by Dorsey, Tim
“This is disgusting!” said Sharon.
“Wake up! Both of you!” yelled Serge.
“What? What is it?” said Coleman, slowly coming around. Rasputin awoke and hit his head on the underside of the table. He crawled out, staggered into a footstool and fell down.
“That dog has bloodshot eyes!” said Serge. He studied the mess on the floor. “You gave him Chee-tos?”
“It’s what he wanted.”
“No wonder he threw up. You, I expect it from…. What’s this?”
“A lava lamp.”
“I know it’s a lava lamp. What’s it doing on the floor?”
“So he could look at it. He got hung up on it for about an hour.”
“What else did you do?” asked Serge.
Coleman look embarrassed.
“Come on,” said Serge. “Out with it.”
Coleman told them.
“Oh! Jesus!” Sharon exclaimed. “That’s the most perverted thing I ever heard.”
Coleman became defensive. “I used a glove.”
“But why?” said Serge. “Why on earth would you do such a repulsive thing in the first place?”
Coleman shrugged. “It was his birthday.”
17
THE CONSOLIDATED BANK BUILDING, where John Milton worked, had a row of thirty-eight glassed-in office suites running along the south wall of the first floor. Thirty-eight vice presidents.
Lights were on in all the suites except the last one, where the blinds were drawn.
There was a space between two of the blinds in the darkened suite, as if someone were peeking out, spying.
The man inside spying was Pierre Principal. He kept an eye on the sea of desks in the middle of the floor, where the account managers and phone reps worked. He watched Ambrose Tarrington III stroll across the lobby and, moments later, the E-Team rush out after him. He saw John Milton set the NEXT WINDOW PLEASE sign in his teller window and head off for lunch.
Just as John was about to walk out the front door, he got a creepy sensation. He stopped and turned around and saw the space between the two blinds on the other side of the bank. Suddenly, the blinds snapped shut.
Inside the dim executive suite, Pierre stepped back from the window. He walked around his desk and sat down, perfectly still, perspiring palms flat on top of the leather blotter. He glanced at the wall clock, ticking. The office was immaculate and well appointed, with a framed inspirational poster of a rowing crew from Yale over a big word: TEAMWORK.
Pierre Principal was the master of middle management, but at the vice presidential level the air was too thin. Pierre never wanted to be a vice president. He knew better. Vice president was one promotion too many. There was absolutely nothing to do. Literally. That’s how they got you. Even if you wanted to work, you couldn’t. And you lived in constant fear of being found out.
Pierre was tall, thin, defensive and bald on top with black sidewalls. Everyone said he looked like that annoying partner on L.A. Law. He had survived until now by staying below the company radar. He aggressively avoided any promotion into the ranks of corporate officers that always got purged with each change of administration.
So far, there had been seven administrations in Pierre’s tenure, and he had gotten along famously with every one. It was his talent, his gift. More competent employees toiled for years at lower pay and station. Pierre owed his success to a single uncanny, involuntary trait. He was a human mirror. Minutes after meeting a new superior, Pierre had picked up voice inflection, figures of speech, physical mannerisms. He didn’t even know he was doing it. When the bosses went out and drank too much, he drank too much. When they laughed, he laughed. On the golf course, he cursed with the best of them. When the bank had a Baptist president, Pierre felt the Pentacostal fire in his belly. When it hired a Jewish president, Pierre curiously found himself politically militant about the partitioning of Jerusalem. When a group of southerners took over the company, Pierre began eating fried okra with a paper napkin in his collar, putting on a tremendous amount of weight, developing a drawl and answering to “Buford.” When an energetic group of New Yorkers supplanted the southerners, Pierre shed the weight, took taxis, talked fast and started spending weekends upstate. His superiors couldn’t quite put their finger on it—they just knew they really liked this Pierre guy.
Then, disaster.
While on vacation, Pierre received an instant promotion when a long-term vice president was fired on the spot for eliminating hidden checking fees based on reckless notions of reason and fairness.
