A short shot
of unprofessionalism from “Dope Hole,” a tiny medical-promotions firm in Montclair , N.J.
Subsections
below:
Intro sidebar: Staffer versus
freelancer, for tax purposes: A notable point to understand for this story, and
something you may be able to use in your career
Sudden uncertainty from Maura on aspects of my arrangement,
and I start being hard about getting checks
The next, bigger check is delayed—and this time,
inexcusably given the period after which it would void
The defamatory e-mail—sent to the wrong
person!
A dog has the last say
[Edit 6/20/16.]
Part 1
is here,
which you might want to read to get oriented on this firm (including why I call
it what pseudonym I do) and on “Maura,” a fellow freelancer (of the decade
2001-10; not sure what she’s doing more recently) who had me in, very briefly,
to this firm. Also, notes at the start of Part 1 sketch the provenance of this
mini-series, which goes back to 2011, including why it’s edited in some quirky
ways as it is. Lastly, there is a subsection at the end of Part 1 playfully featuring
some fictional treatment of the two dogs that were really among the warm bodies
inhabiting this firm’s offices: read about them, and you’ll understand my
little joke at the end of this Part 2.
Intro sidebar: Staffer versus freelancer, for tax purposes: A notable
point to understand for this story, and something you may be able to use in
your career
Here
is a basic description of the difference, in all sorts of business-world
contexts, between being a company staffer and being a freelancer (or an
“independent contractor”), and the differences regarding income tax for each.
This may seem drearily technical, and it’s the sort of thing I learned about
and applied to situations when needed through the late 1990s and maybe early in
the 2000-10 decade, but which has seemed unnecessary to allude to until more
recent years. But when it comes to the crossing of ethical and legal boundaries
that you can find in medical-media (i.e., medical-promotion) firms (see End
note in Part 1 on my use of “medical-media”), and such a simple thing as not
getting your pay on time, this technical issue is a starting point for you to
be able to say how “X situation is wrong
in so many ways.”
When
you are hired as a staffer, you are
expected to be at the office full-time or part-time, whatever the initially
agreed-on arrangement is. You are paid a wage (hourly or some other form) that
has taxes taken out by the employer—federal and state income tax, Medicare and
Medicaid deductions, etc. When it comes time to fill out your IRS 1040 form, if
such a payroll job is the only kind of job you’ve had for the relevant year,
you should have had all the taxes taken out by the employer to cover your tax
bill.
When
you are a freelancer, you are paid at
a certain rate (hourly, per project, or whatever else) without taxes taken out.
You come in on a mutually agreed-on schedule. There is a certain freedom in how
you keep your hours—or rather, you have a certain responsibility (along with
suiting your hours to yourself) to the employer in terms of being there when
needed, perhaps changing times of work as mutually suitable, and so on. This
flexibility may benefit the employer
as well as you. (And by the way, for simple enough factual reasons I won’t give
here, while young people seem entranced by the idea that being a freelancer
means “freedom!,” I am poised to answer this with, “Yeah, freedom to worry.”)
The
IRS long ago developed an interest in defining the difference between a staff
employee and an independent contractor in order to, among other things, get paid
withholding tax on a more frequent basis than just when you, the freelancer,
pay your yearly takes. A lot of the features of each definition are pretty
commonsensical: for one example, the staffer has his or her work controlled in some (fairly) close way, while
the freelancer does not. I believe the IRS started distributing pamphlets or
the like on this sort of thing in the 1980s, if not earlier; certainly I
obtained such a pamphlet in the 1990s. And in 2007 I received a memo from an
accountant at one publisher (i.e., of early-ish– grade educational books) that
reflected the state’s interest in clamping down on abuses by employers that
claimed to use workers in a freelance capacity when really they should have
been classified as staffers.
