Company (7 page)

“It's all about efficiently allocating costs,” Freddy says. “Or something.”

“But I thought Zephyr was a training company. I thought that's what we did. What do we do, then?”

Holly says, “You mean, like, overall?”

“Yes!”

She shrugs. Jones stares. She crosses her arms defensively. “I know what our department does. But Zephyr's a big company.”

Jones looks at Freddy. “Don't ask me. The company does a lot of things, Jones.”

“Which of them involves selling things to people who don't work in this building?”

Freddy scratches his chin. Holly says, “I'm sure there's
something
.”

Jones feels faint. He is realizing that he took a job at a company without knowing what it does.

Freddy says, “I know who our main competitor is, if that helps. Assiduous. Assiduous is always hiring our ex-employees.”

Holly lets out a short, disgusted snort. “Traitors.”

Jones has never heard of Assiduous. “What does it do?”

Holly and Freddy look at each other.

“Oh, come on.”

“Well, you can't go around asking questions about Assiduous,” Freddy says. “How would that look? Besides, when someone joins Assiduous, they're the enemy. You can't call them up and ask how they're doing. You have to protect company secrets.”

“What secrets? You guys don't know anything!”

“Remember Jim?” Holly says to Freddy. “I was sad when he left. I would have liked to have kept in touch with him.”

Jones's phone rings. He reaches over Freddy's shoulder for his handset, but Freddy beats him and pushes
SPEAKER
. Jones says, “Hello?”

“Hi. I've heard there's something of a run on the training courses. Can I still get an order in, or is it too late?”

Freddy frowns and leans close to the speaker. “Is this Procurement?”

“Ah, yes.”

“You're Roger's account! Why are you calling this number?”

“Oh, I'm sorry, I thought I did call Roger.”

“No! You didn't!” Freddy kills the call. He gets up and walks back to his desk.

Jones says, “Was that necessary?”

Freddy picks up his phone. “I want to try something.”

Jones's phone rings. “Hello?”

Freddy yelps. Jones gets it in stereo: across the aisle and out of the handset. “Roger's forwarded his phone!” He hurries to Jones's desk and starts punching buttons.

“Hey, Jones,” Holly says. “This thing about what the company does, don't let it get to you. I was the same when I first started working here. But you just get used to it. The thing is, there's plenty about Zephyr that makes no sense. Sydney got promoted to manager. One of the best parking spaces is always empty, I mean
always
, but we're not allowed to use it. Last month we had to sit through a presentation on eliminating redundancy, and it was a bunch of PowerPoint slides, plus a guy reading out what was on the slides, and then he gave us all hard copies. I don't understand these things. I don't really understand anything about this company. It's just how things are. Like that story, you know, with the monkeys?”

“Chimps,” Freddy says. He stabs at Jones's phone. “A
-ha.
Jones, I've forwarded your phone to Elizabeth.”

Holly folds her hands on her desk. “These chimps, they're in a cage, and the scientists poke in a banana on a stick. The chimps try to grab it, but as soon as they do, the scientists electrify the floor, so all the chimps get a shock. This goes on until the chimps learn that touching a banana equals electric shock. Right? Then the scientists take one chimp out and put in a new one. This chimp, when he goes to grab the banana, he gets beaten up by all the others, because they don't want to get shocked. You see?”

“That's a terrible story,” Jones says.

“The scientists keep switching chimps, one at a time, until none of the originals are left. Then they add one more. The new chimp, he goes for the banana and the others jump him, same as before. But, see, none of them was ever shocked. They don't know why they're doing it. They just know that's the way they do things.”

“So I'm the new chimp.”

“You're the new chimp. Don't try to understand the company. Just go with it.”

In the bowels of the company, a computer is about to be murdered. It's a simple computer, a PABX. Its job is to route phone calls. It is running software that was once as clean and functional as a mountain stream, but over the past decade has been patched, tweaked, and customized into a steaming, festering jungle, where vines snag at your feet and snarling, fanged creatures live in the shadows. There is a path through the jungle, a clear, well-worn path, and if you follow it you will always be safe. But take two misdirected steps and the jungle will eat you alive.

The software prevents two phones from forwarding their calls to each other, which would create what is known as an infinite loop, a particularly brutal way to kill a computer. In IT, infinite loops are the equivalent of manslaughter: death through foreseeable negligence. So at this point on the jungle path there is a strong wooden barrier. What the software does not prevent—not anymore, not after ten years of quick hacks to meet ever-changing departmental wish lists—is a forwarding circle, where person A (say, Roger) forwards his phone to B (Jones), who forwards his phone to C (Elizabeth), who forwards her phone to A (Roger). There is no barrier here, just a deep, dark ravine where things wait with glittering eyes and sharp teeth.

