by Martin Kihn
A few hours later, my boss called me into her sanctum, again.
Without the Nemesis this time, she waited. I didn’t bother to sit; she didn’t bother to ask me.
“Close the door,” she said. “This’s something I told [the Nemesis] earlier, It’s relevant to you. Things are kinda slow around here—”
“Not for long—”
“I talked to Gretchen, It’s official now we can only put up one promotion this round. There’s only one slot.”
“Okay.” I turned to go.
“Wait a second, you’re running off a lot today. We aren’t done.”
“Yes, we are,” I said. “There’s one promotion. It’s him and me. One man wins. You decide—”
“The Committee decides—”
“Whatever, the Committee decides between us two. What’d I miss?”
“Gretchen wants the recommendation in a couple weeks.”
“Ah,” I thought out loud. “So it’s how we do on Lucifer that decides—”
“Among oth—”
“It’s weird I suggested we go head to head, right?”
“I was gonna suggest it myself.”
I looked at her and, as usual, wasn’t sure what to say next. So I asked myself: What would an Asshole say now?
“No you weren’t.”
She looked like she’d never seen me before in her life.
So this is where I found myself: two weeks to an internal presentation with our agency EVP, after which she’d pick either my team or the Nemesis’s to head into the all-important client pitch meeting the following week. Him or me, up or down, life or purgatory.
I stole the good conference room in the corner, the one with all the windows that’s always booked up, and I had my boss’s assistant Noemi make up a big sign that read:
“RESERVED FOR D. RICHARD—24/7 TILL FURTHER NOTICE DO NOT ENTER (This means YOU!)”
D. Richard was our company’s chairman, and he hadn’t been seen on our floor in about twenty-five years. But no matter; his name had a kind of shamanic power to repel.
“I like the ‘This means YOU!’” I told Noemi, remembering too late I’d decided to be an Asshole till further notice.
“Thanks,” she smiled, “I think it adds some teeth.”
“Now put it up.”
I got my two analysts into the room and laid out the playbook for them.
“We’ve got two weeks to put this together,” I rapid-fired. “It’s ‘Marketing to Gen Z’—now, you guys are Gen Y. So don’t think of yourself as the demo you’re marketing to—”
“But why not?” asked Emily, who was obviously not here to make my life easy.
“How to put this?” I mused. “You’re too old. And too nerdy.”
“I’m not a nerd—”
“I am,” admitted Eleanor, smearing butter on a warm Pop-Tart. With her finger.
“What are you doing here? Can you stop it?” I asked.
“Sorry, sir,” she cooed. Then she napkined her butter finger. Slowly.
I would need to do something now.
“Look!” I said, smacking the tabletop with my palms. They both jumped. “This is serious. There’s no attitude about this and there’s no snacking in the conference rooms. Throw that away.”
“What—?”
With a controlled sweeping gesture I slid the paper napkin and the Pop-Tart off the surface of the conference table and into a wastebasket at it’s side. Eleanor’s mouth was literally open.
“I need you to listen,” I continued. “There’s two weeks. I have an idea about embedding into social networks. That other team is off with a platform approach that’s just—just stupid and wrong. What I need from you two are examples of how this networking makes itself felt in the market, right? So Eleanor, you look for other companies, products where it’s worked.”
“What’s worked?” she pouted.
“Embedding, a message into a community—like a network of recommendations. And Emily, you find out where those communities are—”
“You mean online?”
“Yes, online. But also in the world—”
I went on to describe what I thought our approach should be and what I wanted them to do, and after a while Emily came out with: “Oh—there’s a problem. It’s my boyfriend’s birthday tonight.”
“And?” I asked.
“I need to get out, like, at five.” She waited. “Hope that’s not a problem.”
I was enough of an Asshole now in my soul I didn’t even have to ponder my response.
“You can leave at five, alright,” I sneered. “On the fifteenth. For the next two weeks I need you both here round the clock. You can go home to shower and change but that’s it. The other guys are on our ass and they’re smarter than we are. They’ve got Jaime and Roger. They went to Harvard—”
“So what do I tell my boyfriend?” asked Emily.
She was making me angry, and I knew from my work with Hola it was easier to be an Asshole when you’re mad.
“Tell him if you want a fucking job tomorrow, his birthday’s in the waiting room.”
“Are you okay?”
“What? Yes—yes, I’m fine. Are you okay with working?” Then I added: “For a change?”
Both of their eyes bugged open, and they quickly shifted back in their seats. Eleanor actually looked at the door, like she wanted to escape.
I let the uncomfortable silence hang there a moment, then I left. As I walked out, I heard both of them exhale.
I was outlining the Lucifer presentation in PowerPoint when my phone rang. It was my Communist Uncle Francis again. He liked to call me at work just to confirm someone was stupid enough to employ me full-time.
His first words were always:
“Haven’t got rid of you yet, huh?”
And my response was always:
“Any day now. Ho ho.”
But on this day, as you know, I was a different nephew altogether. And he had selected the wrong day to call.
