by Jason Letts
I sucked my teeth and nodded. It sounded horrifying. But I remained optimistic.
“Maybe now that we’ve got a lighter workload there are other people who’d be willing to work with you since they couldn’t before,” I said, trying to coax a little hopefulness out of him.
“Nobody is going to want to work with me now that there’s this big new player in the space. They’re undercutting me on price too,” he said. I frowned. Where was his resilience?
“But if they all knew what was going on they must know they learned everything from you. And if you look around here it looks to me like your bottom line just dropped significantly. Maybe you could lower your prices to match,” I said.
Keenan just shook his head in a groggy way.
“It’s over,” he said.
I stood up, beginning to get angry. I couldn’t believe what I was witnessing. Leaving him here to wallow seemed like the thing to do, but I had one more thing to say, and I wasn’t nice about it.
“Do you mean to tell me that Mr. Keenan Roche, CEO of Mouse Roar and darling of the business magazines, can’t pick up his phone, call around, and land a new client? Where’s your persuasiveness, your perseverance? Yeah, this was a crushing hit and things might not ever be where they were before, but the only one who can beat you is you if you decide you can’t bother to fight back!”
Keenan blinked and looked at me hard. He slowly put his hands on his knees and stood up, looking a lot more like the imposing, dashing figure I knew.
“Don’t talk about me that way,” he said.
“Then don’t deserve it.”
“I don’t.”
“Then let me ask you again. What are you going to do?”
Keenan looked around the empty floor again, but this time he had more of a sense of purpose.
“I’m going to fight back. I’ll get those other clients back. I’ll get more clients. This company will be bigger and better than it ever was before. I won’t forget the one advantage I have. I know people better than they do.”
I smiled to match the grin on his face. This is what I’d been waiting to see. Watching Keenan triumphing against adversity was going to be great.
“Let’s do it,” I said. “How can I help?”
Keenan put his finger to his chin and looked around.
“Can you reach out to everyone and tell them to come back in? If we all put our effort into marketing we’ll start collecting checks in no time,” he said, settling down at a nearby desk and turning on the computer.
A chill went down my spine at the prospect of having to call Martin to tell him to come in to work. I had to say something.
“I know this is the absolute worst time to tell you this, but the fact is you may be better off letting them go. The way those guys behaved when you weren’t around was appalling. It was only a matter of time until they caused you real problems,” I said.
Keenan looked up from the screen at me.
“Like what, they had snack food out on the desks or ducked out early or something?”
I sighed.
“There was some of that, but really what I’m talking about is that I faced a lot of harassment and hostility from them pretty much as soon as I first walked in on my first day. It was beyond unprofessional, like I told you before. The unwanted sexual advances were incessant, belligerent, and sometimes hostile. These guys just don’t have any ethical standards at all, no respect for women or other people really, and that makes them a liability to you. Martin included.”
Keenan squinted at me and got up. His skeptical expression hinted he was on the verge of laughter.
“No way. I know these guys. Some of them can be rough around the edges but they’d never treat anyone badly,” he said.
“I can prove it,” I said. When he nodded, I took out my phone.
He stared at it, puzzled, until I began to play the audio I had recorded. When he started to get the gist of what was happening in the first conversation I played, he smirked and held back his laughter. I could see the amusement of hearing a friend get shot down, but to Keenan’s credit by the end of that conversation and forever after there wasn’t a hint of humor in him. He sat down again and together we listened to conversations for over an hour. On some days pretty much the only times anyone spoke to me were to solicit sex.
It was weird to listen to myself endure this behavior over and over. I wondered if hearing them one after another gave a different impression than the reality, but I decided gaps of a few minutes instead of a few hours hardly amounted to much. Keenan was stewing, particularly over some of Martin’s comments. It looked like Keenan wanted to knock his teeth in.
“I’ve heard enough. They’re all gone,” he said suddenly, before shaking his head. “The ones who stood by and allowed this to go on without telling me are just as bad as the ones who were doing it. But we do need a graphic designer. What about Chelsea?”
I took a deep breath, trying to sort through my conflicting feelings about her in that amount of time. What I came up with was that if she were part of a different staff and hadn’t faced much of the same treatment I did, she might’ve been fine to work with and less in my business.
“Well, I don’t think she behaved nearly as poorly as everyone else,” I said. “It wouldn’t be bad to bring her back.”
Keenan nodded slowly.
“Call her up, have her come in immediately and get her to work preparing a revamp of our website for the branding change. You go out and get us the best programmer you can find. I’ll start making calls. I want us all to have a reason to come in here by tomorrow, and that means there’s work to do.”