Right now a mid-level manager in Travel Services is
dialing her Training Sales representative. She is thinking of ordering some training for her two telesales staff. They don't really need it, but she's caught wind that Training Sales is trying to cancel orders. This manager has been in Zephyr Holdings long enough to know that if someone doesn't want you to order something, you grab as much of it as you can and hang on tight. It was the same way with office chairs.

Her finger pushes the last digit, a six. The phone clicks in her ear. There is a pause. Then the building's lights go off.

Jones, Freddy, and Holly are plunged into darkness as sudden and shocking as a slap. For two or three seconds, the loudest sound is the dying electric whine of printers and copy machines. The air-conditioning, which puts out a hum so low and omnipresent that the employees have never consciously noticed it, emits a throaty death rattle, and silence drops upon them like a collapsing marquee.

A few faint lines of light squeeze through the blinds of Sydney's office, lending a silvery, dungeon-like ambiance.

“What's happening?” Jones says.

“Maybe it's a fire,” Holly says in the gloom.

“Who said that?” Megan calls. “Did someone say there's a fire?”

“Fire!” Roger shouts from West Berlin. “Get to the elevators!”

“I didn't say there
was
a fire!” Holly shouts, but her voice is lost in an argument over whether it's safe to use the elevators during a fire. It is a loud argument, because everyone is sure it's not except Roger, and he is insistent. A chair is knocked over. Megan, trying to get out, bumps her desk and hears bears spill to the floor, just before something crunches underfoot. The lights flicker as the backup generator kicks in, long enough for Megan to see that she has crushed a mother-and-daughter bear set. Tears well in her eyes. Darkness descends again.

“Don't take the elevators!” Elizabeth shouts. She gropes along the wall until she reaches the door to the stairwell and tugs at the handle. But it won't move. For one insane second she thinks Infrastructure Management has locked the stairwell door. Then she realizes she must simply be lost in the darkness. Then she realizes she's not. This is the stairwell door, it is locked, and they are all trapped. “There's no way out!”

People panic, bumping into things and stepping on Megan's bears. Megan gets on her hands and knees, hysterical, trying to save them all; the bears, that is. Jones grabs Holly's buttocks in the dark but doesn't realize it: they're so well toned that he mistakes them for the back of an office chair. Holly is too shocked to say anything. Freddy becomes disoriented and, thinking a sliver of light is a corridor, runs into Sydney's office wall and rebounds from the glass.

Sydney's door pops open. Daylight streams into the department, dazzling them. Sydney's tiny body is framed in the doorway, like some kind of angel. “What the hell are you doing?”

When the power is back and the phones are working—neither of which happen quickly—recriminations begin to fly. During the blackout, numerous departments discovered their stairwell doors were locked, and this has generated a certain amount of antagonism toward Infrastructure Management. People want the department to be reported to the police, or even outsourced. An emergency conference call between Senior Management and all departmental managers is arranged.

Infrastructure Management protests that it locks the stairwells for safety reasons—a few years earlier, a PA tripped and Legal went into conniptions, has everyone forgotten that? They installed a sophisticated system (at great expense) to automatically unlock the doors in case of emergency, but because of the blackout, it didn't work. And whose fault is that? Information Technology.

Senior Management's focus swings onto IT. Indeed, what kind of department allows a telephone call to shut down the building? Information Technology hastens to explain exactly what kind. They have half the staff they did six months ago and keep getting lumped with new systems, like Infrastructure Management's emergency door opener, that require supervision, maintenance, and integration with everything else. It has twenty-four increasingly harried and sleep-deprived technical staff fighting to maintain digital life support to Zephyr's body, in between taking calls from senior executives who are sure they sent an e-mail to somebody last week but now the guy is saying he never got it. In this environment, less critical tasks, like simulating what would happen in the event of a PABX meltdown, have had to be postponed.

Less critical?
Less critical?
Senior Management hopes Information Technology is joking. The building shut down! What Senior Management wants to hear, right now, is that IT understands exactly what went wrong and can promise it will never happen again. You can say this for Senior Management: it knows how to articulate a goal. The strategy may be fuzzy, the execution nonexistent, but Senior Management knows what it wants.

IT does know what went wrong, down to the line number of the offending piece of code. It begins to explain several possible solutions. But these involve confusing phrases like “automatic fail-over switching,” and Senior Management gets irritable. It skips ahead to the logical conclusion: Information Technology is a bunch of idiots who locked the stairwells. They put the wheels in motion: IT will be outsourced by the end of the week.