“Where would you be flying me exactly?”
“New Jersey. It’s not Colorado, I know, but it’s a chance for you to get ahead.”
As luck would have it, Cindy said yes, and, this being seven years later, she was up well into six figures, driving a slightly used Escalade—she needed a big set of wheels to haul her bulk around—and doing just about everything Ben needed her to do, and doing it better than anyone had ever done it before. He’d figured on that.
So when he told her:
“Listen, Cindy—what I need you to do for me—You know those kids we did the deal with a few weeks ago?”
“The FaceMate guys?”
“Right. They need a big-time computer—I guess a mainframe or whatever the hell you call them. Can you check on it and get it done?”
“Sure, sir. How soon do they need it and how much do you want me to spend?”
“Now and no limit—Can you take care of it?’
“It’ll be handled by the end of the day,” she assured him.
And it was.
11
Cindy might have been paid her six figures, plus raises, plus bonuses, plus a little company stock from time to time. But they didn’t pay her by her poundage; they paid her by her performance—And one thing about Cindy—the gal could definitely perform.
Buy a computer, Ben had told her. And that she did—She bought two of them, in fact. But there was a corollary to ordering a couple of multi-million-dollar computers and getting them set up ASAP. The set-up was straightforward: She greased the skids with a five thou per head bonus to the six-man team of techs who lugged the hardware in from the IBM distributor in Cincinnati and set it up. The whole damn thingamajig was wired, programmed, and running like a four-minute miler within a couple of days…. But in the process of ordering and arranging the bank transfer to pay the bill, another little corollary emerged: And that was the service contract.
Now Ben wasn’t one to be beleaguered by these silly little details of his myriad transactions—That’s what Cindy was for: That’s what everyone at Atherton was for: Cindy for those trifling little details, Eddie for the leg work of getting business done, Art down in graphics for aesthetic design, Theodore in finance for…. Well, the long and short of the situation was that Ben had put together an A-type, world-class team he could rely on with total confidence. Which meant that Ben took care of campaign strategy and delegated battlefield tactics to the troops.
So Cindy had a bit of leeway in her dealings—and she used it well. That service contract: You couldn’t prepay it, since weekly, monthly, more and more peripherals and power needed to be added on—It was a project continually in flux. So the service contract could never be a finite sum; it had to vary annually, sometimes even monthly. No way to prepay a figure perpetually subject to change.
Which meant that payment for such a charge would need to be incurred directly by the on-site user—Which meant, in turn, that Cindy would need to look into that.
Which led, in reciprocal turn again, to a fascinating discovery that clever Cindy made along the way, to wit: There wasn’t anything coming in to pay the service bill. Nothing. Zip. Diddly! She found this out from Financials when she ran down to Theodore Zalek’s office for a little talk.
“You mean to tell me the FaceMate kids have nothing in their account?”
“Account? What account? They haven’t got an account.” Theodore shrugged and put his hands out, palms up, as if to show her that what was in his hands was precisely what was in their holdings, and not a farthing more.
“So—how can that be, Theo? They’ve got pretty near a hundred million subscribers. The site is growing faster than Twitter and Facebook combined.”
“Yeah, I tried to talk to them the day the buy-in was signed, but the one kid doesn’t talk at all and the other one goes googly-eyed when money is discussed.”
“Yes, but even so, what have they done with all the fees they’ve taken in?”
“Fees? What fees? They aren’t charging any fees. That’s what I’m trying to explain to you!”
“They don’t charge? Anything?”
“Nope.”
“Am I understanding you right?” Cindy’s mouth was open. It hadn’t fully closed since the moment she’d walked in.
“Listen to me. For four weeks I’ve been trying to get someone to listen to me: These kids are in La-La Land. They don’t charge any fees. They’re not making any money. There’s absolutely nothing in the till.”
Cindy’s mouth dropped open further to its nadir point and a teeny tiny rill of saliva ran straight down from the corner of her lip leaving a glistening streamlet down her puffy cheek.
“Does Ben know?” she asked.
“I don’t know about Ben, but I sent a memo to Eddie.”
