The Bob Watson

by Greg Bardsley

  So I watched and studied Bob. A lot.

  It seemed like he could do just about anything he wanted, with no consequences. To watch him pull off his ditches was kind of a life experience; it helped me realize that maybe I, too, had the power to control my life, even at work, even though the suits wanted me to think otherwise. And does it get more empowering than that? I guess that’s why I studied Bob so closely. This was a master who’d perfected his secret craft—my job was to observe and document, and to avoid tainting anything. I was patient and persistent not only in my observation and documentation, but also in my subsequent practice.

  But I couldn’t stop. After I’d learned how to pull a Bob Watson, I taught myself variations that I named in his honor. And I have many. There’s the Bob Watson Classic (a straight meeting ditch), the Reverse Bob Watson (you leave, only to return five minutes later, to build trust for a future ditch), the FU Watson (self-explanatory), the Watson Solo (you ditch a one-on-one; yes, that’s right: a one-on-one), and the Extreme Watson (multiple ditches, with multiple returns, each absence lasting a little longer than the previous, until you’re gone and never coming back).

  At some point, Bob left the company. I’m not sure exactly when he left.

  * * *

  All these years later, I am super passionate about this stuff. More than ever, I really, truly do not like it when people waste my time. So if you drag me to your unnecessary meeting and I am forced to sit there and wait for my Bob Watson moment, I will pornolize you (sorry). That is, I will imagine you in the middle of some kind of depraved porno—an orgy, maybe, or a gang bang, or a glory-hole marathon. And I will imagine everything.

  But today is different. I’m on a mission.

  Janice asks, “Any comments?”

  I snap to attention, because here’s my chance. My chance to validate, which is a critical element of the Bob Watson. You see, if you want to be like Bob, a serial meeting ditcher who never got fired, you must validate the meeting organizers and, if possible, the attendees. You must make that emotional imprint, making them feel you’re engaged—and most important, that they are okay—so that when you are long gone, all they’ll remember are your passionate comments, your supportive nods, your earnest gazes.

  I raise my hand, and Janice nods. I give her my thoughtful look, raising a brow. “I just wanted to let you know that the company needs this,” I say, pitching my voice high at the end, for resonance. “The J-23 Incubation Initiative is perhaps one of the most important things we can do this year.” I pause, like I’m thinking about it, and scoot to the edge of my seat, my back arched, like I want to jump into the air. “But the question is, how do we drive this point through to the regions?”

  Janice beams, babbles about “leveraging the verticals.”

  I keep the eye contact, thinking of the calls I need to make.

  Janice announces that the J-23 Incubation Process is designed for adaptation in the PWC and that . . . blah . . . blah . . . blah . . . blah. She’s using words like align and cascade and value capture, and then the acronyms tumble out. I try to say something, but she raises a finger, as if to say, No way. I sit and listen, and decide that Janice from Finance is even more of a control freak than I previously thought. But who am I fooling? It’s not just Janice. This office is packed with control freaks. Hell, the whole world is oozing control freaks. Everyone is trying to control each other.

  Do what I do.

  Value what I value.

  Live life my way.

  Do as I say.

  Change to make me happy.

  Listen to me.

  Attend my meeting.

  Generally speaking, I tend to say, Nah.

  Other folks take another path. Just look at my poor sister and her husband: happy subjects of a kingdom of control. Control freaks who don’t even realize that they themselves are being controlled—controlled by each other, controlled by trends, controlled by the hyperactive, ultracompetitive, overachiever subculture that dictates nearly everything they do. At this point, my sister has changed so fundamentally that I can barely see the person who grew up alongside me.

  This malady they have, I’ve given it a name—Overachiever Fever, the symptoms of which are enough to turn a staunch teetotaler into a raging drunk. That’s because with Overachiever Fever, nothing in life—and I mean nothing—is ever quite good enough. This means folks are always stressing out. It means competition is nuts. It means that life mapping—a term I never wanted to learn—is absolutely essential. And it means that looking over your shoulder is a must.

  It’s no way to live.

  The poor bastards.

  If only they could chill out a bit.

  If only they knew the way of Bob.

