Even in temporary space, he had been fierce and unbowed. But now he seemed reduced to something merely corporate.
Before the campus it had still been fun. They'd pitch "insurance" to a large corporation. The company would predictably say no, and then they would go outside, set up lawn chairs and watch as the Cromoglodon tore the place apart. They had him start slow so that everybody had time to get out of the building. This also gave Topper time to assemble a nice wine and cheese so he could properly enjoy the destruction. (Though, in truth, Topper's wine and cheese was really bourbon and sausage.)
But as they had grown, people had stopped saying "no" and started saying "yes." No was fun. Yes was boring. In fact, companies stopped waiting for them to strong arm them and started to seek them out for coverage. So, they acquired an actual insurance company to provide the back-end support. Even that was fun. Nothing like a corporate takeover to get the blood flowing.
Topper especially enjoyed how they had informed the legacy management team of the acquisition. They called everyone together and the President stood up and gave a nice speech about how excited they were to be working with a visionary of Edwin's caliber—to learn and grow and change and hold hands and proactively yadda yadda yadda, bullshit bullshit bullshit— whatever it took to help make the business a success.
Then it was Edwin's turn. He thanked the president for his kind remarks and then asked the assembled team of Senior and Middle management if they were truly sincere in their desire to help. When they finished making serious and enthusiastic noises, Edwin said, "Very well. Gather your things and make an orderly exit from the building, you are all fired. Thank you very much for making this company—now to be known as Omdemnity Insurance—stronger, more efficient and more profitable with your timely departure."
Topper still cackled when he thought of it. And he loved the name Omdemnity. We insure everything, like it or not.
That had been the last good moment Topper could remember. The last bit of pure, king-hell, high-life fun. After that, the needs of a growing company created so much work that Topper's Adventure in Evil devolved into a job.
Topper had never wanted to own any part of a business. What he had wanted was an escape from misery. Call it the freedom to be miserable in his own completely unique way. He damn sure wasn't after a daily commute to an office park.
It was nearly lunchtime when Topper pulled into his parking space. Large, fluffy flakes of snow floated down into the persistent muck of the holiday season. In the wee, small hours of winter nights, after the liquor had run dry and the hookers had run out, Topper hated the holidays because of his lack of family. The terrible alone feeling that time of year always gave him. The rest of the time, he hated the slush and the muck.
It does not pay to be short in winter. It's terrible to have to fight your way up an unplowed sidewalk. When it's up to a normal person's knees, it's up to Topper's neck. The clothes that average adults wore didn't protect Topper for crawling through snow. Not unless he wanted to look like he was a member of an all-midget stunt snowmobile team. So, in the winter, in the suburbs, even in a corporate campus business park, Topper was cold and wet a lot.
Topper wrestled with coats and overcoats and wool socks and thermal underwear and shoes and galoshes and gloves and hats and scarves, but no matter how many times or how tightly he wrapped his scarf, somehow, someway, it always seemed to drag in the slush behind him.
He opened the car door and leapt down into the muck of the parking lot. A cold wind staggered him, threatening to knock him over, and he struggled to remain on his feet. He slammed the car door violently behind him. As he did so, the edge of his scarf was caught by the car door. When he made a move towards the warm, dry building, his neck remained in the same place. His feet slipped out from under him and down he went.
As he rolled and cursed in the slush, Topper's scream of frustration echoed off the cars coated with sand and road salt, and the uncaring, tinted glass of the Omdemnity Insurance Corporate Campus. Topper struggled to his feet and — coat covered in slush, shoes full of icy water — leaned into the cold wind and headed in to work.
Edwin crossed the vast expanse of his empty office, unbuttoned his coat and sat at his desk. Through high windows, he commanded a view of the snowy and orderly office park outside.
If Edwin had allowed himself to reflect on the loss of his beautiful skyscraper, he would have admitted that this new complex offered significant advantages. Not the least of which was that no one building was over five stories tall. Decentralized structures, less vulnerable to attack. But Edwin did not think about the past. Partially because it was a sunk cost, but mostly because he missed Agnes.