Pierre came back from Vegas to suddenly find himself near the top of the organizational chart, which wasn’t the traditional pyramid but more closely resembled an hourglass. The bottom half contained the people who did all the labor and supported the top half of the hourglass, which encompassed innumerable positions of management so important and irrelevant that their work only existed in theory. The purpose of the top half of the hourglass was to eliminate jobs in the bottom half.
Pierre spent the first three days of his vice presidency in a dark office carefully assembling an anxiety attack. On the fourth day, a breakthrough. Pierre was exploring his desk drawers, taking Xanax and bending paper clips when he found a memo pad. He looked around suspiciously, then bent over and began writing. He sat back and looked it over. Professional, high-syllable count, multiple qualifiers, no point. It was more than perfect. It was safe. Pierre set the memo gently in his virgin out tray, grabbed his coat and left for the day.
The next morning, Pierre arrived at work to find the out basket empty and eight memos in his in basket. All eight replies were impressively ambiguous on multiple levels. Pierre was encouraged. He wrote another memo, this time in quadruplicate—white, blue, yellow and pink—and left for lunch.
When he got back, thirty-two memos filled his in basket.
Pierre quickly whipped off another memo, directing that he be placed on all memo lists.
The next morning, sixty-four memos bulged from his in basket, plus the pink copy of his original memo that was routed back to him per his instruction to be placed on all memo lists.
It was a new dawn. He turned on the lights, opened his blinds, and gazed out across the floor with a deep, confident breath. He noticed something on the far side of the office. Three construction workers with tool belts, wiring outlets. Pierre scurried back to his desk and scribbled a new memo, this one with a diagram and list of materials. He dropped the memo in his out basket.
The next day, Pierre watched through his window with a mixture of pride and fear as a new wall went up, sectioning off the back third of the office. Pierre decided he had finally gone too far. He dashed off another memo.
The following day, Pierre watched in awe as the wall came down.
So began Consolidated Bank’s new building phase of relentless office construction and deconstruction. Studs and Sheetrock went up and down, completely new rooms mushrooming and vanishing overnight. Pierre liked what he saw. He decided that change was good, and change there would be. More walls shot from the earth with tectonic abruptness. People who sat next to each other in order to communicate found themselves sitting in the exact same spots, but suddenly in different rooms. At one point, three walls went up in successive days, forming a U around the phone representatives. On the fourth day, a doorless final partition went up, sealing off the work area. Employees showed up and had to be sent home. Management began looking for a scapegoat. It looked bad for Pierre.
He countered by authoring an all-eyes memo alerting the bank to an urgent work-space shortage that was unforeseen but now upon them with a vengeance, and he was roundly praised as the only vice president with any vision.
Since Pierre had so much experience with construction, the board placed him in charge of the much-needed office expansion, which resulted in the erection of the enormous new state-of-the-art Consolidated Bank Building that won civic awards and got Pierre’s picture in the paper with a hard hat and gold shovel. Pierre’s crowning touch:
a magnificent domed atrium atop the bank that would become a downtown landmark and the logo for the bank’s new stationery.
The bank’s entire staff, from mail clerk to chairman of the board, was uniformly dazzled when they moved across town and walked into the new building. The president gave Pierre a stout raise and broke precedent by assigning work to a vice president. He put Pierre in charge of staff development, hoping he would do the same for personnel as he had for facilities.
Pierre wouldn’t disappoint.
He proceeded under the maxim that if change was good, chaos was sublime. He decided that all employees needed to be cross-trained and reassigned to positions as removed as possible from their talents and goals. He argued it would invigorate the ranks and make the company more nimble in the equation.
The board of directors loved it. They wanted more.
Pierre gave them more.