“I guess I’ll have to make a call to Eddie then,” Cindy grumbled. She shut her mouth, wiped her cheek, slammed the door on exiting Financials, and didn’t say a word to anyone on the elevator ride upstairs.
Ben was in a conference call; he couldn’t be disturbed. So she called Eddie, who was eating in some restaurant in town. She could hear the sound of plates clinking in the background.
“You mean there’s nothing coming in?” he asked incredulously with a chaw of foodstuffs in his mouth. It sounded crunchy, probably salad. Eddie usually started off with salad.
“Didn’t you get a memo from Theodore to that effect?”
Eddie coughed, quite a long and violent cough; some of the crunchy-sounding contents of his mouth must have slithered down the wrong way. “I—ahem—I knew they weren’t charging the people to sign up—ahem, ahem—but I figured with the advertising….”
“Are they doing any advertising?”
“I … I assumed so.”
“Ben’s going to blow a gasket if I tell him. Look—why don’t you take care of the situation first and maybe the subject won’t come up. Maintenance is going to be in the thirty grand neighborhood, varying by the month, and they’ll at least need to cover that on their own. Maybe you ought to have a heart-to-heart conference with these spaced-out screwball kids.”
“OK, OK—Look, do me a favor, will you? Don’t tell Ben just yet, and…. And call Brandon and have him fire up the Lear. I’ll head out to the airport right away.”
Rajiv met him at the outside door of the building, just as he’d done a week ago, dragged him first up to the original space on Three, which was being refurbished just in case FaceMate needed to expand a little further in the future—which it undoubtedly would. Then they took the elevator up to the brand new space on Four, and…
Eddie rubbed his eyes in gladsome disbelief. It was incredible! That Cindy—Ben sure knew how to pick ‘em!—Good God!—Look what she and her teams of high-paid hirelings had accomplished in a little over a week! There against the far wall, between a pair of four-foot windows, sat the two huge mainframes neatly wired to their gobbledygook of peripherals, the nature and purpose of which Eddie had no clue. Then between the entry door and the computer stacks, a couple of dozen neatly spaced partitions set in for the gaggle of workers the boys had just brought on. Everything freshly painted in antiseptic white—you could smell the vapors in the air-conditioned air—including, most noticeably, Alex’s mausoleum-of-an-office—turned out that was what the bricked-in structure was—transplanted into the same far left corner it had occupied downstairs. Which figured: Alex wasn’t the type of guy who would adapt that easily to change. A whole devoted floor—Six thousand square feet of orderliness in place of the half-floor hodgepodge Eddie had beheld on his last trip out. If this was destined to be a multi-billion-dollar operation, finally it was beginning to look the part.
Rajiv led him through the maze of shiny white partitions to his own private cubicle, right in the middle of the twenty-something other cubicles that had been put in place since the move upstairs. A regular beehive of activity now; you actually saw some workers’ heads bobbing up above the white partitions; you actually heard computers humming, printers
droning and clicking out their paperwork that ultimately would wind up in the trash. No two-man operation anymore, no sir—this looked like the big time. And, with a hundred million active patrons of the site, as of 8:00 a.m. today, that’s just precisely what it was.
And a nice, blonde, bubbly, cute surprise to boot: Inside Rajiv’s spiffed-up little open roomlet, which was probably fifty percent bigger than the rest, Eddie found three padded metal chairs facing Rajiv’s desk. And atop one, sitting cross-legged in her pretty pinkish tee shirt and cutoff denim jeans, sat Vi. For a girl of unexceptional beauty, she sure looked pretty doggone good.
“Hi, Mr. Eddie!” she bubbled, bouncing up to greet him, and giving him a great big girly hug. Eddie, as was his practice, hugged her back with gusto. Those braless little bumps felt great against his chest.
“Vi came up to visit and she wanted to stay and say hello and thank you personally—I hope you don’t mind, Eddie. Hey, we’re both on a major high these past few days, you know? You guys sure made our lives a whole lot easier with these snazzy mainframes the company ordered in.”
“Oh yeah? How come?”
