[This entry is
adapted from one that was originally going to be posted last summer, and I
decided to cut it then in the interests of being economical. It was referred to
in passing here, at the end
of subsection I. But lately it seems useful as a good encapsulation of the
types of accounting tricks used at medical-advertising firms, especially when
they employ the more insulting forms of use of freelance editors of which they
are characteristically capable. I should advise that this example in its
specific style is not typical of
CommonHealth or of any other medical-ad place I’ve been at, because of how
stupid it is; but it distills into the crudest
form the problematic way freelance editors can be used as, if I may coin a
provocative term, “billing day-laborers.”
(My original phrase, used in another context, was less “politically
correct.”)]
[As elsewhere, I refer to “temp” and “freelance” editors in
this entry as if the terms are interchangeable. But all “temps” I note below as
having been at the Adient division, I believe, were employed through a
placement agency.]
[For information on what the “Pentimento pause” series is
about, see here, item 5.]
Subsections below:
How this stint
started
A small editorial staff
A fairly standard style of proofreading was
expected; but there was unorthodox time-recording
Time-padding led to curiosities, and the start of absurdities
This system was more efficient for billing a Big Pharma client; much
less so for rewarding editor efficiency
A ludicrous issue with one particular account becomes a flashpoint
Some evidentiary “triangulation” via others
A marketing-fellow-aided afterword
Preface. While
people engage in populist grumbling about the IRS’s allegedly targeting nascent
groups via certain keywords (like “tea party” or such) in reviewing their
applications for nonprofit status, or we get such situations as the 1040 forms
and related support coming late in the tax season this past winter because
Congress had belatedly approved budget measures that affected certain tax laws,
we might wonder if anything is sacred at the most fundamental money-related levels
of this Land of the Dollar. But one thing is for sure, for those of us peons
without education in accounting or who have rather low-level jobs and budgets
to attend to: when we see solid evidence of accounting regularity in such
entities as an employer, sometimes the simplest common-sense approach can help
us untangle what weirdness is going on. And if we can’t call down rotten stuff
there, how can we hope to get larger, more-widely-affecting financial
shenanigans mitigated?
##
When it comes to experiences at CommonHealth within the
window of “10 years after the incident in question”—10 years being how long the
firm wants confidentiality maintained—I have generally tried to tread
carefully, mindful of all the considerations I noted in my July 3, 2012, blog entry.
But in the case of a two-month stint in the middle of 2004
(now nine years ago, already!), I can easily make an exception. Here I look in
detail at a particularly vivid example of corrupt behavior, the main reason
being this: it doesn’t just put into distilled—even caricaturish—form some of
the manipulative ways editors’ work could be used at this firm, but it shows such a blunt stupidity on the part of
the managing editor, BR, that it seemed to go beyond the bounds of the studied disingenuousness that seemed
more broadly typical of the firm when it came to freelance time-recording.
That is, what this editor did in its specifics was not typical of the firm (but it might
have fit in more at other, smaller medical-advertising firms). There was a distinct lack of class here—and yet
this person was still working at CommonHealth, six years later, in summer 2010
(not in the division in which I
worked then). This may go to show that she had her value in hauling in money
for the firm, if nothing else (“I brung in good dollar,” you might caricaturingly
picture her saying, stumble-mouthed). (Or it may support the notion, if you
wanted to uptick your snarkiness about this kind of industry, that medical advertising is a form of organized
crime for people who are too stupid for the usual Mafia.)
(Note that, while the stupidity of the accounting moves
used here suggest they would fit in better with the low-minded culture of a
“trash publisher” [some of the information in this document is irrelevant
to the present blog entry], those latter companies typically wouldn’t use this
method, because they try to do
everything on the cheap, and thus would tend not to pay highly per hour for editorial functions, to freelancers
or otherwise. Only medical-ad firms typically have paid high per hour—when it
comes to using contractors [and because, across the board, the money figures
used in various aspects of these firms’ business are too high anyway]—based on the
sort of crazy “money is no object” way of thinking that would allow this
particular kind of seedy move.)
The methods of this editor, BR, for feeding into the general
firm expectation to bill the Big Pharma
client high also had the quality of insulting your (the hands-on editor’s)
intelligence so badly that BR’s example raises the question, “If this is how
much of a piece of crap as you treat me, why even have me here? Doesn’t your Neanderthal treatment of me seem to imply
that I am ‘unworthy to be used at CommonHealth’?” [CC #3, 4; see End note.]
