This American Life - 208: Office Politics

Episode Date: March 1, 2026

Stories of high drama from America's workplaces — surprising, emotional places full of the greed, jealousy, and ambition of real politics. Visit thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners to sign up for our premium subscription.Prologue: We hear three stories of how conflicts are resolved in offices. Two of those stories come from sociologist Calvin Morrill, who studied the executive suites at a number of large companies in his book The Executive Way: Conflict Management in Corporations. The last story comes from host Ira Glass, who talks about how he ended up punching his own boss in the stomach in front of all his co-workers. (12 minutes)Act One: Starlee Kine with the story of a company in turmoil. A young employee gets in a jam and discovers that in times of trouble, when all else has failed, companies in her industry turn to one woman in a suburban home in Long Island, who solves their corporate problems while the TV plays in the background. (12 minutes)Act Two: David Rakoff discusses the world of birthdays and other holidays, as they're celebrated on the job... and what happens when you call yourself an editorial assistant but the editor you're assisting calls you a secretary. (15 minutes)Act Three: Julie Snyder explains the office politics of street vendors on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street in New York City. With her is sociologist Mitch Duneier, who spent years working with the vendors and writing about them for his book Sidewalk. (14 minutes)Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.orgThis American Life privacy policy.Learn more about sponsor message choices.

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm ever glass. Jacobs and the other guys did not like their boss, Manwright. Manright was full of himself. He took credit for things that they did. He was hard to deal with. And they set out to sabotage him. A sociologist named Calvin Morel watched how they did it. It's part of a study of office politics in different companies.

These guys all worked for an old line banking firm that he calls old financial. All the names in this story have been changed. In traditional companies like this one, Morel says, All the politics happen in secret. It's all subterfuge. Here's how Manright was destroyed by Jacobs. Manright used to rely on this fellow Jacobs to prepare him before he would go before the senior executive committee meeting. And Jacobs is very good, very smart guy, and he could anticipate some of the questions that his boss would be asked at these meetings.

And so when he prepped him, he would just neglect to tell his boss about some of the key questions that he could anticipate being asked. There, his boss would stand at the committee meeting naked without the information that he needed. And eventually, he was removed as a result of this. Now, did Manright understand that he had been sabotaged? He didn't. When he actually, he got back each time, this happened to him over the course of several meetings where he was misprepped, if you will. And each time he came back, he was firmly convinced that his subordinates were incompetent. because how else could this have happened?

It never dawned on him that they were so competent and that they might actually be intentionally engaged in sabotage. Another multibillion-dollar company that Morel studied is one that he calls PlayCo in the Toyin Education product business. Unlike all at financial, where bosses were bosses and underlings or underlings, and so all the scheming had to go on in secret, at Playco, there was no real hierarchy. It wasn't clear who was in charge of whom.

And while that might sound like a kind of nice place to work, with no big bosses, it turns out that with no one absolutely in charge to make decisions and keep people in line, all the fighting was right out in the open. At meetings, people would try to humiliate and out-argue each other. They'd form alliances. The executives at Playco would talk all the time about honor and respect, as if they were medieval knights, or maybe mob figures. Then I even witness violence in this firm between executives.

One of the incidents I talk about was about two executives actually getting into a fist fight in front of the world headquarters of this multinational firm. Yeah, just tell what happened between those two. Yeah, well, one guy was called, I call him Greer, and the other guy actually had a nickname called the Terminator. And he was called The Terminator because there's this one guy. said he liked to hunt big game. I'd like to look for executives who he could best in arguments at meetings. And so these guys were parking their cars in the parking lot, and they called each other out, essentially.

Greer accused the Terminator of playing around with women at a local health club and embarrassing the corporation. Meanwhile, the Terminator accused Greer of being a weak executive. This thing escalated, and after a few minutes, one of them had the other over his load of sports car. There's this idea in capitalism that companies are making decisions and products and strategy based on rational evaluation of the market and their customers. To what degree is that true, based on what you saw? and to what degree are decisions being made based on office politics and not a rational evaluation of where their company is in the market?

There is some rationality, but thinking about the bottom line is sometimes a myth that outsiders tell each other about how decisions are made, and it's not always about the bottom line. It's about politics with one another, maneuvering with one another. Given all that, given all the conflict that Calvin Morel saw at all kinds of offices, what's surprising is not how many fiscalists. fights there are in offices, but how few? I know I've been in one. This happened years ago

on a public radio show that was just starting up. And I do not think of myself as much of a fighter, but here's how it went down. The guy who raised the money to start this show had this vision. And what his vision was, was he said, what if there were a radio show where you could turn on every day and you would hear something like Spike Lee and Philip Glass, the composer, and Stephen Hawking's, you know, the physicist, sitting down together and, you know, just talking, talking about the things that interest them in common. So this show was two hours a day, okay? This guy had never worked on a daily program. He'd done other stuff, but never a daily program. I and a number of the other people who worked on the show had worked on daily shows. At the time, by the way, I was not on the air.

It was just a producer. And so we're trying to start this show and every day we'd come in and we'd work and work and work and work and work and work. And every day we would have this experience of we would say, okay, you know, here's what we think we can do. It was a very, very small staff, very small staff. And every day we would say, like, okay, here's what we think we can do this week. And we would lay out like the programs and this and this and this and this. And at the end of the whole thing, all this work had gone into it.