The meetings started. Training meetings, retraining meetings, management seminars, company-direction symposiums, insensitive sensitivity sessions, and forums seeking feedback on meetings. There were questionnaires, psychological tests, self-evaluations. Pierre was able to achieve all this without slacking off on the memos. And soon, the walls started going up and down again in the new building.
It hit a crescendo. The bank had never been so busy. It became an industrious hive of perpetual construction and demolition and hundreds of people crisscrossing the building on their way to a full day of meetings, reading memos, filling out surveys, not looking where they were going, walking into walls that weren’t there the day before. Everyone was so busy, they didn’t have time for any work.
And right when it was all at its feverish apex, Pierre stood in the center of the atrium with his hands on his hips, smiling proudly as two workers on ladders unfurled a giant banner over the entrance to the east wing. Everyone stopped and read the mission statement.
TO COMPLETELY FACILITATE THE NEW PARADIGM OF CUSTOMER-FOCUSED DYNAMICS, EMPLOYEE-GROWTH SYNERGY, SHAREHOLDER-EXPECTATION MODELS AND COMMUNITY-BASED LINKAGE FOR THE MAXIMUM BENEFIT OF MULTIDISCIPLINARY OBJECTIVES. BECAUSE WE HAVE BABIES, TOO.
18
JOHN MILTON was underpaid but secure. Some people need security. John was one of them. Routine made him feel snug, and if he never did anything but work as a teller, he’d be a happy man.
Then a memo went forth, and everyone was reassigned. John ended up a computer-assisted telephone account representative. John said he wanted to stay a clerk. The bank put a gun to his back. John donned a headset and took a seat in the vast matrix of telephone reps stationed on the ground floor, beneath the sparkling dome of the new Consolidated Bank Building.
They told John that because the job was computer-assisted, it would involve computers. John told them he didn’t understand computers, that he was a dinosaur. They told him to evolve. They gave him till Tuesday.
John did his best. His phone manners never wavered when his CPU froze up or zapped all the data off his screen. The bank had a roving computer technician who wandered the aisles of phone reps, responding to questions.
“Please bear with me,” John told a caller, hand raised for the computer tech.
“It’s stuck,” he told the technician.
“Hit control, alt, delete,” said the tech, moving on.
“What?”
A few minutes later, John caught the technician’s attention as he came back the other way.
“It’s still stuck.”
“Do a cold boot.”
“What?”
Large sums of money began moving between unrelated accounts. The bank finally took notice when a hundred thousand dollars turned up in the file for the solitaire game that came preinstalled on John’s computer.
They called him in. They said he was costing them a lot of money.
“I’d like to be a teller again, please.”
They said he was too valuable.
They sent John back to his computer.
The dome high above John’s desk could be seen from all over the city. It had cost a ransom, but it paid off by increasing the bank’s name recognition, which remained a priority because the name changed every six months. In planning the dome, Consolidated—formerly United—would settle for nothing but the best. They hired the people who did the Hubble telescope. They did their job well. Too well. The glass was ground and polished to such a fine tolerance that between 11:45 A.M. and 12:15 P.M. each day the dome acted like a giant magnifying glass, and a concentrated beam of Florida sunlight slowly moved across the ground floor of Consolidated Bank like a cutting torch.
Employees in the penumbra of the beam could continue working with pith helmets and welder’s goggles, but those in the direct path had to move. A scorched strip of carpeting was removed and a flame trench installed.
John Milton stood back from his desk as the computer technician permanently removed the solitaire game from his PC. Then John sat back down and answered the phone. He was helping a retiree balance her checkbook when his system locked up again.
“My computer’s frozen.”
The elderly woman didn’t understand computers and expressed concern that something bad had just happened to her money.
“It’s just computers. Don’t worry,” said John, who had just wired the woman’s life savings to Mongolia.
The system remained on the fritz, and the retiree became more desperate. When it still hadn’t responded after another ten minutes, the phone call turned into a crisis-line intervention.
“Oh, my God! That’s all the money I have! I don’t want to eat cat food again!”