By the
time I worked at Dope Hole in 2009 (see Part 1 to get oriented)—when (as I’ll
recount below) I alluded to the IRS difference between staffers and freelancers
in some tough-minded communications that I sent a company manager (one of the
husband-and-wife partners) when I was trying to get paid—on the one hand this
seemed a kind of nerdy thing to do, and on the other hand, it seemed rather unbelievable that after all my years in
the work world, and with every sort of weird situation with an employer’s
handling money that I had dealt with (now at a medical-media firm, Dope Hole,
where in general it seemed money flowed like wine), I would have to allude to
this basic distinction in trying to get common-sense handling of my pay.
(To
some extent, I could theoretically have taken the same sort of approach at up
to two other medical-media firms that were slow to pay me in other years. But
in 2007, with a larger firm, the issue was framed by the fact that I was
employed there through a placement agency, so what I had to do in the event I
did not get paid was consider filing a complaint with the state department of
labor against the placement agency
and not the firm I was working at, which I eventually did.)
The
situation with Dope Hole was that, when suddenly the Big Pharma company (which
was Dope Hole’s client, relevant in this story) apparently barked that it was
time for it to move on an account, Dope Hole sprang into action and, among
other things, hauled me in for editorial work willy-nilly. Then, after I was
there about two weeks, suddenly there were odd money-related decisions such as
one of the company’s managing partners (the wife of the husband-and-wife duo)
deciding to reduce a freelance writer’s fee on a project from $1,000 to $300
(which I overheard quite intriguedly) because of an alleged problem with the
already-done work. (Meanwhile, a group of the staffers would within a very few
weeks all head off to, I believe, some Caribbean venue for an educational
meeting the company had scheduled, which obviously was not cheap to do.)
Then,
mediated through news from Maura (Part 1 describes her in some detail; I think
this was explicitly or implicitly given to me by her within a week or so after
I left), I was not to be had in for some time, and (whether this was apparent
immediately or not) it looked to me for all the world as if the company
wouldn’t have me in further at all.
But within a very few weeks after I last worked there, the problem became my
getting my pay…and I’ll get to this part of the story shortly.
##
Getting
the first two of the three checks
took me between one and two months.
Of
course, the work I was doing was in-house, which tends to conform with the IRS
definition of a staffer, and there was indeed
some level of control by management of my work. Also, the fact that I was
hauled in (and could only come in) when the company was suddenly pressed by an
imperative to chop work out on an account suggests that I was handled as a
staffer, at least in practical terms regarding the work. But of course the
narrowly temporary way in which I was handled suggests that I was only a
freelancer.
But
this is only one of the many exquisitely ambiguous arrangements you can find in
the medical-media world; for instance, what
are called freelancers could be allowed in to work at an office for
time-limited periods, but they are there to do intense, short-term work when
the accounts being dealt with require it; and
yet they could also be entered into the firm’s payroll system, in a temporary
fashion. And then they’re dropped
like a hot potato as soon as the work is done. So, technically speaking,
are they staffers or freelancers?
In
Dope Hole’s case, when I pointed out to the male managing partner the
difference between a staffer and a contractor, he might, first, have indicated
in a sort of petty-academic fashion that I was just a freelancer, but then what
he did say—which was really the annoying part for me—was his contention, which
he made in an almost snippy way, that freelancers were paid on “30 net,” an
accounting term essentially meaning after 30 days. Though this technical way of
handling (as I said in 2011) seems to be an increasingly common practice in use
of freelancers at such companies, I would point out that I come from a time (flourishing
from about 1990 to about 2007) when this would have been unacceptable, with the
larger nexus meaning that the firm was calling in a freelancer to do work that
is sometimes borderline-staff-like,
and then making the worker wait for his pay almost as if it is a bill for paper
or wood.
When
we see below how Dope Hole actually sat (for 10 days) on one of my checks for
half the time that the check was stipulated to be good, we can see that the
balance sheet between “new business practice” and “darkening grey areas” leaned
toward sleaze in this one company’s case.