At the end of the whole thing, the guy who had raised all the money and was our boss would say, you know, that's really very nice. but, you know, it's just not our original idea. It's not Spikely and Philip Glass and Stephen Hawking's, you know, sitting down and talking to each other. And those others who had worked on daily programs that always said to him, you know, like, well, that is a perfectly good idea. There's a very valid idea, perfectly good idea,

but you have to remember that you're on for two hours a day. You know, you have like two people making phone calls and booking this. You have like one or two tape cutters, one or two other people. It was a very, very small step. And so even if, you know, you could get Spike, and Philip Glass and Stephen Hawking's into a room, and you can figure out what in the world they actually have to say to each other, which would take a certain amount of research and time on someone's part. Even if you can make all this happen, you know, that's only one hour. That's

only going to be one show. And so we have to think about what's going to happen in all these other hours. And so that's a very good idea, very, very fine idea. But here are all these other ideas that we're going to do to fill all this other time, too. And this went on for day after day and week after week. And people were working very, very hard and sort of burning out. And finally, after weeks of this, we're all standing around. And we've just finished our first five shows, and it's been grueling. It's been really, really hard.

And we're evaluating what to do next and how we should change the format of the show and all that kind of thing. And we get to the end of this long, long discussion. It seems like we're all on the same page. And at last, like we're all in accord here. Here's where we've been. Here's where we've going. And our boss says, well, you know, there's one thing that we haven't gotten to,

and that is I think we're forgetting the original idea of the show. That really what it needs to be is, I think every hour needs to be more like, just imagine if Spike Lee and Philip Glass and Stephen Hawkins could sit down together. And, you know, just chat about whatever. And it had been a really hard few weeks. And as Nelson Mandela said in a very different context, You know, we had tried reason, but reason had failed to produce a solution. And so violence was our only option.

And I didn't really see anything else to do. Well, to say I didn't see anything implies a kind of thinking that really wasn't exactly happening. It was just straight, pretty much gut instinct, and I walked over and I punched him in the stomach. And his reaction, I have to say, was not really as satisfying as I was hoping for. It was like he was sort of cushiony. I didn't feel like I was making much of an impression. And we're standing very, very close now. And closer, I think, than we had ever stood to each other.

And he looks me in the eyes and he's a little bit sweaty. And he doesn't get mad at all. The whole thing just makes him get really, really sincere. And he says, you know, Ira, I really think that you should think about what you're doing for a second. which I have to say, you know, just made me mad. Like if you're really mad at somebody and they just start to talk to you like they're your therapist, you know, it just makes you matter. And so I punched him again. And again, not terribly satisfying and sort of a cushiony kind of feeling.

And, you know, punches don't make as much of a sound in real life as you think they might. And again, he sort of like looks me, our face is very close to each other, looks me in the eye and he says, you know, I think you're really having some feelings here that maybe you might be expressing a different way, which of course made me punch him again. At this point, at the third punch, pretty much people had gathered around us, and I was pulled off by the public radio staff of this show, which included a guy in a wheelchair, which gives you a sense of the tough kind of fight that was going on here. And I say all this now just to illustrate that even in the offices of an outfit known for its calm,

let us all sit down together and reason together kind of reasonableness. You know, even in the offices of public radio, even here, in the office where I speak to you from right now, feelings are so extreme that they can lead to hitting. Our relationships at our jobs, I think, contain all of the feelings, you know, we have in all of our personal relationships. You know, there are people you like, people you don't like. There's gratitude. There's resentment. There's jealousy.

It's all there. All the feelings are there. except in the workplace, we can express it, you know, because it's a workplace. You have to keep it bottled up inside, and then it ends up seeping out in all these other ways. Well, today on our program, office politics, we bring you three stories of conflict and high drama from our nation's workplaces. Act one, hang in there, kitty cat. It's almost Friday. In that act, a lowly office worker gets in a jam. and discovers that in times of trouble, when all else has failed, when all hope is gone.

Companies in her industry turn to one woman, one woman, my friend, in a suburban home in Long Island, who solves their corporate problems without ever turning off the TV that plays in the background. Act two, she cakes in the conference room, whiskey after dark. David Rakoff discusses the world of birthdays and other holidays as they are celebrated on the job. Act three, when the job to get you off the streets is on the streets, in that act we hear stories of the intricate office politics that take place in a location where you might not suspect there is any politics because there is no office. Stay with us.

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Kelly worked for a small startup. There were only about a dozen people on the staff, and the office was just one big room with no walls, like in a classroom. And a lot of the same office politics that happens behind closed doors and other offices happened in this one, except without the doors. It didn't take long before the employees took on the established roles. There was a cool kid, the flirt, the gossip, the nice boss who was really mean, the mean boss who was really nice. There was even the person who functioned as the unofficial psychologist. Every office has one, the person who is everyone's confidant, who listens to your problems and gives you a shoulder to cry on. In this office, though, the politics were so extreme that even she couldn't be trusted.

Our person would come in with the person who was crying, and the person who was crying would be like, thanks, I'll buy you a beer sometime. I really needed to get that off my chest. and that the psychologist would be like, oh, it's okay, you know, anytime. I'll be right back. And literally walk over to the person who the other person had just been saying is torturing them, making their life hell, and that they think might want to kill them. And then go over and be like, do you see that person sitting right there? Yeah, the one right in front of you.