“Uncle Francis,” I began, white-knuckling the speakerphone in my hands, “how many times have I been fired from a job? In my life?”
“What’s that?”
“None. That’s how many times. Not once” I breathed in and breathed out, imagining my unsafe space with the portraits of my enemies on the red molten walls. “Now you’ve been fired—that’s true. But don’t take your insecurities out on me ’cause I used to be half a man. I’m getting tired of this shit with the jokes. So stop with the freakin’ innuendos—are you there?”
Bartholomew swung around in his chair and looked at me like, Who are you talking to?
I definitely needed to put a priority on getting my own office.
There was a whistling breeze sound on the phone as my uncle processed what I’d said.
But no. Actually—“What’s that?” he said, coming back on the line. “I dropped the phone. Did you say something?”
I told him I couldn’t talk right then, and I did not add, “because you annoy the shit out of me.”
Right then Gloria called, and I told her too that I couldn’t talk, I was busy.
“Meeting with little Emily?” she asked me. Sarcasm isn’t my wife’s usual style, so I had trouble recognizing it.
“No, as a matter of fact,” I said. “We’re meeting later on.”
“Of course you are.”
After I hung up, Bartholomew twirled around in his chair and said: “We’re having quite the family reunion today.”
“Mind your business.”
“Whoa—who changed your meds, man? You’re all dangerous.
“Just leave it.”
He turned and didn’t talk to me for the following forty-eight hours, which allowed me to get a lot of work done. Gloria evidently also received the message: she didn’t call me at work for a few days.
The Nemesis had staked out another conference room on our floor, opposite to mine. He had no lying sign on the door, as I had, but his two boys were camped inside. I saw t
hem through the door crack as they came and went to the bathroom, coffeemaker, copier, and so on. My team was discouraged from breaking.
A couple times I looped the floor, to gain intelligence, but I didn’t see the Nemesis anywhere. Thought maybe he’d left the building for his loft. But on my second loop I saw my boss coming out of her office trailing the Nemesis, and both of their heads were—were they really?—bowed in prayer!
Or so I imagined. It was quite late. I could have been wrong.
“You guys praying?” I said, as I passed.
“To Satan,” said the Nemesis.
Then I fantasized about calling Facilities and asking them to put up a regulation-size boxing ring in the large conference room on the nineteenth floor for my face-off with the Nemesis.
Emily and Eleanor didn’t light up warmly at our eight a.m. meetings, but they were there, prepared, with their high helping of research as requested. We went over the PowerPoint draft of the presentation, and I spent the afternoon reworking it. Then we met again and chunked out the missing pieces.
When I say chunked I mean that literally: I spent a lot of time in the bathroom, due to my diet. But I’ll spare you the details—you’ll find out for yourself, when you try it.
Our Lucifer argument was that we could use behavioral algorithms to identify influential in the Gen Z demographic and then recruit these influentials—defined as kids with a certain critical mass of social contacts and friends—to shill our products. We’d give them free stuff, and we’d pay them some nominal “consulting fee.”
Of course there was the tricky question: What if you found the influential kids, got the product into their hands, got them to agree to recommend it to their network if they liked it and … they didn’t like it? Were they then supposed to just lie? Current wisdom was they should be paid no matter what they said, which was almost impossible to monitor anyway. So more than one company had been forced into the counterintuitive position of paying kids to tell their friends not to buy their product because it, like, sucked.
Here was my idea: We’d pay them to “guarantee referral.”
That is, if they liked the product, they’d tell their friends they liked it.
If they didn’t like it—well, they’d tell their friends they liked it.
They’d lie. For money.
“Isn’t there an ethical thing here?” asked Eleanor in her young-person’s naïve way.
“Like how?” I asked her.
“Like if I had a friend I found out she was lying to me to get paid for it—I don’t know, I wouldn’t think that was so great, you know?”
“She agreed to do it,” I pointed out.
“That makes it worse. It’s like we’re attracting assholes.”
“And?”
“Well,” she said, puzzling, “why do we want amoral customers?”
“What’re you, born again? They’re not amoral—”
“They have no integrity.”
“What do we do here all the time? At this firm? We lie to sell products. The other name for that is advertising.”
“Yeah, but people expect us to do it. They don’t believe a word we say. It’s different with your friends—”
The Nemesis picked this moment to peek in—his head appeared disembodied for a second, horizontal, and was followed by his body, in black jeans and a black turtleneck that emphasized his scary muscle fiber. “Hiya guys,” he grinned, “sounds intense in here.”
“What’s up?!” I snapped.
“Just sayin’ ‘hi.’ So: ‘Hi!’”
“Hi,” said my grumpy girls, and he looked at them and asked: “You’re coming to my party, right? Friday night?”
This was the first I’d heard of any party, but the girls seemed to know what he was talking about.
“I dunno,” said Eleanor.
“Can we bring someone?” asked Emily.
The Nemesis put his arm around my shoulders like a coach, and I wanted to hurl. “You’re gonna let ’em out Friday night, right, boss?”