[end of sidebar]
Sudden uncertainty from Maura on aspects of
my arrangement, and I start being hard about getting checks
As I
foreshadowed, when I was leaving—at first, I think, Maura left it open that I
could be back, but it was unclear to me when—I
asked her when I could expect my first check. She told me in a couple weeks, or
such. Of course, due to my own personal circumstances, I became in dire need of
the money.
(Here’s
a clue for young readers: If you get acutely anguished at times about needing
money for a pressing bill, don’t go into the print-media or publishing fields.
Sometimes, I found, if you’re really desperate to haul in a little money you’re
owed, the tendency of firms not to accommodate you [on whatever excuse]—almost as
if they sense your anguish and want to spite you—can be especially galling or
upsetting, even when technically the firm should be paying you sooner rather
than later.)
Within
(I think) the next week or two, I asked her again once or twice by e-mail. She
suggested the first check would be available three weeks after the first week
of my work there, or such. Then the three-week end point came, and no check.
(As it would turn out, this “three weeks” claim did not exactly follow the
company’s supposed “30 net” policy.)
Whatever
lengths of time she specifically told me, and however many times I asked Maura
when my first check was coming, I do know I gave the company the time she’d
said to get me the check, and I didn’t think at first that she had been talking
so loosely just to temporarily get me out of her hair. Things hadn’t gotten
that bad at first.
Finally,
based (I think) on what I felt I had a right to do at that point in my
medical-media career—and perhaps with my nerves all the rawer because of the
just-past Bauer suit—I sent a certified-mail letter to the male half of the
husband-and-wife managing partners of the company, demanding that I get my
first check soon. I believe the letter included a contention that his firm’s
using an editor like me as, in effect, something
of a staffer (in terms of features of how I was managed) while it handled
my pay as if I was a freelancer
(which latter I was generally functioning as, anyway) after I’d done a lengthy
term of work ran contrary to IRS rules on
the difference between a staffer and an independent consultant.
As I’ve suggested in the sidebar, I hadn’t actually had to deal with this sort of issue with an employer for some years; and, in fact, I
felt it was a bit of a stretch applying this particular standard at this point.
But I felt that doing so was (tactically) worthwhile. I think also I felt I had
given the firm adequate time in accordance with the three-week guideline Maura
had spoken of, and I was becoming worried maybe they wouldn’t pay me (remember
the one partner’s dropping a freelance writer’s fee by 70 percent, after the
agreement was made on the fee and the work had been turned in). To my letter I
added some kind of legal threat.
I
heard back from the male managing partner—he e-mailed me, but shortly
afterward, we also talked on the phone. He fairly lectured me on the phone
about the tone of my letter, as if I was incontrovertibly out of line and could risk not getting future work with the
place if I dealt with the issue like that again. (I had already been
thinking with what seemed moderate good sense, quite based on all available
indications, that they wouldn’t use me again anyway—or let me put it this way:
Maura’s suddenly giving me no more time and no promise of when I’d work again
left me, for my own practical needs, bereft enough that I was perfectly ready
to write Dope Hole off completely. But these little places can be so arrogant
that they can put you in this sort of position, and still they want to reserve
the right to call you up whenever they pleased, which of course didn’t really
mesh with your own practical realities. [End
note] So, in short, my own position was that I was finished with the
company, thus the managing partner’s lecturing me about jeopardizing my
prospects there was beside the point and ludicrous.)
In the
conversation with him, I held to my basic position about why I’d sent my
demanding letter—at least as to my attitude (and I wasn’t cockily defiant but
just remained confident in my own practical rationale for having sent the
letter). I also probably argued a little, logically, in defense of the letter.
I do know the male managing partner seemed miffed that I wouldn’t be cowed or
“put into line” by him.
When
privately I hypothesized after all this that (along with other facts that I
more surely knew) he was about 10 years younger than I, I felt that on this
basis alone, he was an arrogant sort to think he should be cowing me on
the check-timing issue and my manner in dealing with him about it.