She thinks that you might want to kill her. Since it was a startup, the company was having trouble even staying in business. Pressure was high, hours were long. There was lots of stress and breakdowns and teardons. years in fighting and of course sex. There was one person in particular who was sleeping with one of the women in the office and until the last day I think that most of the staff thought he was gay. There was a woman who was heterosexual but was obviously had a crush on the one lesbian

we had in the office like a hot and heavy crush. And also on the men too. Like she wasn't, you know, doesn't discriminate. And I mean a certain amount of sexual attention is, great. You know, it gets you get up, you know, to get up in the morning to actually wash your hair. But in this office, it was flying at you from such strange directions, and there was couplings happening within the office. From Kelly's perspective, the creepiest coupling was between her two bosses.

The three of them were working super closely on a new project. The two bosses had both pretty much already hated her, and they'd been hard enough to deal with them as individuals. But together they formed the sort of invincible, two-headed monster of hate, and Kelly was her number one target. When you're working with a very small staff, it's like being stuck on a ship with people. That's your only existence at all. So let's say you're stuck on this boat.

You're out at sea, calm waters in the beginning. A lot of us celebrating. I like you. Do you like me? I like you too. Yeah. And then things start to get rougher. Things start to get rougher. People are testy because they've been stuck in that boat for a long time.

you now know things like things that you don't even want to know about people you're forced to know in those environments so imagine that and then imagine the two people that I need to work with on a daily basis um not talking to me and not liking me and sleeping together so imagine we're all in that boat and we have to make room for them to sleep with each other like okay move over on the cods they just wouldn't make eye contact with me wouldn't talk to me for the entire deadline that we were on. And also this person is only sitting six feet away from me. So the uncomfortability of that was through the roof. And then slowly the ship began to sink.

They were running out of money. The bosses grew paranoid and started picking off their employees one by one. A person answered the phone incorrectly and was fired that same day. Malays set in. Employees started coming in later, not at all. No one believed in the project anymore. And then one day, some irreplaceable photographs that Kelly was in charge of went missing. I looked everywhere.

I looked in the bookcases under my desk. I looked in, you know, other people's offices on our floor. I looked in the drawers that were public. You know, we had public drawers that were people could store stuff. And then we had drawers that were private, which I didn't go into when people were there. But I did get so desperate that I went through everyone's stuff. Like I was getting irrational. Kelly suspected that one of her bosses had stolen the photographs.

They knew that she had to return the photos to the photographer and that her reputation was on the line. It would be a huge embarrassment if she had to actually call the photographer and tell him they were gone. In her office, sabotage was becoming trendy. Kelly had seen other examples of it. It just had never happened to her. She thought all was lost.

Until her friend told her what other companies in the industry did when objects like this couldn't be found. If this situation arises, they will hire a psychic to help them locate the images. A girl gave me a number of someone who she said was certified by the state of New York, was a crime, psychic. I called her.

She said, okay, I've got a half an hour for you, two days from now, come. Apparently, once you've accepted the notion that your bosses are actually trying to sabotage you, the idea of going to a psychic just doesn't seem that crazy anymore. It's even appropriate. Kelly called a psychic from her desk

in plain sight of every person. one, including the suspected boss. She didn't even bother lowering her voice. And then she said about following the psychic's instructions. She took Polaroid photos of the office and all the people working there. And then she got on a train to the psychic's house in Long Island.

She was hoping that the psychic would be able to tell her something, anything, about where the photos were. What she got was a whole lot more. The psychic lit a cigarette while Kelly laid out to Polaroid she'd taken. Then the psychic started describing the subtleist nuances of her co-worker's personalities.

Sometimes she would just say, like, words, like, oh, she's so insecure, as if she was having, like, a whole other conversation that wasn't with me, and she'd be like, oh, she's not pretty, oh, like, and she would start to feel sorry. And then she'd be like, oh, okay, he doesn't like women. He's not like he's gay. He just never thinks that women are worth that much. Of all the reading rooms and all the homes of all the psychics in Long Island, Kelly walked into this one. The home of Anne, the office politics psychic.

Anne had Kelly draw a little map of her office with lines indicating where everyone sat. The psychic went from desk to desk to desk, describing the office politics between Kelly's coworkers. These two are always gossiping with each other. Don't trust them. This one was your friend, but they didn't like her, so she got fired. He's sweet. You can tell him things. Then she got to Kelly's two bosses. and then she said, oh, okay, the person who sits here talks to the person who sits here all day long.

She actually drew a line between the two bosses who were sleeping with each other. She drew the line. Well, she would draw a little stick person, like behind the desk, and then she would draw another little stick person, and she'd be like, oh, this area to this area. Like, my two main bosses, she were saying, we're constantly talking to each other all day.

She went into things that I didn't even know happened, that later I found out happened. Like, they went on a trip. She knew basically that he was living at her place. There was not anything that she didn't know. Like the same amount of information with added psychic phenomenon as if she'd been sitting next to me the whole six months.

I've never called Miss Cleo. I've never had a terror reading or had my tea leaves read. I've never crossed over. But when I heard there was a psychic in Long Island, who could tell who was lying about breaking the office fax machine, I had to go. I called and made an appointment. She had one stipulation for letting me come. No debunking.

The great Italian cook. Everybody's a comedian today. Anne lived with her elderly mother and her seven-year-old daughter. When I get there, grandmother and granddaughter are nestled in easy chairs watching Golden Girls. Anne's doing a reading in the back, and her mother turns to me and asks if I'm there for a reading too. I tell her I'm not. We watched TV together in silence for a few minutes, and then Anne's mother turns back to me and asks if I'm there for a reading.

