Domestic Violets by Matthew Norman Read Free Book Online

in the men’s room. However, I know that these sentiments are not sincere, and only succeed in undermining me in front of my team and fellow employees.
    These complaints, which I have saved on my computer in a file called “Ass Face,” are among the greatest achievements of my career. I read them sometimes when things are bleak or there’s a particularly ghastly paper jam in the printer down the hall. They always make me feel just a little better.
    “So, Greg, to what do I owe the honor?” My face hurts, but I keep smiling. It’s called commitment.
    He sits down across from me and sets a stack of papers on my desk. It’s copy for a brochure I’ve written about one of our shitty new products. He’s celebrated my hard work by dousing it with red ink, slashing through entire paragraphs and writing suggestions in the margins. There’s nothing wrong with what I’ve written, of course. It’s actually pretty good, as far as corporate propaganda goes. He just has this compulsive need to make random changes to everything I write. He’s like Dustin Hoffman counting those matchsticks in Rain Man . He just can’t help himself.
    “We need to talk about this,” he says, very seriously.
    “Well, OK. Did you like it? I wrote it especially for you.”
    Across the top of the first page he’s scrawled, “NO CONTRACTIONS!” in big, bold letters. To further articulate his point, he’s crossed out every contraction on the page—every “it’s” and “who’s” and “we’ve” and “you’ve.” It’s a whole new achievement in douche-baggery for him, and I’m almost impressed.
    “The tone is all wrong here. It’s way too casual for the audience. This is supposed to be targeted at C-levels. C EOs. C OOs. C IOs. You’re talking to them like they’re a bunch of interns. These are decision makers here, Tom . . . a sophisticated group.”
    “Well, certainly. All the executives I know are wildly sophisticated. But we’re not cutting contractions, Greg. We’ve been over that. This isn’t Comp 101. Have you ever actually tried to read something without contractions? It sounds like it’s written by robots.”
    “They don’t have time for casual. All they care about is WIIFM .”
    I actually close my eyes here for a moment—that’s how badly this hurts me. “WIIFM” is one of those bullshit, made-up corporate acronyms, and it stands for “What’s in It for Me?” Greg uses it no fewer than ten times a day. Every time it leaves his mouth, I’m convinced that something good and pure in the world—an endangered species or perhaps a rare, exotic flower—is destroyed and Earth becomes that much more hopeless. “I’ve given them all the benefits, Greg—I’ve led with them, in fact, as I learned in copywriting school. I think these brilliant executives of yours will be able to dumb themselves down enough to figure it out . . . despite the contractions.”
    The color of his face is beginning to match his burgundy tie. Greg is a tie guy, and I am a non-tie guy. This represents the rift among the males in our office—Business Casual versus Business Formal—and I’m almost certain it will eventually lead to a choreographed dance fight in the employee lounge.
    “Seven out of ten people receiving this piece make more than three hundred thousand dollars a year.”
    “Well, I’m happy for them, but if you wanna start tossing around arbitrary figures, then I can tell you that one out of one Tom Violets doesn’t care. We’re not cutting the contractions.”
    Greg sighs deeply, counting to ten in his head. “That’s very clever, but they aren’t arbitrary figures. It’s all in the research that I provided. It’s called a customer profile.”
    “Greg, there are starving children in Africa. And there’s this virus out there that actually eats human flesh. But still, you and I are sitting in my office arguing about this . . . again .”
    He drops another stack of papers on my desk, ignoring my plea for