House of Lies

by Martin Kihn

  The key word here is seems…

  Start with $9,750 per month. Now the subtraction begins. Subtract: $2,340 in federal tax (including imputed tax on the second-year tuition reimbursement you foolishly deferred), $680 social security/FICA, $160 Federal Medicare, $598 state and city tax, $165 medical and $975 401(K) deductions, and others… leaving you with $4,800 per month, or about $57,600 annually.

  In other words, entirely legally, somebody is taking 57 percent of your paycheck every month. Poor you.

  You wish the bewailing could stop—but, but no…

  The dreaded student loans; there they sit, like a tithe on your impulses. They will sit there forever, or at least ten more years, nibbling at your will to live. You took out the bare minimum, persisting on savings plus $15,000–$20,000 each year, neglecting your wife’s diet and your own addiction to ballet. But you weren’t a scholarship baby; you were too freaky and showbiz to get institutional funding. So you resorted to loans heaped upon loans.

  You pay them off in two groups—the Sallie Mae–herded federal loans, and a hodgepodge of smaller loans, including two from Columbia University itself, that are managed by somebody else. Each month your bank account is debited by both loan managers and you are denied the enjoyment of these funds. The Sallie Mae debit is for $285, and the other one is for $210—together, they amount to just under $500 monthly, year after year, or over 10 percent of your current net pay.

  Grand total, net, after student loans: $4,300 per month.

  So it would have been more honest to say to your brother, in response to his question about your salary: “I make fifty-two thousand, whether I need it or not.”

  This in a city where the average one-bedroom apartment rents for about $30,000 per year.

  As the Good Partner likes to say, “That’s an awful long way to go for a very short drink.”

  Final Accounting—The greatest math of all

  As an ultimate note, it seems fitting to ask: Who pays for all this? Consultants—top-tier and otherwise—exist. Ergo, clients must exist. Despite abounding skepticism, a recession or two, and sky-high fees, people are still willing to part with real shareholder value for the privilege of securing your help. Who?

  The answer contains a kind of existential epiphany, but before we get there let’s list, in order, the industries that are the major consumers of strategy consulting services:

  Information and communications (including Telecom)

  Financial services

  Health care

  Public sector (including the U.S. government)

  Energy & utilities

  Together, these groups account for most of the $22 billion spent on strategy consulting in 2001.47 A casual observer might conclude that these five industries hired so many consultants because (a) they’re more complicated than other industries; and (b) they need more help. Both conclusions are wrong. No industry is inherently more complicated than any other. Dig deeply enough into salmon farming and you uncover a mountain of detail on spawning habits and water temps and trends at least equal in complexity to the memory chip trade. And it turns out these five industries are not more helpless—in fact, quite the opposite.

  Industries that hire consultants are the ones who can afford them—the ones with ample free cash flows to match the ample fees. Consultant-buying companies are the ones that are doing well, making money, building shareholder value, stuffing the piggy bank. Is this because they hire consultants? Probably not—it would be difficult to imagine a pharmaceutical or medical services company so poorly run in the rigged-up U.S. market that it didn’t choke on its own spigot of cash. The same goes for telecommunications (until recently). And the U.S. government, whatever it says, is a money machine.

  No—the sad fact is, most companies who hire consultants (a) would do fine without them, and (b) have too much green in their sacks. There is a name for a very expensive, dubiously useful item purchased by people of superior means.

  That name is: Luxury.

  Part III

  In the Client’s Own Godforsaken Town

  Part III describes in fervid detail the glamorous daily life of the top-tier management consultant:

  1. Things to do in Cleveland when you’re dead

  2. Proper etiquette at dreaded team events, including seemingly endless dinners

  3. How to lose your (a) personality, and (b) looks—yet still be more attractive than your client

  4. Appropriate ways to handle a client who hates you

  5. Paying your own salary by working for the government

  Welcome to the Working Weekend

  Good morning!

  It is Monday and you have a big week ahead of you. This week is enormous. Its shape is unknown but its size is too clear. A week on the road; a week in consulting, engaged, on the map. You are barely awake, yet your heart is atwitter with shame. The first thing is the bomb. It goes off in a pile of white powder. What time is it, anyway? Does anybody here know what time it is? And the echo…

  4:30 a.m.

  Snooze.

  … A sound within silence; black and red, a team of surgeons and nurse practitioners holding bowls of ripe fruit. Is there to be a celebration? Maria Kowroski the great ballerina appears arbitrarily, carving careful patterns into the operating theater, her patterns resurrecting garish lamps and…

  4:39 a.m.

  Snooze.

  It is not clear when you awake these Monday mornings, but the earliness is so extreme it looks like death. You micturate, rend water on your face. The mirror is a mistake; each day your body retreats from some ideal. You take a bath, which is also dangerous. It’s never entirely clear that your wife is asleep. She is halfway there, always halfway there. It used to be a secret set of events, these Monday mornings—padding to the sock drawer, hoping for a blindfolded color match, and out the door without a kiss. But then she said one day, “What you’re trying to avoid has happened—I’m already awake. So kiss me good-bye.”