This pattern continues for the rest of the show. I finally give in and say, yes, I'm there for a reading. Then she gets up and shuffles off to the kitchen, and I can hear her muttering under her breath, fucking gypsies. Then Anne comes in and takes me to her reading room. Well, we kept the red carpeting. It's your root chakra, and it gives me a lot of energy,

because I'm actually in a beta-level sleep state. so I'm kind of groggy, and the best thing to wake you up in the morning is that nice red carpeting. Anne Reading Room looks like a suburban guest bedroom. There's a daybed that she likes because it makes it feel more like a therapist's office, pictures of her family, and a TV cluttered with chachkas like a jar labeled, ashes of problem customers. Anne prefers to be called a clear-audient trans medium, which means that she can hear stuff that isn't there as opposed to seeing stuff that isn't there. She goes into a trance and then her three-spirit guide to feed her the information.

When I talked to Ann on the phone, she told me she'd be in a trans when I got there. In fact, she'd been in a trans when she told me that. It turns out Anne's almost always in a trans. At her house, I saw her receive payment for her services, recommend a good restaurant, and usher her client to the door, all while in a trance. This seemed to be a complete abuse of the word trans. Not to be debunkie or anything. Appointments with Anne are hard to get.

She'll take anybody, but she's usually booked months in advance. People come for the usual stuff like channeling dead relatives, but she does a big business of finding lost objects and a large percentage of her client come about problems at work. If you think about it, that's where you spend most of your waking time during the day in most cases is in offices. That's why there's so many issues that people, the variety of issues, I couldn't begin to count or measure.

I mean, you name it, I've had them all. I watch Yen's clients drift in and out of her home from morning till night. And what I learn is this. It doesn't matter that the people work in different kinds of jobs. All their stories are the same. There's a cop with a corrupt boss intent on making his life hell. You know, you could be sitting in a room of five people he would walk in and say hello to the other four. And just like ignore me like I wasn't there.

There's a woman from the car rental agency with the boss who didn't like women. And he had already been responsible for firing the two other girls in the office out as the last remaining female. There's a woman from the phone company who were working with a lot of people younger than her. There was a few managers that had a problem with. She was the type that laugh in your face, but she actually, like, did you in behind your back? Talking to Anne about all this, every office is Othello, full of jealousy and greed and intrigue. Kelly's story wasn't surprising to her at all. Surprise me? Not much of it, honestly, because I find it very common in the workplace and very often.

In times or not, there's a lot of backstabbing. At some point, I'm guessing, you've worried about investing too much emotional energy in your colleagues, your boss, your work. At least we're all doing it. In fact, for Kelly, one of the best things about going to Anne about the missing photos is that Anne

didn't view her freak out as excessive. Up until that point, you know, I would be like calling my mom saying, like, they've taken them. They've taken them. I know they have. and she would be totally freaked out as any, like all of my friends were and they're like, let it go, you're gonna find them.

And I'd be like, no, no, this is bad, this horrible place, and, you know, and I'd be going on these rants and my friends and my family were trying to be okay about it, but she was the first person that was like, oh, yeah, this is bad, and you're right, and that's unfortunate. And I said, well, you know, I brought photos,

you know, so I wanted to show her the photos to show her the different places in the office. And she basically looked at the first one, which was a Polaroid of all the guys in the office, and said, oh, that's him. He was really mad when you were taking that photo because he knew that you were coming here. The man she pointed to was Kelly's boss. He's red in the face in this photo glaring at me. His veins on his neck are sticking out, and it looks like he could probably hit me.

How much actual clairvoyance was involved in this? is anyone's guess. Anne's clients all swear by her. Love her, actually. But Anne and her clients all say that a part of what Anne does is confirm what you already know. Kelly suspected her bosses, Anne told her she was right to. Armed with this new knowledge, Kelly did absolutely nothing.

She didn't confront her bosses or go over their heads to the head of the company. She didn't do anything. She didn't need to. She felt better. I felt totally vindicated. I felt like released. After Anne. Yeah, I told her.

fully felt released because before I went to her, I kept waiting for them to break. I kept thinking that maybe they'd tell me or that they'd admit to it or that they'd just, like, put them on my desk at night and I'd come in in the morning and they'd be there. I'd have fantasies about that a lot. And then afterward, I just, I didn't have to worry anymore. I had no suspicions. I knew that everything that I had thought she had told me was true. And I stopped caring.

I felt like I could look at them from a different angle, and it wasn't personal anymore. It was just more like, wow, that's pretty pathetic, you know? The lost photos were never found, just like Anne said they wouldn't be. Kelly now works somewhere else. Anne is booked her next summer. The problem with office politics is it never really makes sense outside of the office. Your friends and family will never fully understand what it is you hate so much about the girl down the hall. With Anne, not only does she seem to understand.

You don't even have to tell her about it. Starly Hein. She was a producer in our show when she made that story. In the years since we first broadcast today's show, she went on to create this beloved and short-lived podcast called Mystery Show. If you like this story, you might want to check that out wherever you get your podcast. Act two, she kicks in the conference room, whiskey after dark. Americans are, as everybody knows, spending more time on the job,

which means more people's social lives are organized around their work lives. and more holidays are celebrated more intensely and mean more on the job site. David Rakoff wrote this next story while we at This American Life, took our show on the road, doing our show before live audiences around the country. It is a parable of three such holidays as celebrated on the job. Holiday the first, National Secretaries Day. At least we consoled ourselves. We were assistants, not secretaries.

