“Can you spare the time to go, Shelley?” Brad asked.
“We have no choice. We have to get to the bottom of this before anything else comes out. And it’ll show Powerplex how committed we are to a solution.” I admire commitment hugely. In point of fact, though, I am not sure commitment by itself shows much; it depends what you commit to. Conch’s earliest employees, who have basically created entire jobs out of retelling stories of their first months at the company, don’t understand this. The fervent loyalists think their stories have intrinsic value; they overlook that the value of their past is indexed to the level of our present and future success. But me going to Malaysia would reassure Phil about how seriously we were taking the Clitch.
Brad nodded.
“I’ll make arrangements. If I leave tomorrow, let’s see, Wednesday, and I go through Hong Kong, I can be wheels-down on Friday.” I hesitated. I thought of the ice cream outing, the Creamery, whatever it was I had committed to. “Or I could leave tonight.” We could reschedule. There were other nights. I knew this to be true but felt internal friction over telling Rafe. Sometimes that’s a clue you’re leaving some factors out of your analysis. He’d be annoyed. Would Nova be upset? It was hard to know.
“That seems smart,” Michelle said, looking beadily at me.
So it wouldn’t be a quiet night with family. Was it ever really going to be? There was a flight around 10:00 p.m. I did my mental packing, in which, Claymation style, I envision certain neutral suiting basics inchworming their way into my spinny suitcase, the belts coiling, the socks rolling like hedgehogs. A blouse slipping itself off a hanger. And then I text the maid and she puts the stuff in.
Michelle glanced back at the house and I felt a stab of uncertainty about leaving. How many more nights did I have here before Rafe and the kids moved? Quick jump cut in the mind to upstairs: the children, so vulnerable and fleshy, with their soft wrinkly fingers fresh from the bath, smelling of their calming calendula baby shampoo. I glanced at Michelle—could I trust her here? I remembered the orange striped balcony of the apartment at Enrique’s and the nausea that memory brought up; I didn’t even want to remember. I thought of Rafe and the kids with Michelle and imagined the four of them eating ice cream and strolling around Stanford.
“I do think it’s best,” Brad said.
“I agree,” I said, privately thinking, two days to get there, the rest of the week shot, and I’m doubtful it’s a supplier issue. But I couldn’t not go.
Brad knew that if more accounts of Conch failure hit the press, investors and consumers would become leery of our company, and most pertinently in the short term, the Powerplex deal wouldn’t go through. Worse, it could destroy Conch’s reputation in the consumer market. And mine. My reputation hung in the balance too. It wouldn’t be an atmospheric, prologue-y failure like Cullen and Irwin’s first company in middle school. It would be news, probably not at the television evening news level, but definitely worth a couple of pieces in Forbes (cue the alarming infographics), zillions of blog posts from people who had never even run their own lemonade stands, and maybe even a couple of New York Times op-eds (“Why Stone’s Failure at Conch Is Not a Gender Issue”). The Journal would cover it. The Gaggenau (“It’s a nice refrigerator but I wish you had gotten the other one” —Jacqui) would go to auction and Johnny-come-latelys building megamansions in the exurbs past San Jose would bid on our kitchen appliances. I’d have to take Rafe up on moving.
All of this shouldn’t scare me, of course. Fear is no reason not to do something. If there’s one axiom the Valley has adopted unanimously, it’s that failure is an excellent thing, a sign that you’re trying.
I know that I have to retrain myself not to be averse to failure, instead to reprogram myself to like it, welcome it, embrace it—I know this, I have fucking made a brand out of it—but the reality of what it’s like to really fail, when your own job is at risk, when three hundred Conch employees’ jobs are likewise on the line (so many mortgages and college tuitions and water bills, all balanced on my shoulders), and by fail I don’t simply mean to have a marketing campaign go bust or make a bad acquisition or hire a polarizing COO, paralyzed me. It’s not fear, like Greer insists: it’s just that I didn’t want it to happen. Was that so wrong? All this striving to fail—bigger and better—strikes me now as the most preposterous bullshit, propagated by people who have gone on to achieve mammoth success and are only ready to reminisce in extravagant retroview. There were only a couple of days to fix things with Conch, and time was running out.