Edwin sat a pile of paper on the thick, finished wood. He produced a pen from an inside jacket pocket and sat down to work.
For all the puffery of modern management theory, the problem is always the same: How does one man impose his will on others? Seen this way, all of history is one long experiment in management. And even though the phrase "the motivational techniques of Genghis Khan" contains significant comedy, you can be sure that the great Khan used techniques, and that they were motivational.
But beyond proper motivation, there are command and control questions. Throughout history, more has been lost to over-eager zealots than to mediocre slackers. A slacker leaves well enough alone. A zealot, a true patriot or company man, will keep pushing and pushing and pushing until the situation is screwed up beyond all recognition. If not properly motivated and constrained, a zealot is the most destructive force of all.
The zealot cries, "To the death!" and means it. The ordinary man cries, "Hey, good enough! Let's call it a day!" and does just that. Religious movements and holy wars need zealots. Business benefits from a more reasonable, bribable kind of person.
Edwin needed both for what he wanted to do. The problem that faced him now was how to co-ordinate them. How does the consultant manage people?
Edwin did it by making marks on paper.
Edwin sat at his desk and placed the first paper from the stack directly before him. He read it carefully. If it was part of a multi-page document, he would continue until he had absorbed the entire document, but he would only focus on a single page at a time.
Edwin had never been comfortable with meetings and conference calls, spirited debate or the back-and-forth that Topper enjoyed so much. By nature, he was a quiet, contemplative man. But success brought the restrained intellectual new challenges.
Omdemnity was not successful just as a front company. It was successful in its own right. A living, working, breathing insurance company. Under Edwin's direction it had doubled in size. Yet, at the beginning, Edwin had worried that purchasing it might have been the biggest mistake of his career.
His life had been lost in endless meetings that went nowhere and accomplished nothing. Pointless conversations, social events, team-building exercises—all the swarming villainies of modern corporate culture overwhelmed him. In the first three months the slightly unprofitable company he had purchased had become wildly unprofitable. And Edwin was suffering from debilitating headaches. It was as if all of the inanity flooding in through his senses had started to accrete and calcify on the delicate mechanisms of his brain.
It was Topper who had broken him free.
On that day, Edwin had retreated to his office and lowered the shades. He closed his eyes, lay down on the floor and draped his jacket across his face. As he wished for the pain to stop, he drifted in and out of consciousness.
When he heard someone open the door to his office, the barest squeak of the hinge and the bottom of the door rubbing on the carpet caused Edwin to convulse in pain. He did not look up to see who it was. Instead, he said, "I am not to be disturbed."
When the door slammed, Edwin sat bolt upright and gasped in pain. He saw Topper, arms and legs crossed, leaning against the door.
"What the hell are ya doin’?" asked Topper in his high, scratchy voice. Topper's voice was naturally set at the mos
t painful octave for Edwin's headache. With each word, Edwin's skull rang like a bell.
"Please Topper, I have a headache."
"Ahhhhhhhhh," Topper said as he swaggered across the office towards Edwin. "I'm not here to have sex with you, so that excuse isn't going to cut it."
"What do you want?"
"No," said Topper, "What do you want?"
When Edwin opened his eyes again he saw the little man standing next to him holding his appointment book. For the first time ever, they saw eye to eye.
Topper softened his voice and spoke gently, "Edwin, do you want to do any of the things written in this book?"
"But, I am—"
"AHHHHH!" Topper shrieked, sending Edwin into another paroxysm of pain. "That was a simple yes or no question and now you are just screwing with me."
"No," said Edwin, his faced clenched tightly as the pain from Topper's yell bounced around inside his tender skull.
"Then why are you doing these things?" Topper asked.
"Because—"
"Ya got no good reason, do ya?"
Edwin was ashamed that this once, Topper seemed to have thought things out farther than he had. How could this be possible?