  Sitting there thinking of Audrey’s assignment, I decide that teaching the Bob Watson to Collin makes all kinds of sense. I realize that in the coming years, it will be way important for my little dude to stay strong in the face of the oppressors—the overachievers, the control freaks, the stress ballers, the elitists, the aspiring masters of the universe.

  He needs to learn how to fight the power, Bob Watson style.

  It reminds me of this time I asked Audrey out for a drink. She just smiled and said, “Hold that thought, Rick Blanco. Because I want to tell you about your nephew’s extracurricular activities.”

  I thought this was an odd response, but I dig her quirkiness. “Shoot, baby.”

  “I mean, listen to this: There’s the Mandarin-immersion program at school, the software-coding tutor at home, the personal trainer for lacrosse at the health club, the oral forensics coach, who visits after dinner on Tuesdays, the body-language coach on Wednesdays, the cello instructor on Saturdays, the personal shaman/spiritual adviser on Sunday nights, and the publicist who is on retainer.”

  I focused on Audrey’s lips.

  “He’s eight years old, Rick Blanco.”

  I admired her hairline. “He also wants his nanny to have drinks with cool dudes.”

  Audrey shook her head and sighed. “Rick Blanco.”

  I still can’t figure that one out.

  Bob Watson Step No. 3:

  Distract and Leave

  Trapped in the conference room and thinking about Audrey’s perfect lower lip, I come to an easy conclusion.

  I need to get out of here.

  Now my heart is racing. That’s what happens when I have a plan, when I know I’m about to pull a Bob Watson. I bite my lip and tap my foot as I wait for an opportunity to initiate a Bob Watson launch sequence.

  That’s right. After you’ve made yourself visible and present, after you’ve validated speakers and attendees, after you’ve made those emotional and mental imprints, you must gently toss to the center of the room a smoke bomb of sorts—a distraction. “Cover” that allows you to slip out. Usually it’s an “innocent” comment or question that quickly leads people to a subtopic so inflammable that no one can resist weighing in. Which is when you get up and leave, unnoticed.

  Janice says, “Which is why—if you look at row seventy-eight on the chart printout—you can clearly see how the subtiers of the P-FID fluctuate.”

  I raise my hand and offer my stupid look. “But what about the SysCON?”

  Janice stiffens. Everyone else groans.

  The SysCON is her catnip.

  “It’s quite simple.” She steadies herself, and her cheeks redden. “We shall—God as my witness—leverage the SysCON for the richest ROI this industry has ever seen.” She turns to the whiteboard, where she starts to draw out a hexagon, labeling each corner. “And I’m talking about the L-PAR, HyperPHY, AGRO, a variety of industry-standard M24s, and the whole range of J-4s in the FOD.” I notice two people fighting off sleep, three others checking email, and one poor soul somehow—against all odds—paying full attention. “We must strip it apart—do a complete K-KAR on this baby—and put it back together, but with things like the J-8s and AGRO rationalization.”

  Crickets.

  “And we will K-KAR an
d K-KAR and K-KAR as long as it takes. And only then will we feed it into the SysCON.”

  I raise my hand. “So it really is a deep, full thrust with the K-KARs and the L-Docs?”

  Janice lowers her eyelids. “We’ll drench the K-KARs with L-Docs and the SysCON and B-24s, and then spreadsheet the whole thing.” She seems to have transported herself to a curious, acronym-rich dimension I hadn’t thought possible. “And it’s K-KARs in the RAD, K-KARs in the—”

  “Janice Janice Janice.” I’m like a traffic cop, with my arms out—Stop. “Sorry to interrupt, but . . .” She’s frozen, and the attendees look up. “. . . I just have to step in here. Please.” I approach her and pluck the marker from her hand. “I’d like to draw something out.” I move to the whiteboard under a growing din of murmurs. “Because I’m starting to feel we’re thinking about this all wrong.” I look at her open mouth, then at the attendees, all eyes on me—what drama, what an interesting break from normal programming. “And our problems start with the K-KAR.”

  You could’ve heard an ant burp.

  “The problem is . . .” I write out K-KAR in giant letters. “. . . the K-KAR is limited in scope.” I make a big show of crossing out the K-KAR with the marker, “slashing” it with long, dramatic swipes, adding little curlicues at the end. “The K-KAR is—forgive me—the largest Chihuahua.”