I had no choice but to go. What could I do? Conch needed me to.
Part 4
PENANG, MALAYSIA
Chapter 18
I don’t meditate as much as I should, but there’s peace to planes: the endless immediacy of being in the air, the surrender to a seat belt and somebody else’s timetable. Meditation is one of the topics I plan to study when I have more time, along with ancient Sumerian literature and what is gained by spiralizing vegetables.
I chatted with the man in the seat next to me and gave him a sneak peek of the SportConch prototype I’d brought along in my carry-on. He was impressed by its energy-harvesting technology, and I convinced him to buy a regular Conch now and upgrade to SportConch when it’s released. I don’t have hard and fast rules about speaking with seatmates. You have to be flexible and take the gifts the world offers. I’ve hand-sold a lot of product by not being afraid to get conversational.
The downside of flying is the sinus pain. When the plane started to descend, it was as if someone were holding me up by icy-hot rods plunged deep into my ears. Like twin drills going in, one from each side, or electric icicles. The pain eclipsed everything else. While other people put away their laptops, wiped away drool, or watched the clouds part and Malaysia tilt below us, I leaned forward, pressed my temples, and visualized sinking into a warm bath, discomfort floating away in the form of iridescent soap bubbles. The man next to me looked concerned. When the plane hit the runway, a smattering of people in the back clapped. The agony subsided, replaced by a stuffy fullness that padded reality like a European-hotel duvet and gave me a regal detachedness as I gathered my bag and strode down the concourse.
The airport in Penang was glossy and modern. More orange and umlauts than the San Francisco airport, but the same incongruous Hyundai SUV parked in the middle of the food court, near the McDonald’s and the Starbucks.
“Weather alert,” my Conch said. “Rain and thunderstorms expected later. Remember your umbrella!” Swollen gray clouds hung low in the sky. My Conch buzzed with pent-up alerts, and I dismissed them all. It’s Friday, I thought, the day I’ve been dreading, and tomorrow is my birthday, and I will be forty. Outside, the air was warm, humid, and smelled of unfamiliar fruit.
I found my driver and we lurched onto the highway. I felt as if I could fall through the floor of the car. Keep hold of the reins, I said to myself. I’m not sure where it came from, maybe a dream on the plane in which I was on a horse in a forest, riding too fast.
We drove straight to the factory, along a wide and freshly asphalted highway. We passed billboards in English, Malay, and Chinese, for phones, TV shows, “miracle berries,” and some product represented by young people piggybacking each other. A bright red potato chip truck whizzed by, painted with pictures of unfamiliar yet indisputably snackable curls and twists. Skyscrapers poked above the trees. Cranes swung overhead, putting the skyline together piece by piece.
My ears were sealed fortresses. I tried to clear my nose, and there was a sound that started in my brain and sizzled outward, blotting out everything except its own sound. I like this feeling, even though it’s a horrible noise, even though my ENT suggests antihistamines and can’t I not fly when there’s fluid in my ears, don’t I realize it’s not advisable? When I turned my head it sounded like crackling in a pan, like static searching for a channel, like an emergency alert on the radio, like something inside me coming into tune.
We turned off the highway. Th
e skyscrapers fell out of view. All around were reminders of how it used to be, how a lot of it still was: a narrow palmy road, fronds obscuring the low painted cottages. Corrugated tin roofs with yellow pollen filling the channels. Plant pots lined up along a rusty metal fence.
Some bumps, an annoyed cry from the driver, and we turned again. Our surroundings became more industrial, grimier, and smokier, the sooty buildings matching the gray sky. We passed factories making car parts, chips, and semiconductors. One final turn, and at last we bumped through a gate into the walled parking lot of the factory. Birthplace of 4.5 million Conches and counting.
