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Design Flaw None of us working at the company saw it coming, but looking back, perhaps I should have. I sat across from him in the Information Technology office, his image usually cut in half by the edge of my computer’s monitor. His slumped figure stared at his screen every day, pounding out code on his keyboard. Tatta-tatta-tatta-plunk-tatta-tatta. Paul was his name, but most of us called him Paulie, and he didn’t mind. Paulie and I chummed around on our breaks, bumming cigarettes from each other when one of us had forgotten our own pack. Neither of us really smoked. Lighting up was just an excuse to get the hell out of the office. Rain or shine, snow or blinding heat, we escaped out the back door a few times every day. He was one of the nicest guys I’d ever met. Kind of a hermit, but that went with the stereotype that he filled so nicely. He liked being a geek. He was proud of it. I really don’t know why we hit it off like we did. Our job descriptions were similar; we worked in the marketing department designing and maintaining our “corporate web presence”. But the chasm between our skill sets was far and wide. We were like two chefs, one who specialized in pork tenderloin and duck a l'orange, and one who flipped burgers for a truck stop diner. In the grand scheme of things, though, we were just two guys who sat in front of a phosphorus tube for forty hours a week in the same office. Forty hours that we were paid for, anyway. Our Director of Marketing, Martin Fenwick, didn’t show up to work one cool fall day—and we never saw him again. It turns out that he had left the country, and taken plenty of travel money with him; two-hundred fifty thousand dollars and some change, to be exact. The story is still sketchy, but what I was told is that he had figured out how one of the other general managers was embezzling money. Marty, always resourceful, had managed to siphon about half of the other manager’s illegal profit away, and by the time the poor schmuck knew it, Marty was on his way to sunny Brazil. He had managed to do this in only four years at the company, his first year as a lowly Sales Manager. Perhaps accounting would have suited him better. That was a month ago, in late August. One month later is when things started to fall apart. The woman that replaced Marty was an angry young executive from British Colombia. No one ever figured out what she was angry about, but there was no doubt that she arrived with a score to settle. She was hell-bent on proving herself, and didn’t care who she ruined in the process. I’ll never forget the first time I met her. It was a Monday morning. She was slated to hold a meeting with the technical and web design department that morning, shortly after the Very Important People Wearing Suits had their weekly morning powwow over croissants and gourmet coffee. It was early still, and I walked into the small kitchenette near my office, almost directly across from hers. I noticed the new gold doorplate etched with her name, Geraldine Matthews. As I started filling the carafe of the little coffee pot that Paul and I shared, I noticed her standing near the back of the little room. “Excuse me”, she said. “Could you come here a minute?” I knew who she was, just from seeing her being paraded through the hallway on the nickel tour, but this was the first time I saw her face to face. She was young, thirty years old at the most. She was wearing a close-fitting red knee-length skirt with a softly shaped jacket that matched. Her white delicate blouse draped her perfect breasts, gently hugged her waist, and tucked neatly into the waistline of her skirt under a thin gold belt. Impressive. I turned off the water and set the carafe on the counter. I stretched out my hand as I walked toward her. “Hi. I’m Josh, in IT.” “Yeah,” she started, ignoring my hand and moving to her right. She pointed downward with one manicured finger. “Hey, I’ve made kind of a mess here. Could you get this cleaned up? Thanks.” And she left. I put my hand back down by my side, and looked at her “mess”. It looked like she had tried to make a three-point shot at the trash can with a wet coffee filter full of old grounds. And she had missed, only managing to bounce it off the wall and the side of the can in the process. I was speechless. I looked back over my shoulder to see if maybe it was a joke. Expecting her to be standing there, smiling, hand outstretched, ready to move into a peaceful employer-employee relationship and live happily ever after. But the doorway was empty, and the only thing left of her was the trailing scent of her perfume. Ladies and gentlemen, Geraldine Matthews has left the building. I let out a little laugh, still incredulous. I grabbed the carafe and walked back to my office where I planned to call housekeeping and report the mess. *** I knew Paul would hardly believe it when I told him, but when I walked into the office, he was hammering away at his keyboard, fingers flying and clicking like miniature tap dancers on speed. “Whoa, man, slow down! The java’s not even brewing!” I said. He just shook his head, and kept typing. He was fuming about something. “What’s going on, Paul?” He never looked away from his screen when he said “That bitch wants a complete re-write of the whole fucking site, and she wants it in three days before the launch.” The “launch” was for our new software, not even through its beta testing, but appearing in a full page ad in The Wall Street Journal and USA Today on Friday. The “site” was our corporate site. We had worked on it for months, and were very pleased with the results. Paul had spent countless weeks perfecting it, and hailed it as his best work. We’d even won an award or two. “That bitch? You mean Geraldine?”, I asked. “I just met her.” “Fucking bitch”, he replied. I noticed for the first time that he was on the verge of tears. I sank in my office chair, and saw a memo placed squarely in the middle of my keyboard. Interoffice Memo To: Technical staff, web design, artists From: Geraldine Matthews, Director of Marketing RE: Realigning corporate strategy--URGENT As you all know, the newest revision of our key product is being announced Friday. I shouldn’t have to stress the importance of our image to any