The True Spirit of Christmas

I worked at SAS Institute, Inc., a computer software company, from 1988-90. It was frequently named as one of the best companies in the U.S. for which to work. Aside from every other perk, which I’ll cover in a later post, it shut down each year during Christmas week.

The rationale was that no sales were likely to go through anyway, so why bother. The company also ended the sales year on November 30. In theory, then, December wouldn’t be a month of a panicky deadline but instead the start of a new year. Though not a salesperson, I thought that was pretty humane.

It’s been too long to recall what the week before the Christmas week vacation was like; the atmosphere on campus was pretty relaxed a lot of the time anyway. A couple of years later, I would begin a job at AIG and wear suits and ties again, but slacks and casual dress shirts were the order of the day at SAS.

We worked on a number of contracts the negotiations of which never seemed to end. One was with a computer leasing company, Comdisco, which was being handled by Joan Kingston. She was in her 50’s, was querulous, and owned neither a sense of humor nor self-awareness. I think she may have toiled away on Comdisco the entire two and a half years I was there. (Ironically Comdisco is no more, having finished up a complex bankruptcy not too long ago.)

Some contracts were like that. Another woman worked on the EDS contract that long. EDS, a powerhouse owned by Ross Perot, is no more, as well. (What does this tell us about the futility of human endeavor?) She may actually have finished the negotiations by the time I left. One afforded the unlucky people working on these forever projects the respect afforded firefighters or sanitation workers: their negotiations were complicated, possibly dangerous, and fraught with importance. The EDS contract was worth millions. One never asked how EDS or Comdisco was going; it was assumed badly.

Joan Kingston would tell you how it was going anyway, as it was her only topic of conversation. You could hear her around a hallway corner.

“What do I say to Comdisco about this,” she’d ask her conversational partner, usually a senior lawyer. I’d stop before turning the corner. Note that I ended that quotation with a comma, not a question mark. She was asking a question, but she didn’t really want you to think that she was relying on you, not really. She considered it a colloquium among equals.

“Well what’s our position on that?” the senior person would ask, gently trying to make Joan do her own work.

Everyone secretly disliked Joan; she badgered everyone about Comdisco, in a plaintive but bitter voice. There was no escaping either Comdisco or Joan.

One day I heard a senior lawyer answer with a suggestion, and Joan answered impatiently, “No, that won’t work.”

I always tried to arrive at work in the middle of the pack: not too early, never too late. But one morning before Christmas week, I arrived at the same time as Joan Kingston. She was standing in the hall, so I was anxious to hide in my office.

But barring the way was our floor’s cleaning person. She was short, in her 50’s like Joan, probably, and fierce: she shoved her vacuum up and down the hallway, brutally attacking the carpet as if to punish it for daring to insult her with dust. Her face was lined like a smoker’s, and her eyes squinted in anger. Her thin lips turned down in an expression of despair. Truly she had to have been descended from North Carolina mountain people: One dare not intrude on her territory, her carpet, while she was vacuuming it.

By the way, the carpet was green astroturf, with grey cubicles, and we lawyers had offices facing some greenery outside. We were on the bottom floor, but it felt somehow worse than the first floor, darker and more ominous, like a basement.

Joan was watching her, for, today, the woman had brought a large radio in; it was blasting out Christmas music, and we’re not talking Haydn here. We’re not even talking Nat King Cole or Bing Crosby.

Joan asked the woman, “Are you playing that music?” Her tone said, because, if you are, I am about to ask you to turn it off.

Without looking up, the woman declared, “Someone has to!”

Joan turned away from her, and Joan’s expression was one I’d never seen before on anyone: shock, nausea, and resignation. By 10:30, Joan would be surprised by how tired she felt. Until the woman’s work was done, and usually she was at least by the time everyone arrived, we were going to be listening to “Frosty the Snowman.” That was the first and only time I appreciated the redneck cleaning woman: she left Joan Kingston with no response.

The gratitude I immediately felt, the warmth of fellow feeling toward the mean-spirited redneck cleaning woman, exemplifies for me, and should for all of us, the true spirit of Christmas.