In the world we were in the world of New York publishing these titles meant everything. It's a loathsome distinction, the almost meaningless difference between field and house slave. After all, we all of us, secretaries and assistants alike, had much the same duties, filing, photocopying, taking dictation, and making reservations for meals we would never get to eat.

There was one glaring discrepancy between us and the secretaries, Specifically, their salaries dwarfed ours. But our penury came with the promise that we were bound for better things. We would be mentored, promoted, and one day raised to our rightful stations as book editors, our faith in the East Coast meritocracy restored. Still, every April, when National Secretary's Day rolled around, many of us took sick days, genuinely nauseous with worry, that we might be mistook for them

and there on our assistants' desks would be the asparagus, fern, and baby's breath surrounded long-stem roses, with the heartfelt note from the boss who just couldn't do it without you. Instead of National Secretary's Day, we assistants had our own folk traditions with our own holidays,

one of which we celebrated often, almost nightly, in fact. We called it drinking. With disturbing regularity, the end of the workday found us at the old monkey bar, the Dorset Bar, the Warwick Bar, all of which were attached to serviceable and somewhat down-atheel hotels. Midtown Manhattan used to be full of just such comfortably shabby establishments where career waiters with brilliant-teened combovers and shiny elbowed jackets served marvelously cheap, albeit watery drinks along with free snacks. Withered celery sticks. unironic faux-asian poop-patter's pretzel nuggets accompanying a cheese spread of a color

that in nature usually signals I am an alluring yet highly poisonous tree frog beware dinner and forgetfulness all for ten dollars youth is not wasted on the young it is perpetrated on the young hooch happily was one luxury we could afford our drunkenness was twofold first there was the liquor, but there was also the intoxication brought on by the self-aggrandizing conviction

that we happy few, we cheery boozehounds, were the new incarnations of that most mythic bunch of souses, the Algonquin round table. This pipe dream sustained not just us, but I suspect countless other tables of publishing menials all over town. So desperate were we to assume the mantles of Parker, Benchley, and their ilk that we weren't going to let some silly thing like a dearth of wit or the complete absence of a body of work on any of our parts deter us. With enough four-dollar drinks sloshing through our veins, even the most dunderheaded schoolyard japerie qualified as carouscating repartee.

What do you want? A repost might begin. A medal or a chest to pin it on. Oh, to she! We cried merrily as we clutched our martinis. That represent. the high point of the discourse. Gradually our tongues thickened and our moods darkened unpleasantly, as the evenings wore on a hostile, gin-scented pole fell over everything, and our glittering aphorisms were reduced to the wishful and direct. I hope my boss is dead right now.

Paying the bill, we stumbled out into the street and back to our apartments, where we spent the rest of the night jealously reading the manuscripts of those who actually wrote, wrote and didn't just drink about it. Rising unrefreshed, we would return to the office and rubbing alcohol and cotton balls in hand, get down to work swabbing leaf by leaf the potted plants in our boss's office, a vain attempt to stop the outbreak of whitefly that was going around the floor. Impressing the higher-ups became our constant purpose. We spent an inordinate amount of time attaching disproportionate significance to our message-taking skills, our collating

acumen, no small feet from under a hovering cloud of job hatred. How sad to realize from the vantage point of years later that the answer to the question that was perpetually on our minds, what do they think of me, was they didn't, at all. Realistically, we were the help, and it was best not to forget it. Holiday the second, Christmas. Those three weeks or so of Midtown Manhattan Christmas are an assistance dream. No work gets done and all is romanticized melancholy.

It was precisely why so many of us had moved to the city so that we too might gaze misanthropically at the corporate Christmas tree in the lobby surrounded with gift-wrapped empty boxes that fooled nobody and in the institutional fluorescent-lit sadness of it all feels something approaching depth. the phone's idle we spent our days going to the movies during lunch returning hours later to troll the holes of the office

foraging through the gift baskets like a ravening pack of voles subsisting on cars water biscuits individually red wax dip balls of baby gutha butternut toffee popcorn smokehouse almonds and fancy fruit preserves eaten directly from the jar a diet that had our faces peppered with blackheads and glistening with oily sebum as unto the shining visages of the apostles. Our bosses were away with their families at country houses, having real lives.

We wondered how they might greet the sight of the empty food baskets upon their return. Such anarchy, such transgression. As usual, they never even noticed. We, on the other hand, could not even conceive of a world wherein we did not know the exact quantity and location of our giant cashews. Holiday the third. Happy birthday. after any moment of extreme assistant subjugation, say, a morning wherein one might

innocently open an unsolicited manuscript only to find that someone had mailed the publishing house a jiffy pack full of human feces, or one might be sent to the corner to pick up a cappuccino for an author who had just been given a million-dollar book advance, a coffee for which I was not reimbursed. After such moments, we would make our way to Sheila's cubicle, where we could always always be guaranteed, clear-eyed advice, and cigarettes. Sheila was our bad girl leader. A poet and writer herself, she despised her job

and didn't care who knew it, smoking openly at her desk and standing on ceremony for no one. These would be my pajamas that I slept in last night. She would say indicating the black long-sleeve t-shirt and black workout pants she was wearing. And this, she would add fingering a crusted white smear on the hem of the top. This would be spilled food. nice.