One
thing he said is crucial: he said they paid “30 days net,” meaning a
freelancer’s check was typically cut 30 days after the invoice had been
received. This, to me—as I argued in the sidebar above—did not undercut, and in
fact it supported, my beef about people being used as semi-staffers to do
editorial work, but being paid as freelancers. And for a delay in freelance
pay, 30 days was rather long, in my experience. (Believe it or not, at some
earlier point, Maura made the contention with me that 30 days was an industry standard for the delay in
paying freelancers, which I knew to be false—and which she should have known to
be false—it wasn’t typical of at least some of the work situations we’d both
been in earlier.)
Suffice
it to say that the male managing partner and I were at a bit of a standoff in
our philosophies on the matter, but he stated that in fact the check would be
cut at the 30-day mark.
The
first check was on the small side, covering a few days. The next check would be
the biggest by far. And of course by the time I pressed to get it, I
desperately needed it.
The
male managing partner had been chafed by me with my legal-type demanding
letter. My first check had gone out. One might say, in a kind of concert with
the managing partner’s presuppositions, would
I jeopardize my standing with these people by getting tough with them again, or
had I learned a needed lesson, to be patient or the like?
The next, bigger check is delayed—and this
time, inexcusably given the period after which it would void
The
30-day period for the second, big check came
and went. Where was the check? I sent another demanding communication, this
time by e-mail (I think), and copied to (I think) more than one person who
should have been in charge of my pay. I was about as tough in my tone and
wording as I had been with the certified letter, and yet this was as you would
have expected me not to be if I had
“backed down” out of discretion, or with some kind of apologetic attitude
following the earlier letter.
This
time I guess I really got them flustered. The male managing partner, I think,
sent me an e-mail in answer, saying the check would go out and that this would
finish my business with the company. He probably felt he put me in my place with that one.
Was I
too headlong or headstrong in sending the second tough message? No: as I found when it came, the second,
big check had been cut and dated about 10
days before I actually got it in the mail—it had been sitting idly on
someone’s desk, apparently—and it would have automatically become void, per a notice printed on it, 20 days after it was cut. So
it was delayed in being sent to me for half the time the check was good.
Enough
said.
There
was a third, small check I expected from them, but I thought that with how
things wrapped up with the second, big check, I shouldn’t expect it. But
eventually I got it, and on time—without having sent any communication to spur
getting it.
The defamatory e-mail—sent to the wrong
person!
As if
the development with the second check wasn’t bad enough—and mind you, it never
thrills me (as I wrote in 2011; times have changed) to lose the chance to work
at any medical-media place in whose door I can get my foot, but I won’t be made
a fool of by these places either—my association with Maura M. also ended quite
unceremoniously, or quite tackily.
Amid
the flurry of heated response to my second demanding message, she sent an
e-mail that claimed that I’d long-term been “eccentric” but now proved to be
“deranged.” How I knew about this e-mail
is that, though clearly she meant it for all her relevant coworkers at the
company and not me, she sent it only to
me—a good example of her capacity for errors.
(One
irony of this message, of course, is that, if they’d received it, it could have
made her superiors ask, “Well, if he was such an eccentric, why did you call
him in on short notice as if he was a choice editor for such a purpose?”
Perhaps it isn’t surprising to say that, once, I saw two of the partners
exchange a cliquish-wiseass look—as if acknowledging “as proven” Maura’s eccentricity, or such—over
something about Maura’s relating to
her son when he was visiting her in the office one day.)
In
case her hypocrisy—however heatedly you want to regard it—in regard to my being
“eccentric” or “deranged” isn’t clear, not only did she (more generally) engage
in her trademark talking to herself and odd sighs and groans in the Dope Hole office
when I shared the small editorial area with her (see Part 1 on these behaviors),
but one behavior she engaged in was just nuts. She would start sniffling, on a
number of days I was there, as if she started having an allergic reaction, or
had a cold. The sniffling was apparently limited to the office. She really
sounded as if you didn’t want her
breathing near you.