How this stint
started
In spring 2004, I had started working for the placement
agency The Gary Laverne Group (a pseudonym), after a fairly fallow period (in
terms of medical-media editing) from fall 2003 through winter 2004. Within this
same period, as it turned out, I did my last work for Horizon Graphics, which
as a placement agency essentially went dormant by spring 2004. Though Horizon
had my phone number, and it had used me for many gigs from 2001 through 2003,
it never called me back for work after some short gigs in about late winter
2004.
(I was surprised to hear that Horizon was back in business
in early 2006, when I encountered a temp editor that it had placed at Cardinal
Health in Wayne Township, N.J., when I was working as a freelancer
there in a capacity independent of any placement agency. Horizon seemed to have
kicked into action again in late 2005, if not earlier.)
The first gig GLG got me—which
was a blessing, given the paltry amount of freelance work I had the
winter/early spring of 2004—was the division of CommonHealth called Adient,
which was the successor name for Ferguson 2000. Ferguson 2000, by that point, had
moved from its office in Little Falls (where I had been interviewed in 1995).
It had moved to an office building in Wayne Township,
which also housed several other divisions of CommonHealth, including MBS/Vox,
where I had worked for eight months almost continuously in 2002-03.
My gig at Adient lasted about
two months (April-June 2004), as the high heat of summer was beginning. Then
the gig abruptly ended, for a couple reasons; and I don’t think I had anything
at a division of CommonHealth that lasted nearly as long—even though the Adient
gig was a fraction in length of the MBS/Vox gig in 2002-03—until two periods at
CommonHealth that I don’t think, in either case, were even as long as two
months (and both were through GLG): (1) in late 2004, three or four weeks (and
my first time) at the Ferguson division (then at its Lanidex Plaza location in
Parsippany); and (2) in late 2005, a few weeks at the division of Carbon, when
it was still located in Wayne, N.J. (And in this latter period, I had the first
experience of a paycheck from GLG bouncing, which presaged GLG’s bizarrely going
out of business in 2007.)
A small editorial staff
The editorial staff for Adient
was a small group: there were about three staffers, including BR, the longtime
managerial editor, a middle-aged, stocky woman who dressed rather frumpily (as
I recall) and definitely carried a construction worker’s lunch box for her
lunch. Overall, she gave off a very blue-collar air. Her handwriting looked as
if she had dipped a rock in red ink and used that to write.
She had worked for years at
American Cyanamid and/or American Home Products (the different names applied
originally to two separate companies in [I believe] different locations, but AHP
eventually took over ownership of Cyanamid—and BR’s workplace, with whichever
name, was at an office campus in Wayne Township). In a general sense, this meant,
as the distinction sometimes was made in the medical-advertising world, that
she had worked “on the pharma company side” rather than “the media-company side”
(this paraphrases the argot). Thus she was well used to playing the corporate game…though, as I found, her
way of handling editorial time at CommonHealth was startling for its
ham-handedness.
She had a female assistant, who
I think was a staffer (and had started as a temp), a nice woman (I can picture
her face but her name escapes me right now) whom I think I worked with
elsewhere (later or earlier). (I think it was she who had referred me to
another firm, Metaphor, where I ended up working freelance in 2006.) And there
was also a thin young man who started doing work there—I think he had started
as a temp well before I arrived, and still was there as such when I arrived (it’s funny how my memory
is fuzzy on these details); I think he became a staffer while I was there.
I think that Adient was yet
another place where the “temp to perm” bone was waved in your face when you
started there as a temp/freelance editor. But of course the prerogative in this
change regarding your status’s being made lay primarily with the management,
and the consistency of intent, or of rationale,
could be more apt to mutate—seemingly freakishly so—on management’s prerogative than on yours as a temp (this latter implying
your communicating your desire to get full-time work there if you thought it
was a wise idea).
(An example of what this means:
You enter an ostensible temporary gig not entirely hopeful or desirous of
working there full-time; there is some promise suggested by management that you
could get a full-time job there; you work on, rather unsettled by the ambiguous
stuff going on there; finally, when it seems that, due to your sheer practical
needs, you ought to indicate that you would like full-time work there, you find
that suddenly management decided to withdraw the option to allow this for you,
for no obvious reason. Variations on this have gone on over two or more gigs
I’ve been at, and I’m sure other editors have stories similar to this.)
I don’t think I expected to
become perm here under BR, or I didn’t really want to. But I think I felt I
could hope that a temp gig for me there could last there a good many months. I
know I was surprised and/or disappointed when it ended as quickly as it did. (I
guess I was spoiled by the hopes set up by the eight-month length of time I had at MBS/Vox.)
