Botched-Botox man raises his hand to stop the blankpage-Botox man ROFLing. “Money? That all you want, Dylan? We’ve tried to ask you nicely, but if you’d rather just have money then, sure, why the hell not. How about £500,000 for the whole poxy enterprise? I can have it for you in cash in an hour.”
Doesn’t take me long to do the sums. £500K = nearly thirty times my mum’s full-time salary back when she was well enough to work full-time. But as every self-stroking keynote speaker will tell you, you don’t never, ever accept the opening offer. “Don’t insult me,” I tell them.
“Oh please, we should be offering you £500, not £500,000,” says the blankpage-Botox man. “Would you like us to remind you what your revenues are?”
“Fuck my revenues – what century are you from?” I tell them that, at this stage in my start-up’s development phase, they’re s’posed to consider my projected future cash flows based on my estimated critical mass. “Frankly, fellas, I’d have expected better due diligence from a potential suitor than all your bully-boy corporate scare tactics.” Next, I find myself giving them some idiot sales pitch I got nailed for all the fucktard funding competitions on the student entrepreneurial society circuit. Start with the projected size of the digitising market given how much data and stuff still only exists on paper – in libraries, filing cabinets, museums, notebooks. All of it still waiting to be scanned or typed or just generally uploaded. I tell them that even the largest search engines still know only a cut of everything publicly printed to know – though, again in the interests of SEC-style full disclosure, I fess up that the number of as-yet-undigitised books and documents is actually getting smaller and smaller every minute. Then I close out by dropping my big business idea – cos, after all, every budding tech tycoon needs their very own Big Idea. Some big, hairy bollocks about the “sharing economy” and shifting social norms around privacy or whatever just to hype up their own corporate growth projections. Here’s the precise PowerPoint script: “The definitive version of something is now the digital version, not the paper version. Whereas, before, the paper copy was seen as permanent and the electronic versions were just fly-by formats – like the analogue waves carrying old-school broadcast signals.” (Sometimes, depending on the audience, I’ll even go full poshboy and drop in some word like “ephemeral”.)
The botched-Botox man seems to sigh through his eyes – like a man already burnt by life and earlier tech-market bubbles. “You really want to play it like this, don’t you, Dylan? Fine, but you’re not in a pitch meeting now, so how about we stop bullshitting. We may not be privy to your ‘projected future critical mass’, but we know about your current clients – all piddling three of them. We know about the dissertations you’re digitising for your university’s soon-to-be-shut-down Faculty of Irrelevant Studies. We know about the little import–export company that’s hired you to type twenty years of invoices into a basic database – and the only reason they hired you instead of a proper outfit is because their whole company’s just a front for selling fake vitamins. Not even fake Viagra, mind, fake vitamins. And then let’s not forget the dying newspaper that’s got you manually correcting all the scanning mistakes in an online archive of back issues that they’re ten years too late to compile in the first place. We know that your corporate bank account is actually the joint marital account your mother set up when you were ten so that you could sign cheques on her behalf. And we know that your debt–equity ratio is still modelled on the same high-street remortgaging terms you found online when you were twelve. Now, granted, that’s not much of a childhood, Dylan, but neither is it an MBA.”
The botched-Botox man zips up his double-breasted biker jacket and coughs like he’s closing up his lungs.
“Wait up,” I go. “How can you—”
“How can you get a higher pension income?” the younger-looking old man cuts me off. “How can you play the lottery while abroad? How can you open a link in a new window? How can you mend a broken heart?”
“We do realise what you’ve been doing here, Dylan. Acting dumb, trying to distract us with information about your projected future cash flows. We’re proposing that you wind up your start-up and instead of agreeing to do so, you puke out your company prospectus. Which means I was right the first time: someone warned you we’d be speaking to you, didn’t they? That’s why you’re so well-prepped.”
And, just like that, they close out our business meeting. Before I can issue some cleverly worded denial.