Well, they say, dress for the job you want, not the job you have. So, of course, it was immediately to Sheila that I went when I received my birthday card. It was late November. Opening the envelope, my eyes fell upon it, a reproduction of one of those

tinted B movie stills from the 1950s, a woman in a smart, warsted business jacket wearing a pair of glasses at which men seldom make passes, and a switchboard operator's headset out of which were shooting tiny lightning bolts were shown to be thinking, someone needs coffee. Above her head in screaming

sci-fi acid yellow type was the title of this card's purported movie, the amazing tale of the psychic secretary. I slid the card back into the envelope, walked over and showed it to her. Get your coat,

she said. Her voice business-like, her face unreadable. We went to the Warwick bar. Don't talk for a while. Just smoke, she said. And then as an afterthought she added, but you knew I was going to say that, didn't you? Psychic Secretary. Across from us in the darkened booth, a couple sat, a man and a woman. They'd clearly been there for hours because the woman's head was lulling about on her neck as she alternately whispered lubriciously or laughed too heartily at her companion's jokes. We had a clear view under the table where we could see her

rubbing ever higher up his thigh. I knew where this exchange was leading. Psychic. Not long after that evening, I sat in a movie theater packed to the rafters. Just before the lights went down, a woman marched up the aisle, looked at me, and asked, is that seat taken? I was nowhere near the end of the row, but trying to be helpful, I asked, which seat? Looking directly into my eyes, she said, that seat.

She pointed. She was pointing to the center of my chest, to my very heart. Well, I'm sitting here. I managed, finally. As if I were her college-age daughter who had suddenly announced that I was a vegetarian, she shrugged in a kind of suture self-indulgence of my fantasy of existence and moved on. I looked up and down the row for some sort of laughter, some eye-rolling commiseration, or just plain corroboration that this had just happened, but I got no response.

To this day, I cannot explain it. Was this an emissary sent from on high at that time of year, not to trumpet the birth of the Son of God, but to proclaim with heavenly proof my complete and utter insignificance? She's right, I thought. This seat isn't taken. It was the perfect moment for that time in my life. I mean that, of course, in the worst way possible.

The theater went dark. Up on the screen, the camera zoomed past a huge close-up of the Statue of Liberty, swooping down to find the Staten Island Ferry scudding along the water, transporting our working girl to her office job, where we already knew she would triumph, vanquish the harpy boss, and win the love of the man. Sheila taught me a survival technique for getting through seemingly intolerable situations,

interminable lunches, stern lectures on attitude or time management, being trapped by the office bore beside the sheetcake in the conference room and the like. Maintaining eye contact, keep your face inscrutable and mask-like, with the faintest tint of a smile. Keep this up as long as you possibly can, and just as you feel you're about to crack and take a letter opener and plunge it into someone's neck, fold your hands in your lap, one nestled inside,

the other, like those of a supplicant in a priory. Now with the index finger of your inner hand, right on the palm of the other, very discreetly and undetectably, I hate you. I hate you. I hate you. Over and over again as you pretend to listen. You will find that this brings a spontaneous look of interest and pleased engagement to your countenance. Continue and repeat as necessary. In the dark of the theater, I write my message, pressing hard into the flesh of my hand.

Although I don't know who I'm writing to, I'm just glad to feel that it hurts. Thank you. The late favorite rackoff. He put a version of this story into his first book, which is called fraud. Coming up, Philip Glass, Spike Lee, and Stephen Hawking, sit around and have a casual conversation

about, you know, Whatever. That'll be the day. In a minute from Chicago Bubba Radio, when our program continues. It's an American life from Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose some theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that team. Today's show is a rerun from many, many, many years ago.

Office politics, high drama in our nation's workplaces. We've arrived at Act 3, Act 3, when the job to get you off the streets is on the streets. So it was a time in New York City. at 6th Avenue and 8th Street in Greenwich Village for pretty much any day you would see tables on the sidewalks manned by scruffy-looking man.

These days there's just a handful of tables like this, but back in the early 2000s when we first made this episode and put it on the air, the tables extended for two blocks, one after another, selling magazines and books. Most of those magazines and books have been pulled from the trash,

found in dumpsters. Julie Snyder reports on the politics of this particular business. After spending a couple of days on the corner of 6th Avenue in 8th Street, what strikes me is not how different street vending is from other businesses, but how similar. As if the rules of business are so deeply encoded in us that as soon as anyone starts to sell anything in any setting,

the rules and hierarchies of a company start to gel around them, even if what they're doing is selling other people's trash. On the corner, you've got your entry levels, and you've got the people who have worked and clawed their way to the top. That's more or less what Ishmael Walker did. When I visit, he has the best spot on the block right on the corner in front of the Barnes & Noble. And what got him there was simple ambition. At one time, I was down the block.

And I was just sitting out and I said, damn, all the money is up there and everybody up there. So, see, that bookstore, people go and buy books, right? And I got books on the table. I got magazines. I might just got what they want. There are other reasons Ishmael went in the corner. Right across is Gray's papaya, a hot dog restaurant with plate glass windows that looks directly under the corner. When it rains, he can sit inside and eat and still keep an eye on his stuff.

Also, there's a small alcove that's right in front of Ishmael's table where he keeps a chair and can relax or nap during the day. To understand how you rise to the best space on the block, or how you get demoted to the worst, Ron's story. I told you one time I had this whole block from the light post to the light post. This was when I first came out here. Ron's at the very end of the blocks in what is arguably the worst location. Years ago, before Ishmael made his move to the top, Ron controlled the entire block, including

the area where Ishmael is now. Now, how I got control of this old block was that I was living here. I was living right here on the sidewalk. There was no way anybody was going to get here before me, you understand? And I used to sleep over there. Me and a few other guys used to sleep over there. I'd pack my stuff up in a dumpster, a post office thing. And I would push it over there.