“How come, you’re asking? About the new computers? I’ll tell you how come. You know what we did last night, Eddie—huh?—Vi and me, I mean; you know what we did?—Just take a guess. For the first time in, like, a month, I’m talking—You want to guess what we did?”
Eddie shook his head and grinned; he had a dedicated grin for just such opportune occasions, just one of his many dedicated grins: “I’m not sure I want to know, Rajiv. Us old guys don’t have the stamina you young folks do, so it might put too much stress on my coronary arteries to hear about your partying last night.”
“No, Eddie, come on—it’s not like that at all.” Rajiv looked narrowly at Vi. She smiled. “What we did last night was actually go to dinner and a movie.”
“Whew! Good. My coronaries just got reprieved.”
“Hey, your circulation is probably better than mine with all the spare ribs and pizza I’ve been eating lately—That’s all Alex orders in—But hey: I know a night out with your girlfriend doesn’t sound like that big a deal to a jet-set guy like you, but let me tell you, just going out one evening with my lady here is, like, a super-special treat after being locked in this friggin’ office the past whole month. What do you say, Vi—am I exaggerating, babes, or not?”
Vi volubly affirmed the fact that Rajiv wasn’t exaggerating one teensy weensy little bit.
“And getting a new computer let you have your date?” Eddie looked puzzled, primarily because he was.
“Yeah, sure. Sure it did. Come on, Eddie, don’t you realize what my life is like since all this FaceMate hoopla began? Hey, you were here a week ago—Didn’t you see the way the operation runs?”
Eddie shrugged. He’d been there, sure, but didn’t have a clue as to what Rajiv was getting at. “I don’t know, it seemed to run well enough from the impression I got. The place downstairs might have looked like total shit—Yeah, it did look like shit, kid; I hate to tell you that—But, truthfully, I thought the operation functioned pretty well.”
“Yeah? You think? You really think?—So let me ask you: How much did you talk to Alex while you were here?”
“To Alex? Talk? You’re asking me? Hey, somehow I get the impression that Alex doesn’t like to talk to anybody a whole helluva lot. And certainly not to me.”
“Not just you, Eddie—He doesn’t talk to anybody at all—Anybody but me, that is. I’m the one that gets the talking to—Not that it’s really ‘talking’-talking the way normal people talk—more like electronic mind control, if you know what I’m saying here. Alex is … how should I put it so you’ll understand? Alex uses me as a kind of intercom—He uses me to communicate through. Which means that if he doesn’t have me around to be his mouthpiece, he doesn’t have a mouthpiece at all, and the whole operation comes to a screeching halt.”
“And getting you a couple of mainframes fixed all that? I don’t get it, pal.”
“You don’t? Well here’s the explanation for you then: Since those mainframes got delivered, Alex is like a kid with a brand new train set for Christmas. He’s busy playing with his presents night and day. Since the IBM guys brought the new equipment in, he hardly has time to hassle me anymore—He doesn’t need to talk, so he doesn’t need to talk through me—well, except for asking me a couple times a day about the pictures of Ben and all—Oh, by the way, Eddie, did you remember to get them for me?”
“Pictures? What pictures?”
“I asked you, remember? Alex wanted the pictures of Ben—You said you had some publicity photos, and Alex was kind of counting on you maybe finding some older ones—You don’t have pictures of him when he was a kid, I know, but we thought maybe some shots of Mr. Atherton when he started at the firm.”
“OK, those—Yeah—Well, I doubt it but I’ll check. Current pictures are about all we’d likely have—But, like I told you, just get a couple of the business magazines and there’ll definitely be some shots of Benny in there. That’ll probably be your best and quickest bet.”
“Yeah, well I did that, Eddie. I got a bunch of them, but the images in the magazines are dot-matrix prints—we can’t enlarge or modify them to use with our program; there’s not enough detail—So what we need is actual high-res photos—even if you’ve only got recent ones. Younger pictures would be ideal—anything but a high-school yearbook, which is dot-matrix too—but if current photos are the only ones you’ve got, we’ll have to make them do.”