“I don’t know—”
“Oh, come on, you know you’ve got this thing locked up. I’m ready to toss in the towel.”
“Why don’t you?”
He winked at me. “See you Friday. Oh—and I was talking to Sherry, she might be able to make it. So you should poke your head in.”
After he left our team room I went after him, cornering him against a cabinet in the hall. He wasn’t smiling anymore.
“You talked to Sherry?” She was the client for Lucifer, the one the boss had explicitly told us not to reach out to before the pitch because she herself had requested it. I’d never met her.
“Sure,” said the Nemesis. “We talk all the time.”
“You called her?”
“What did I just say? She’s cool with—”
“But she told us not to—”
He shook his head, slowly and sadly. “Marty, Marty, still playing by the rules, huh? You can’t take these things literally. She’s a very cool lady. You’d like her. Want some advice?”
“No.”
“I’m worried about Emily and Eleanor—they look tired. Don’t work ’em so hard.”
“Who asked you?”
His head was still now, and his eyes unwavering. “It doesn’t matter what you do,” he whispered, “you’re gonna lose. Pardon my Uzbeki.”
I was totally perplexed. Not by the Nemesis’s weirdness—I didn’t trust that at all. He was a weasel who’d mind-fuck a man till the condom fell off. No—the disturbing nugget was of course that he’d gone ahead and called the client. Against orders. What was I to do?
“Bartholomew,” I said to my office mate, “I’ve got a problem.”
“Can’t help you.”
It occurred to me that if it hadn’t been for the incidents with the lighting and the speakerphone, he might have been willing to toss me a bone. But there was no bone.
My issue was that the client was herself going to pick a winner, and since the Nemesis had some kind of dialogue going with her he would have a much better idea of what she was looking for.
So I called the main client switchboard and asked for Sherry’s office.
She answered on the first ring, and I introduced myself.
“Oh,” she said, “you aren’t working on the proposal, are you?”
“Yes, I am.”
“I can’t really talk about that. But how can I help you?”
“I understand you’ve been talking to one of my colleagues here.”
Silence.
“Um,” I said, “I’m wondering if you had any more information on what you’re looking for.”
“Who is this?” she asked, and I told her my name again. “Did you get the brief—the proposal request?”
“Yes,” I said. “But is there more? Apparently you told my coworker something about the approach—”
“It’s in the brief.”
“But—”
“Sorry, that’s the other line. I’ll see you.”
And she hung up.
A few hours later, I went to the regular department meeting in the conference room on the 24th floor. The forty-odd members of our group sat around a huge oval table. My boss was halfway down, the Nemesis sat at the top, some of the new kids hung on counter space around the room’s edge; I chose a seat against the wall near the door so I could leave if things got dull, or if my diet started talking back to me.
In my mind, my acting coach Al said: Use this opportunity to assert yourself. Send a message about the New You.
The agenda was mostly administrivia about an upcoming, intra-office move we were making, new hires and exits, a little on financial results and key client updates.
Imaginary Al kept screaming in my ear: Look at the Nemesis. He’s got the power seat, right at the end. See, even if it’s an oval table there’s a power seat. Look how his shoulders are forward like he’s about to tackle the speaker. See his comment right there didn’t make any sense, he just said that to show
he’s here. Interrupt now, Marty. Do it!
“That design sucks,” I blurted, interrupting my boss walking us through a floorplan of the space we were moving to.
All eyes immediately turned to me—and I realized, with horror, that I had absolutely nothing to say. I’d committed myself now, of course. But of the world of possible things to get all Alpha about, I should probably not have chosen architecture. I have no visual sense at all. My idea of a well-designed room is one with a big dog in it.
“I’m sorry?” asked my boss. “Marty—you had a comment?”
I persisted: “All the offices are in the middle—and, and the cubes are around the sides. That means the VPs don’t get any light.”
“We talked about this—”
“It doesn’t seem like you should get promoted away from a window.”
“They’re already built—”
“I’m just saying,” I said, not sure what I was just saying, “that—you know. It’s dark.”
“You get light, Marty,” she said, turning back to her floorplan walk-through.
“Any comments?” she said at the end. “Marty? Still too dark?”
People tittered, and invisible Al said: What do you care? Someday you can fire them all, just to watch them cry.
At that moment I suddenly understood a study I’d read recently. It said assertive behavior was more common in one-on-one situations than in larger groups and used more often against friends than enemies. The hypothesis was that groups tend to “water down” the threat, spread it over more victims, so that any given member of the group feels less personally at risk. Messing with a big group just feels silly.
During announcements the Nemesis said: “Yo, I wanted to remind you about my party Friday night. You’re all invited, bring anyone you want, and B-Y-O if you’re planning on getting yo’self hammered. Ha ha.”
“What’s the occasion?” someone asked.
“Nothing, just wanted to thank you all for great work.”
“Are you going somewhere?” asked the boss, and people laughed, but not the boss herself.
Finally there was a call for volunteers to host the Kids’ Room for Bring Your Kids to Work Day next week, and the Nemesis actually raised his hand. I smelled a rat.