Triple Bagger

by Mari Reiza

  With Marene, it was not as simple. You did not know where you stood, because everything depended on the hairdo she was wearing that day. She was explosive tints and shimmering shapes, a nearly two-metre-high splendid Nigerian beauty in her thirties, using the scale of her hair to produce both angst and awe. She was mercurial and her power was in her ability to change, react and adapt without losing her core identity. Marene had an appetite for experiment and an emphatic laugh, and once she got started, she was largely content to let events unfold without her intervention. One day, she could be a forceful immigrant girl with a short bob, escaping across a field of English poppies holding a gun, a frenzied circle of limbs on a sea of red. Another day, it was the elaborate matron dressed in royal purple silk, standing by Mankell’s O Paraiso hotel, shouting furiously at the punters with a chimpanzee on her shoulder. On another occasion, she could be a straight-haired black version of a curvy Helen of Sparta, searching for sanctuary in burning Troy. Or perhaps a long-plaited ghost of a bygone time, walking on the waters of Yerebatan Sarayi. I could also have imagined her writing the next Americana novel from a secluded ranch where she kept an alligator pit. Whatever had been decided she was that day, you were guaranteed a powerful theatrical adventure. It was operatic and you wanted to dip your fat fingers in her fearless pigment until they were soaked and smelly. The visual thrill was enhanced when she started moving and talking. No man could ever plant that rhythm in his lover, even after years of Mendelian machinations. And you just knew that, as her body would age and weather, those gestures would remain the same because they were the real vessel, and you would always rest your coffee on her stuck-out booty, which looked like a pair of booster pants and four Brazilian bum pads shoved inside her knickers. (Miriam regularly enlightened me as to the existence of such things.)

  And finally there was Bianca, the third Mary. Bianca was of Caribbean origin despite her name, her face a brew of Edith Piaf and Aretha Franklin. She always seemed distracted, moving in the murderous lassitude of a disgruntled leopard. She would unexpectedly burst to speak eagerly and with a vitality that was unfortunately indefatigable. She was a renegade in spirit and passionate in her outpourings, with that anguish and impunity (or is it stupidity?) of the young. She wore fake fur coats and unbrushed hair, colour blocks (like the first wave of technicolor) and ugly shoes. On weekends, she probably sported cartoonish pink hair (which she washed on Monday mornings) and grandad socks. ‘A little clunky kitsch goes a long way!’ was her phrase. She called it tomboy chic but it did not look anything like Isabel Marant, a high-end tomboy who, according to Miriam, had taken the world by storm. On any given day you would not know if Bianca was out of Peter Pan or Alice in Wonderland, or whether she was only challenging her inner hangover. But it was fine because it was bound by an attitude. She could not care less about the rules and would reinterpret herself at every turn. She loved vulgarity and it was a choice, her choice. Like having a pet turtle at home who liked James Brown and begonias which thrived on Amadeus. She was spiritual and a singer, and chatted at length to Rich. But you knew that she could have eaten the poor boy alive, it would have never been a balanced act. She was always looking for a boyfriend but kept insisting on the fatal combination of dating websites followed by first encounters at Nando’s and, God forbid that worked, killing candidates with a second date at the London Zoo. As a result, she still lived in Hackney with her brother who was in the rap scene. Bianca was vital but mournful and constantly angry at one injustice or other, so Enterprisers avoided her. Her tranced rants scared the hell out of them, out of me too; at those times you really hoped invisibility was a technical possibility. We concluded that she probably practised voodoo at home. And despite, or because of, all her grumble, I could not help the feeling that she came from a reality that made her current daily grind seem the best that she had ever had, that if she was one day to find that perfect world she was fighting for inside her head, she would be extremely startled because she really thought it did not exist, it was just an ideal.

  These people were people, but to us Enterprisers they were only PEN. And we had corralled them into such a small space, they must have felt like they were living in the Copan building in São Paolo, whereas large, airy offices were assigned to Enterprisers constantly out working at client sites or playing golf. Maybe we should have called the PEN-ers’ enclosure El Buti, out of Havilio’s Paradises. ‘El Buti lives and resists.’

  And against all their street colour, PEN-ers’ responsibilities were lowly, but they were brilliantly played into a pandemonium of unrestrained disorder and tumultuous chaos, as if the world would stop rotating if Enterprisers’ requests were allowed to clog the PEN-er’s grid. After all, PEN-ers were like everyone else, they could not go against the prevailing trend to look busy. Who could blame them? Hens lay their eggs with fanfare and ducks in silence, and what is the result?

  Day after day, tracked data requests needed to be moved in a panic by PEN-ers from the Received column in their grid to the Clarification Required column, to be later moved further on to the Clarification Received column. This required endless checking and phone calls and probes. PEN-ers carried out numerous searches against the Professional Enterprise PAnacea (PEPA) library system, which combined Enterprise’s patchy knowledge with less than robust, unscalable technology to harness disparate sources of data and provide a single, clear view on complex issues. But even PEPA didn’t work to consistent definitions, and it left us all over the goddam place! So PEPA searches were followed by interpreting and re-checking, and bits of analysis and discussions, and more phone calls and storylining, and some beautiful slides if PEN-ers were looking for best marks from Enterprisers. This burst of activity invariably resulted in requests moving to the Data Found Incomplete column, and being churned out of the grid back to Enterprisers. ‘Up yours!’

