I’m writing for a slightly odd reason. A few months ago I had this client, Dov Weberman. He hadn’t been convicted of anything, but last week this 19-year-old kid, who claimed to have been sexually abused by Weberman, jumped off a bridge. I’m wondering if we can use this to start a conversation about company policy – maybe the rule about no convictions is not filter enough? Could we woodshed on a different type of screening? Given that you’re higher up and I’m just a freelancer, I thought going to you might be the right first step. What do you think?
All my best,
Alice
From: [email protected]
Date: March 7, 2015 at 11:57am EST
Subject: re: client screening
Hey Alice!
Long time, dude. Hope you’re doing well out there in New York!
Wow, that is a real bummer to read and I hear you 110% about how conflicted you must be feeling. I looked into the case and it seems like the sales reps did some pretty heavy vetting and just could not have predicted this, you know? He appeared to be someone very invested in his community who truly needed our product to repair his reputation, and because he was never even tried we had to assume he had been wronged. Unfortunately, I can’t help you out with moving this up bc I’m working in ideation now and don’t even have contact with that branch. Just remember you are a super talented writer and this company has really benefitted from your hard work.
Cheers!
Ethan
Alice read and reread the email, looking each time for the encouraging support or helpful directive she knew it did not contain. Then she went back to the Times, refreshed the article about the boy who was gone. Looking at the news now was like watching a tide eat away at sand, revealing the things buried deeper; new facts and developments were integrated seamlessly, brought into the existing article, under the same headline, as though they had been there all along. Because she had read the article no fewer than five times, the new sentences stood out and waved to her, taunting her with a deepening sense of tragedy. The Times had expanded the paragraph about the traditional bathhouse, where the teacher had frequently taken the boy, to include the name and location. Now, the piece closed with an anecdote from that morning, in which a group of men had surrounded Weberman as he left his home to shield him from the small cluster of protesters as he made his way to work. The series of related photos had also multiplied, though the composition of most was similar – the silhouette of the same hat, the same box-shouldered coat, repeated, a crowd of men with their heads down and an army of hands raised to block the camera’s view. There remained just one photo of the boy, taken before the community had shunned him. He still wore the curls around his face, the yarmulke, the starched shirt: his face made a decent impression of a teenager’s, but the tone of his skin was blanched, the way he buttoned his lips an indication of adult worries. He had left Williamsburg shortly after he turned 18, ostensibly hoping that the scandal of his accusations would die down, that his parents and six siblings could resume their regular lives, that the low anonymous voices would stop calling, that the notes taped to their windows every morning would cease to appear. In the year following his disappearance from the community, he had washed dishes at an Olive Garden in Times Square, showed up early for every shift. He had also arrived with time to spare for his own suicide, strolled the Manhattan bridge for a full hour in the February dark before going over.
Alice had failed to attach to the idea of a God, but she was envious of anyone who could. The idea that the boy had been pushed from his faith and his family at once was with her like a bronchial infection, impossible to breathe around without discovering some new blockage. It was with this in mind, how he had given away his every ritual and belief, that Alice wrote the first public post.
CommunityBoard: AirCommunications
Subj: Re-evaluating our Standards
Author: AliceN
12:06:54pm EST
Hi writers and editors:
Many of you may recall working on pieces for Dov Weberman, who purchased a package of 40 bios. Recently, a young man from Weberman’s orthodox community in Brooklyn, NY, took his own life after his accusations of sexual abuse by Weberman resulted in threats to him and his family. Weberman was never charged and thus screened as an approved client. I feel that something should change about the way we filter customers, and I wonder if we might all put our heads together and discuss a solution. Thanks in advance for putting some time towards this important issue.
All my best,
Alice N
CommunityBoard: AirCommunications
Re: Re-evaluating our Standards
Author: EliseR
12:13:12pm EST
That is so sad. I have been working as a writer for six months and have wondered the same thing on a couple occasions – could the company maybe turn down people with pending accusations against them, or implement a waiting period to see whether the accusations have been substantiated?
CommunityBoard: AirCommunications
Re: Re-evaluating our Standards
Author: Supervisor
12:16:32pm EST
Thanks for your input, team. At AirCommunications we truly value your insight and discerning judgment. Our customer service department does everything possible to screen our clientele, and will continue to do so.
12:16:46pm EST
This post has been closed to further comments by Supervisor.
The post was shut down in under 10 minutes, deleted in 12. She had watched it happen like a member of any audience, a viewer at home helpless to the outcome, someone who would later decide the ending had been inevitable. Soon another post appeared in the CommunityBoard, reminders about style and grammar, and banal responses and sub-responses filtered in by the handful. When it comes to parallelism, someone wrote. Alice closed her computer and crawled onto her made bed, the well-matched lilacs and greys, and she slept off most of the afternoon, the hand-tooled leather belt she wore around her waist pressing a welt there.
She opened her computer once more that evening, in the depressive haze that followed her nap, the screen the only source of light in her darkened bedroom. Nobody had emailed her directly, although a post about Shared Workspace etiquette did appear, and she scanned the veiled sentences for a clear judgment of her behaviour… Given the sensitive nature of our work… Clientele privacy is of utmost concern… Extensively trained sales representatives… Alice was back asleep in under an hour, and she dreamt of a nagging electronic buzz, the urgent tenor of it, coming from a device she couldn’t find and didn’t know she owned.
She did not have the chance to make the decision for herself. When she logged in the next day, partially out of habit and partially because she wanted to escort her anger somewhere relevant, she found no new posts, no tasks waiting in her queue. She refreshed it every few minutes for most of an hour, checking the news and social media in other tabs, feeling increasingly that each shallow breath she took was an effort pulled off at the last minute. Her apartment around her remained as beautiful as she had made it – the low periwinkle couch with splayed wooden legs and the spotless sheepskin beneath it, the spider plant she had trained to grow down an antique ladder – and she had never hated a place more, never wanted to leave as badly. She packed a bag with a panicked assortment of things, some face wipes and an extra sweater and a packet of dried apricots, and at the last minute she removed her phone and left it on the granite kitchen counter. There was nothing it could tell her, Alice thought, no email or text or weather alert or match from a dating app, that would change how she felt. She was not going anywhere in particular, and she would not need