance to her husband. No one at our company had seen Lars in more than a half-decade, during which time our company’s business in Sweden had shrunk by nearly two-thirds.

  Coincidentally, a friend of mine at one of our competitors mentioned that he also worked with a fellow named Lars Dahlberg who also had a wife named Astrid and five children. My friend said they never saw Lars at his company either. Lars had perfected the art of Extraknäck.

  Willy Mertens, the Belgium Country Head, an affable, overweight fellow, kept us all entertained without realizing it. A knowledgeable businessman, Willy could always be counted on for incisive business analysis whenever he was sober and awake. Unlike Claude Lambert, Willy was reliably punctual, being sure to deposit his oversized frame, bloodshot eyes, and drooping eyelids into his favorite chair at the conference table, no later than thirty minutes before the meeting started, a useful time to socialize.

  However, Willy preferred to use that half-hour to count sheep. Several times during the meeting, Willy would lumber to the rear of the room, where a coffee urn and a table of pastries were set up. There, Willy would surreptitiously—or so he thought—remove a flask from his inner suit pocket and pour generously into his coffee cup. He returned to his seat convinced that no one in the room was aware of, or had ever seen, the flask. However, we all knew that it was three-inches high, made of polished silver, sported a stylish leather covering on the bottom, and had Willy’s initials engraved on the side in Arial Black font.

  Our business in Spain was managed by the garrulous and restless Juan Carlos Huertas. JC held no grudges, save one; he couldn’t help sneering down his long Castilian nose at our Portugal Country Head, Joao Pinheiro, and for good reason. Pinheiro had been caught on more than one occasion attempting to lace the Spaniard’s coffee with a powder reputed to induce diarrhea. Neither Huertas nor Pinheiro have quite gotten over the Portuguese War for Independence in 1640 and were still miffed about a couple of the provisions of the Treaty of Lisbon, which granted Portugal its independence in 1668.

  Gunter Blatter knew that the completion of the meetings’ agenda would be in jeopardy once Huertas got going, yet he was powerless to stop the Spaniard. Huertas pontificated on every topic raised, always sounded intelligent, and went unchallenged because all of us were happy to continue completing our Sudoku grids while he held the floor. I figured that Juan Carlos could trace his lineage back to one of the great Greek or Roman orators.

  He fidgeted while seated as others were speaking, but, when it was his turn, he vaulted out of his chair like a man freed from prison after a decade of splitting stones with a pickax. Huertas never spoke; he declaimed. And for that, he must be on his feet, pacing around the meeting room to make a point or answer a question, even if asked whether he preferred tuna fish salad or ham and cheese for lunch. Huertas would circle the conference table, head bowed, lips in motion, pacing behind the chairs in which we sat.

  You knew he was getting close to you by the waft of garlic on his breath. Every few steps, he would stop, look up and place his hands on the shoulders of the person seated in the chair at which he’d stopped so that he could properly emphasize the point he was making. “I’ll have the tuna.” By the time he finished his soliloquy, everyone had been touched except Mr. Pinheiro. After a couple of meetings, this began to seem creepy. The next time Juan Carlos began his peregrination, two of the country heads excused themselves and darted to the men’s room. Then two more did the same. By the meeting’s end, the Spaniard was talking to an empty conference room, all of us—except Gunter and his shoulders—being either in the men’s room or outside the building grabbing a cigarette, even those who didn’t smoke.

  Last to speak was the England Country head, Duncan Clarke-Cooper, our own Ralph Nettleby from The Shooting Party, who had us believing that he was pure British aristocracy. But, although he strutted, tut-tutted, and dabbed only the side of his mouth with his napkin, I suspected he might be a closet hooligan.

  He did little to hide his impatience with these management meetings and with the human beings in attendance, particularly ones from the insufferable countries of Europe and a former colony across the Atlantic. He sat motionless at the meetings, jacket always on and sporting a stiff upper lip, which we could always use to open the San Pellegrino we had with lunch. If nothing else, Duncan Clarke-Cooper was fair—he annoyed everyone. I couldn’t pinpoint whether he was born that way or just worked very hard at it. As he settled into his chair at the beginning of each meeting, Duncan would conspicuously place a biography of Winston Churchill, a different book each meeting, as an unsubtle reminder to Blatter about who won the last world war. Gunter pretended not to notice, but his eye twitch gave him away.

  However, Duncan reserved his sharpest needle for Claude Lambert. As a self-proclaimed student of history, Duncan would pepper his conversation with quotes such as “I would rather have a German division in front of me than a French one behind me” (General George S. Patton) or “The best thing I know between France and England is the sea” (Douglas William Jerrold). All the while, Claude would remain outwardly unflappable—smiling, arms extended on the table, hands clasped, with his cufflinks bearing the number “1066” in plain view—while inwardly wishing to thrash Duncan with a baguette.

  Every European management meeting was a real-life version of Groundhog Day. They were remarkably effective at preserving both ancient rivalries and the downward financial trajectory of the business. The only thing that could possibly have helped would have been a miracle—or the promotion up and out of Gunter Blatter.