But also, as I found from a
recent review of papers from this time, I was so indignant at how my
time-keeping was required by BR, and possibly at how the placement agency GLG
could benefit from this mechanism but not really myself, that I started working
to trigger an end to this stint before BR could effect it. But BR managed to
trigger the finality of it per her own rationale rather abruptly.
A fairly standard style of proofreading was expected; but there was unorthodox
time-recording
This was one of the most
rigorous proofreading-type jobs I had at CommonHealth, which I also had at
Xchange and Quantum: you got versions of the sales materials fitting the
general categories of “detail aids,” “slim jims,” and so on, and proofed the
newest version against one or more of the previous versions (whatever was
instructed on the cover sheet/such). The volume of work was usually pretty
good—I think you rarely had a lot of idle time at this gig.
But the way you recorded your time here was unusual, even by
CommonHealth standards.
The work came in a cardboard folder
with a sort of cover sheet stapled or taped to its outside. Times spent by the
editor on the specific item were routinely recorded on the cover sheet. BR was very
specific that the time you put down for what work you did had to be the time that had last been written on the
cover sheet. So, if the last time was two
hours, you put down two hours for
your work, no matter how much actual time you spent (even if it was much less than two hours). I think that always,
or almost always, you spent less time, sometimes quite a bit less, than the
time last noted on the cover sheet.
This same time got put on your
own log of times you kept that ended up getting submitted to payroll at
CommonHealth, along with your placement agency timesheet (while this latter was
the basis for your being paid—by your real employer, who was the placement
agency, to which a copy signed by a CommonHealth staffer was submitted). The
total time for the day, based on the sum of all the cover-sheet determined
times, should match the total you put on your placement agency timesheet.
Thus, if you worked on three
items, at a claimed 2 hours, 3 hours, and 1.5 hours, the total of 6.5 matched
your 6.5 put on your placement agency sheet (and I forget what was done at
Adient to “soak up idle time” so that you could get paid for 7 hours for the
day, a common enough “standard” across divisions of CommonHealth and at other
medical-advertising firms, too).
BR confided—or alleged—that she
had this system of putting down for current work the last time on the folder to
make sure that she had money preserved in her department’s budget (approved by
higher-ups) so she could have enough freelance (temp) editors as she needed. (This
was what she said.) So far, this all
may not sound so strange; this sort
of rationale, as to a general method
of padding, partly for being so simple, was fairly common at medical-advertising
companies.
Time-padding led to curiosities, and the start of absurdities
Things got strange when work
became so voluminous—and the padded times added up in such a way—that the total times you accumulated for given
days exceeded what you could get paid for within a day. With a set of, say,
six or eight different spates of work, all with padded times, you could end up
with, say, nine hours for the day,
but you could only “work” 7 or 7.5—that is, could only report this much for a
given day, whatever it was expected to be. (At this firm, and I think at
CommonHealth gigs in particular, it was never said you could get “overtime,” or
something like that; I forget offhand some aspects of this, but I think there
was some ironclad reason for not exceeding a daily limit, for overtime
purposes, that didn’t seem so strange or disserving; but more typically, you
often weren’t physically there more than seven or eight hours a day, as to
trigger overtime anyway.)
In any event, a cardinal feature
of this Adient arrangement was that the excess time—in the example, nine hours
minus seven, or two hours—would get bumped to the next day.
And depending on your working as
much as “seven hours” the next day, this could cause time to get bumped from the next day to the day after that.
I was thankful for the busy-ness
of the weeks that were busy—I hated being idle at these places—but I ended up, at least twice, with weeks that
contained more time in terms of totaled padded item-times than I was paid for
via the placement-agency timesheets. That is, the total padded-item time
for a week might be 42 hours; the total claimed for the placement agency should
only be 35 or 40 (whatever was expected); so the two or seven hours extra went
to the next week’s log of my time worked. This
actually caused one week, whose timesheet had time bumped-in from the week
before, to have more excess time bumped to the next week. A domino effect of sorts was set up.
Let’s look at a more extensive
example to see how this worked, because if you understand the mechanism here,
you see how not only are you the worker
being “screwed up,” but tax laws could be said to be flouted in some way.