  We deserved it. The requests we used to put in that device of torture… like how many unused grade-three onion peelers existed at any one time in Hokkaido. In my heart I could do nothing else but take their side.

  ‘Let’s kill the grid,’ I could imagine myself saying, waving a French flag high, my man breasts to the wind like Liberty. ‘Free these honest men and women!’

  But PEN would be there to the end.

  Working with Hammi

  I spent my first three years at Enterprise under the wing of the same Truth Leader, Hammi, Peter’s protector and best mate, in Paris, the city of ninety-minute lunches rigorously starting with a wine menu, where it is fine for food to be inconsistent because it is genuine. Peter had put in a good word for me, and Hammi was always kind, especially to Peter.

  Hammi soon became my constant and my inspiration in those early days, as I worked for various Confrères that worked for him, most of them not very memorable, who passed through my life as fast as Usain Bolt. Was I hoping to become one of them soon? Was that an obligatory step before becoming Peter? or Hammi? (Could I ever become Hammi? I seriously doubted that.)

  I was grateful for Hammi. And for Trojan hating me for having a powerful patron. Under Hammi’s guidance, I put my head down, thirsty to gain experience with a few patient organisations in France and Italy. It was probably not easy for a proud French CEO to be told what to do by an Indian brat just past his twenties, but at least I was only lightly coloured and could disguise it as a tan in summer, and tiredness was already ageing me fast. I sometimes played the Swiss card, given that Aunty Anita had been like a second mum to me after she had married a rich Indian businessman from Cal and moved to Geneva. Italians especially look up to the Swiss, I thought. And then, I was not really telling anybody what to do, I was Hammi’s boy responding to whatever his Confrère of the day wanted me to fetch for him.

  It was always a similar story.

  Our diagnostics revealed demotivated, inefficient, unorganised workforces, which we whipped into shape. It could be anything from slash and burn to value and help; from technology as the eliminator to technology as the creator; from how to organise bett
er, be more efficient, compensate correctly, to how to forecast accurately or lay out with clarity. Would employees be more motivated if they had free parking spaces, or their logo was blue, if they could have a trident on their desk or sit on a Philippe Starck chair? Who did the employees report to? How were they reviewed? Were there incentives other than monetary? (How would these ever be real incentives?) Were their teams vertical or horizontal (whatever that meant)? What was their manager’s style like? Were they strategy setters, sergeant majors in business suits, amateur psychotherapists? And what would they like them to be?

  Enterprise selected, trained, compensated, motivated, managed and led us, so we could work at these issues with scientific precision. This was our life, and we lived by it, with it and in it.

  And yet, though personal ramblings were a crime at Enterprise, I sometimes wondered what explained our patients flinging themselves under our wings, spending precious moments of their lives reading an ill-written script on how to transform themselves by someone who had only recently learnt to tie his own shoe laces? I could only think that many of our patients could not have managed a trip to the loo on their own, and I was reassured to see that anxiety was a universal reason why people (not just me) did stupid things. We despised them, corporate managers, but we were also asked to understand that these were special people, dealing with intractable problems, more than any other elite in the world. ‘Really?’ And that managers may have looked square but they were wacky guys dreaming incredible things and making them happen, WITH OUR HELP.

  We invariably went into instructions with a hypothesis, a living beast to be constantly revised and improved as it was tested, as new information came to light or the patient changed his mind which happened sometimes. In reality, hypothesis refinement depended very much on the Squad’s Confrère. Some changed their hypothesis radically and repeatedly, because they had formulated it single-handedly in fifteen minutes after a thirty-six hour work stretch and it made no sense. Others thought changing their mind was a sign of weakness, even if their hypothesis did not make any sense either.

  Hammi always said to his Squads that it paid to consider a wide range of solutions, redemption switches as we called them, when solving for salvation. We bowed to him and did not dare to ask more. We organised the possible solutions into branches, Every Switch into One Branch (ESiOB). Then we used our Sailing up the River Framework (SuRF) to gain a top view before choosing key branches. It was all in our manuals.

  I found that there was never scope to be thorough though. It would have broken the patient’s balance sheet at our daily rates. I had learnt at school that if you got the details right everything would follow, that the devil was in the detail. I had lived in fear to be caught out by the demon I did not know, the detail I had missed. I thought all these things in my head whilst working for Hammi. But I didn’t act on any of my impulses and I let the details go. We told ourselves instead that if enough smart people aligned on the governing flow, the rest of the work would be directionally correct.

  Hammi said my thirst for detail was called pre-Confrère anxiety and that most people grew out of it, or left Enterprise.

  ‘It’s got to be perfect,’ that was our line. ‘Too many people take second best, but we would not take anything less.’ But maybe it was a lie.

