I look over at the woman. “How long?” she asks the unseen person on the other end of the intercom.
“A bit.”
She heaves a worried breath.
The guy asks for our names and we tell him. “Okay, Noelle and Stella, sit tight. We’re working on this issue. Buzz if anything changes in there, okay?” With that he’s off.
“If anything changes,” she says. “What is he thinking might change in here? Like if we run out of air?”
“That won’t happen,” I say with more confidence than I feel. “He probably means in case one of us needs medical attention or something.”
“Not exactly comforting.” Stella slides to the floor and hugs her knees.
Clanking noises ring out above us. Stella winces with each clank, terrified gaze fixed on the elevator ceiling.
“Or in case of werewolf transformation,” I add.
She turns a shocked gaze to me.
I give her a sassy little smile. “Appearance of vampire fangs?”
She laughs, relieved. “Oh my god, I thought you were serious for a sec,” she says. “Sorry. Not my day. And I don’t love elevators.”
I get the feeling that this is an understatement. “We’ll be fine,” I say. I set down my bag and sit. “They really do have safeties.”
The clanking stops. A drill begins to whir.
“Though I have a feeling ‘a bit’ is more than a few minutes,” I add.
She sighs. “Actually, I’d rather be stuck in here than go to the meeting I’m supposed to be at. I’d prefer ice picks in my ears. Leeches sucking my blood. Kid Rock on endless loop.”
“No,” I whisper. “Not that.”
She tips her head back on the panel. “You have a route to get to. Is this going to put you behind?”
I shrug. “I’ll be okay. So, do you work here?”
“No,” she says dolefully. “Or, I’m starting a month-long assignment here, so I guess.”
“Sounds like you’re not looking forward to it,” I say.
“Understatement of the year,” she sighs. “Don’t say anything.”
“Of course not,” I say.
She nods. People tend to trust the uniform. “And so begins the first day of many long days. Many long and excruciating days.”
“That bad?”
“Worse,” she says. “Six hours it took in traffic to get here this morning and now this. And the hell hasn’t even started.”
I give her a sympathetic wince. “Does your job always suck?”
“Kind of,” she says. “You’d think it wouldn’t. I’m an executive coach, which is technically a super cool profession.”
“Executive coach?”
“We help executives build their skills. My area is soft skills, like emotional intelligence, building positive relationships, leading through inspiration, you know. The skills that enable a leader to aggressively build a business are not the same skills that allow them to be a good manager of people. Business-building is a transactional skill; management is more of a leadership skill. So we help them with that.”
“That sounds like it would be really fulfilling,” I say, though I’m surprised such a young woman would be teaching leadership to executives. She’s a few years younger than I am for sure—twenty-six at the most.
“You’d think, right? And I’m with a really good boutique agency in Trenton. Very well respected.” She hugs her knees harder to her chest. “Okay. I’m ready for the elevator to start. Now I’m dreading it even more, just sitting here. My first meeting would be underway by now. And afterwards I’d be out, walking into freedom. In the sunshine.”
“Yikes,” I say.
“No, I’m being negative. I love the material.”
A drill whirs above us.
“So what’s the problem? If you don’t mind my asking.”
“Here’s the thing,” she says. “There are two kinds of executives who get executive coaching from our company. There are the kinds that are excited to improve their skills, successful businesspeople who are fired up to be more effective leaders. They want to learn and grow. Unfortunately, I don’t get to work with those kinds. My bosses take those jobs.”
“What jobs do you get?”
“I’m the person they send when the executive has been on the losing end of a lawsuit and the person is” —here she makes quote fingers— “mandated by a court of law to undergo a program to be designed by an accredited executive coach to improve emotional intelligence skills.” She sighs. “And guess who that lucky coach is?”
“Ouch.”
“It’s the worst,” she says. “Like when some ragey guy gets into a fight and the court sends him to anger management. You think he wants to be there? You think he loves the material?”
“Uhh, no?”
“Right? The people who I coach don’t want me. By the time I’m walking in, somebody on the leadership team has shown problematic behavior, and a mediator or judge has gotten involved. The training I do, it lets the company say they’re addressing the issue, but they usually don’t care if there’s change. So yeah, I’m the punishment. I’m where they focus their resentment.”
“Oh,” I say.
“Oh my god, you seriously can’t say anything. Not that I’d care if they fired me at this point,” she says, checking her phone.
“Cone of silence,” I say. “Everything stays in this elevator…except us. Hopefully.”
There’s more banging and whirring above us. Voices yelling back and forth.
“Like the people I work with—the dudes I work with, because let’s face it, it’s dudes we’re talking about—they could not be more disdainful of the material. Basically I just try to do the minimum so that we both can say it happened. My firm gets paid…I don’t know why I’m venting. It’s just…not the job I envisioned when I did my training. I thought I’d help people, not be their hated punishment.”
I nod sympathetically. Did somebody on Mr. Blackberg’s leadership team get out of line?
“When they first sent me to do one-on-one coaching with a bigwig exec, I was so shocked. I mean, I have a psych degree and tons of coaching training, but no experience, and they’re sending me to coach this C-suite guy? They put me right in on the A-list? Turns out I was on the grunt list.”
“Is there nothing you enjoy about it?” I ask. “Maybe one nice thing?”
“No. You kind of have to be a self-starter, too. I think I picked the wrong job.” She sighs. “Do you like being a mailperson?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I love it.”
“That must feel so good,” she says. “To love what you do.”
“It does,” I say. “Having a job you love is amazing. And when life gets hard, having this one little area where you feel like you’re making a positive difference means everything.”
She looks at me longingly. “I wish I was making a positive difference.”
“Aren’t there other jobs you can get?” I ask.
“I feel like it’s too late.”