  Gasps.

  “Here’s what I think of the K-KAR.” I keep crossing out the K-KAR, like I’m committing a crime of passion. Janice takes a step toward me, stops. Bites her lip, her chest heaving. “I’m sorry, but the K-KAR is like your grandpa’s landline telephone—an out-of-date relic.” I turn and look at Janice, then the others. “And yet we need the K-KAR. We all know that.” I look at Janice again, giving her the serious eyes. “But we also need the SysCON and the L-Docs.” I turn to the attendees. “So what do we do?”

  Silence.

  I wipe the board clean. “What we do is—and I’m serious—something I’ll call . . .”

  I make them wait a sec.

  “. . . process husbandry.”

  Hushed murmurs. Janice sways.

  “Yes.” In a fit of creativity, I write out the K-KAR diagonally. “That’s right. It’s time to . . .” Under the K-KAR, I write “SysCON” as if the former is mounting the latter. “. . . mate the K-KAR with the SysCON.”

  You would have thought I’d just dropped my pants to reveal a banana sling.

  “We need to put the K-KAR in a room with the SysCON.” I offer them the serious eyes again. “And we need to lock that door. And we won’t let them out until the SysCON is knocked-up, so to speak. Knocked up with their love child—a zygote ready to incubate into a new breed.” I turn and stare at Janice, then at the attendees. “I’m talking about a love child that will evolve bottom-tier data transformation into a new kind of species. I’m talking about a new era.” Under the SysCON, I draw a crude, asexual orifice, and out of it I produce a waterfall of fluid. Atop the small pool of discharge, I write out a new acronym—K-CONKAR. “The era of the K-CONKAR.”

  The room explodes into a chorus of cheers and gasps. Janice charges, swipes the marker from my hand, lifts her lip at me, and heads for the whiteboard, taking the eraser in the other hand. People at the table are debating, excitement in their voices, as Janice works frantically to erase my explicit suggestion. Slowly, I step back, out of the spotlight, and look at my phone—nothing.

  Janice is trembling as she attacks the whiteboard. “The K-KAR . . .” She shouts. “Cannot . . .” She stops herself, takes a big breath, and lets it out slowly. “. . . be crossbred.”

  The attendees hush for a moment, then explode into debate. Floyd thrusts an index finger into the air, nearly shouts over the din, “We need a committee. A K-CONKAR exploratory committee.” The words are hardly out of his mouth when a cadre of K-KAR purists pounce on him, their teeth showing, their shoulders leaning forward, their eyes glaring. The notion—no, the blasphemous, perverted, nearly incestuous suggestion—of a process called the K-CONKAR has half the room foaming at the mouth, mindless of the fact that, two minutes ago, they were listless zombie slaves. Now, they’re alive—their faces flushed, their hearts thumping, their throats tight as they prepare to interject a rapid, buttery flurry of L-Docs, J-23s, and HyperPHYs into the dialogue. Don’t they know they are back on the bottle? Bolstered, invigorated—propped up—by a rare and short-lived tonic drawn from the very insulated, antiseptic, corporate monotony that just minutes ago had brought them to their knees, their heads bowed, their clasped hands begging for the executioner’s special brand of swift mercy?

  This high? This K-CONKAR high of theirs? Oh yes, it will crash. And when it does—when my poor colleagues awake in a sea of their own empties, reminded of their relapse, their obsessive-compulsive binge into bottom-tier data transformation—I will be long gone.

  They bark at each other, nod, fold their arms, and scribble.

  Slowly, I backpedal to the conference room door. “And once we complete the L-PAR thrust,” I say, “we penetrate deeper with the HyperPHY. And we must go so deep with the HyperPHY, it hurts.”

  Hank says, “And once we’re in with the HyperPHY, we can—and we will—pound away.”

  I take another step back as Janice pounds her first into her palm, creating a rhythmic listing of acronyms—“First, it’s the R-PID . . .” Fist pound. “Then it’s the L-Docs . . .” Fist pound. “And then it’s the L-PARs . . .” Fist pound. “. . . and the J-22s . . .” Fist pound. “. . . and the A-100s . . .” Pound. “. . . and then that deep thrust with the HyperPHY—over . . .” Pound. “. . . and over . . .” Pound. “. . . and over again.”

