Dedication
To Jessica
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1: It’s a Hard Life
Chapter 2: The Only Way Is Up
Chapter 3: I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For
Chapter 4: Don’t You (Forget About Me)
Chapter 5: Holding Back the Years
Chapter 6: Photograph
Chapter 7: Walking on Sunshine
Chapter 8: Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)
Chapter 9: Let’s Dance
Chapter 10: Who Can It Be Now?
Chapter 11: All Night Long (All Night)
Chapter 12: Abracadabra
Chapter 13: Smooth Operator
Chapter 14: My Hometown
Chapter 15: Start Me Up
Chapter 16: (I’ve Had) The Time of My Life
Chapter 17: Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now)
Chapter 18: Live to Tell
Chapter 19: Small Town
Chapter 20: (Just Like) Starting Over
Chapter 21: Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want
Chapter 22: Run to You
Chapter 23: Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go
Chapter 24: Let’s Go Crazy
Chapter 25: Hello
Chapter 26: Lovin’ Every Minute of It
Chapter 27: House of Fun
Chapter 28: True Colors
Chapter 29: Sledgehammer
Chapter 30: Here I Go Again
Chapter 31: Don’t Talk to Strangers
Chapter 32: Careless Whisper
Chapter 33: When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going
Chapter 34: You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)
Chapter 35: Talk to Me
Chapter 36: Words
Chapter 37: The Final Countdown
Chapter 38: Manic Monday
Chapter 39: Everybody Wants to Rule the World
Chapter 40: Under Pressure
Chapter 41: Is There Something I Should Know?
Chapter 42: I Think We’re Alone Now
Chapter 43: Every Time You Go Away
Chapter 44: I Want to Know What Love Is
Epilogue: No More Lonely Nights
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter 1
It’s a Hard Life
THE DAY THE Time Machine arrived started innocently enough. One of my clients (okay, my only client) had asked me to come in for a meeting at three. Perfect. I couldn’t have picked a better time myself, even if it was a Friday.
See, I was self-employed, which is how we describe people who once had a job but have been downsized or outsourced and are now “personal brands.” I was the CEO of Me Inc. I was also its HR department, IT department, accounts department, and office errand boy. The official name of my company was Webscoe, because when I registered it, back when I was in university, anything about the web was “way cool” (as we said in those exciting days). Plus, Webscoe was what Richard Pryor’s character called his company in Superman III, a very underrated movie.
Being self-employed was great. I could hit Snooze as many times as I wanted (which is why 3 p.m. was the perfect time for a meeting). I could work in sweatpants and a T-shirt (and I did), and I could listen to Total 80s FM as loud as I liked, all day long. I did that too.
To be fair, being your own boss does involve a certain amount of discipline: taxes, sending out an invoice once a month, remembering to make sure there’s milk in the fridge, that sort of stuff. Sometimes I missed the old days at the office—the conversations, the jokes, and the long Friday afternoons when somebody would bring in a six-pack and we’d sit at our desks and shoot the breeze and then head to a nearby pub. I did not miss the bitchy politics and lengthy meetings.
My client’s text woke up my dozing sense of duty. I rushed to do some honest research for a new app for a bank, but the fancy algorithms knew me better than I did and . . . well, soon I was deep inside the internet rabbit hole, in the world of eighties music videos, Japanese game shows, and movie GIFs. At 2:30 p.m., I watched a fifteen-minute video of a teenage boy—judging by the cracks in his pubescent voice—who’d played through The Hobbit, a computer game based on the J.R.R. Tolkien novel, and one that I had once mastered.
Then I ran for the bus.
It’d been a couple of years—a decade, even—since I became a freelance contractor for the company that had downsized me. I still loved the freedom, but I also relished returning to the office to chat with colleagues. As I walked in on the day the Time Machine arrived, Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” was playing in reception. I wondered if it might be a cosmic coincidence (music always seems to stalk me), or if, more likely, my old boss enjoyed forcing his playlist on everyone who entered the office. Either way, I loved the tune, and the happiness the song gave me silenced whatever bit of guilty conscience its title prompted.
The receptionist greeted me with a broad smile. Like the potted plant behind her, she was fresh and new.
“Hi there. Can I help you?”
I gave her my name and told her I had a meeting with the boss. She mustn’t have realized who I was, as she gestured to a couch in the corner and suggested I wait for someone to pick me up.
“Thanks, but I know my way,” I said, and kept on walking. I spotted some guys standing around the coffee machine, two of the three leaning on the counter with empty cups in their hands.
“Hey, Pete, good to see you.” That was Johan—the only one of the three I knew.
“Hi.” I reached for a cup from the pile next to the coffee machine. No herbal teas, I noticed.
“Haven’t seen you around lately,” he said before turning to the other two. “Peter’s our internet guru.”
The two young men nodded at me. No handshakes.
“I’ve been busy with that bank project,” I said. “How are things?”
“Same old same old. Plugging away. You know. Clients want more for less, the usual. You?”
“The same, I guess. You should know, you’re my client,” I said.
