No Solicitors

This photo showed up as a Facebook memory but I decided to write about it here

The only good thing about this job, my first start-up job, aside from using the time I sat in front of my computer to write poems and edit chapbooks, was hanging out with Bob, our septuagenarian "general counsel," and listening to him talk about his time as a corporate attorney and letting him relive all of his big cases as I sat in his office petting his bulldog Lucy, avoiding my own busywork. He had represented our CEO when he was sued by Nielsen for breaking contract, and I guess they got along well enough that our CEO just kept him on retainer. He would eat stone fruit while standing over the sink in our breakroom, and I could always hear him on the other side of the building whenever he was on the phone chatting it up with his buddies. When I had a book release party in Oakland at The Octopus Literary Salon for My Posey Taste Like - The Paradise Lost Edition he showed up in a suit and sat in the front row. He told me later that he thought Cassandra Dallett was cute. “The tall blonde,” he said, and pantomimed wiping sweat off his brow.

One morning we walked into the new office (the one with cheaper rent, a few blocks away from our old office where we shared a building with Fantasy Studios and the daycare center where the children of Dreamworks employees spent their days, which our company moved from after the CEO realized he'd spent all of the funding we received from a Japanese diaper company and that he was basically owned by them to do consulting work until he worked his debt off) and I noticed our shadows alongside the words “No Solicitors” from the entryway projected onto the wall ahead of us. “Hold that pose,” I said, and he kept his stance in profile as I took a quick picture. “This looks like an album cover,” I said.

Shortly after we moved into the new office, Bob probably saw the writing on the wall and decided to retire. Either that, or our CEO wasn’t able to keep paying his salary. About a year later I got laid off.