“Easy,” said John. “I’m here with you. I’m not going anywhere…”
“John!” someone yelled.
“Just a second,” said John.
“John!”
“Be with you in a minute.”
“Watch out!”
The beam of sunlight hit John.
Colleagues ran to him and called 911. An elementary class on a field trip was quickly hustled out of the atrium.
DESPITE PIERRE’S BEST efforts to the contrary, Consolidated Bank was able to keep humming along for about a month due to the sheer grit and pride of its workforce. Then the wheels started coming off. Productivity went into a free fall, and human errors were up a thousand percent. There was better morale in Hitler’s bunker. Pierre walked into the atrium after lunch on a Friday and flew into a rage. “Who did that?” he yelled, pointing up at the wall and the large decal of Calvin and Hobbes peeing on the mission statement.
The board of directors decided enough was enough. They called Pierre in. It looked grim. The chairman laid out Pierre’s blunder trail in exhaustive detail. But a curious thing happened. It slowly began to turn. The chairman crossed his leg. Pierre crossed his. A board member poured a glass of ice water from a carafe. Pierre poured his own.
“We need to think outside the box,” said the chairman.
“Less is more,” said Pierre.
Before they knew it, the board was wondering how they ever could have thought someone like Pierre was at fault. It would almost be like blaming themselves. But who, then, was responsible? Pierre said it was the workforce. They nodded. Of course. There was only one thing to do.
CONSOLIDATED BANK HIRED Damocles Consulting, and Jim Davenport was dispatched to the atrium in downtown Tampa. It was as impressive as he had heard.
Just after eleven o’clock, Jim was observing the phone reps and taking notes. Then something unusual started to happen. The employees began putting on dark visors and pith helmets. Was this some kind of sick joke? Were they making fun of him?
The room grew brighter until Jim had to shield his eyes. An employee ran up to him. He fell to the ground and clutched Jim’s ankles. “You’re the consultant, right? You have to make ’em do something about the dome! They won’t listen to us! Someone’s gonna end up dead!”
Three men in black suits and mirrored sunglasses grabbed the employee and dragged him off through a secret door that opened in th
e wall, then the door closed and more men in dark suits slid a divan and potted trees in front of it.
THE FOLLOWING MONDAY at Damocles Consulting, Mr. Young summoned Jim Davenport to his office.
“Have a seat, Jim,” said Mr. Young, leaning back in his leather chair, flipping through Jim’s latest report. “Apparently I didn’t make myself clear during our last meeting. I’m particularly troubled by this section here called ‘The Beam of Death.’ ”
Jim opened his mouth, but Mr. Young cut him off.
“Jim, we’ve decided to let Bill rewrite this report. We’ll leave your name on it, of course. You’ll still get credit. We want to do what’s fair.”
Jim paused to consider his response. He didn’t know it at the time, but many years had led up to what he would say next.
“I don’t think I want that report rewritten.”
IT WAS JOHN Milton’s first day back at work after the light-refraction incident. They had gotten him to the hospital in time, and there would be no permanent injury, just a temporary reverse Mohawk covered with an Ace bandage.
John didn’t care. It was good to be back at work. He arrived early and was spraying his computer screen with Windex when they sent for him.
John timidly entered the personnel office and gave his name to the receptionist. She pointed at a conference room with an open door. “Right in there.”
Pierre was already inside, reading a report. John smiled and sat down, but Pierre’s face showed distress.
John became uneasy. “What’s this about?”
Pierre handed John the report without speaking. It was from Damocles Consulting, and it recommended sweeping layoffs.
“We have to let you go, John.”
“I’m fired?”
“Oh, absolutely not!” said Pierre. “You just can’t work here anymore.”
John began stammering. “I’ll work harder. I’ll change. I’ll, I’ll—”
Pierre sadly shook his head. “If it was up to me, I’d keep you on. You know I would. But we have no choice. It’s those consultants. They’re making us do it, the bastards!”