"You got so busy doing the things that were put in front of you that you forgot about all the stuff you wanted to do. And it's bullshit. Ya didn't hang out your shingle to turn into some corporate drone. You don't play the game the way everybody else does—you're Edwin Windsor—you can make your own rules."
Topper was right. It was the kind of thing that should have made Edwin's headache exponentially worse, but it didn't. In fact, as soon as he realized what was truly bothering him, the pressure in his head disappeared.
"Now, I'm gonna take this book and I'm going to go throw it in that big lake that runs down the left side of the number three fairway. And after I'm done with that, I'm going to play golf. If you quit feeling sorry for yourself you could come with me. I figure we got time for 16 or so before we run out of daylight."
Edwin got up slowly, not fully trusting that his headache was gone. That afternoon they only managed to get in 14 holes of golf because Topper played so slowly. For once, Edwin didn't mind. And when he came back he changed everything.
It is all very well to say that the trick of management is to fire all the idiots. But what if you buy a company that is filled with idiots, what then? If you fire all of them, you don't have a company anymore. If you try to cover for everyone else's lack of competence, you can't get anything done. Edwin decided that he would start with the meetings.
The next day, he dictated a very brief memo that read, "Time is our most valuable resource. My time most of all. Anyone found to be wasting time will be subject to summary dismissal."
Because it was a memo in the age of electronic communications, many employees had seen fit to ignore it. Really, who sent memos on paper anymore? But in the first wandering, pointless meeting Edwin attended—when the first twinge of headache intruded upon his otherwise serene brain—Edwin stood and said, "You are all fired." Then he walked out.
Everyone had laughed, thinking that it was some kind of joke. What a card our new owner and CEO is. What a pip. What a pistol.
The next day, he had another meeting. It was also agenda-less, wandering and seemingly unconnected with any action that could cost or save the company money. Edwin once again stood, buttoned his coat and said, "You are all fired." This time someone had the temerity to laugh while he was still in the room.
Edwin did not attend a third meeting. He let a week and a half pass. When the next paychecks went out, everyone he had fired received an envelope in the mail. Instead of a check, there was an invoice for office rentals and administrative support services pro-rated from the date of termination.
Several employees came to plead with Edwin. They needed their jobs. They couldn't understand why they had been fired. Some of them had been with the company a very long time, and after all these years of service…?
Edwin listened patiently to each of them. And then he said, "You are welcome to keep coming in each day, but we must charge you rent. We are a business, not a charity. We have responsibilities to our shareholders."
One man, fat, outraged and red in the face had said, "But you are the majority stockholder!"
"Yes, and you have not lived up to your responsibilities. Good luck in your future endeavors."
In the end, Omdemnity Insurance still had wasteful meetings. But Edwin neither saw nor heard of them, so his problem was solved. And he was freed up to really get to work.
He began his search for a specific kind of employee. Something more than just replacements for the useless men he had fired. Edwin created for them a very special and rigorous training course. One out of every 10 candidates graduated. Nothing was graded on a curve. And after a year, Edwin had produced a cadre of the most ruthless and efficient businessmen the insurance industry (and perhaps the world) had ever seen.
He called them The Adjustors. In a normal insurance company, an adjustor was a person who adjusted the numbers to fit reality. Not so with Omdemnity Adjustors. These men adjusted reality to fit the numbers. After all, reality is messy. Reality is whimsically cruel and imprecise. Numbers could be pure in a way the real world could never be.
As magnificent as the Adjustors were, they were not enough. One could not win a war with Special Forces alone. So Edwin had written page after page of policy and procedure. After a year of work he had described the roles and responsibility of every last employee in Omdemnity Insurance. He had created an elegant, interlocking system of rewards and punishments, rights and responsibilities. His genius had created a system designed to be staffed by idiots. By the time he was done, he had poured his heart into this work—and his grief as well.