He got up with a determined look on his face and stormed into his office, closing the door behind him. That left me alone on the office floor with a task I had no idea how to complete. Getting a hold of Chelsea and telling her to come back in was easy enough, but hiring a programmer—the best one—was much less straightforward. I started by tooling around on jobs websites but finally had to interrupt Keenan in order to get the basic details of what would go in a job listing. When he told me how much the programmers made, my jaw nearly hit the floor. Apparently writing with symbols and code was exponentially better than writing words. At least I’d be able to offer my applicants an amount of money that seemed to me like a fortune.
The trouble with the jobs websites was that it was going to take a long time to get a listing posted, sort through applicants, interview, and get anyone in the door. I needed someone who could come in tomorrow, which I fully realized would make finding a really great programmer even more of a stretch.
I went into Martin’s office, put an empty box from the kitchen beside it, and pushed everything off his desk into it. Then I sat in my new chair and looked up the number to the NYU computer science department. I managed to rustle up one of the professors, but he couldn’t give me any leads on anyone looking for work, whether they were current or former students. It didn’t bode well when he told me that he got calls from people offering jobs at least three times a week.
With my school proving not to be a viable option, I had to look elsewhere and fast. Another conversation with Keenan told me that Wesley was not a possibility because he was committed to his startup. I didn’t feel bad. Wesley didn’t fit into the dream culture I was rapidly imagining for our revamped operation. I wanted a workplace with real values that didn’t vanish when no one else was watching, warmth and cooperation, diversity, and lots of talent.
By lunchtime I was reduced to Googling “New York City programmers” to try to find where candidates might exist anywhere in the area. I had wondered if Keenan would want to take a break and get something to eat, but his door remained fixedly closed and his phone line in constant use. If he felt the drive to work straight through the end of the day, I could as well.
It wasn’t long after that when Chelsea finally made it in. She gave me an excuse about being in the middle of something else when I told her to come back, but she was warm enough about it a
nd I urged her to find a desk that wasn’t an attempt to hide in the corner.
“Things are going to be different now,” I said to her as she was about to go. “The stuff that went on here before isn’t going to happen anymore.”
She looked at me and smiled.
“Having the last laugh, are you? I see you’re Martin now,” she said, which wasn’t exactly cozy.
“I won’t be doing any laughing until this company is back on its feet,” I said.
Chelsea made a punching gesture, as if she were ready to get down to work and fight, and she headed away.
I got back to searching and soon landed on something that seemed promising, one of those small intensive coding schools that ran for two months and promised to make people fully fledged programmers when they graduated. When I called them up the woman who answered said they were days away from the next graduation. I saw my shot and got up to go take it, leaving my office and our building behind.
It required taking three different trains to get across town, and it was mid-afternoon by the time I reached the front doors of the TechUp school. A small pedestal in the middle of a short hall bore the name of the school. As best I could tell it only consisted of a couple of rooms. One opened, revealing a red-haired woman with freckles who might’ve been only a year or two older than me.
“Hi, I’m Lena Yowen. Thanks for coming by,” she said, greeting me warmly with a brief shake of the hand.
“Of course,” I said. “Like I mentioned on the phone, I’m here on behalf of Keenan Roche of Mouse Roar Inc. We are looking for a lead programmer to take charge of a new development portfolio that we’re building. I’m sure your students get a lot of interest from companies.”
I craned my neck to try to see where anything resembling a school actually was. Lena took my cue and led me to another door with a window in it.
“We do. The ones who are real go-getters sometimes even manage to line up jobs before they’ve had their first day of classes with us. Now that we’re approaching graduation, several of them have accepted offers already. And there’s Tomas finishing up a seminar. The students will have work time after this,” she said.
Tomas stood at the far side of a large room with about twenty-five computers lined up side by side before him. He was on the shorter side but appeared to at least have the mannerisms and rhythm of an excellent teacher.
“How would you describe the students who don’t have jobs yet? Any standouts I could talk to?”
Lena stuck her thumbnail between her front two teeth and glanced back and forth between the classroom and me. She had a nervous, deferential way about her.
“I suppose it depends on what you mean by lead programmer. If that’s just a sort of title and you’re looking for someone to do basic web work or applications, then yeah, there would be some reasonable candidates. But you have to remember that our students came in here not knowing anything. If what you’re after is someone completely fluent who can do anything, plus manage subordinates and know what they’re doing, that’s almost surely unrealistic.”
She seemed embarrassed while giving this frank evaluation, and it became clear she truly cared about her students and was hoping that I’d be able to help them with a job. I was worried I was going to have to dash that hope, as I did really want someone with sophisticated abilities. But considering I had to have someone by the very next day I wondered if I was going to have to take what I could get from them.
“I see. And how long have you been doing this? Maybe some of your previous graduates who’ve had more time to learn and get experience are still looking for some place to work,” I said.
Lena nodded her head vigorously.