Say you worked on 28 items in a
week, five on one day, four on another, etc. Say the real time for all added up
to 32 hours. (Note that if you worked well and quickly, you might feel you
should be able to get “credit” or be valued for being efficient with your time here, but the time-padding system
obviated this.) Now you use BR’s time-padding method, following the times last
put on the folder cover sheet. Now, for this week, you have 46 hours. But you
can’t work more than 40 hours a week! So six hours go to the next week’s
timesheet.
Now—your GLG (placement agency)
timesheet shows you worked 40 hours; you get paid for 40. This is generous
enough for 32 hours of actual work (and since you ordinarily weren’t paid for
lunch, maybe this seems fair enough.)
For tax purposes, because GLG
calculated your tax only from what you reported to them, your federal and state income tax is based on 40 hours of
work in that week. Uncle Sam and the state couldn’t complain.
But now—think of that six hours
put to the next week. If you fill out your CommonHealth timesheets to have that
six put to the next week, one presumes that the Big Pharma client whose items
were bumped in that six hours to the next timesheet would see the accounting
for this work appearing on records for that following week. (I can only
speculate on how, if at all, CommonHealth represented to clients specific
craft-level work, in terms of hours spent by freelance editors on the client’s
individual items, regarding what days they
were done [whether these days were falsely represented, per BR’s accounting
style, or not].)
So, for example, you worked on
the HeartMed slim jim the first week, at 35 minutes; but you put down (per the
“last time” on the cover sheet) two hours, which could eventually cause a bumping
of time to the next week. Does it matter to the Big Pharma client that you
supposedly spent two hours on the HeartMed slim jim the second week, when you only spent 35 minutes on it the first
week? Hard to say.
(I’m leaving
aside consideration of how CommonHealth may have applied surcharges [billed to
the Big Pharma client] to the cost for having a “freelance editor” on board—so
that, not only was 32 hours of work inflated to 46, but an hourly surcharge
“for our processing costs,” or whatever, made the amount of money charged per
hour even higher than you’d expect, due to an hourly/percent surcharge.
(I mean, the time-inflating and
–bumping method should all be pretty easy to understand—I think a monkey can figure it out [because, it
seems, a monkey designed this system]. I don’t pretend to know the intricacies
of tax law or the possibilities of jiggery-pokery in accounting; I’m a
cash-basis, super-easy-ledger type. But it would seem to me that the problems
of this system are obvious—such as, on a practical level, you as an editor
being prevented access to a way to have your value as an efficient or capable editor, which is so commonly an integral
factor within normal publishing [not
medical advertising], weigh in on how the system you’re in values you for your work and therefore handles you. Instead,
in medical advertising, you are a rather faceless, expendable commodity
manipulated for the benefit of the larger media company. If you substitute—for
the jaded, plodding figure of BR—a recent college grad who doesn’t know jack shit about what editing is, then
you can have the same crass manipulation, except with more naivete from your
young supervisor about what’s going on, or the excuse she might give of her “just
doing what’s she’s been told [by a higher-up] to do.”)
But think again of the tax side
of things. If you supposedly worked 46 hours on all that stuff in the first
week, but six of those 46 hours were recorded as being in the second week, is
the tax being fairly applied with respect to each of the two weeks? Should tax
be paid on 46 hours of work for that first week, and not 32 (or 40)? And should
tax for the work on the HeartMed slim jim apply to the second week, when the
work wasn’t really done, and not to time in the first week?
More fundamentally, what is
income tax assessed on here (if only the figures submitted to GLG are used)? Actual work? Or inflated billing times?
And if the medical-advertising agency adds surcharges (hourly) to your pay (and
GLG’s fees) in billing its client, the Big Pharma company, for the hourly
amount GLG has charged it (say, $35 an hour for you and $15 an hour for its
fees), can the additional amount (the ad
agency’s surcharges) be taxed by the federal (or state) government at all? And as what? Income? If so, whose?
(I can think of one particularly
crazy billing scenario, at a place I worked in Manhattan [which of course was
not part of CommonHealth] for about five months in 2005, where I saw in an
actual item of paperwork—an invoice or such for a client—reflecting that they
paid a freelance editor, who may only [as exampled by one freelance editor I
actually saw] be someone who pulls material off the Internet in an ad hoc way
for a particular educational conference, $100
an hour—which is high for any type of editing in any industry—and then, in
the same billing, the company levied on the client (for the use of the
freelance editor) an additional $150 an hour (of the editor’s work time) as what
was simply identified as a “[company name] markup”—for a total of $250 an hour billed to the client for
use of a supposed crack editor. This, to me, looks like nothing so much as
fraud. And of course, in this case, all that gets taxed [with income tax] is
the $100 an hour, which the freelance editor would pay as an independent
contractor, complete with form SE at 1040 tax time, etc.)
