Meat

Abstract

Tema Siegel Tema Siegel was born in Buffalo, New York. She is trained as a Wittgenstein scholar, and received a doctorate at the University of Chicago where, in her last year, she taught Wittgenstein and the philosophy of language. Ten years ago she stopped teaching and went into business, which she has stayed in since then. She is now an associate with an executive recruitment firm in Chicago. Meat IT'S STRANGE, the things you find yourself doing. Right now I'm a spotter for a repossessor. I drive through the streets at three or four in the morning, and when I spot a car that's on my order list I call it in on my two-way radio. Then in minutes the pros come along in the van. One of them breaks in while the other one opens the back of the van and puts down a metal ramp. They drive the car up the ramp. They puU the ramp in. They puU the doors shut behind them. And they drive away. The whole thing takes less than two minutes. This is byno means the sort of thing you'd expect someone like me to be doing—with my credentials—and I'm totally aware of that. You might say it was just something I feU into when I lost my job at Ecotech. My brother-in-law Bernie turned out to have some fairly exotic connections. "Dena darling," he said, "think of it as something to do while you are resting up. You are obviously a very nervous, depressed person right now." I think he exaggerates. He likes to play amateur psychiatrist, imagining that a bunch of purely physical symptoms—my headache and nausea—are the signs of some sort ofpsychological disorder. He's wrong. I pride myself on just the sort of self-control and reasonableness that Bernie has always lacked. And as soon as I'm feeling a little better, say in a month or two, I'll goback to consulting, work that's more suitable. Even after what happened at Ecotech, my position should be strong. After all, I'm a woman and I've got an MBA from Wharton. Right now that makes me a precious commodity, and I should have no trouble at all selling myself to one of the better consultancies—Booz Allen, McKinsey, A.T. Kearney. Ecotech was really a step down for me in money and prestige when I think about it. But I can't fault the place for challenge. Take the job I was working on when I got fired, my Ecotech "swan song" so to speak. Midas Meat had gone into the purveyor business in New York and Boston—seUing meat to hotels, hospitals, diners, and nursing homes. They were losing their shirts but they didn't know why. Now Midas had just been acquired by a conglomerate, Mogulcorp, and the executives at Midas were scared that the whole division would be sold off if they couldn't turn things around, and they'd all be walking the streets—since they are all in their late forties or fifties, which nowadays means they are virtually unemployable. So they came to Ecotech with thousands asking us to find out how the successful meat men in New York and Boston were doing it. "I don't care what you have to do," my boss Dave said. "Make up a story. Say you're from Meat Packers' Weekly. Say 148 · The Missouri Review Tema Siegel anything! But talk to those guys and find out what they're doing." We got the job on a Monday in mid-December. The next morning Dave and I were on a breakfast flight to Newark. I was looking out the window at passing clouds when Dave caught me. "I always use flight time to do expense reports," he said. I've watched Dave on planes. Sometimes he speedreads entire books or stacks of annual reports. He never looks out a window. Dave is a rational, methodical man. I think he always worried about me. I think he always wondered whether I was "Ecotech material," as he put it. He seemed to think that...