Company (10 page)

Seventeen floors up, Senior Management begins to stir. It gathers in the boardroom. At first, confusion reigns. Is this something to do with IT being outsourced? Is the new provider not honoring their contract? Who is the new provider, anyway?

No one is quite sure. There is a scandalous lack of documentation, due, one suspects, to lack of initiative on the part of the PAs. But Senior Management knows there's no point in playing the blame game. Its role is to identify solutions, not culprits. Or at least solutions first, then culprits. Gradually it emerges that in the aftermath of last month's blackout, the task of expunging incompetent goons in IT was assigned a higher priority than organizing an appropriate replacement. Zephyr has no IT people.

A snap decision is made: everyone laid off is to be immediately rehired. They are to get the network running again as a matter of urgency. Then, once a proper outsourcing plan is in place, they can be terminated again.

Senior Management relaxes. Crisis over! The order is passed to Human Resources for implementation. But here it strikes a snag. Human Resources' files are all on the network. Without them, it has no idea how to contact the ex-employees. It doesn't even know who they were. The call goes out, echoing plaintively around the building: Does anybody remember who we used to employ in IT? But no one does. Zephyr departments barely mingle at the best of times; those odd, T-shirt-wearing IT employees were actively avoided. There is only one person in the building who could supply the information Senior Management needs: Gretel in reception with her piece of paper. But nobody asks her.

In East Berlin, Holly carefully touches up her nails. She wonders if she could sneak off to the gym for a while; she's not doing anything useful here. She twists around in her seat to see the wall clock, and is surprised to discover that Megan is standing right behind her. Holly sits with her back to Megan, so she never sees her coming.

“Sorry,” Megan says. “Sydney asked if you could summarize the reps' sales reports onto a page for her. She needs it by twelve.”

Holly leans to one side. The wall clock says eleven thirty-five. Holly would bet a lot of money that Sydney has known about this task for several days. To Holly, it seems that Sydney's main job is to transform routine tasks into urgent ones by concealing their existence until the last possible moment. “Okay. Thanks.”

Megan moves off. Holly flicks through the reports. Part of her whines:
Why doesn't Sydney just ask the reps for shorter reports in the first place?
But she firmly represses this. It is the sort of question she would have asked three years ago, when she was as fresh as Jones. Understanding of such things would, she imagined at the time, be accompanied by the gaining of rungs on the corporate ladder and the purchasing of ever-finer shoes and shirts. Today Holly has neither rungs nor comprehension. Instead she's got a permanent frown line, a reputation for being unsociable, and a growing addiction to the gymnasium. She loves the gym's simple, immutable rules: if you run, your butt will tighten. If you lift, your arms will tone. It is so different from her life in Training Sales.

She slogs through the summary and is heading for the
PRINT
button when Jones and Freddy return from their expedition. She sits up. “Well?”

Freddy shakes his head. “Network's out everywhere. So it's just an IT problem, thank God. What are you doing?”

“The usual. Wasting my life.”

Freddy drops into his chair. Jones looks around. “Maybe now's a good time to speak to Sydney.”

“Gahh,” Freddy says. To Holly: “Jones is obsessed with finding out the company's
true purpose.
”

“Oh. I worked that out for you, Jones. It's a big psychological experiment into how much pain and suffering human beings can tolerate before they quit.” She turns to Freddy. “Which reminds me. You know how people have been complaining to management about work-life balance? Well, they've agreed to hold an all-staff meeting about it next Monday. At 7:30
A.M.
”

Freddy starts laughing. He wipes his eyes. “Which would be worse, do you think: that this kind of stuff is deliberate, or they're just clueless?”

Holly shakes her head. “I think maybe Wendell was lucky. Did you hear he got a job at Assiduous?”

Jones jumps. “Who told you that?”

“One of the girls at the gym. Why?”

“Don't you find it the tiniest bit suspicious that everyone who leaves Zephyr seems to join Assiduous?”

“Not
everyone.
”

“Name one person who's left that you still keep in touch with.”

“Um . . .”

“
I
think,” Jones says, “that there's no such company as Assiduous. It's just an excuse. A reason to stop you from getting in touch with anyone who's left.”

Holly looks startled. “Why would they do that?”

“Because,” Freddy says, his voice dropping,
“they haven't really left at all.”
He laughs.

“I don't know why. But I'm right, I bet I am.”

Freddy says, “
I
bet that if you keep poking around, you'll get fired.” To Holly, he says, “One day Jones just won't turn up, and they'll tell us he's left . . . for Assiduous.”

“Don't,” Holly says. “You're giving me goose bumps.”

“I'm so sorry,” Penny says, dumping herself into a chair. Penny is Jones's sister. She slides her black leather bag under the table, pushes her sunglasses onto her forehead, places both hands palm-down on the table, and exhales dramatically. “Court ran until one fifteen. It's unheard of, but the witness was crying, it's a sexual assault . . . if George hadn't cut her off, she might never have gotten it out.” She looks around for a waiter. “Have you ordered?”

