Fabulous Girl's Guide to Grace Under Pressure Extreme Etiquette for the Stickiest, Trickiest, Most Outrageous Situations Of Your Life

Chapter One The Workplace "What did you do to your hair? It looks good," Cheryl, a senior editor at Smack! magazine, squealed at me as she ran past my desk. Despite the backhanded compliment, I had to admit that I was having an unusually good hair day. Normally my hair misbehaves a few times a week, generally when I have a can't-miss cocktail party to attend. But that day my tresses looked fab. I chose to take my good hair as an omen. I loved my job as associate editor for the magazine. Smack! is known in the rag trade as a general-interest magazine, but I'd been hired to give it specific interest: young and hip. In other words, it was my job to tell our middle-aged readership about what the pretty young things were drinking and shopping for, where they went to listen to music and get their hair done. I'd been at it for over a year. And while I was happy, I was beginning to want to move my work in another direction--upward, that is--but unfortunately I couldn't yet grasp exactly where up was. Whack! Something walloped my desk with a mighty slap. "Do you read Dudley's page?" There stood John Bradley, Smack!'s editor in chief, the big boss, with a wad of rolled-up newspaper in his hand. I wondered if he was now going to swat me on the nose with it. "He's funny. Your writing should be more like his. You know, chatty." "But he's a gossip columnist." "And?" "And I'm not." I tried not to sound annoyed, but lately Bradley seemed to find fault with whatever I did or didn't do. "Well, if you'd rather have dull copy. Did you dye your hair?" "No, it's just a good--" Bradley hurried away, leaving the offending paper on my desk. Dudley's gossip column ran in a national newspaper. Since being on the job, I'd become an observer of sorts. Being out many nights a week gave me plenty of opportunities to people-watch. I'd met Dudley on many occasions and he was not what you'd call gentlemanly. I wasn't really on his radar--he would barely say hello to me. And now there was Dudley's sucky face sneering at me. Truth be told, I hated his column. It was brash, tacky, and rude. He was not the sort of gossip columnist who lived to suck up to local celebrities, he was the kind of creep who wormed his way into parties thrown by the well known only to turn around and mock their choice of wine or fashion sense in his next column. But like the dutiful worker bee, I read Dudley's words, most of them meaningless drivel. Meaningless, that is, until I got to the last paragraph, which was horrifying: "TV producer Bingo Jones was all hot and bothered with local celeb news babe Muffie (first name only please) at last night's opening of the so-hip-it-hurts eaterie Spanks. If Bingo's regular chica, mag art director Elenor Brown, had eye-spied the duo giving each other a good tongue-lashing, it would have been spanks all right." Now, I've never been a fan of Bingo. He was an ill-mannered lout, the kind of guy who took cell calls at dinner parties, was rude to waitresses, and, worse, was a terrible boyfriend. I knew this last fact to be utterly true because Bingo was in a long-term relationship, off and on, off and on, with one of my two best friends, Elenor. And the fact that Bingo was now a confirmed cheating bastard (during a supposed "on" moment) really riled me. As did Elenor's public humiliation at the keyboard of Dudley. My first reaction? Poor Elenor! My second--I would never stoop to those depths in my writing! Bradley would have to find another writer to dish the dirt. The fact that I wanted to keep my job, however, prevented me from marching into his office to tell him so. I was hoping he'd just forget the entire conversation and continue with his latest idea for making over Smack!, which was more sex and gardening. But firstIzzo, Kim is the author of 'Fabulous Girl's Guide to Grace Under Pressure Extreme Etiquette for the Stickiest, Trickiest, Most Outrageous Situations Of Your Life', published 2004 under ISBN 9780767915489 and ISBN 0767915488.