Do not ever tell me that the old days were the good days.
When I was a young freelance journalist, my professional world looked very different from the way it is today. Researching an interview subject involved a lengthy and laborious trip to a reference library; filing copy from Los Angeles to London meant walking the printed out article to the Post Office and standing in line to pay $20 to have it delivered by the next morning. Telephone calls cost an arm, a leg and a firstborn child, and were rife with echoings, hummings, and unexpected cut-offs; if the editor needed to communicate with me urgently, she would do so by telegram, which for some reason would be delivered by telephone through the telegram center in Dallas, Texas. I was new to most American accents then, and when the voice on the telephone would inform me that “May-a-hayum, you hay-ave a tele-gray-a-hayum,” I would know that, between their accent and mine, we were in for a merry time.
But all of the minor inconveniences of supplying the copy paled into nothingness beside the very real challenge of getting paid for it. These days, payment for journalists is painfree. I email an invoice to an editor, they approve it, forward the email to the accounts office, the computers take over, and it all runs as smoothly as a jug of custard. Not so back then. First, the invoice must be made out by hand and mailed to the editor for approval; then the editor must hand it to the secretary to walk across the building to deliver it to the accounts department; and it was when it was in the hands of the accounts department that the really good times began.
The people who worked in newspaper accounts departments in those days were notoriously infuriating. Reliably surly men – and in those days, they were overwhelmingly men – they were rumored across the industry to have been hired deliberately for their incompetence, so that writers could be paid late and the publishers rake in extra interest on the money thus withheld. Nobody oversaw them; nobody questioned the ever-more labyrinthine methods they chose to use to process payments. Wresting money from them could take weeks, if not longer.
I once wrote a series of features for a large daily newspaper, which had earned me, in theory, a substantial pay check, only to realize a few weeks after publication that, of the several invoices I had submitted, not a single one had yet been paid. I made telephone inquiries around the office and was sent at last to talk to the accounts department, proudly staffed by two Neanderthal gnomes I’ll call Sid and Sam.
“Where’s my money?” I asked Sid.
“It didn’t go out this month,” Sid reported cheerfully. “We only have one pay run a month, see, so it’ll have to wait till next month.”
“But why didn’t it go out this month?” I asked.
“Because it didn’t,” he explained, patiently. “And there’s nothing we can do about it till next month, not now. We only have the one pay run, see.”
“But you’ve had it on your books for weeks,” I said. “I don’t understand what the delay is.”
At this naked display of wanton greed, Sid’s good humor evaporated.
“You’ll get your money,” he hissed darkly, in the tones of one witnessing a moustache-twirling landlord cast a grieving widow out into the snow. “You’ll just have to wait till next month for it.”
Another month passed, and there was still no sign of my payment.
“Where’s my money?” I asked Sam.
“It didn’t go out this month, love,” said Sam. “You’ll have to wait till next month now.”
“But why wasn’t it sent this month?” I asked.
“Don’t get yourself into a tizz, love,” reassured Sam. “Just be patient, you’ll get it next month.”
“But I need it this month,” I said. “I have bills to pay and it’s ridiculously overdue by now.”
“Try to calm down, love,” counseled Sam. “You’ll get your money. You’ll just have to be patient, OK?”
After a couple of months of such exchanges, it became apparent that Sid and Sam had agreed it would be a good joke to put the uppity woman into her place by continuing to block her invoice from each monthly pay run while hilariously assuring her that it would be included in the next. The pair were having audible fun with this witty wheeze, and I could hear them giggling into their fists with increased merriment with each month that passed; the sum I was owed was no doubt more than they felt any mere woman deserved to be paid anyway, and the more frustrated I grew, the better they enjoyed it.
It was a situation in which I was powerless. The articles I had delivered – on time, and to specification – had already been printed, read, and apparently enjoyed, because the newspaper’s circulation was booming; my editor, who, like many of his kind, had never himself been freelance, made it plain that any problems of mine with the accounts department were mine alone. It was just me, Sid and Sam, and their little joke.
“Should I write a letter to the managing director?” I wondered to a male colleague.
