Goodbye Buddy, Hope Ya Find a New Startup

Watching ELF with the Oregon Chai skeleton crew

To help finance my divorce in the winter of 2004, I picked up extra work through a temp agency. As luck would have it, they placed me as a receptionist at a company I knew well: Oregon Chai, often credited with discovering the spicy-sweet, milky tea in the Himalayas and introducing it to American coffeehouses. I’d met the founder once or twice, back when she was selling her product one case at a time out of the back of her Volvo stationwagon.

When I arrived in mid-December for my two-week gig, however, the company was on the far side of a feverish startup trajectory. Oregon Chai had recently sold out to frozen-entree giant Kerry Group for a reported $74 million, who then greased its employees with a generous paycheck and showed them the door. Its offices were already barren, its production line was dismantled, and the tasting room was filled with moving boxes. Of the 15 or 20 employees who remained, many had been there since the beginning. In a plain funk, they clung to each other in small, whispering groups as if lingering at the wake of someone who’d died suddenly, before her time.

Working the front desk, my primary responsibility was to keep the seat warm. Business had already been transferred to the Death Star, so the phone didn’t ring all that much. I wanted to share war stories about pitching wholesale accounts for a local coffee company and rebranding another, but there wasn’t much enthusiasm for industry gossip. Besides, I was just a guy from the temp agency.

Then, on the day before Christmas Eve, the Last Vice-President Standing ordered a stack of pizzas. He locked the front door, directed me to send the calls to voicemail and called the skeleton crew downstairs to the main conference room. Someone popped a DVD of Elf into the player. Munching on slices of designer New York-style pizza, we laughed in all the right places as Will Ferrell, playing Buddy the Elf, lunked around in his green tights. But when those surly New Yorkers came together in Central Park to sing “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” and reignite the spirit of Christmas, the room got quiter.

There were a few sniffles that I assumed were symptoms of cold and cough season. Then, I looked around and everyone — I mean everyone, including the Last Vice President Standing — was letting loose with unabashed tears, wiping them away with scratchy brown pizzeria napkins.

Ferrell’s uninhibited, childlike performance opened up a path to express something we’d been too timid or too professional to show before. Buddy’s spirit helped save his onscreen family, but no amount of Christmas cheer could keep this company together. Or keep my own family from falling apart.

The video continued through the closing credits until the DVD returned to its menu. For a while, we sat in silence. No one wanted to be the first to leave the conference room.

Not much work got done after that. I answered the phone, but sent the calls to voicemail. The front door remained locked. I updated my blog. What was Corporate going to do, fire us?

Over the next few days, Oregon Chai’s team members peeled off one by one. Finally, it was down to just the accountant, who stuck around to close out the books—and me, whom the accountant kept around mainly to help her feel safe in the empty building.

Then, on the evening of Friday, December 31, she announced she’d finished. We shut off the lights for the last time, wished each other a happy new year and headed out into the darkness, into our separate futures.

If you have a memory to share about a holiday movie or TV show, please let us know.

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