Once
she was in a tizzy of looking for some document, and for no clear reason at
all, she picked up my coat, which due to the lack of coatracks nearby I kept
lying on one side of my desk, and she fluffed it around as she ostensibly
looked for the document, which was totally unnecessary to the task of seeking
the document. This while she was sniffling ostentatiously. I was anxious in
watching her do that: at times since, I have pictured myself berating her for her
mucking around with my coat while she sounded as if she had a cold: What the eff are you doing, Maura, PUT IT DOWN!
It may
seem sad that a work association with one colleague ends for all time like
this—I have not been inclined to work with Maura again, after her nasty e-mail—but
in a way I don’t care one way or the other. The general economic world in this
country has gotten harder and meaner. The medical-media realm (I said in 2011) has
gotten crazier and seedier. Maybe Maura and I were both respectively ripe never
to work together again, for our own quite-honorable sakes.
##
The
immediately above is one of the original crabby ending paragraphs of an early
draft, but as I finish editing this entry (in 2011…and in 2016), I can be a
little more light-spirited about the story….
As
with the “Foreign Legion” story (another anecdote originally available in 2011,
and differently disposed of later), with Dope Hole the anger that a
cheap-spirited place, first, historically
leaves you with, consequently, psychologically
leaves you angry when you try to fashion a publishable story about it; but the
process eventually gets less burdensome.
But I don’t
think I’ve entirely lost the possibly-recurrent
“revenant” angry thought I have that Maura herself, somehow, seems to have left
me with—a frustration about getting my money from that place, when she kept
promising me (though whether she was deliberately disingenuous isn’t clear)
that it would be out in a couple weeks or so, yet this was not the “30 net”
terms under which the male managing partner was going to disburse it; and
meanwhile in everyday-life terms, the
money wasn’t out yet….
Or, I
should say: In 2016, this situation is basically water under the bridge, except
that if someone (in a conversation, especially if the person really didn’t know
these kinds of firms or industry) were to deny or dismiss out of hand this
whole account, then, along with whatever else, my anger at the 2009 situation might
reconstitute. That’s how it is with these things; I’ve found that in today’s
history-denying climate, someone’s doing Stalinist airbrushing of your solid past
experience raises more anger (including from an original source of trouble) than
it has any sense or positive effects.
So, if
the 2009 anger were reconstituted, I might echo in my head my imperious,
shrieked demand I imagined in 2009, something like, “GET THE MONEY OUT! [GET THE]
MONEY—OUT!” —as if Maura, a bit unfairly to her, stood for every
business lunkhead I’d ever dealt with who, in rough terms, couldn’t or wouldn’t timely meet his or her end of the bargain.) [Added 6/20/16: I mulled over how this last subsection read...and talking about my arguably lingering anger regarding Maura or Dope Hole was the hardest part of this essay to edit for 2016. You say, it was seven years ago, and I was only a few weeks there. The relevance of this entry isn't as a good example of "unresolved anger" as much as might be regarding a workplace with which I was associated several or many years, and regarding which I had tremendous investment in terms of type of work and/or links to people there. So the relevance of the Dope Hole story is more (1) as a preface to the CPG story, which is still significant, in part, for showing why I left the "staffer route" for the "freelancer route" as an editor and never looked back; and (2) when it comes to companies with lots of money riding on a few staffer-shoulders, with the associated implications and cachet of medically-related media products, the excesses, ethical messes, craziness, etc., are still instructive years later, even in a place at which your tenure was very brief but from which the moral lessons can be, if told right, pungent enough.]
A dog has the last say
“Hey
chief,” says (in 2009) the friendlier managing-partner dog (see Part 1, end) from
wherever he is, “I would get that PSA test done that you keep putting off.
Never mind the war stories about the medical-media shitholes. Your health comes
first.”
(Actually,
I finally had my first PSA test in 2015, after much-too-much delay. I turned
out OK.)