  The bath is dangerous because it is so wide and deep…

  4:52 a.m.

  What you are trying to avoid has already happened.

  You talk to people you work with about travel; there is little you have in common besides a certain rootlessness, and so there is this travel chat. It seems they have a system, as consultants do, and are in possession of two entirely separate suites of things. There are those ensembles—the clothes, the shoes, the toiletries and books and electronic equipment—that append their lives. Then there is the separate set of stuff—clothes, shoes, toiletries, stamps, and protein bars—they set aside for rituals like this…

  Fuck.

  5:01 a.m.

  The phone rings. A tear falls. There is a country doggerel rhythm to this winter in Long Island City, Queens, ten minutes from Laguardia Airport.

  “Hello,” you say.

  “Is this Marty?”

  “Yum.”

  “This is Allegro Car calling. Your car number five-oh-one is outside now.”

  “Smmmm.”

  As you say, your colleagues pack twice to live once. They have their travel bag on call, like diplomats and counterrevolutionaries. Their stated purpose is to organize their trip logistics, cut down on worry time. You know the real reason for compartments, though. They need to separate themselves from themes of loss.

  You kiss your wife good-bye. She has never been awake.

  The thing you are trying to avoid has already happened.

  The cars you ride have skidded down the decimation—the rest of the economy may be in recession, but consulting deserves a better word—have skidded down, so you find yourself inhabiting a Lincoln Continental with a slightly acrid smell. Six months ago it was Boston Car & Limo, a high-end service owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway; its gorgeous black cars never saw more than forty thousand miles before being resold; crisp interiors with GPS guidance and same-day copies of the Wall Street Journal in the seat-back pocket, readable with discreet halogen pen lights depending from the sound
proof ceiling pads. Riding in a Boston Limo was an excursion into playerhood that is most definitely over. Allegro is your top-tier firm’s new “ride of choice,” and its idea of service is a year-old copy of National Geographic on the slush mat at your feet.

  You look through the window at Queens in the winter.

  “What way are we going?” you ask the driver, who appears to have advanced bronchitis.

  “Airport.” He coughs.

  “LaGuardia?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How’s traffic?”

  “How should I know?”

  A good point, of course. You decide to stop talking to the driver.

  As you say, your colleagues live two lives and pack as such. This, you cannot do. Your life clothes are your work clothes; your living luggage, your consulting tool kit. You have one bag, which you purchased at Wal-Mart in Luddington, Michigan, for $19.95 one time when you were visiting your dad. This lack of compartmentalizeability will someday be your undoing, you know this too.

  Suspiciously long for a ten-minute trip, the voyage to the airport ends.

  “You have a voucher?” asks the driver.

  “What?”

  “A voucher? For the ride?”

  “I never have a voucher.”

  “This time you have to.”

  “The travel people have the charge number. They charge it to the number. I don’t need a voucher.”

  “Yes you do.”

  “Can you give me one?”

  “If I give you one, then you don’t have to have one, right?”

  This driver—it’s like he’s been reading Jean-Paul Sartre. If you weren’t so sad you’d probe him on this thought.

  “How much?”

  “For what?” he asks, sucking down a wad of snot.

  You have been obsessed with luggage. Particularly, as a cause of pain. Luggage is not about transporting items but about transporting luggage. You think this often—like now, as you stand in line at LaGuardia’s Delta terminal in the long line for the “Express Kiosk” for a flight on Northwest Airlines. It would be difficult to design a less wieldy object than the lumpish black steel cubes people wheel through airports worldwide and cram despairingly into overhead compartments. These businessmen and -women on the 6:10 to Chicago—they’re the robot elite. Some carry tote bags with their consulting firms’ names gladly blazoned: KPMG (a relic now), IBM CONSULTING, PRICEWATERHOUSECOOPERS (also a relic). These are the IT consultants, the implementers. They’re something less than you top-tier management consultants, of course; they actually know how to do something.

  So they wheel their five-ton boxes around for a three-night stay. The boxes are too heavy. They are shaped all wrong. And they look identical, causing problems at bag check.48 One of your many escape scenarios—all consultants have these, though they are never mentioned—one of your more fanciful, is to quit and start a luggage firm. You are convinced there is an unmet need, as the marketers would say, for a lightweight, soft garment bag–style piece of luggage that can accommodate a laptop and papers and gym shoes. You have thought about this a lot, and even made some preliminary sketches in the air. (See below.)

  Source: James Meddick, Ltd.

  Note the ingenious use of helium in the structural elements, allowing for almost effortless carriage.49 Conventional luggage is not only too heavy but it actively damages clothing by forcing human-sized garments into a rodent-sized box. Drapage in a garment bag is the solution, reducing wrinkling. In addition, traditional luggage does not accommodate two essentials of the road warrior’s entourage: her company-issue IBM ThinkPad T23 laptop computer and her running shoes. She will never use the latter, but they are psychologically necessary. Your design says: Problem solved.