Maybe this set of tax-related questions
is narrowly academic.
More intriguing, perhaps: If you
are always being denied the chance for overtime pay, yet a total of 46 hours
are being claimed, initially, to arise from that first week, with six bumped to
the next week, is that violating state labor law?
All these questions suggest that
if a little less stupidity was used in BR’s accounting process, a host of
puzzles would have been eliminated. One thing in her system’s favor was its
blunt simplicity.
But more serious—and effective—problems
would arise.
This system was more efficient for billing a Big Pharma client; much less
so for rewarding editor efficiency
One thing that was lost in the
“accounting” here, as I said, is how efficient an editor could be. If any
editor could work on 10 items in a day (and with good-quality work), he or she
would not in any practical sense be credited for this quality of work; over the
long term, and across different company divisions, that kind of efficiency was generally
not rewarded at CommonHealth;
certainly it wasn’t at Adient in 2004. And if any Big Pharma client wanted to
pay high rates for efficient editors,
it was not going to get the benefits of this
kind of efficiency; such a client would only find that it took “two hours” to
work on item X (not the actual 40 minutes it had really taken), etc.
This might all seem
objectionable enough, but part of the way my work ended as it did was a
distillation of how dishonest a division of CommonHealth, in this case Adient,
could be. To this day I don’t know the precise, honestly held reason (on BR’s
part) for why it was decided I would no longer work at Adient that season
(though my resistance, on some level, to BR’s crudely dishonest ways may have
been part of it). Get a load of how she made an issue that she alleged was
reason to curtail my stint there (though the ostensible reason she told me for having my stint end was a reduction
in foreseeable total work coming in).
A ludicrous issue with one particular account becomes a flashpoint
A few days before my stint there
ended, there was a job, for a several-page detail aid or such (for a cardiovascular
intervention, I think), that was to get a routine “check changes”—a check to
see if corrections were (entered into the electronic file) in the new version
(reflected in a printout of this version), which had been marked on the printout
of the old version. I was surprised to find that there were still errors in it,
beside the numerous errors that had been marked to be fixed, which were duly
corrected in the new version. These other errors the editor who had last worked
on this item had not caught. There must have been about half a dozen or more
she hadn’t caught—rather numerous, all things considered. I marked them all.
Who hadn’t caught the errors
when she had read this item in the version before mine? According to the cover
sheet on the folder, BR.
What time had she put down
previously? Two hours. (I think it
was actually 2.5; a copy I have of a
log of work times from that period suggests this.) That amount was, per her
system, supposed to be the time I was
to put down for my own work. But how much time did it take me to do “check
changes” and find unmarked errors as well? About
20 minutes.
I was astonished. BR had
supposedly taken two or 2.5 hours to work on this item the previous time, and had missed several (I believe
obvious-enough) errors. And I had found them with 20 minutes’ work.
To beef up (in practical terms) my
actual time spent on the item, to more closely match the lie of a time I was
supposed to put down on the cover sheet as my own, I read the item all again—for another 20 minutes. Total 40 minutes—on an item for which I was
supposed to record two hours.
I was always uncomfortable with
her ham-handed way of inflating times. A few times I tried to buck this system
a bit by putting down an inflated time that was closer to the actual time worked than the ludicrous “ironclad criterion” of the last time written on the item’s cover sheet.
This time, I think I put one hour or
1.5 hours (I can’t remember the exact amount)—to “reflect” my 40 minutes.
BR later made a big stink with
me about this. I forget whether an additional error or two was found on the item
after I had read it, but her basic point—or claim—was that I didn’t spend enough time on the
items. (This was her way of saying I failed to put the ludicrously
inflated two or 2.5 hours down for this
item.) As if I was rushing. Never mind that I had done a full “check
changes” and had found errors SHE had missed in 20 minutes, and I’d done this
twice, for 40 minutes total.
It was almost too outrageous
that she hewed so much to her fake-time system that she dinged me for “not
spending enough time on the items” when, actual-work-time-wise, this was false,
AND I had found errors she had missed. The unspoken point didn’t even seem to
be that I showed up how erratic an editor
she could be in that I had caught things she hadn’t. It seemed her whole
beef was my not adhering to her times-inflating system.