* * *
—
Mr. Tengku smiled. I smiled and inclined my head slightly, splitting the difference between a nod and a bow. We did not shake hands. That was not the custom here.
“I trust you traveled well?” he asked, politely. He invited me to sit in his office, which had one small window, and a fluorescent light overhead. It was like a shed within the big shed of the factory. He asked about my children, and I asked about his. We talked for a moment about children in general: how small they are, how resistant to our ideas. He had recently gotten, he said, a new toy for the children, for the garden. He raised and lowered his hands in opposite directions. For them to go up and down.
“A seesaw!” I said. “We have one of those too.”
“Yes.”
“What do you call that here?” I asked.
“A seesaw,” he said, smiling.
“Ah,” I said.
I held myself back from being bold, direct, or moving the conversation along; that’s not the custom either. My patience level, had it been quantified, dropped to single digits. Finally, he opened a cabinet and drew out some noise-canceling headphones.
“Shall we?” he said, and I felt a flutter of excitement, as if he were asking me to dance. But it was even more exciting, because he was gesturing me through the door at the other side of his office, the one that led onto the factory floor. I put on the headphones and led the way out.
In the huge gray space, robots roared at each other. Zillions of Conches immobilized in purpose-built trays swished along on conveyor belts, up ramps and around quick turns, like dead people in very quick-moving hearses. Stripped of their housings, the pattern of circuitry made the Conches look like they were smiling. I felt dizzy with pride, or possibly jet lag plus hunger.
“So good to see you again, Mr. Tengku,” I said loudly, over the roar, and with such earnestness that he blushed. We strolled through the factory, taking in the trays and trays of Conches in various stages of completion. The heart of the Conch is a flexible printed circuit board with capacitors embedded in it, made using a plastic substrate and photolithographic technology. The Conch housings are manufactured separately. Then the two components are joined. One at a time, a factory worker sets them in a custom ultrasonic welding machine and fuses them together.
The factory floor was cavernous and dim, smelling of oil and fresh plastic parts. Heat radiated from the motors of the machines. At one end of the space a robotic arm trundled back and forth, trailing lassos and bundles of wire: red, blue, green, yellow, and black. A narrow table held an open laptop, and a full glass of water. A man leaned over the computer and tapped a key.
Besides him, the room was full of thin, young-looking workers—mostly women. Or, now that I looked more closely, all women. They wore blue medical scrub pants and smocks. They were standing at long tables assembling Conches. Their hands flew, pulling components from bins at the center of each table and fitting them together. Almost all the workers had long straight hair pulled back with scrunchies—the color variation among the scrunchies being, at first glance, their starkest differentiator. It was hard to focus on any one person—there was so much noise and motion. They kept their eyes down on the worktables as I walked past. I tried to emanate friendly approachability, while knowing that none of them would approach me.
“They are good akers,” Mr. Tengku said. “Very good, this group.”
“And the staff turnover? How is it?” I wondered, and was surprised to find myself wondering, if the employees got enough to eat. Mr. Tengku noticed my eyes lingering.
“We have an attractive remuneration package for the akers,” Mr. Tengku told me, gesturing toward the workers.
“What does that mean, in dollars?”
“It’s quite competitive.”
“With the other factories around here, you mean?”
He nodded. There was something so uncomfortable about talking about this in front of the workers, watching how regimented they were, thinking about how many hours a day they stood at these tables. I might be able to do their jobs. I was able to work beyond other people’s outermost limits. But surely it was not good for most people to do the same tasks, over and over, or stand so long. Surely some of them would prefer a different sort of work.
I had been here before. On a previous visit, I had toured the factory, examined new prototypes, and drunk small cups of tea with Mr. Tengku in his office while congratulating him on his efficient fulfillment of our orders. I had walked the factory floor and inspected the machines, but I was spellbound by seeing the manufacturing process up close, and I’d given only cursory attention to the workers. I’d thought about how much they were paid collectively, relative to how much their equivalents would cost in the United States, and the business case for manufacturing in a country with so much cheap migrant labor. I hadn’t thought about what it was like to be them.