@Dylan: Just bossed a business meet with some guys who wanna buy my start-up. Could donate proceeds to charity in memory of my late mum. Told em I’m holding out for a Nasdaq listing. #NotForSale #RIPMum
@Dhilan: Checking in on Mum again. Need to step up my monitoring/surveillance/psychic connection. The way she knows how to push my buttons & dig out my most embarrassful info. As if our privacy infringencies = public displays of affection. #YoungCarers
@Dillon: Turns out the student film society is holding a marathon screening of all the ‘Alien’ films – the ones where the alien foetuses have to infect/rot/disintegrate/liquidate whoever’s giving birth to them in order to be born. #BirthPangs
9
DESKPHONE’S GOT SOME caller-display screen but it only does its thing if they dial you direct. If they come through the switchboard, they basically wearing a balaclava beneath a burqa. Meaning I can’t just phone that woman back. I just sit at the exact same workstation as I done earlier. Lay my fones on the desk, just me and my fones. And together we wait. And I’ll bail on Ramona. And I’ll munch dinner in the staff canteen like some lonely dickless loser. And I’ll work or I’ll try or I’ll pretend to work.
Cos, fuck it, this is how it is – this is what I do. While the others are flexing their biceps and their books.
This is what I do.
Or farting around playing rugby.
This is what I do.
Except, tonight, technically ain’t even lying when I text Mama to say I’m sorry but I’m working late. And ain’t lying when I text Ramona to say I’m sorry but I’m working late. Instead of running from one to the other. Downing duplicate dinners or lunches, duplicate birthday cakes. Checking the timestamp printed on the Starbucks receipt so she don’t clock me checking my watch. Heading eastbound instead of westbound to corroborate my story about broken down Tubes. Switching my fone to airplane mode to make it sound like I’m still underground. And tonight I’ll stay in the office till I get to the bottom of all this fuckery. And then tomorrow I can go back to lying.
She might’ve just been telesales.
Cold-calling to sell compensation for mis-selling something.
Might’ve had diddly-fuck to do with those two aged-out Botox men.
Try replaying the woman’s voice in my head. Can’t hardly even remember it, though – was too busy being multimedia-bollocked by my aunties and aunties and uncles. All I know for definite is that the two old men were proper certain someone had tipped me off about them. Just cos I managed to front with them as if I’d been properly prepped or someshit. Spitting lines straight outta some student start-up forum and my Advanced Data Analytics module. Dropping all them obviousness bombs about online privacy, personal-data mining, ad-targeting, digital surveillance. Was just stock-standard basicness, though. They call it “data mining” instead of snooping to sound less creepy but, fact is, all the easy-to-reach data lying close to the surface has already been extracted and crunched. Digital businesses can’t just scrape it out no more, they gotta dig deeper and deeper into all your shit just to keep their profits on the upward. Mostly they do this by keeping you logged on for longer and by monitoring your actual behaviour – your lingering and hovering and hesitating. Scoping out your personality by measuring shit like how long you typically take to click. Whether you’re easily addictable. Whether you’re scared of whatever you’re searching for. The algorithms learning more from the way you behave than from the data you intentionally disclose. We’re talking known and unknown info. Sharing shi
t you don’t even know about yourself. I look once again at the dead plastic deskphone and realise how doubtful it is the woman will call back.
Big tech corporations got other tools for digging deeper. Analysing your friends’ foto uploads. Selling you some voice-activated digital assistant to stick inside your home. Even used to eavesread your emails to help tailorise your ads. The algorithms constantly reconfiguring themselves by learning from their own success rates. Success = whether you stay logged on and under watch. I reach for a pack of antibac wipes and start cleaning my fones. She ain’t gonna call me back.
