HOUSTON — The gleaming towers don’t loom proudly any more. They are ringed these days with TV satellite vans on stakeout. Reporters assigned to the "boom and bust" beat are hanging around in case someone comes out of the building with the shredded detritus of scandal.
The only people making a profit off Enron now are cynics selling the souvenirs of their severance on eBay. The hot item on the site is the "Enron Code of Ethics: Never Been Read." The bidding is up to $102.
Today, the eighth-largest corporation in America is buried under the rubble of a scandal that may reach the White House. Cruising around this tourist attraction, a former Enron lobbyist explains the collapsed corporation to me as if he were an anthropologist talking about an ancient culture.
Once upon a time, says George Strong, "Everybody wanted to work there. You would say, ‘I worked for Enron,’ and they would say, ‘good for you.’ "
People worked hard here, I am told by everyone. Many didn’t take lunch. Many didn’t take vacations. Competing in a performance review pressure cooker called "rank or yank," the top tier made huge bonuses while the bottom tier worried about their jobs.
This was the hot company, a place where even an executive secretary like 59-year-old Gerriann Warner could work up a 401(k) worth $300,000. And a place where she watched it erode until it was worth little more than the corporate coffee mugs on the same eBay site that read: "Enron Retirement Planning."
I came here expecting outrage and there is plenty of it among the 4,500 former employees who saw their jobs and their retirement money disappear while they were assured that everything was OK. Average employees watched helplessly, locked in, while many at on the top cashed out. They learned too little, too late about fuzzy math and fuzzy accountants.
But along with anger, there is lingering bewilderment, sadness, warring feelings of being foolish and fooled, self-deceptive and deceived.
In 13 years at Enron, Warner, the family breadwinner with a husband on disability, saw the best as well as the worst. She saw a company that paid college tuition for the two children of a boss who died young. She saw a company that became so competitive that when your electronic entry card didn’t work, the joke was that you’d lost your job.
"Everybody was stressed out, everybody had a cell phone, everybody had a pager," she says. "Work was hard, stressful, exciting. Everyone was expected to be 100 percent devoted to Enron." But the word she uses the most is "faith." "I had faith in the company," she says again and again, as if she is still trying to remember why.
In the rest of America, Kenneth Lay may be Kenny Boy, the CEO villain of this scandal. Linda Lay’s "Today" show portrait of her husband as a man of integrity may sound like a set-up for next week’s congressional hearings. But many in this town also remember Lay as a the go-to guy, a man who had his finger in every good cause in the city.
When I ask about Lay over dinner, breakfast, lunch with a dozen Houston men and women, there is a pause and someone talks about a guy who rode the elevator with his employees, shared photos of his grandchildren, encouraged Enron to be the No. 1 corporate citizen. And yet … kept telling them the company was OK. How could their Ken Lay have known? How could he not have known?
Last week a financial analyst told Warner that if she works another 11 years, she’ll earn back half what she lost. Still, refusing bitterness, she goes back and forth. "I’m mad at myself," she says and repeats the line on her 401(k) form: "Remember, you’re responsible for your own money." Yet she is also "mad at the company because they kept telling us they cared about us — and put the money in their pockets."
Does this make her sound like a wronged wife astounded that she once believed that her husband was out working until 4 a.m.? She wonders how she could have ever trusted the company. "We had a gym, we had a cafeteria, we had a doctor on site," says Warner, but the bottom line is that "they didn’t care."
Someday the last code of ethics book will be off eBay, the teapot will have blown its final dome, someone or some dozen may go to jail and folks who thought they would retire will still be working. Maybe then, like everyone says, historians will compare Enron to an earlier generation of fast and loose corporations that ushered in Teddy Roosevelt and his populist trust-busters.
But here’s the difference. In Houston today, trust itself has gone bust.
Ellen Goodman can be reached at The Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071-9200 or send e-mail to EllenGoodman@Globe.com.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
