Too good to be true
The Help: Interior Design Stories
Esteemed Readers ~
I’ll be taking “Summer Hours” in August—FORD KNOWS will appear every other week all month.
Also, starting in September, FK is moving from Fridays to Mondays. ¡Gracias!
CURRENTLY READING: Hotch Potch Literature & Art - Vol. 3, Issue 1 Summer 2024 - Get your free copy.
From
author of Falling Through the Night—fall in love with the original art and writing collected in this thriving online journal.
The Help: Stories about my time in the mixed-up, low-down, poodle-eat-Pomeranian world of interior design.
See also:
By 2012, I’d had enough of working in the SF Design Center. After the recession, we’d moved the showroom, shrunk by two-thirds (read: layoffs) and virtually eliminated furniture. The soft coverings service we provided, which I had worked so hard to learn and sell when I’d started seven years earlier, was the laughingstock of the SFDC.
Turns out, our workroom was the same one used by JC Penney to produce their shades, curtains, and bedding. This is not a bad thing in itself except that no designer who was selling their clients $200/yard fabric wanted to risk that detail leaking out. Also, they screwed up so many first orders that it was virtually impossible to convince the designers to give it a second try.
There was also the problem of the Regional Manager, let’s call her Brenda. This nightmare in stilettos breezed in every other month for a few days, completely upending our lives and working our nerves with her toxic positivity. “Fluff your pillows!” she’d sing-scream every morning before opening.
She would make snap decisions like a new way to display fabric which required us to painstakingly cut awkward little slits at the top of over 1,000 wings so they would fit onto racks quite definitely not designed to display fabric that way.
She would go through the drawers in your desk when you were at lunch and throw out or rearrange your stuff because she just couldn’t help herself.
During one sales meeting, she made each of us read our job description out loud (seven sales people, one job description, read verbatim seven times) because we just weren’t “getting it” and she wanted it to really sink in.
We were on our fourth manager in six years because Brenda gave them all nervous breakdowns. My career was going nowhere, and quite frankly I was ready to leap whether a net appeared or not. Enough.
I gave four weeks notice (generous, me) but I didn’t have a new job lined up yet, so when one of the designers said “Come work for me!” I was flattered but also a little nervous. She was a sweet old thing, closer to 80 than 70, but she had a lot of spunk even if she had been slowing down lately.
When no jobs or even interviews materialized by my last day, and a few more weeks went by and things were starting to look dire, I decided to give her a call and see what could be done.
There were warning signs of course. When I first called, her daughter answered the phone very gruffly, and when I told her my name and how I knew her mom, she said, “What did she say to you?” as though she were in permanent damage control mode. But she warmed up a bit when I told her my credentials, and after the very casual in-person interview—casual, as in she was wearing a T-shirt, shorts, and flip flops and didn’t even look at my resume—the details of my employment became more clear.
The designer had had hip replacement surgery not long before—the preeminent hip man, Dr. Sah (pronounced, I kid you not, “saw”) had done a great job, but she really couldn’t handle the business the way she used to, and her daughter was not a designer or even an especially willing assistant/partner. They needed someone to be the new face of the firm.
Their office was down on the Peninsula in a fairly ritzy area, so even though it would be a long commute from Oakland, I could set my own hours, miss morning/evening traffic, and they were willing to pay me a fairly decent hourly wage until I started earning a commission on sales and charging my own design fees to her extensive client base.
Too good to be true!
My first day, we went over to a new client’s house in Atherton, “the wealthiest city in the United States” according to Wikipedia. Big and new were the house’s chief features, so we were going to be furnishing it from the ground up—lighting, window coverings, rugs, furniture, art, accessories—the kitchen and bathrooms were done, but everything else.
It got off to a rocky start. The designer was too old and frail to drive, and she was using a walker, so she had a driver/attendant. The new client demanded the driver leave her house and go wait in the car (through the service entrance, thank you.)
The client wanted to keep a bunch of the catalogs we brought with us—we had to say no because clients will often try to buy the merchandise direct or through a designer “friend” with a resale license. This is a problem when you wrap your entire fee in a generous mark-up from cost, which was the old school way designers used before time-billing.
No, no, no. No, she didn’t want to pay design fees, she would rather just pay our retail price of the items (but what kind of discounts did we offer?) No, she didn’t like the idea of 8 to 12 week lead times, she wanted all this done by the end of summer (it was the end of July.) No, she didn’t have the architectural drawings or dimensions of all the rooms, and no she didn’t want to pay us to do the measuring.
Then the family dog walked into the room and took a shit on the floor.
Luckily, the meeting was just about finished. Needless to say, the client became extremely difficult to get hold of over the ensuing weeks.
Other cracks started to appear in the facade.
Most of the designer’s clients were also in their 70s and 80s (or dead) and had already done their big interior decorating splurge decades before. A lamp here, a mantel there, but not enough to pay the rent (or my hourly wage.)
The designer was writing me checks out of her personal checking account. I cashed them of course, and soon discovered she was the daughter of a once-prominent businessman, and wife to a San Francisco banker with a huge gorgeous house of her own. She never really had needed to make money as a designer; she was a “society decorator” for wealthy family friends and associates of her husband’s.
The 50-something daughter was coming in mid-afternoon looking scorched and hungover, crabbing about everything, and started throwing out the word “stupid”—about me or her mother I’m not sure which, but I immediately let her know that word was not acceptable.
I was mostly in the office alone, answering meager requests through an online service they subscribed to for things like “a new kitchen light in my condo” and “a window shade to match the others in my living room—the cat shredded this one.” They were running on fumes, in other words, and this was going to be a slog.
But the designer did have a special fondness for me which I foolishly found charming. She would often have her driver pull up outside the office, call me on her cell, and ask me to come out to the curb and receive a “present”—an ice cream sandwich, usually. By the end of my stint, there were half a dozen stashed in the tiny freezer of the office mini-fridge.
She started to ask if she could kiss me on the cheek. One day she shuffled up behind me as I was sitting at my desk—I could feel her hovering, and when I turned, her face was right there.
“Hello,” she whispered coquettishly.
“Mom, get away from him!” her daughter yelled. What could I do but laugh?
Unfortunately, the day came when we were all out at an old client’s house; she needed a new powder room. I was standing in front of the house with the contractor after we took some measurements and the designer was saying her goodbyes. He was grumbling because the last however many times he’d come out to talk to a client with her, it had all come to nothing.
“So,” he said, “you’re the new guy.”
“Excuse me?”
“Well there was another guy a while back, but he left and I guess there was a settlement or something.”
“I don’t know anything about it,” I said.
“Be careful.” He seemed grimly pleased to deliver this warning.
“Why?”
“Well, the settlement—he was going to sue them, but they paid him off …” He was dragging it out for fun.
“OK, I’ll bite—what for?”
“Haha, funny you should say that—he said something she didn’t like, and she came up behind—”
“OK…”
“—and bit him.”
“WHAT THE FUCK?”
“Yep. Bit him on the cheek.”
Obviously, that was my last day.
Bwahaha! I am hearing right now the scream-sing. “Fluff your pillows!”
Love these stories, the characters, the humor, the style. ;)
So glad you didn’t get a cheek bite. And yay for summer hours! Enjoy.
Oh my god, this is a book! I worked for an interior designer once and was saying yes, yep, uh-huh to each character you introduced in this piece. Theater!