  Until you gain the nerve to strike out on your own and really live this luggage dream, it is a point of pride with you to travel with only a single bag. No computer case, satchel, backpack, or parcel. Nothing but your garment bag, cleverly packed to contain all consulting trip essentials. Each week, you try to make the bag weigh less. You put it on your bathroom scale and trim the ounces off. Last week you discovered you could get by with only two pairs of fresh underwear, saving almost an ounce. It’s as though you want the combined total of you and your bag to stay constant, while you gain weight.

  The thing you are avoiding is happening now.

  The Northwest kiosk asks you if your bag has ever been out of your possession, and if anybody you don’t know has asked you to transport something for her. You know this: If anybody you don’t know asks you to carry any luggage, you will say no. In fact, if anybody you do know asks you to carry any luggage, you will say no. It is simply too heavy.

  So you and your lightweight luggage endure the ritual humiliation of a strip search and pat down with M-16s at the security checkpoint, and you’re heading for your plane.

  You run into someone you know from the firm, heading someplace else. You always run into people you know at LaGuardia at 6:00 a.m. A bomb now would eliminate half the consultants based in New York.

  “Hey, Jon,” you say.

  “Whauopsouauoa?”

  He looks upset, very upset; Jon is not a morning person.

  You, however, are.

  “You know what I was thinking?” you chirp as the two of you head for the Coffee Beanery concession next to the McDonald’s franchise.

  “Houwsinosea?”

  “Yeah—I was thinking, you know those military guys by the pat-down area there? Those guys with the machine guns? It’s kind of ironic that the entire purpose of them wearing army camouflage is so they do stand out, right? It’s like the opposite of what they were designed for.”

  Jon says, “Hwatpoinseauan?”

  “I don’t know,” you say as you pick up your first enormous flavored coffee today. “I don’t know what my point is, exactly.”

  Jon tries to smile—he really does. Then he’s gone, to Baltimore, ironically enough, to consult for the U.S. Department of Defense.

  Flights are all alike and differ only in the width of their delays.

  You land in Chicago and the transformation is complete. It starts with musings on the state of luggage in airspace, continues through encounters with those transients that walk across your work, and ends as the wheels of your Boeing 737 kiss the concrete cancers of Illinois. Your wife is still asleep, and that is now her life, like a chicken in a plastic bubble at your back. You are a consultant.

  My watch reads 9:14 a.m.

  Debarking from an aircraft is an exercise in mind control. Many of the flights you take are on smaller aircraft, like the Embraer 170, which has three tiny seats per row split by a comical aisle. The great vexation, however, is the small plane’s business-friendly allowance of “gate checked” bags—that is, bags that are stowed below and await your hurried businesswoman self directly outside the aircraft door upon deplaning. This service is indeed a luxury, until the plane decides to land. The platform approaches and docks with the plane’s door. The door opens. And then—you wait.

  You wait.

  These “gate checked” bags, of course, require removal from the cargo hold before any passenger is allowed to depart the plane—otherwise, how could these bags be waiting planeside when you leave, as promised?

  Evolution has improved the landing process to the point where the long (optional) wait in the baggage claim area for an unlucky few has become a long, mandatory wait within sight of the gate for an entire planeload of people.

  This is a good time to practice your Zen circular breathing. Four counts in, hold four; four counts out. No air for four.

  No air.

  Four.

  There was a time when trips were not routine. You went home from college on a plane and the process seemed elaborate and queer. It was something you prepared for, like a prom. Since journeys have become a rule, you make the effort to decrease your preparations—indeed, all mental and physical energies expended—to just above absolute zero. Your motions are minimalist; your though
ts somehow fanciful, not serious. Helium luggage? In any other context this might seem silly…

  It is not for the first time you wish you were a poet.

  You prefer Hertz to Avis for no particular reason. Consultants, like most frequent travelers, are utter loyalists. Contrary to popular belief, there is no reward for this loyalty outside the realm of dreams.50 However, there you have it: Hertz. You get on the Hertz bus, crowd in amid the pack of well-heeled refugees. All of them look older than their years, it seems. Including you.

  The driver stands in the front of the bus and shouts back, “Is anyone a Gold member?”

  “Yes,” answers the bus.

  “Yes,” you say.

  It seems that every single person on the bus is a Hertz Gold Club member. It’s hard to feel special as a Gold Clubber anymore. In fact, the only way to be truly unique in the eyes of Hertz is not to be a member of the Gold Club.

  The bus guy starts up front. “Name?”

  “Goldman. G-O-L-D-M-A-N.”

  The Hertz guy, who is sloppy and a little loud, pecks the letters one by one into his device. This takes a minute. Then he takes a step sideways. “Name?”

  “Hirschorn.”

  “Harts-what?”

  “Hirschorn.”

  “With an L?”

  “H-I-R-S-C-H-”

  “Whoa—hold up. It’s W—”

  “H…!”

  One time, after fifteen minutes of such didgeridoo, you asked another Hertz guy why he didn’t just drive you all to the rental place and let you get into your cars. “Well,” he said, “we’re just trying to save some time.”

  “How so?”