Johan laughed. Then he pointed at my watch.
“Nice watch. What time is it?”
I checked. “About five to . . .”
As I said it, I realized that I’d fallen for his joke for about the thousandth time.
“Are you sure?” he said with a wink, and then went on to explain his hilarious “joke” to his young colleagues. “Peter here created one of the first websites in Finland—the web version of the Talking Clock,” he said.
The young men stared blankly at him.
“You know, the number you used to call to check the correct time?” Johan went on. These kids probably had no understanding of life before iPhones, whose time display is constantly synched by the cellular network. “You’re literally looking at a piece of internet history.”
“Umm . . . awesome,” one of them said.
“Is it still online?” asked the other.
“Thanks. I’m not sure. I haven’t needed to check it for a while . . .” I said.
We stood there silently, waiting for Johan to get his coffee, and then the two younger men to get theirs. I regretted my decision to pick up a cup. Now I was stuck in this awkward line while they pressed buttons and muttered something in young-people code.
“Hey,” said Johan. “I thought I’d see you at Pauli’s goodbye party last week.”
My first thought was: Pauli left?
My second thought was: Why didn’t I get an invite?
I hope I managed to keep both from showing on my face.
“Ah, I was busy, you know . . . networking event. Being
self-employed, it’s all go-go-go.”
He smiled like he understood, blew on his coffee, and wandered off.
At 3 p.m. exactly I knocked on my client/boss’s door.
He waved me in and gestured for me to sit down. He was a big man with a fondness for pastries and a black belt in management-speak. He was also one of a handful who’d been at the company since the days when the office had a dog-walker-in-residence, so we went back a long way. In fact, I had been his “mentor” when he’d first signed on as a fresh-faced intern with a business-school degree. In the years since, he had worked his way up, all the way to the top, but in my mind I still called him “kid.”
“Listen, thanks for coming down on such short notice. I didn’t want to do this on a Friday afternoon. It’s such a cliché, right?”
He wiped some invisible dirt off his black Stevejobsian shirt and laughed awkwardly.
“Peter, we’re going in a different direction,” he said.
“We are? Well, that’s a smart move. I think I mentioned that we should focus more on mobile apps in my memo the other—”
“Buddy,” he said, and sighed. “There’s no I in team. Except for the I in our new Indian team. See, we just acquired a digital design agency, so we’ll have that expertise in-house. Well, out-of-house. Bangalore, to be exact.”
I sat quietly, reality spinning around me.
“We’ve been trialing them for a couple of months, and the truth of the matter is they’re cheaper than you—”
“Oh. We could look at my fees—”
“They’re quicker than you—”
“I could devote more time,” I said, worried I was sounding desperate, regretting how much of the past ten years I’d spent on Facebook when I’d been invoicing them for my services.
“And there’s sixteen of them. Peter, I’m afraid we don’t need Webscoe’s services anymore.”
“Oh.”
“Look, Peter, I’m sorry. You’ve been here since the dawn of time, I know. And we both know that since you took your brand external we’re under no obligation to offer severance. But as a gesture of goodwill to my old mentor, I thought maybe you could invoice an extra month. Does that sound fair?”
It didn’t sound fair. It sounded monstrously, ridiculously, biblically unfair. But I knew that, legally speaking, he was right. They owed me nothing.
“Um. Sure.”
“So . . . that’s great news, right? Have some ‘me time.’ Great news for your other clients too. I’ve always worried that we hog too much of your time. Am I right?”
I swallowed and tried to find my voice. He pursed his lips and then stared at his phone, as if willing it to ring.
“Look, sorry, buddy, I have to take this,” he said, and turned in his expensive swivel chair so that his back was toward me.
His phone wasn’t ringing.
I was seething, but I somehow managed to keep my cool as I got up, leaned against the desk between me and my—now former—client, and said, as evenly as I could, “I remember when you started at this company. You didn’t even know what HTML stood for.”
He looked up at me, as if surprised to see me there.
“Well,” he said. “We learn something new every day, don’t we?”
I scrabbled for a witty retort, but he’d already turned away.
I stormed out of his office, out of the building, and kept on walking until I saw the Central Station clock tower.
I stopped. Closed my eyes. Took a deep breath.
Chapter 2
The Only Way Is Up
FIGHT OR FLIGHT. Your choice.”
In my head I heard the boisterous voice of Seppo Laine, my old science teacher. I remembered him teaching us about the primal instinct that lurks in all of us, that despite millions of years of evolution, thousands of years of society teaching us to be nice, we’re still all basically mammals with self-preservation instincts. When faced with a threat, we fight or we flight. Fly, I mean. I ordered another pint, my second, and noticed that I was starting to feel a little tipsy. I hadn’t had lunch.
I spent every Friday evening with Sofie, my niece, while my sister, Tina, went to teach her yoga class and her husband, Tim, “worked late.” I was supposed to be at Tina’s at six, which meant I had a couple of hours to kill after leaving the office. So I’d headed for a new place around the corner—Retrobar, it was called—pulled up a stool, and ordered a beer.