I was so floored by this
situation that, after I’d permanently left this work stint, in August 2004, in my
private time at home, I wrote a letter to Jen C., the immediate supervisor I’d
worked under when at MBS/Vox last in 2003, trying to see if I could get work at
her division again, and not through a
placement agency. (I found copies of my letters to her within the last few
months.) As at least part of my rationale, I made my case (keeping some things
private) on the basis of how fraudulent this Adient situation was.
I also saw (and indicated very
generally to Jen) this situation as benefiting GLG in some seedy way, while
insulting and/or shortchanging me. Part of my request seems naïve in
retrospect, but it reflects what I was understanding of the potential for
dishonesty and manipulativeness in the med-ad-firm/placement-agency
relationship, on which I didn’t have the full picture as I’ve been able to lay
out in my 2012 and 2013 blog entries. I wrote, in 2004: “I do not want to work
for MBS/Vox through [Gary Laverne]. There are a few reasons I want this, but if
you do not want to employ me directly as a freelancer, so be it. Also, I ask
that you do not consider calling [the Gary Laverne Group] to ask for me in the
future. … I also ask that you do not tell [Gary] that I have asked to work for you
directly.”
I never heard back from Jen.
The two hours/40 minutes contretemps
with BR was at least one fairly obvious spur (to me) for BR’s ending my time
there, of her own will—which, with someone so crude, was no surprise. It was a day
or so after the 2.5-hour issue (I think it was longer than one day) that BR, in
a nicer mood, spoke as if to pave over her reasoning for letting me go, by
saying (as if the reason was an innocuous, can’t-be-helped condition) the
volume of total work had slowed down for her department. Sometimes in such
situations, you might expect to be called back months later, when work indeed
picked up for the division and bygones were bygones. But I never was called
back by her (through her calling GLG). And that was just as well.
Actually, how my stint ended was
more complex than this, and speaks more to my dignity in trying to curtail that
stint. It is reflected in a few sentences in my early-August letter to Jen:
“I left Adient
in late June, in a complicated situation in which I resigned from the project
(only giving my notice to [Gary],
intending to tell my supervisor [BR] at Adient later)[,] but [I] was also laid
off by [BR] at Adient for an intended two weeks due to[, as BR claimed,] lack
of work…. My current understanding [agreement] with [Gary], which I required, is that I do not
want to work at any branch of CommonHealth through his agency except for The
Xchange Group, where I have worked before. My reasons for this include
[ethical] problems I have with the placement agency/CommonHealth relationship.”
Unless I did a few days here or
there at the likes of the division of Xchange in later 2004, I think the only
work I got next at CommonHealth (through GLG, and as I described relatively
early in this entry) was in the Ferguson division in late 2004 (within
October-November, I think). And that gig came in part because Karen Smaldone,
the editor there at the time, asked for me on the basis, as she later suggested
to me, of my having worked at AB Bookman many years before (where she had also
worked, but not simultaneously with me). There was no time-recording nonsense
in Karen’s department, certainly not of BR’s ilk.
A broader-visioned point to make
is: When
a significant chunk of a business’s accounting is fakery, how would an auditing firm audit
it? It’s like looking at smoke and saying where the beginning or end of it is.
Some evidentiary “triangulation” via others
When I’ve told about BR’s
time-inflating method to someone else in the medical-advertising realm (who was
about 10 years younger than I) who ought to have seen his share of bizarre
practices in the firms he’d worked at,
he said he’d never heard of something like this before. I’ve long thought BR’s
method was too sleazy even by what I had seen of CommonHealth practices by that
point (or would see in a few years after).
As I suggested, when I was at
CommonHealth in 2010, I heard reference made (within the Ferguson division) to BR,
though I don’t think I saw her anywhere at all in the sprawling company offices
in the four-plus months I was there then. (She would have been working not in Ferguson, where I was in
2010, but in some other division.) I found it rather ironic that that old
troglodyte of an editor was still there, with all her foibles. But in a sense
it meant that she did have a way of hauling in money via billings, perhaps more
prodigiously than at least some of the time-padders who used more subtle means.
##
A marketing-fellow-aided afterword
“I brung in good dollar!” we can
imagine BR claiming proudly. “I brung in—brung? brunged?—no, brung in
good dollar!”
Frank, the marketing character, eyes averted, tells her calmly, “Brang
in good dollar.”
“Brang?” Then BR seems contentedly corrected. “I branged in good dollar!”
##
End note. “Confidentiality criteria” (abbreviated “CC #__) referred
to in this entry are numbered per the criteria listed in my June 28, 2012, blog entry.