You understand, if I wanted, I could be up 24 hours if I wanted to. More than half the guys on 6th Avenue were homeless, so it's easier for them to stay with their stuff and keep their spaces on the street. Eventually, Ron moved in with his aunt in Harlem. He lost control of the block, and now he doesn't get as much business as Ismail does. He's away from all the action. But it's just not worth it to Ron anymore. Because I'm not gonna stay out here all night to pull down the spot.

You know, I got a place to live now. You understand? I'm gonna pack my stuff up at night and go home. You understand? The way Ron started here is the way all the guys start. He was a panhandler, but you're lucky if you get any of the guys to admit that because, for the most part, the vendors are embarrassed about their panhandling pass. The panhandlers, meanwhile, look down on the vendors,

saying they have too much pride to sell someone else's trash. sell someone else's trash. Ron remembers panhandling is just being humiliating. I was like panhandling over there on 9th Street. And I remember one day I walked up to my brother-in-law. I didn't walk up to him. I was panhanding like my back was turned. And he walked up and I turned around and said,

made some change. And he was my brother-in-law. And he looked at me like, said I got a wife and kids to support. And he kept going, you know. And one time I was really embarrassed. This time I was working at this job. I was working on his job as a timekeeping.

I was getting good money. And I end up leaving that job because, you know, I'm at drinking. And one of the coworkers that I didn't really get along with that good was a girl. And she had a boyfriend. Her boyfriend was a police, police, New Jersey cop. And I remember one day I was pine-handling uptown. And she walked up and she looked at me like she was real startled. And she was with the guy.

And, you know, I remember I was really embarrassed that time. So I'm actually glad that I was able to start spending, which is, you know, more respectable. When you spend time on the corner, what it looks like is there will be 20 or 30 guys all around the tables, and it seems like they're just hanging out doing nothing. But it turns out they all have different and distinct jobs with different responsibilities and pay scales. There are placeholders who camp out overnight on the sidewalk, holding a space that they sell to vendors in the morning. That usually pays around $20 to $30. Guys called storage providers have places either in their apartments or under the subway tracks or in empty storerooms,

where they charge $7 to $10 for the vendors to keep their tables and crates of magazines during the night. The movers help the vendors haul their stuff on and off the sidewalks. They generally make $5 to $10 a move. If you were to show up on 6th Avenue tomorrow to start in the business, even with a high school or college degree, even with other job experience, you'd have to work your way up, same as anyone, before you'd make vendor. When sociologist Mitch DeNirich came to the block to write about the vendors, he was first put to work getting coffee and helping out in little ways for months before getting his own table.

He ended up spending years with the vendors. Not anybody can come out here and set up a table. You have to work your way through the system. because there's only a certain number of legal spots on the street. The city regulates how many spots there can be. And so some guys show up in the morning and their whole job is just to be a mover. And in fact, that's how Conrad got started out here. He was originally just a mover.

And now he moved up to getting his own table. And there are many people who start out as table watchers, watching a table all night while someone else goes to sleep or watching a table while people go to the bathroom and, you know, they may wind up having their own table one day. one day. Mitch introduced me to everyone on 6th Avenue and explained that excessive drug use

is pretty much what brought all of the guys out here. Most times, a person's position on the sidewalk correlates to their level of addiction. If you smoke a lot of crack and aren't too trustworthy, a placeholder is about the best job you can get. If you're pretty clean, you're probably a regular table watcher or a vendor.

So there are clicks on the sidewalks and mutual snobberies between the panhandlers and the vendors. But like in any workplace, there are people who sidestepped those trivialities. Ignore the politics. BA is one of those people. Watch the town, so I'll tell you the lady here, right? Some people say the BA stands for bad attitude, but BA prefers business administrator.

It's an apt title for him because he's sort of a floater on 6th Avenue, one of the few guys who jumps from job to job during the day. On this afternoon, BA is table watching. He's also placeholding, a space next to him for a vendor named Joe. an elderly white guy who sells rare and out-of-print books but only comes to the sidewalks on weekends. And then on top of all of that, at four in the afternoon most days, he goes down to the Path train station to Panhandle, though today he isn't going. Yeah, I got somebody down there working for him.

At the train? Yeah, the Path train station. You pay somebody to go down there for you if you can't go and then... They pay me when they come up. They pay me. Because you have a spot down there too? They take my time. You know what I'm saying?

My time is from 4 to 6, right? So if they want to get on my time, I tell them, give me half. They can go down there for 4 to 6, give me half. So right now, you're making money down at the train station. And then you're also making money right now on the table. Of course.

That's how I go. And then you'll also make money tonight by holding the space for Joe for tomorrow. Got it. What would you do if they went, If somebody, like, just went down there from four to six and started panhandling and you didn't know them and they didn't pay you. Like, isn't that possible? No, no.

They got to go. Because I go like 3.30 and I check out my spot. You know what I'm saying? I go at 3.30, I go make sure everything is clear. I'm saying I go set myself up, put my crate down there, get my cup ready. I change my clothes to look like a bum. Wait. At the risk of making homeless advocates' crows.

I want to make sure you caught that. Right now, B.A. is wearing a polo shirt from the Gap, cackies and Adidas. But when he goes down to Panhandle, he says, he changes his clothes to look like a bum. I change my clothes to look like a bum. You change your clothes to look like, because right now you look really nice. That's how to say. I told you I had to go change and everything. You have to go down and go panhandling. Then what do you wear?