“I wouldn’t,” said my colleague, who knew the director on a bloke level. “He’d only show it to his friends and say, ‘Look who’s in a bad mood because she hasn’t had sex lately.’”
In those days, it was OK to talk like that.
In fact, I was otherwise in a particularly good mood that summer, and, since you ask, having a very nice time indeed, thank you, with my increasingly serious boyfriend, one Mr. Los Angeles, one of our proposed uses for the missing money being to fund a trip to Europe to introduce him to my family. Mr. Los Angeles had been following the saga of my invoices with interest, and when the next pay date rolled around, decided to pick up the telephone extension and listen in on one of the calls.
“Hello, love,” Sam greeted me genially: he made it plain that he thoroughly enjoyed our little chats. “All right, are you?”
“Did my invoice go out in this month’s pay run?” I asked.
“Ah, don’t be like that, love,” he remonstrated. “We’ve been talking to each other for weeks now, haven’t we?”
“We’ve been talking to each other for weeks,” I reminded him, “because I’ve been chasing my money for weeks. Did it go out in this month’s pay run?”
He chuckled forbearingly.
“Well, now, let’s have a look, shall we?” he suggested.
There was a pause, and the sound of a happily slurped mouthful of coffee.
“Well, would you look at that!” he identified, then, contentedly. “It didn’t make it into the system this time either! It’ll have to wait till next month now, love, won’t it?”
“But you said that last month,” I said. “And the month before and the month before that.”
Sam tsked gently.
“You’ll get your money, love,” he reproved me. “Just try being patient, OK?”
“How about you try doing your job?” I suggested, and he hung up on me.
When I called back, it was Sid who answered.
“Sam hung up on me,” I said.
“He did,” he agreed stonily. “You was rude to him.”
“But you haven’t paid me,” I said.
“You’ll get your money,” Sid told me sternly. “In next month’s pay run.”
Which was when Mr. Los Angeles started to laugh. Mr. Los Angeles is a large man, with a rich and booming laugh, which can sound most delightfully genial when he intends it to. This morning, he did not intend it to.
Across the international telephone line, we heard the faint whistling of Sid’s head whipping to attention.
“Who’s that?” he asked, sharply.
“This is Gabrielle’s boyfriend,” announced Mr. Los Angeles. “And I am getting tired of watching her being given the run-around. She has been owed this money for weeks, and she needs to have it immediately.”
Sid did not take to this new line of conversation at all.
“But we won’t have another pay run till next month,” he snapped indignantly. “What do you expect me to do about it till then?”
“I expect you …” said Mr. Los Angeles, and proceeded to outline, in stentorian tones and glorious Technicolor anatomical detail, a full and graphic description of precisely which digit he expected Sid to pull from precisely which bodily orifice in order to cut precisely which sort of colorfully described check and put it into the even more colorfully described mail system, like, now, did Sid hear?
Well, good-bye, money, I thought, listening in some awe as the tirade unfurled, but isn’t this fun?
By the end of the speech, Sid, too, had hung up, and when we tried to call back, no one answered at all. Mr. Los Angeles and I shook hands, agreed to dine on cornflakes for the foreseeable future, and I turned to the back of the sofa to search for loose coins.
I had underestimated the power of a voice fueled by testosterone.
Not five minutes later, the telephone rang.
“Is that Ms. Donnelly?” asked a nosebleedingly posh woman’s voice.
I allowed that it was.
“This is the editor’s secretary,” said the voice. “I’ve just been handed a cheque to be sent to you by express post. The accounts department have particularly asked that I confirm your address to make sure it goes to the correct place.”
My fury at the fact that it had taken one expletive-ridden diatribe from an unidentified man five thousand miles away to elicit the money, after fruitless weeks of reasoned requests from the woman who had actually earned it, was somewhat tempered by the fact that, in Sid’s haste to oblige Mr. Los Angeles, he had miscalculated the amount owed to me by several hundred pounds to my favor.
Of course I’m planning to give the extra money back. I haven’t quite gotten around to doing so just yet; but I’ll do it next month. They’ll get their money then.
And do not ever tell me that the old days were the good days.