“We’re starting our second year now and finishing up our third term. Time has really flown. It was actually my idea to start a school after meeting Tomas at a convention where we were both lamenting how the New York tech scene wasn’t coming along as quickly as we’d like. But we do have an informal list of former students looking for work. I think at least a couple are on it. I can put you in touch with them, if you like.”
I smiled at Lena as a thought occurred to me.
“I have no doubt that you and Tomas love what you’re doing, but maybe one of you would be interested in coming to help us out, since we are looking for someone with a broader range of expertise. I’m sure these students pay quite a bit for the privilege of your instruction, but I don’t doubt that we’ll pay more. You could hire a replacement and still get some earnings from your ownership of the school, giving you a double income. And then if you didn’t like it with us you could always come back after a few months,” I said, which was my horrible insinuation that it’d be good to think about fallback plans in case the company failed. But if Mouse Roar were going to fail, it would probably happen before the next term even started.
Lena scratched behind her ear, thinking hard.
“I hadn’t considered something like that. To be honest, Tomas is head and shoulders superior to me. I hate to admit it, but sometimes the students stump me or catch mistakes in my own work. I think he’ll be out in a minute and we can see what he thinks.”
After going through a few more slides projected on a whiteboard, Tomas turned off the projector. Lena signaled to him, and in another minute Tomas was sneaking out the door while his students got down to work.
“Sorry to bother you, but Sarah here was wondering if we’d be interested in jobs with her digital marketing firm. I didn’t want to say anything without consulting you about it,” she said, her eyebrows narrowed slightly in concern.
“Nice to meet’cha,” Tomas said, speaking very quickly. “To be blunt I think I’ve done the teaching thing long enough and wouldn’t hesitate to move on if the right opportunity was there.”
“Oh,” Lena said, showing surprise at this answer and looking at the floor, flushed.
“If you like we’ve got an empty room over here where we can sit down and speak,” he said, already leading me that way and gesturing for me to hurry up and follow him with his hand. Lena still appeared a little crestfallen, and I couldn’t help but feel sympathy for her.
“I’d be happy to tell you each individually about the position and let you know who I think the best candidate would be,” I said.
“Of course,” Tomas said, opening the door for me.
The room we entered was a break room with two minimalist black couches set on each side of a white table. One side of the room featured a sink and a refrigerator while the other had windows that looked out at a brick wall.
“And you’re with…” Tomas said, lounging comfortably. I gingerly took a seat and set my bag down in front of me.
“Mouse Roar Inc. and CEO Keenan Roche. He’s been written about in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes. We’re located farther downtown,” I said.
“Can’t say I’ve heard of either of them, but I’ve been wrapped up in this for a while and I was doing some work over in Europe before that,” he said.
“Sounds impressive,” I added. “You certainly seemed like a strong teacher too. What areas are you proficient in when it comes to computers?”
Tomas squinted at me and took a long breath.
“Computers? Can we be frank here and say that if I told you you wouldn’t understand much of what I meant? I will say that if what you’re doing is marketing then everything you could possibly need would be within my grasp. Do you want to go ahead and tell me what sorts of things you specialize in?”
While he hadn’t said it rudely, it wasn’t pleasant being told that I wouldn’t understand an answer to my question. Even if he was right, which he may have been, why not just give the same answer anyway in the same breath and move on?
As the interview continued, his condescension only grew. At one point he hinted at some curiosity over why I was the one conducting interviews for something I knew so little about. I thought it best not to get into how the entire staff had been laid off in a panic as the company teetered on shutting down. He began aski
ng me probing questions about what exactly he would be doing, which was uncomfortable because at the moment there wasn’t much work to be done.
“Thank you for speaking with me. If you could send Lena in I’d appreciate it,” I said.
Tomas simply nodded and exited. I had little doubt that he was excellent at what he did, and there was a good chance he would get along better with Keenan, who would be better suited to discussing his work, than he did with me.
Lena cracked open the door and peered through it. I had to wave to her and tell her it was OK for her to enter her own break room.
“What can you tell me about your work experience?” I asked, smiling. From her rigid posture I got the sense that anything resembling an interview produced a flummoxed state in her.
“Well, I graduated from Penn five years ago, and since then I’ve worked for Pliant, West to North, Quaint2X, the city of Trenton, New Jersey, and Plymouth Inc. Those were all positions related to web development. And then of course I’ve been doing this,” she said.
“Wow, that’s kind of a lot of jobs in four years,” I said, causing her to smile sheepishly.
“It was and the constant moving wasn’t easy, but it was challenging to find a place where I felt comfortable,” she said with a little nod that rang loud and clear to me. It was exactly the kind of answer I would’ve given to downplay yet broach some of the toxic atmospheres I’ve been in, Mouse Roar included.
“And what would you say is important to you in order to feel comfortable?”