I'm putting on my awl. Old o'alls or something. My sneakers are, you know, just dusting something dusting on my du rag or something like that. You know, and sit down and just look homeless. And in two hours, how much can you get? I'm $60 to $80. Hey, Shardy, where you get those baby for? You, what's the...

Baguzee? At one point in the corner, Ishmael's friend Shortie pulls up on the sidewalk and gets out of a cab carrying several cardboard boxes. Someone had cleaned out their apartment and given Shorty a bunch of old books. Oh, uh-oh, uh-oh. He got something up in there. The guys gather around and evaluate the books. Most of them seem pretty old, with titles nobody's ever heard of.

But there are a few known sellers. You used to miss, the babysitters club? The babysitters club. Needs a cell, bro. I don't let nobody tell them, like, a person don't sell books or magazines. Don't know nothing about. Some of these guys have known each other for over 20 years. In the mid-80s, they lived together in Penn Station before the city cleaned it up.

After time in jail and treatment programs, the guys regrouped on 6th Avenue. And they're close in a way that makes it nice to hang out with them. They joke around, they get into little arguments that last a day or two and then blow over. These are all good prices, my brother. How much are you on the $1 piece on them? A good deal for those. Starting around 4 in the afternoon, the sidewalks start getting busier. the music gets turned up on the stereos,

and what's known as the power hour begins. Each table has about 150 to 200 magazines laid out. The sellers? Vogue, Vibe, GQ, Martha Stewart Living, architectural digest. There are foreign fashion magazines like Italian Vogue and the occasional specialty order. I got a girl right now,

she wants Drew Barrymore Playboy issue. She said on the internet, they're asking $60 for it. I don't have that book many times. I'm waiting on it now. I'm just charge it $3.5.5. The losers? Any weekly magazine, the New Yorker, Sports Illustrated, Newsweek. Neighbors will often donate stacks of weekly magazines, like people, to the vendors.

The vendors will take them just to be polite, and later, quietly throw them away. It seems that Smut sells the best, and there's a surprisingly large stock of gay porn that everyone is completely matter-of-fact about. In fact, it's all pretty relaxed, no hard sell, except for Ishmael, sitting in a small. in his premium spot at the top of the block. At one point, a cab driver, who Ishmael has apparently dealt with before, pulls up next to the tables and asks Ishmael

if he has any computer books or software. Yeah, they're right there, the whole session, the whole foot. Come on out your cab. You got to get up out of the cab and come on by the table, bro. The cab driver is reluctant to leave his cab parked, sitting in the middle of a lane of traffic on the side of a busy New York City street. You got to come on out.

You got to get up out of it. But we ain't going to have that accident no more like we did last time. I don't worry about the ticket. I want you to see the books, man. Ishmael actually gets the cab driver to come out of his cab into the table. He sells the computer book for $10. Now, I don't understand how you're going to see like that. It's good to go around the table and you can see what's in fun.

What got Ishmael to the top of the block is pretty much what gets someone to the top of any business. He just wanted it more. When he first started on the sidewalk, there was a guy named Scotty, sitting at the corner by the bookstore. So Ishmael made a plan. He says he stayed inside and rested up for a week and got ready to make his move on Scotty. So the day come, he didn't come yet.

So my tables is in there. Next minute. Here he comes. Oh boy. I fought for three morning, three days straight. Right? Physically fighting. Tables in the street.

Common books in the street. Books in the street. He kicked mine and I kicked it. for three days straight, eight o'clock to about 11 o'clock on the afternoon. Morning. When Mitch first introduced me to Ishmael, Mitch said he'd met few people in his life

with the determination that Ishmael has. And I know it's weird that the path to triumph will be kicking the ass of your opponent for three hours every morning, but if Coke and Pepsi could do the same thing, don't you think they would? Ishmael, I have seen you in 30 below, zero weather. At 3 o'clock in the morning, I've seen you preserving this space out here

when everybody else was gone. That's right. Because it's like the, they said, the ghost come out at night, you know, and if you're not there, believe me, somebody is willing to slip up in there. On a good day, when the weather's nice and lots of people are out, Ishmael makes about $150. but he works seven days a week, and a lot of days, it rains. Julie Snyder was the senior producer of our show back when we first broadcast today's program.

She went on to co-create the serial podcast, thanks to Mitch DeNir for acting as our guide to this story. His book, documenting several years in the lives of the vendors, is called Sidewalk. That book became a documentary film with the same name. Mitch still visits the vendors every few months. B.A. and Shurdy have since passed away. Rom was deported to Jamaica. But Ishmael still hangs around the neighborhood. He's retired now.

When people started looking on their phones on the subway and stopped buying books and magazines to read there, the vendors on 6th Avenue took a big hit. Thanks today to Monica Hall and Chris Neary. Production help on this rerun from Michael Comite, Molly Marcellar, Stone Nelson, and Ryan Rummary. This American Life is a little bit of public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.

Thanks as always to our program's co-founder, Mr. Tori Malatia, and Spike Lee walks in on Tori and me and Philip Glass and Stephen Hawking. This is what happens. He would walk in and say hello to the other four and just like ignore me like I wasn't there. I'm Eric Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. Next week on the podcast of This American Life,

a bus full of people going to D.C. Only the driver doesn't want to go to D.C. He's going to go wherever he wants. And the passengers? strangers who never met till now. Nothing like one rogue person to make everyone else unite, you know. What happens next? A real-life version of the movie Speed.

Next week on the podcast, on your local public radio station.