“OK, sure, Rajiv, I’ll run down to graphics first thing tomorrow morning and send some out. You’ll have them in a day—OK?”
“Yeah, great. That’ll make Alex happy. Between that and the new computer, I might actually get another night off this week. Vi will be in heaven.”
Vi smilingly attested to the fact that the provision of said photographs would indeed put her into into social-function heaven.
“Well great then, Rajiv; glad to help you out; you’ll get your pictures, I promise—But the other thing we gotta talk about—the main reason I flew out here today is—Hey, listen, do you want to do this stuff in private or….”
“No, Eddie, it’s OK, Vi knows the business same as me—We can talk with her around, unless you’d rather….”
“Hey I don’t care who’s here if you don’t. And this business stuff won’t bore you too much, will it, Vi?”
Vi shook her head no. And in fact she looked pretty interested. More so perhaps than her boyfriend was.
“OK, then, kiddies, listen up: We gotta have a serious little discussion about something. It’s something Cindy pointed out after ordering all your stuff.”
“Oh-oh, what’s the problem?” Rajiv’s swarthy face turned very slightly pale. “I hope it isn’t something I screwed up.”
“No, no. You’re great, Rajiv. And both you geeky guys are doing fine with the website so far. No problem with that—But there’s this one little wrinkle in the cash-flow situation, which is this: Our finance guys are telling me that…. Look, is it true that you don’t have any money coming in?”
“Money? Well, we’ve got the credit line going now. I mean, the computer stuff is covered, isn’t it? And you said we own the building as of—what was it—a week ago?—so there won’t be any rent to pay.”
“And what about the salaries? You hired a bunch of extra staff—right?—you plan on covering what you pay them with the credit line?”
“I don’t know; I guess. Can’t we use that till the cash comes in from selling off the stock? Mr. Atherton said we’re going to have all those billions eventually, so….”
“Maybe. The key word here is ‘maybe’. Selling a property is largely dependent on what money the property is projected to bring in. Are you…? Is there any money coming in from stuff like advertising? Anything at all?”
“Yeah, a little. Maybe a few thousand bucks here and there. We haven’t really pushed the ads.”
“And you’re not charging any
fees to users, I understand.”
“No, Alex didn’t want to. He said we’d build the site faster that way.”
“Uh-huh, your pal was right about that at any rate. You guys are generating amazing numbers, and that’s all to the good, but—Ben’s got a fantastic nose for business, and I think he’s gonna want you to start charging a fee to your subscribers. It doesn’t have to be a lot, but…. Look at it this way, Rajiv: You’ve got—what?—a hundred million people using your services, right?”
“Yeah, it’s a hundred and six now, growing by the second as we speak.”
“OK, so let’s say you’d been charging each one of them—what? Maybe ten bucks a head?—Let’s say an even ten as an example, OK? So then how much would you have taken in by now if you’d started charging right up front? Figure it out; it’s simple.” Rajiv paused and did the two-second calculation in his head.
“Umm, that would be—Jeez, Eddie!—That would be a billion dollars-plus—Good God!”
From Vi’s chair to Eddie’s left came a quiet but audible gasp. Then she cleared her throat. The prospect of a billion dollars does that to a girl intent on escargots and haut-couture habiliments.
“Our financial department went over it—Cindy had them text me on the plane—And they say twenty dollars would be a reasonable asking fee. It wouldn’t likely decrease new enrollment more than ten percent, they calculate; and that way you’d have some operating revenue coming in. Besides, you guys are giving your subscribers a lot more bang for their bucks with the new questionnaire Alex installed, aren’t you? I mean, now you’re telling people when they’re likely to have their heart attacks and who can learn to play the piano—That stuff is worth twenty bucks alone.”
“Yeah, I see where you’re coming from, Eddie. I guess we do provide a pretty valuable service after all—So what you’re saying is—you want us to ask the people to pay us, like … with money? Like pay in cash?”
“Cash, yeah, sure—Unless you want to take it in chicken wings—Hey, that’s it—Have all your users mail in twenty chicken wings apiece, then we can open a restaurant and finally stash some money in the bank.”
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