  Marene had once worked in one of my Squads and questioned whether we were being irresponsible. ‘Can we be so easily happy to take a chance with someone else’s businesses?’ She had been quickly silenced.

  ‘EsiOB and SuRF are not fancy fads but indispensable tools,’ our Confrère argued, ‘and they are bulletproof.’ He was a man invariably turned on by unintelligible scribbles on flip charts, with whom we spent most of our late evenings preparing progress reports, following a storyline in which he would take the patient for a journey, from their current mindset to the desired outcome. He showed us his toolbox full of cones and storyboards, underlying headlines, sketched facts and exhibits in different indentations. And then, the cherry on the cake: the so-what? bubbles, in a visual, well-chosen font. ‘One needs experience and seniority for so-what-ing (and font selection),’ our Confrère claimed, and that in time I would do these too. Marene, being a PEN-er, never would, of course, or at least would never get the credit for it if she did.

  Our Confrère’s doodles were the twenty per cent that was worth eighty because the top view was what mattered. Next I would fill in his scribbles with some patchy details, together with Marene, Mandy or Zainab, or further outsource the work to PEN-er Central via the grid and get a farcical call from Cate. It was a bulletproof process set in stone. And all the time I closed my eyes and looked up to Peter and to Hammi, to the time I could bypass the process and become them.

  Hammi was certainly good enough for CEO material. He had wavy greyish hair, and was tall and strong-built, though a master at weight cycling. Large blue eyes and a broad smile with big teeth gave him an affable look. He dressed like royalty, not a Top Gun pilot like Peter, but a cruise captain, and you knew with him you would see great sites in relative comfort. The first thing he had told me after I landed in Paris was to book a table at Aizpitarte’s.

  ‘My university friend Carlo has already done it for me,’ I replied full of pride.

  As with many people in Enterprise, it seemed, Hammi’s origins were a mixture. I soon realised that colleagues called him by his surname, and that he had been born to a wealthy Algerian dad settled in Paris, like BHL (Bernard-Henri Lévy), I did not fail to notice. However, Hammi’s mother was Italian from Emilia-Romagna, and being an Emiliano at heart made him a pleasant man to work with. Emiliani are the fathers of Pavarotti, Enzo Ferrari, Ferruccio Lamborghini and the Ducati brothers, and the home of Parmesan and Balsamic vinegar. ‘It is the Italy that you see in the movies,’ Hammi used to say. He had attended boarding school in England, and, I guessed, later probably driven an MG whilst undergraduate at Christ Church, Oxford, (way before I had been in town) and played polo, joining summer trips to Argentina. He was basically part of that elite that goes on to rule the world, you could easily tell. For him, life could be a nice joke of food and pussy. He was the kind of guy who would buy himself a Snoopy Rolex at four and a half grand for a fun night out and not blink an eyelid. Was that what I was looking forward to? Certainly better than the miserable life of a junior…

  How we loved our days back then.

  5.30 am Squad workout, exercise is good. 6.30 am what’s-blown-up-overnight BlackBerry check. 7 am laptop on, incoming outsourced work screened. 7.30 am cab ride to patient site, stopping by Starbucks. Shit coffee. 8 am arrival at patient site, Squad quarters’ preparation. 8.30 am Squad’s checkin and accomplishments (whilst listening to two other calls simultaneously). 9 am first patient meeting to remind the patient we are here. I’m KNACKERED already. 10 am call with PEN-er Central to learn about the patient’s industry. 10.30 am side-by-side with patient employees to remind ourselves of our purpose. 11 am Squad truth solving around our purpose. 12 pm food picked up by most junior member being taken advantage of. 12.30 pm checking emails after having grazed in a hurry. I’m recovering from INDIGESTION. 1 pm (stressful) patient meeting over data we have had no time to analyse. 2 pm rearranged call with unprepared but brilliant senior Enterprisers. 3 pm final preparation for progress review in thirty minutes! 3.30 pm soaking patient’s disappointment at progress review. 5 pm checkin with senior patients, a high stakes opportunity but not as high as looking good in front of our own leaders. Goes badly. I bluntly feel the PATIENT’S HATE. 5.30 pm Squad checkin, as we do need to checkin multiple times a day despite sitting side by side. Special dispensation for team mothers (there's rarely any) to call their children before going to bed. 6 pm checklist for PEN-ers and Creative Pictures Singapore (CPS) to complete whilst we dine, even if needed only the next day. Keep them on their toes! 7 pm leaving the patient. I can’t STAND my SQUAD anymore. 7.30 pm team dinner and war stories with Squad, playing Two Truths and a Lie. Strictly no getting blitzed on martinis like bankers!
9 pm calling girlfriends for a few minutes from the taxi to the hotel. 9.30 pm working in the room updating the Excel model, creating some truth solving pages, drafting a storyline and reviewing candidate CVs whilst half-watching TV, though no porn can be expensed past Gert, the office manager. I have lost the WILL to LIVE. 12.30 am wrapping-up, taking a shower. 1 am bed after checking email one last time.