There was a woman at the end of the row, with her hair pulled back into a stubby ponytail. She was watching me, with an expression that reminded me of Melissa’s, at times: as though she knows more than I do.
“How are you?” I asked her, and I had to ask again, too loudly, before she seemed to hear me.
“She doesn’t understand you,” Mr. Tengku said. “She doesn’t speak any English.”
The woman next to her, who had a young, expressive face, looked surprised by this, and it occurred to me that it might not be true.
“Can you ask her how she is?” I said. Mr. Tengku signaled to the man who patrolled the edge of the factory floor and occasionally typed away at the laptop. He seemed to be some kind of supervisor, with keys on his belt. He stalked over, there was some back-and-forth, and finally she said something rapidly and turned back to her work.
“She is saying she likes to work here,” Mr. Tengku told me, and though I felt certain that this was not what she had said, or not exactly in such utilitarian terms, I smiled and nodded with great enthusiasm.
“It’s so nice to meet you,” I said. I introduced myself.
This time he did not bother to translate. “She does excellent work.”
“How long has she been working here?” I asked him.
There was another exchange between Mr. Tengku and the foreman. “Five years,” Mr. Tengku announced proudly.
“That’s wonderful,” I said. “Good for you, retaining talented staff. Will she be promoted to a supervisory position soon?” I gestured to the table with the laptop to make myself clear.
Mr. Tengku laughed.
“Why not?” I said. “Has she not developed all the necessary skills yet?”
There was an air of expectancy hanging over the room, as if all the workers who were not watching me were concentrating very hard on something that was not the innards of Conches. A girl—I hope she was a woman, not a girl—at the next workstation sorted wires into tiny bundles, but she kept turning her head toward us as if she were listening. I noticed the thin gold chain she wore around her neck.
Mr. Tengku said something to the supervisor, who looked surprised. Mr. Tengku turned to me and inclined his head. “Women are so qualified to assemble Conches,” he said kindly. “They do it so perfectly, with such patient, nimble fingers.”
“Do you ever hire men?”
“Only as the manager,” he said, smiling.
I felt many pairs of eyes on me. I paused, deciding whether to say someth
ing. But I needed his help, so I breathed in deeply, nodded, and we moved on.
It was uncomfortably loud, even with headphones on; not that the women were wearing any. A robotic arm scooted along a track and then swooped down to place a bit in exactly the right spot. The arm weaved and dipped and, every time it picked up a piece, detonated small flashes of blinding orange light and a sprinkle of sparks. I recognized it instantly.
“The surface-mount technology component placement system,” I said happily. It assembles the sleek, paper-thin printed circuit boards.
“Yes,” Mr. Tengku said, pleased. We shared pride over it. He patted its blue-gray metal strut. We stood together watching it work, pleasantly hypnotized by the seductive, subsuming rhythm of it.
Steel everywhere, and the sound of precision machinery cutting metal and spraying water. The machinery was the best in the world and imported from Italy, where they make great machinery, but all the digital components inside were from Japan. Metal, blades, wires, water—it was complicated, overwhelming, really, if you spent too much time thinking about it. Lots could, and perhaps was, going wrong. Hence the famous old adage, which everyone in industry knows too well: manufacturing is a bitch.
The conditions in the factory, they weren’t great, I didn’t delude myself. Our contract specified certain provisions, but it was hard to say if they were carried out. And the workers, the women in blue smocks, looking intent or tired or bored or avoiding my gaze, weren’t my employees. Our relationship was deeply dependent, closely intertwined, of course, the way working relationships often were, but it was contractual; this wasn’t Conch. These employees made Conches, but they worked for Mr. Tengku. To be even more technical about it, they’d been hired not by Mr. Tengku, but by an agency with which he contracted, which brought workers here from Nepal, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and other places. My company was a proxy employer. It wasn’t up to Conch where they lived or what they were paid. It was important to remind myself of that. I twiddled part of my cheek between my teeth, biting in the reminder.
The Glitch_A Novel Page 29