The Hidden Financial Lives of CoWorkers

One of the interesting things about modern work life is that it brings one into contact with people of different backgrounds, life experiences, races and cultures.  Most importantly, it introduces people of different financial circumstances to one another--even if they aren't always aware of it. 

 

It's an unspoken rule that in America, we don't talk openly about our finances; no one admits to the type of credit card debt the average American family holds.  And yet work often exposes you to subtle cues about how other people live.  The secretary who will be taking an 18 hour bus ride to visit her boyfriend for the weekend because the $250 for a flight is too high.  It doesn't matter the ticket is still $100 bucks and will cost her almost 2 days travel time.  Or the lady who works downstairs who doesn’t have a credit card, but a Nick’s Check cashing card.  Then there is the secretary whose kids are constantly calling to say the electric company has turned off the power, despite the fact that she explains to the electric company every month “I pay my bill on the 15^th, not the 5th." But they just don’t get it so every month they turn off her power for a few days because the bill comes due sooner. 

In one of my first jobs out of college, I find myself very aware of money at work.  Especially when accounting drags its feet in reimbursing mileage and expenses.  I turn in my card with every pay sheet only to find that the check covers only a portion.  Sometimes a pay period will come and go with nothing.  “Next time, it comes next time,” the accountant always nods, slightly annoyed.   

” Since I just got paid for July, will August’s check come in October?”  I ask.  She looks at me, deferring “No.  Next time.  You get paid next time.”  Work currently owes me $110.  I can cover it but it annoys me to have to keep track and remember--least they never repay me.  For many employees, this would be a problem, but I am lucky. 

 

My boss had explained,  “We'll pay for your mileage out, your parking.  If you stop to get a coffee, we’ll pay that too.  No one ever takes me up on it but we will."  He added, "It’s totally appropriate if you get out of a meeting at noon to go get lunch and expect the company will pick it up.“  But as I quickly learned, there is a big disconnect between the boss and the accounting department.  “They shouldn’t make you wait." He told me, "If you need to be reimbursed right away, use a check request to get the money in advance.”

 

All over America, wages have not kept pace with inflation and you can see it at the workplace if you know where to look.  I pay close attention to my coworkers cars--not because I'm particularly interested in horsepower, or sleek lines and name brands, but because of what it no longer signals.  Everything is bought on credit these days, especially vehicles.  The boss drives close to the same car as the secretaries.  A few of the workers have older cars that are a little beat up, but most drive $30,000 or more vehicles.  One secretary drives a shiny new oversize SUV she leases because she can’t afford the purchase.  But as she told a friend one day over a coffee break, when she goes on trips she rents an Escalade from a friend that runs a luxury car rental,  “A one-hundred-and-twenty-dollar a day car, I get it for sixty.”

 

My eye wanders to clothes, purses, shoes--trying to dissect the hidden financial lives of these people.  I know that even the lowest paid among them can’t earn less than 30-40 K yet some of them can’t pay the bills and many carry debt.  What do they spend it on?  Are they just bad with money?  Hidden expenses?  Some of them have had bad breaks.  One woman in particular, I think she just doesn’t know how to deal with money.  She cashes all of her checks at Nick’s check cashing and uses it as her bank.

Gas prices, I am sure, haven’t helped.  Most of my coworkers commute. I was coming in from a conference at 10 am one morning.  As the elevator door slid shut one morning, a woman staggered on.  She caught my eye. “Traffic.”  She pauses dramatically, “Was horrendous.  It normally takes me one hour to get here but it was hell today--took me an hour and a half.”

 
”You know," I calculate,  “If you commute an hour each way every day, you’ve essentially worked 10 hours you weren’t paid for ever week.” 

Her eyes lit up,” I know.” She said, “Isn't it crazy?”

 

I didn’t have the heart to tell her I lived a mile and a half away.  One of the things I am realizing is that most people just don’t think about these things from the perspective of what it is costing them.  She got it, yet she acted like she didn’t have a choice.   

When I first started working at Initech,I mentioned to a secretary that I only lived a short distance away.  “Oh, my god, we hate people like you!”  she joked, calling to an admin assistant.  “But you rent, right?  I own a home, so I’m out in Valencia.”  The other woman lived in Fullerton.  I should have been geographically shocked, but I once had a friend who lived so far away then when she went on job interviews the firms she interviewed with had never even heard of it.  "Monrovia?” they asked incredulously.  Two hours is too far even by LA standards.

*

I remember reading a series of articles in the LA Weekly about living in LA titled “The L.A. Dream Revisited.”  Since most people in the LA area rent, the series contained the curious subtitle “Beyond the house and the yard…the apartment as object of desire.”  It focused on the people who rent, which the reporters struggled with against a backdrop of record home ownership and housing prices.  As Robert Greene writes, “A majority of Angelenos don’t live in cottages, mansions, or tract houses but in apartments, and there is no living unit more emblematic of LA than the three-story dingbat apartment building, parking spaces underneath, stucco covered…” I read with some amusement an article on a couple who have sold their house to rent because it is such a comparatively good deal.

And yet more and more people have added the additional burden of a long commute into the mix.  More and more people have felt compelled to jump into the real estate market, moving further and further out for affordability, never questioning whether home ownership is a good investment when you calculate the cost of commute times and high prices on lifestyle.

 

With the rise in gas prices, the effect has been two fold; a loss of time and a money.  That house now costs many more than they realize.  The job that pays 40 K and takes 40 hours a week now pays less for more time when you factor in gas and the 50 hr work that commute creates.  And that assumes you never come in early or leave late, an increasingly difficult balance to strike.

 

It's the hidden financial lives of coworkers that are changing in subtle ways the American worklife.  It has to affect productivity, and one questions the societal toll as we look to schools to baby-sit and raise the children whose parents are stuck in traffic or the cubicle and can't get back until dinner. Can we reclaim our work lives and roll back the clock?  

Sometimes, the hidden lives of coworkers don't remain so hidden.  The girl who used to cruise to Vegas in the rented Escalade didn't come to work one Monday and rumors swirled about an arrest.  With the skills I'd gleaned from a previous contract job, I looked her up on the LA County jail site: she'd been arrested for check forgery.  Becuase she was in jail and couldn't come to work, she was fired later the next week for failing to come in. 

I left the job a few months later, but sometimes I think about my old coworkers and wonder where they are.  What my boss is doing.  But not very often.  You never know what's really going on in the cubicle next door, or in the millions of cubicles beyond it.  BUt everywhere you look--there's money, a real person, and a story hidden behind them.