  Floyd says, “You can’t create a K-CONKAR with the HyperPHY.”

  Someone says, “We must hyperscale the HyperPHY.”

  “No,” Janice snaps. “We must milk the HyperPHY.”

  “Which is why the HyperPHY must not be soiled by the K-KAR.”

  “The HyperPHY has no place in this discussion.”

  “Are you kidding? The HyperPHY might very well be our Lucy.”

  “Lucy?”

  “The Australopithecus of all Robards International processes.”

  “Why are we even having this discussion?”

  “Because the K-KAR has been R-POD’d and L-Doc’d to death.”

  “What the HyperPHY needs is much more of that.”

  “You have got to be—”

  “The HyperPHY needs a good soiling by the SysCON.”

  “A rogering.”

  “Or the K-CONKAR. The K-CONKAR could do that.”

  “The point is—and I’m serious—the HyperPHY has been wearing a chastity belt of sorts.”

  “Folks. . . . Folks. . . . Guys. . . . Let’s keep the tone—No need for—”

  “Listen, you think the HyperPHY is some protected, virginal princess?”

  “No. I know it’s—”

  “Dude, the HyperPHY is a cougar. A chain-smoking, whiskey-drinking cougar.”

  “I don’t like your tone, mister.”

  “Try this on for size—I don’t like you.”

  “Well, you can take the K-CONKAR and shove it up your HyperPHY’d—”

  “Shut your trap, you raspy bag.”

  “SysCON hugger.”

  “HyerPHY dittohead.”

  “Hyperslut.”

  “Asshole.”

  “Prick.”

  “You want the SBC Office on your ass?”

  “People.”

  “I’ll HyperPHY your ass right out of this company.”

  “Guys. Stop.”

  “The K-KAR is a simple, dull sloth.”

  “And the SysCON is a flatulent old whore who doesn’t bathe.”

  Janice shouts, “We need an L-Doc on the innards of the K-CONKAR ASAP.”

  “The K-KAR is an overfed pedophile living in a desert trailer.”

  Janice says, “Rick, help me with these people.”

  I address the group. “It seems like the L-Docs may not be al
igned with the K-KAR. And maybe that’s our problem.”

  Janice pauses, touches her chin. “I know we had a break scheduled, but I think we’re getting over the initial anxiety about the formation of a K-CONKAR, and this discussion seems to be becoming productive. So we’re gonna cancel the break and keep going.”

  But of course the door is already shutting behind me.

  Gently.

  Graciously.

  Bob Watson Step No. 4:

  Get Shit Done

  The beauty of the Bob Watson is that it allows you to ditch the spreadsheeters, the bullshit artists, and the hot-potato tossers so you can actually get shit done. On most days, I’d be knocking out a series of P-FIDs and L-Docs. I’d be on the phone with Europe. I’d have the SysCON tool up. I’d be scanning in medical bills and documents, and resubmitting it all for the fifth time in three days. I’d be rebooting my PC after it once again crashed in the middle of an application for a benefits reimbursement. And yes—I’ll admit it—maybe I’d be taking a few “nonstrategic” detours along the way.

  Today is different. Today is all about getting the green light from Audrey.

  At my desk, I lean back and tap a text to her.

  OK. . . . So . . . I guess taking him on a dump run won’t do it.

  No response.

  Five minutes later, I tap: Is there something specific u had in mind?

  My cell shakes. Just be you, RB

  I lower my cell and squint into space. Just be me?

  And then an idea strikes: When I’m with the kid—when we really just hang out—I’m not thinking of Audrey or trying to be cool. We’re just ourselves. The kid and I just thumb our noses at the world, and we do what we want—not unlike pulling a Bob Watson, I suppose. We don’t meet up very often, but when we do, it’s pretty cool. And it’s pretty clear that Collin really digs our adventures—it’s like he never gets to be a kid, unless he’s with me. Now that I think about it, I’m not sure my sister and brother-in-law care about the beauty of just hanging out and having fun.