Free Been There, Done That by Carol Snow

cologne. He looked very much the pampered executive, sitting behind his oversized mahogany desk, the bounty of a trade for ad space. His desk chair was standard swivel. The remaining chairs—the ones we sat in—were of molded plastic and looked like they belonged in a high school cafeteria.
    Richard had thin blond hair that I could swear was highlighted and a red, acne-scarred face prematurely wrinkled by sun, salt, wind and the other perils of the yachting life. Just short of fifty, he looked closer to sixty, albeit a fit sixty. Like his wife, he logged a lot of hours at the gym. Once he even turned up at our aerobics class, clad in a muscle shirt and royal blue spandex shorts, which yucked me out beyond belief. Mostly, he stuck to the weight room, working his delts, pecs, triceps and abs. His legs, he completely ignored. As such, he was so disproportionately muscular on top that when he stood up he always looked like he might fall over.
    Once we, his staff (behind his back we referred to ourselves as his subjects), were perched on our plastic chairs, he gave us the news: “I’m sorry to announce that Kristen will be leaving us.” We all made efforts to look both surprised and dismayed. In fact, it had been common knowledge that Kristen, head of advertising sales, had been offered twice her salary to work for a magazine geared toward kayakers. “I can’t wait to tell that cheap-shit Richard how much I’ll be making,” she had commented. We fellow drones all hoped that Richard would increase our salaries to keep pace with the competition.
    “I was shocked to hear what the going rate for ad sales-people has become,” he intoned. This was a man who thought teachers were overpaid. “Quite frankly, I don’t think we can afford to replace Kristen.” Richard was talking in the corporate, not-my-fault, “we.” That had to be bad. Our cross-the-board raises were fading fast. “Sheila and I—” He paused to give an adoring look to his wife, which she returned. “We discussed alternatives.”
    “We thought outside the box,” she piped in.
    Richard smiled. “Here’s what we came up with . . .”
    When he was done, we just sat there, staring. He had proposed—no, commanded—that the staff spend an hour a day selling ad space. He would handle the established accounts. We would make cold calls.

ten
    I made two attempts to sell ad space. The first potential client hung up on me. The second screamed something about the Do Not Call registry. When she threatened a lawsuit, I hung up on her.
    Tim could have sounded a little more surprised. But when I made my announcement—“I’ll do it”—all he said was, “I knew you would.” That, of course, made me want to change my mind all over again. But when he added, “You’re too smart to turn down this kind of a story,” I forgave his smugness.
    He hopped on a plane almost immediately and called Richard from the airport to schedule a meeting. “I could have set the meeting,” I said. “I work twenty feet from the guy.”
    “I just wanted him to know how committed to the story New Nation is,” he assured me.
    Perched on the edge of Richard’s desk, he laid out his plan. I would call my old friend Dr. Archer, Mercer’s dean of admissions, and say something along the lines of, “I’ve got an idea for the neatest article! I’ll pretend to be a student so I can tell people what it’s like to be in college today—the dreams of college students, the friendships, part-time work and volunteer efforts. It would be a real upbeat piece, super publicity for Mercer!”
    I was aghast. “You want me to lie? ”
    “It’s not lying,” Tim said. “It’s undercover investigating.”
    I crossed my arms. “You’d make a hell of a politician.” Richard’s Polo cologne was especially strong today. It was giving me a headache.
    “Come on, Kath,” Tim said. “If you can’t step around the truth on this one little thing, how are you going to convince all those