Though it was a poor replacement for her, when he thought of this system, he called it Agnes.
As Topper stomped up the front steps, he thought, Yeah, I'm definitely quitting now. Soaked to the skin, even his considerable fury wasn't enough to keep him warm. He was never putting up with this shit again. Unh-unh, no way. He was going to make an angry beeline to Edwin's office, sting him a few times with insults and fly away as free as a metaphor gone bad. Yeah, he thought, as his waddle lengthened into a damp swagger—that's how I roll—weird and loose baby. Weird and loose. Nothing’s gonna slow me down.
Except that.
On the steps of Omdemnity Building One, a small boy sat hugging his knees and crying. Topper had seen a lot of strange things in his time with Edwin Windsor. After dealing with men who could fly or thought themselves the reincarnation of Charlemagne—and one guy with terrible psoriasis who claimed the absolutely useless power to be able to talk to fish—he didn't think there was anything left that could surprise him. He was wrong.
"Hey, little fella, are you okay?"
With eyes filled with tears, the boy peered over the top of his knees at Topper. "Did your Daddy bring you here too?" he asked.
"What? No, no. I'm not a kid. I'm just short, powerfully built and irresistible to women of a certain persua… anyway, that's not important. Why ya crying? Why ya sittin’ out here? It's colder than a witch’s tit."
"They were mean to me."
"Okay, okay. That makes sense. 'They' were pretty crappy to me too, when I was your size. It's okay: you're gonna grow up big and tall and strong and then you can beat them up, see?"
"I don't want to beat anybody up," the boy said without looking up.
"But it will be EASY!" Topper said, "They'll be all old and wrinkly by then and you can push them and their walkers over and say, 'Hah. That's what ya get for picking on the little guy.'"
"Did they push you down in the snow?"
"Yeah kid, lotsa times. But I always get back up again."
Just then a scared man in the garb of an Adjustor came stumbling out of the building. It was Jerry. For every rule, there is an exception. For every set, there is an outlier. Such was Jerry. He was the one Adjustor who didn't fit. A good egg tryin
g as hard as he could to fit in a bad basket. In the past, Jerry had been a source of great amusement to Topper; just now, Topper couldn't remember what the joke was.
"Oh, thank God, is he okay?" said Jerry.
Topper was pretty sure Adjustors were forbidden, by policy, to believe in God, but he gave that a pass and said, "Aside from some hurt feelin's, yeah, I think he is. What happened?"
Jerry hugged his boy as if he was afraid someone would take him away. Which, given the kinds of things Omdemnity Insurance did, was a reasonable worry. "Oh, God, how am I going to get him home? I'm late for work as it is." He stroked Timmy's head frantically and Topper noticed that Jerry was shaking. Then Jerry's eyes snapped up to Topper. "Did you hurt him?"
"No. NO! I just found him sitting here. Come on, I'm a bad guy, but I'm not a fucking asshole." Topper quickly covered his mouth. "Sorry, I don't spend much time around kids. What are you doing bringing a kid here anyway?"
"It's National Bring Your Kid to Work Day."
"Jerry, we don't have a Bring Your Kid to Work Day."
"But I thought… Oh, jeeze, I'm so stupid."
Topper looked at father and son for a moment and then said, "Take him home, Jerry, Omdemnity's President of Vice commands it. This is no place for a kid. Ya gonna be okay, kid. Ya gotta good Dad—a little stupid about where he works, but he's gonna take care of you. Ya gonna grow up big and strong and nobody's gonna bother you again."
Little Timmy nodded and made a snuffling noise as he wiped away tears with the back of his wrist.
Topper looked up at Jerry and said, "He's gonna be okay, y'know. Take it from me, little guys are tougher than you think."
As Jerry carried his son off into the parking lot, Topper called after him, "Ya know, you're a real jerk for bringing your kid to a place like this!" But inside, he wished his Dad had cared enough to take him into work. Hell, he wished his Dad had cared even enough to stick around after he was born.
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