Penny clerks for a judge in the family court. She is always coming out with little stories like this, which make Jones feel small and pointless. It is not easy, being the younger brother of a rising star. “Yeah. I got you the usual.”

She smiles. Since she started clerking, Penny has taken to wearing snappy jackets and shirts with big, sharp collars. This always looks to Jones like she has been playing dress- up in Mommy's closet. “Wow, it feels like I haven't seen you for a year. How's the new job?”

“It's good. I mean, it's great. I'm starting on the ground floor, but it's a big company, so there's a ton of potential.”

“Yeah? Which industry?” She begins to tug shiny black hair out of a ponytail.

“Well . . . it's a holding company.”

“What does it hold?”

Jones looks around the café. “Ah, you know . . . various stakeholdings. It's a diversified portfolio.”

“Why don't you want to tell me? What is it? Porn?”

“No! It's not porn.” Penny stares at him until he cracks, a tactic that has worked since he was nine. “Look, the thing is, I don't really know. I thought it was selling training packages, but that's just my department. The company as a whole . . . I'm not actually sure.”

“Wow,” Penny says eventually.

The waiter arrives with their coffees. “I know. I know. I'm going to find out, it's just . . . it's a big company. They do things differently there.”

“What do you do?”

Jones hesitates. “See, last week the network went down, and without that there's not much you can do. So we . . . well, until they fix that, we're mostly just . . . talking.”

“What company is this again?”

“Zephyr.”

“I haven't heard of it.”

“It's very big, in . . .”

“In whatever field it's in.”

“Right.”

“Stephen,” Penny says, “you realize this is nuts.”

“Is it?” he says anxiously. “Because it's hard to tell. Nobody at Zephyr seems to think anything's unusual.”

“No. Trust me. You don't know what the company does. That's unusual.”

“Well,” Jones says, sitting back, “this isn't the court system. This is the real world.” A certain amount of relish leaks into his voice. When he was a student and Penny was new at her job, she breezily dropped phrases like “real world” at family dinners. “Maybe this is how big business works.”

Penny doesn't say anything for a moment. Then she picks up her coffee. “Sure. Okay, yeah, that could be it.”

Jones sighs. “I have to find out what's going on.”

“I think that would be good,” Penny says.

In the lower levels of Zephyr Holdings things scuttle and crawl, like Corporate Supplies employees. In many ways Corporate Supplies is a zoo: its staff spend all day shoveling materials they barely recognize into animals they don't understand, and when they're done, the animals want more. Corporate Supplies considers itself something of an engine room at Zephyr Holdings, and from time to time its employees dream about what would happen if they simply closed their doors and deprived Zephyr of embossed letterhead, Post-it notes, and bottled water: the company would collapse, that's what. In the glory days, Corporate Supplies spanned three floors and had its own elevator; old-timers occasionally put their feet on their desks and bend the ears of interns about it. To hear them tell it, requests for materials by other departments were once just that, requests, and Corporate Supplies acquiesced if and when Corporate Supplies was good and ready. They made things to last in those days; if you ordered a pen, the ink would last for eight years. And graduates had more respect; they knew their fancy book learning wasn't worth spit on the floor. They were golden days, all right, before ugly words like “cutback” and “rationalization” and “reorganization” were invented. Now Corporate Supplies is half of one measly floor. There are a quarter as many people doing four times as much work. When a department orders something
—orders—
it wants it delivered that day and gets aggrieved if it's not. And they don't even call anymore, so Corporate Supplies can't suggest alternatives or advise of delays; instead their requests (“5 ¥ box blue pens ballpoint, need bfore 10
A.M.
”
)
just pop up on Corporate Supplies computers via the network.

That is, they did. Since the network went down, the phones have begun to ring again. Things have changed, Corporate Supplies is realizing. They are still a twelve-person department with a laughable budget, but it may just be that the glory days are here again.

Throughout the building, Zephyr Holdings is slowly getting back to full operating speed. Not because the network has been fixed; oh no. The east wing of level 19 remains a barren wasteland. No server lives there. No hub can flourish in 19's harsh, inhospitable conditions. Dry, gasping network cables search for data they will never find. IT is dark and dead and will not recover.

But there is work to be done, network or no network. Two weeks ago the network went down; soon after Senior Management assured the company it would have the problem fixed within a few days; now everyone is realizing it is never going to happen. Work-arounds are springing up everywhere you look, like new grass after rain. In the absence of e-mail, employees are discovering the art of speaking into phones. They are realizing that discussions that previously required three days and six e-mails can, with phones, be settled in minutes. Spam and computer viruses, both of which IT claimed were unsolvable problems, have vanished. The plague of e-mail jokes, funny at first and then not, has been eliminated. The pressure to forward chain letters under threat of personal catastrophe has lifted. In-boxes no longer fill with desperate sales pitches from co-workers trying to shift their cars, or kittens.