Retrobar was one of those new theme bars that kept popping up downtown. Eighties movie posters, vintage clothes, and album covers hung on the walls. There was a pinball machine in one corner and Pac-Man and Daley Thompson’s Decathlon games in another. Screens were everywhere, like in a sports bar, but instead of football and hockey, this place showed music videos and movies straight out of my high-school years.
I was the only customer.
The TV above the bar was playing Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days,” with the Boss and Little Steven rocking in a small bar in Anytown, USA; the one next to it featured Trading Places. As I watched Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd head to the World Trade Center, intent on payback, I considered the two options Mr. Laine had presented.
Fight: I wrote a long email to my former boss. I told him exactly how I felt about what he was doing to the company I’d once loved, and I told him exactly what I felt about him, making particular reference to his Steve Jobs fanboyism, and that I had proof he’d taken the subway during the Helsinki City Marathon (I didn’t, but I had reasonable grounds and wanted to shake him up a little). I reminded him of my mentorship, and then went on to explain all the benefits I’d brought to the company over the years and how I could still be of use to them. I basically begged for my job back. I saved it in my drafts folder.
Flight: Thinking about it, I realized my job situation had become stale; it really was time for me to move on. In many ways, this wasn’t so much a sacking as a liberation. I had a good portfolio, a decent set of contacts, and enough savings to tide me over while I recalibrated, defragged, rebooted (or whatever computing analogy best fit) my life. There was no shame in running, I told myself. It wasn’t running away; it was running toward a new adventure.
Yeah, right.
My savings—even with the generous “severance” offer—weren’t likely to last the year. My “portfolio,” if I could muster the wherewithal to organize one, would be horrendously dated. My “contacts” were probably stored on an old Nokia phone somewhere.
I’d been working at that company in one way or another since its early days—since my early days. I knew nothing else; it was the only “real” job I’d ever had. When I’d finished high school, my grades had gotten me into the best university around. When I aced that, I walked straight into the first job I wanted. When they offered to outsource me, it just made my life even more awesome. At the time, I had felt as if the world was constantly falling at my feet. Looking back, it now seems more like I just went with the flow, took the path of least resistance, never challenged, never strived.
“You can’t fire me,” I said to myself, “BECAUSE I ALREADY QUIT!”
Too late, I realized I’d shouted that out loud. I looked up at the barman, who didn’t even flinch. I expect he was used to daytime drinkers.
When I’d first agreed to stay on as a contractor, I’d imagined building my own company into a web juggernaut. I was going to have numerous clients. I was going to be ahead of the software development curve. I was . . . not sure exactly what, but not this. What I hadn’t done was formulate a business plan, or reach out to new clients; I hadn’t even built my own website, or followed the tech news, or attended conferences. In short, I’d been complacent. When I’d gone freelance, Dad had advised me to put aside 20 percent of my earnings “because you never know when the lean times are coming.” Had I done so? No—but I did have a superb sound system in my apartment.
I mulled over the meeting I’d just had. I tried to see it from a bird’s-eye perspective, and I didn’t like what I saw. There was me, slouching in
the chair, shrinking before the kid, stuttering and stunned. “Oh.” “Um.” “Sure.”
I found myself doing my movie voice-over thing: “Sitting at the bar, Peter wonders what the hell he’s going to do next . . .”
As CEO of Webscoe, I spent a lot of time by myself. Some things just had to be said out loud, and why say them in a normal voice when you can drop a couple of octaves and add movie-trailer gravitas?
“In a world where corporations are stomping all over people’s lives, one man completely fails to stand up to them . . .”
I pulled out my phone and sent a WhatsApp to my old colleague Pauli: Congrats on the new job! Don’t be a stranger. Beers soon, okay?
Pauli and I had joined the company at about the same time. We’d worked together on what were, at the time, some fairly cutting-edge websites (although they’ve since been superseded many times over, and probably look like Windows 3.1 to the modern eye). Pauli was the first person I knew to get an iPhone; we’d spent an entire afternoon downloading apps, and then the whole of the next week emailing each other ideas for new apps. Mine were mostly online versions of retro games, live-streaming music concerts, watching videos—good ideas but things for which 2G service providers lacked the bandwidth. His were more to do with utilizing the phone’s GPS and interlinking it with goods and service providers. Pauli probably invented Uber ten years before Uber did. Which probably explains the different paths our lives had taken.
I guess you could say I was ahead of my time. I talked about watching videos on my phone, but instead of dreaming up YouTube, my solution was more of a VHS and DVD second-hand marketplace, just like my “Spotify” was basically a mix-tape song-list generator rather than a subscription-based content-streaming service. I didn’t dream big enough.
My phone buzzed a couple of minutes later. Thanks, man. Not a new job. They offered me a partnership but I decided to start up on my own. So, super-busy but yes let’s definitely do beers at some point soon.
That gave me some hope. If Pauli was starting his own company, maybe he could help me out with some work.
So I replied: Well if you need any websites built, be sure to get in touch.
Someday Jennifer Page 1