  • • •

  JET LAG

  Japan is known as the “Land of the Rising Sun,” reflecting the belief held by ancient Japanese that their islands were the first land in the world awakened by the rising sun. I frequently traveled from New York to Japan on business. Each time, I fell asleep as the sun was rising and woke up well after it set. This did little to enhance my career because my boss, a traditionalist, conducted business meetings during the day and expected everyone to maintain consciousness throughout.

  It all started with a flight that lasted fourteen hours and, seemingly passed through an equal number of time zones. Unlike some of my naturally melatonin-rich colleagues who step off long flights with their circadian rhythms intact, I deplane with the cerebral equivalent of cotton mouth. Knowing this, I plan a strict regimen on the flight: a full meal including one glass of wine, followed by one movie to induce me into seven to eight hours of sleep—only it never works. But on this flight, I tried again. After meal, wine, and movie, in went the earplugs, and on went the sleep mask, and for thirty minutes, nothing happened. So, with another glass of wine, I washed down a large snack and watched a second movie. Still nothing. By now, seven hours into the flight, everyone else on the plane was asleep. Being the only one awake, I was also the only one concerned by the sound of snoring coming from both chairs in the cockpit. I stood to stretch my legs, walked to the serving area, and gently woke the flight attendant to request another glass of wine. I watched a third movie, read seventy-five pages of Non-Linear and Asymptotic Systems and Signals, and still no sign of the Sandman.

  After thirteen and one-half hours of flying, the captain, thankfully awake after a good night’s sleep, announced that we were preparing for descent into Narita Airport. This coincided with my own descent into a time-zone-induced, coma-like sleep. With the plane landed and now empty, the flight attendant, having failed to awaken
me, called the maintenance crew, who unbolted the seat from the aisle and took me off the plane.

  I struggled to remain upright and awake in the queues for customs and immigration. The fellow in front of me disgustedly swatted away my head as it attempted to come to rest on his shoulder. Eventually, the fellow gave up, and so together, Siamese twin–like, we trudged through the long line. I did my best not to snore too loudly in his ear or drool in excess on his shirt.

  Finished with customs, I gathered my luggage, hailed a taxi, and headed directly to the first of several meetings scheduled that day. These meetings, a series of presentations held in a conference room, were straightforward, routine, and boring to those with a full night’s sleep, deadening to victims of sleeplessness and jet lag.

  About five minutes into the first meeting, the passage of time slowed considerably; I heard only every other word spoken by the presenter. If I was meant to be contributing to the meeting, I wasn’t. The effort to create any sound resembling a word was too daunting. After ten minutes, I was lucky to register one word per sentence as I lost control of my head and eyelids. I’ll just close my eyes for a moment. The relief was profound. To my horror, when I reopened them, what I thought was a few seconds later, a different person was presenting, and a small pool of saliva had accumulated on my tie. How many people had noticed? Did it look as bad as I was imagining? A lot, and yes. Spotting a coffee urn in the back of the room, I served myself a cup and returned to my seat. The speaker’s lips were moving, but nothing audible was coming out; I was drifting off again. I willed myself awake and went back for another cup of coffee.

  Hoping that a splash of water on my face would be helpful, I headed to the men’s room. A few handfuls of water on my face didn’t really do anything, so I placed my head in the sink under the running faucet. My brain, again fooled, that the horizontal position of my head meant a pillow had appeared, sent signals to my eyelids to close and for rapid eye movement to begin. Based on how soggy my shirt, tie, and upper part of my pants were, I guessed that I had been asleep for thirty minutes. I couldn’t return to the conference room soaking wet, so I crouched under the hand dryer and taped the on button down so it wouldn’t stop. Mistaking the flow of soothing, warm air for the tranquilizing feeling of lying snuggly under a comforter, my easily fooled brain sent instructions to skip rapid eye movement and go directly to stage three slow eye movement (the stage that precedes coma). After some noises coming from patrons of the men’s room woke me, I sprinted to the conference room to find it empty, which also aptly described my prospects for career advancement.

  I still had dinner to get through. Relief—pillow and bed—were only about two hours away. But to save my job, I had to demonstrate I was still capable of thinking and speaking. Food and wine, which had failed badly to produce sleep on the airplane, were remarkably effective at the restaurant. With my eyelids drooping and my job on the line, the toothpicks in the hors d’oeuvres looked more tempting than the hors d’oeuvres. Dinner progressed. I grew sleepier, but as long as I was drinking or chewing, I was less likely to fall asleep in my soup or entree. My mouth in full chew, I turned to converse with the gentleman to my left. My addled brain fixed on his pale complexion, round face, and starched white shirt, convincing my eyes that I was seated next to a talking pillow. Well, that was hardly what I needed, so I turned to chat with the lady on my right. Her short, straight, light brown, Edna Mode–style haircut sat atop her head like the shade on my night table lamp at home … next to my bed … where I sleep.