of you. Starting first thing Monday morning, it will be your job to completely revamp our image to the public. We are not children, and we do not manufacture toys. We are a corporation, and it is time we began to present ourselves as one. I expect to see an entire new look across the site before midnight Friday morning. Please have your ideas storyboarded by 11:00am Monday morning for the mandatory staff meeting. I’m looking forward to working with you. GM I felt sick at my stomach. That bitch. *** We didn’t take a smoke break that morning. Nor did we take a lunch break. Our meeting was nothing more than a ridiculous lesson in “Corporate Strategy”. Paul and I both brought storyboards with our ideas, as did some of the guys in the art department, but they were all quickly dismissed. None of use were too surprised when Geraldine handed each of us a thick packet of printouts, neatly bound with a plastic see-through cover. Inside, in glorious color, were her ideas for the site. And we realized that discussion would be futile. Paul leaned back in his chair and turned sideways. His cheeks and eyes were red, and his nostrils quivered. I had never seen him this upset. Later, hours past the end of our normal work day, we took our first smoke break. It was already dark outside. “She can’t do this”, Paul began. “This is totally insane!” “I know.” I had no real reply. “She’s crazy. She’s got everyone in Marketing licking her feet, too. They act like she’s a goddamn deity!” Paul rolled his eyes. “That site is huge. You can’t just say ‘Gee, I don’t like the color, let’s just change the whole fucking thing!’ This kind of thing takes time!” Paul’s hands were shaking. Every trembling drag on his cigarette ended in an exasperated spew of smoke which seemed especially thick in the cold night air. “I can’t do this in four days. There’s no way.” Paul had a habit of taking any project entirely on his own shoulders, and his attitude was nearly justified. He was the backbone of the department. I couldn’t imagine doing this without him. I let the selfish statement slide. “Just who the hell does she think she is, Jeff? Who died and made her Queen Bitch of the Known Universe?” I tried not to laugh, but it was funny. I had been in mid-drag, and now I was choking—half laughing, half-gagging on my own smoke. “I’m serious, man!” he said, but a faint smile had crept onto his lips, too. The heavy back door opened, and a sudden burst of light and warm air overtook us. As if summoned, Geraldine stood in the doorway and looked at both of us. Her eyes settled on Paul. “You’re Paul, right?” Paul had the look of a man about to vomit. “Um, yeah.” “Do you think you could come to my office for a minute?” she said. She wasn’t asking. There was no option here. Paul and I both knew it. “Uh, yeah. Sure. Let me finish my…” “I really need you to come now”, she interrupted, and then opened the door wider for him. Paul glanced at me, then took a quick breath and dropped his cigarette on the concrete sidewalk. He snubbed it out with the toe of his shoe as he walked toward the door. Geraldine let him enter before her. She stared at me as he walked past, then shut the door without another word. *** We worked night and day for four days straight, taking turns at short naps on the couch in the reception area. We lived off of any kind of food that could be delivered. Pizza, deli sandwiches, Chinese, gyros…anything would do. Depending on the time of day there was always a cup of coffee or a some kind of cola at every workstation. Paul and I never left, and never went home. Paul had been right, there was no way we could get that amount of work done in that short time. We cheated, though, and cut out massive sections of the site that had generated the least traffic over the past six months. A little snip here, a link removed there, and we cut our workload by about thirty percent. No one ever missed the crap we took away. We planned on incorporating it back into the site later, but never got the chance. Something had changed in Paul in the midst of this nightmare. It was like he had lost all of his positive outlook on life, and his blossoming career. In one fail swoop, Geraldine had snatched Paul’s happiness. Whatever she had told him in her office that night had sapped him of the glow he once had. He never told me what she had said. But he had looked ashamed, desperate even, after almost an hour had passed that night and her door had finally opened. By Wednesday evening, I was coming close to losing it. Nothing seemed to work like it was supposed to. Every bug that I found and fixed pointed out another bug that had been overlooked. In a moment of sheer frustration, I flung my pencil cup across the room, and enjoyed the sound as it shattered on the marker board, pencils scattering in several directions. Paul whirled around in his seat, first glancing at the doorway, then looking at me. “Cut that shit out, Jeff. You want to get your ass fired?” “Maybe I do. I don’t need this shit, Paul, and I don’t know why you’re taking it yourself. You’re acting just like the ass-kissers that you’ve always ranted about.” Paul looked ruffled, but didn’t reply immediately. It was a harsh thing for me to say, but I was pissed. And Paul, the guy I would have expected to fight this project until the bitter end, had been docile and complacent. This was not the Paul I thought I knew. Finally he spoke. “Just do your job. Don’t make waves. Let’s just get through the week, ok?” He looked at down at his shoes, almost seeming to be ashamed of what he had said. Paul, who perhaps had more right to be righteously angry than any of us, was telling me to play ball. I wondered, then, if this was the crux of his conversation with Geraldine. Had she threatened to fire him if we didn’t get this done? There’s no way she could. This place would be lost without Paul—she had to realize that. But Paul wasn’t the only one that worked here. There were others of us that were considerably more expendable. Hell, I was one of them. And at once I knew. I recalled Geraldine’s cold glances, and how she always avoided me. I never asked him about it, but from then on I could see the unspoken threat confirmed. It was written across his face, and I knew. *** |
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