Main reason I was so well prepped on this shit ain’t just cos of my student start-up forums – it’s cos sometimes I reckon maybe I’m glad all my shit’s being monitored. Like as if I wanna be measured and evaluationed – under the scope of some great big watchful dataflow up in the clouds. Just to know that someone or something is keeping the score. Clocking that my bad clicks are outgunned by my good clicks. That I gave money to a beggar in the street. That I’m sorry – that I’m so, so sleepstipated and sorry. And once I get going with this thinking, I feel like some official suspect of something even darker and wronger and dirtier. Start getting properly suspicious of myself, even. And then I wanna fall under even more surveillance. Maybe she’ll call me back if I walk away from the phone?
What goes down next happens when I leave my post to trigger the motion-sensor ceiling lights. Check me striding up and down like some Jedi electrician. Even though I’m the only gimp holed up on this floor, the open-plan office feels smaller. Surely it should be the opposite? Ditto the late-night lecture theatres. Ditto every unlocked classroom in my secondary school. Down on this deck, it’s usually just data-enterers, the IT helpdesk and the Website Functionality Enablers. All the ad people, journalists and Other Assorted Media Professionals sit on the floors above us – bagging not just the best views but also better kitchenettes and vending machines. So ain’t no reason for someone who ain’t in this department to be using our food facilities.
The woman is squeezing some kinda melting plastic pasta thing into a plastic bowl. Green pesto that matches her dress. Beside her, the rows of microwave ovens lined up like gym lockers – each oven reflecting her face at a slightly different angle. I hit up the coin-op for a can of Red Bull.
“Burning the midnight caffeine, are we?” Her voice tells me loud and clear that she ain’t the woman who’d phoned me earlier. There’s way too much subwoof on it – like an old woman moaning for pain relief. Though she can’t be more than forty-five, tops. “Still, I suppose it’s high time the IT helpdesk had a late shift.”
I tell her I don’t work in tech support. That I’m a consultant. A contractor. A freelance data-enterer. Okay, a typist.
She sniffs her plastic pasta thing like she’s taking an extra-long toke. “What rot that the staff canteen’s shut. I loathe these vending-machine dinners.”
I start asking one of her various microwave oven reflections if she eats dinner in the office often, but then stop in case it sounds like I’m on some kinda cougar-type shit.
“Still, nice to meet you, young man. I suppose that’s one good thing about dining à la vending machine. After all, it isn’t as if I have someone at home to eat with. All by my lonesome self.”
Trust me to find the only posh person in the building who doesn’t have that whole stiff-upper-lip thing going on.
Then she tells me that I’m missing something. Her exact words are, “Aren’t we missing something,” but it’s obvious she’s doing that thing where the word “we” just refers to you.
“I am?”
Starts pointing to the left of her chest. Tapping it like it’s some touchscreen.
“Oh,” I give it. “Yeh, sorry – I keep forgetting we’re meant to wear these all the time now.” Pull out my office security pass and clip it to my left lapel.
“That’s better. I hang mine around my neck, you see. Along with my press card. Like a necklace – you see?”
I go back to interacting with the vending machine. Foto of my mummy tucked behind my student card. The woman looks at my wallet then turns to face the microwaves.
“Well, not much point showing me your ID, was there? Not if it bears the wrong name.”
“I’m sorry?”
“The security pass on your lapel says that your name is Dylan. But that student card there in your wallet says your name is Dillon.”
Slide my vending card back in my wallet.
“Well? Which is it?”
I ask her if I’m making her nervous. This happens to be one of them news publications that keeps shit easy and simple by blaming immigrants and skin pigments for every explosion or economic downturn or earthquake or whatever.
“Which is it?” Her reflections all look up at me in sync. “Is it Dillon? Or is it Dylan?”
Should tell her that either will do. That Mummy and Daddy spell it differently. That I ain’t a terrorist or welfare tourist or crack dealer – that I ain’t even doing retakes. Instead I tell her my real name is “Dhilan” but everyone misspells it.
After that, the one-minute wait for her pasta to ping feels like a whole fucking hour. She actually starts pulling faces at me in her reflection in the microwave ovens – puffing her cheeks, narrowing her eyes, even doing some buck-teeth baring like she’s showing off her gum disease. At one point, it looks like she’s simultaneously pulling completely different faces in each different microwave – though obviously she ain’t; that’d just be weird.