  Somehow, I made it to the end of dinner, never having had a conversation with anyone and avoiding dozing off by continual, excessive eating. I left the restaurant, scurried back to the hotel, and headed straight to bed for that long, deep sleep I had craved all day. Tomorrow, I would be refreshed and alert for the next day’s vapid presentations. I set the alarm for 7:00 a.m., tumbled into bed, and yielded to the Greek god, Hypnos. He never arrived. Instead of shutting my system down, my dysfunctional body clock switched into high gear. Lying in bed was pointless, so I sat up and read, watched TV, ate, read some more, and watched more TV until the alarm went off propelling me into a real-life version of the movie Groundhog Day.

  • • •

  HOTEL CALIFORNIA

  Last month, I believe I set the record for the longest hospital stay for a medical procedure without complications. Guys who checked in after me left with different hearts than the one they came in with and wished me a speedy recovery on their way out. My doctor put the “ultra” in ultra-conservative, and he seemed to have a keen interest in learning just how long a human being could remain attached to an intravenous drip. So lengthy was my stay that I began to have positive feelings toward my captor, er, doctor. I also fell in love with my IV walker. After all, we went everywhere together; we even slept together—and I affectionately named it Ivy.

  My ordeal began at home when an ulcer decided to pierce a part of my duodenum, which happened to be adjacent to a major vein. I don’t know how long this ulcer was beavering away at the vein, but the breakthrough occurred on a Saturday afternoon when I was relieving myself in the bathroom. Suddenly, the hard, cold, tiled floor looked like a very attractive place to rest my head. I remember successfully easing my head to the floor, although my family members, who heard a loud thud reverberating throughout the house, seem to think differently.

  When I came to, I was lying on the floor, surrounded by a half-dozen people and attached to so many IVs, that had they been balloons, I would have floated toward the ceiling. My son kept telling me, “Stay with us,” which I found an odd request because I didn’t feel much like going anywhere, and I had decided earlier in the day to give away my tickets to the Puerto Rico Symphony’s performance that evening.

  Soon enough, I arrived at the hospital, where they placed a tube through my nose into my stomach, and then one into my rear end, which felt like it also reached my stomach. Or was it the rear end tube that went in first and the nose tube second? Or maybe they were both inserted at the same time. That part was a little blurry, but whatever happened, I do remember ricocheting off the ceiling, returning to the bed with the nose tube in my rear end, and the rear-end tube in my nose. The alert doctor quickly corrected this and may have even cleaned each tube off before reinsertion, but I was too groggy to notice. A few hundred radiation-laden tests later—X-rays, MRIs, CAT scans, electrocardiograms—and I was delivered, slightly aglow, to my prison cell hospital room.

  I am not paranoid like those guys who are always hearing voices in their heads; I hear them only occasionally. My unease grew when everybody assigned to my care—and I mean everybody: nurses, nurses-in-training, doctors, doctors-in-training—would look everywhere but into my eyes and say that I had the most conservative doctor in Puerto Rico. No one was willing to explain what they meant by “conservative.” I brushed that off and focused on my condition: a dangerously low hemoglobin level of 8.2g, which I had to build back up to my normal level of 15g. How unusual, then, that every morning (why did they have to do this at 4:30 a.m.?) the nurse—Nurse Ratched, I think her name was—would take from me what I needed most: a blood sample and some of my precious hemoglobin. Each night, my doctor would visit, gravely informing me that my hemoglobin level was not going up. Well. I considered discussing my theory with him but feared that he might instruct the nurse to increase the size of the daily blood sample to keep me docile.

  A day or two into my stay, I thought I overheard one of the nurses mention that my doctor had a substantial financial interest in a company that supplied the hospital with hypodermic needles, a plausible explanation for my treatment as a pin cushion. At least four times a day, some sort of needle penetrated my skin. My favorites were the daily, deep intramuscular injections of vitamin K and iron. I would bend over, hold onto a wooden chair in front of me for support, and the nurse would sink two impossibly long needles, one into each buttock. In her zeal to get the deep part right, the nurse would often have to dislodge the needle tip from the woo
den chair I was holding onto. I have seen so many stars that I now have all the constellations memorized.

  If four needles a day were not enough, after a week, a new nurse suddenly appeared two days in a row to prick my finger (with a needle, of course) testing for glucose. No one had explained to me why glucose is a concern to someone with an inadequate supply of hemoglobin—which, of course, it isn’t. The nurse returned to my room to say “Whoops!” and told me that the glucose test was meant for the fellow in the room next to mine.

  Either Doc just wanted to sell two more needles, or he was fishing for a bad glucose reading to keep me “under observation” for a few more days, or both. When he told me that one night that week he would be unable to check in on me and would send another doctor in his place, I presumed it was because his attendance was required at the National Needle, Syringe, and Intravenous Fluid Association’s Gala Dinner, where he would be the honored guest.

  I concluded that being on the receiving end of an error at a hospital—a rare event—placed me in a select group. Perhaps I would be interviewed for a scholarly article in the Journal of Medicine. I figured that it would be years before this institution made its next mistake, that is, until the night nurse told me that I had been scheduled for ACL surgery the next morning.