Truth is, these kinds of slip-ups over my name don’t actually happen all that often. Can’t be arsed to go into how I manage to juggle my different IDs – end of the day, everyone fronts differently when they’re in fonespace. Everyone’s like some rock star juggling a posse of different stage personas. Different vibes for different apps – different usernames/profiles/zoological species. I just take it to some next level is all. Ain’t anything deep and meaningful and sociologicalful, it’s just functional – lets me keep shit real for me while at the same time lying to Ramona about my mum. It ain’t as if I wear different facial expressions for each of them. Or think in different voices. Ain’t even some cleverly designed system; it’s just a strategy that works on the fly. And so long as I keep strictly separate fones for Dillon, Dhilan and Dylan, I hardly ever fuck things up. But, yeh – I do realise that there’s a pretty big-ass design flaw in trying to use social media to keep shit secret. Sometimes I reckon the tech actually makes it harder to run double lives.
“Well, Mr So-and-So” – her make-up less pancake than it had looked in all the microwaves – “Perhaps it’s easier when people just refer to you by your surname?”
And so I go back to the exact same workstation. Lay my fones on the desk, just me and my fones. But this time ain’t no need to wait around for jack. I click open the client’s internal staff directory and scroll down the list of four-digit phone extensions, searching for my surname. That woman who’d phoned here earlier didn’t ask to speak to no Dillon or Dylan or Dhilan, she’d asked for Mr Deckardas. I deffo shouldn’t be listed, though, cos everyone on this project is a temp – even the Digital Archive Project Manager ain’t on the payroll of permanent, pensioned-and-share-optioned-and-phone-extensioned staff. Soon as I start tapping in my surname, I get hit by some fucking plot-spoiler before I even finish typing. No shitting: I’m literally typing the letters “DECK” on my keyboard when the full word DECKARDAS pops up in some text message on my Dhilan fone – like as if my different devices are doing each other’s autocomplete. The full text of the text message is this: “DAMN YOU DECKARDAS, WHEN ARE YOU COMING BACK HERE TO FUCKING HELL FACE ALL THIS?” You see, Masi often calls me Deckardas instead of Dhilan or Dillon or Dylan – i.e. my father’s family name. Subtext’s so unsubtle it takes dipshit-idiotness to the next level. And it don’t even mean nothing, seeing as how I know next to fuck all about my dad. Just childhood memories that feel like someone else’s (his eyebrows, his voice, his hairy hands, the fact that he wo
rked loads and that his work was selling insurance). Mum once said he’s one of them blokes who couldn’t ever piss without ripping out a fart – that was basically her filler for the holes in the family fotos. Oh, and apparently he used to shoot his load too quick. And so I hate it when Masi calls me Deckardas. And I love it that she calls me something that means she and I ain’t the same. My mum changed her surname to Gital – her maiden name and probly the only surname Masi’ll ever have – but, still, Mum kept the name Deckardas as her middle name. He can’t be such a useless, loner, loser, wanker, workaholic shitface if she kept it as her middle name.
When I’m done typing my surname into the directory, I know in my head that it makes fuck all sense for my father’s full name to pop up. Like I said, I’m for definite the man’s always worked in insurance and, anyway, I know for a fact he can’t have been no journalist or nothing – cos, let’s face it, it ain’t as if I haven’t tried looking him up on the internet over the years. I mean, whenever I been bored enough to bother to google him. I ain’t gonna milk the violins here by telling you how the last time I tried to fone him was from the hospital waiting room during the removal of tumour number four. How he didn’t turn up at the hospital that day, that week, that year – ten years since she was first diagnosed and he never friggin showed up once. No big deal, though. Done and done. No drama, no obligatory obligations. Ain’t like it’s in some custody contract – an “In Case Mum Gets Cancer” clause.
Distortion Page 7