Paranoia (8 page)

For the next two hours I sat in the Human Resources reception area with a clipboard, filling out form after form: W-4, W-9, credit union account, insurance, automatic deposit to my bank account, stock options, retirement accounts, nondisclosure agreements. . . . They took my picture and gave me an ID badge and a couple of other little plastic cards that attached to my badge holder. They said things like
TRION
—
CHANGE YOUR WORLD
and
OPEN COMMUNICATION
and
FUN
and
FRUGALITY
. It was kind of Soviet, but it didn’t really bother me.

One of the HR people took me on a quickie tour of Trion, which was pretty impressive. A great fitness center, ATM cash machines, a place to drop off your laundry and dry cleaning, break rooms with free sodas, bottles of water, popcorn, cappuccino machines.

In the break rooms they had big glossy color posters up that showed a group of square-shouldered men and women (Asian, black, white) posed triumphantly on top of planet Earth under the words
DRINK RESPONSIBLY
!
DRINK FRUGALLY
! “The typical Trion employee consumes five beverages a day,” it said. “Simply by taking one less cold beverage per day, Trion could save $2.4 million a year!”

You could get your car washed and detailed; you could get discount tickets to movies, concerts, and baseball games; they had a baby gift program (“one gift per household, per occurrence”). I noticed that the elevator in D Wing didn’t stop on the fifth floor—“Special Projects,” she explained. “No access.” I tried not to register any particular interest. I wondered if this was the “skunkworks” Wyatt was so interested in.

Finally, Stephanie came by to take me up to the sixth floor of B Wing. Tom was on the phone but waved me in. His office was lined with photos of his kids—five boys, I noticed—individually and in groups, and drawings they’d done, stuff like that. The books on the shelf behind him were all the usual suspects—
Who Moved My Cheese?; First, Break All the Rules; How to Be a CEO
. His legs were pistoning away like crazy, and his face looked like it had been scrubbed raw with a Brillo pad. “Steph,” he said, “can you ask Nora to come by?”

A few minutes later he slammed down the phone and sprang to his feet, shook my hand. His wedding band was wide and shiny.

“Hey, Adam, welcome to the team!” he said. “Man, am I glad we bagged you! Sit down, sit down.” I did. “We need you, buddy. Bad. We’re all stretched thin here, really raked. We’re covering twenty-three products, we’ve lost some key staff, and we’re stretched way thin. The gal you’re replacing got transferred. You’re going to be joining Nora’s team, working on the refresh of the Maestro line which, as you’ll find out, is running into some heavy weather. There are some serious fires to put out, and—here she is!”

Nora Sommers was standing at the doorway, one hand on the doorjamb, posing like a diva. She extended the other hand coyly. “Hi, Adam, welcome!
So
glad you’re with us.”

“Nice to be here.”

“It was not an easy hire, I’ll tell you frankly. We had a lot of really strong candidates. But as they say, cream rises to the top. Well, shall we get right to it?”

Her voice, which had almost had a girlish lilt to it, seemed to deepen instantly as soon as we walked away from Tom Lundgren’s office. She spoke faster, almost spitting out her words. “Your cubicle’s right over here,” she said, jabbing the air with her index finger. “We use Web phones here—I assume you know how?”

“No worries.”

“Computer, phone—you should be all set. Anything else, just call Facility Services. All right, Adam, I should warn you, we don’t hold hands around here. It’s a pretty steep learning curve, but I have no doubt you’re up to it. We throw you right in the pool, sink or swim.” She looked at me challengingly.

“I’d rather swim,” I said with a sly smile.

“Good to hear it,” she said. “I like your attitude.”

13

I had a bad feeling about Nora. She was the type who’d put cement boots on me, bundle me into the trunk of a Cadillac, and throw me in the East River. Sink or swim, tell me about it.

She left me at my new cube to finish reading orientation stuff, learn code names for all the projects. Every high-tech company gives their products code names; Trion’s were types of storms—Tornado, Typhoon, Tsunami, and so on. Maestro was codenamed Vortex. It was confusing, all the different names, and on top of it I was trying to get the lay of the land for Wyatt. Around noon, when I was starting to get really hungry, a stocky guy in his forties, graying black hair in a ponytail, wearing a vintage Hawaiian shirt and round black heavy-framed glasses, appeared at my cube.

“You must be the latest victim,” he said. “The fresh meat hurled into the lion cage.”

“And you all seem so friendly,” I said. “I’m Adam Cassidy.”

“I know. I’m Noah Mordden. Trion Distinguished Engineer. It’s your first day, you don’t know who to trust, who to align yourself with. Who wants to play with you, and who wants you to fall flat on your face. Well, I’m here to answer all your questions. How would you like to grab some lunch in the subsidized employee cafeteria?”

Strange guy, but I was intrigued. As we walked to the elevator, he said, “So, they gave you the job no one else wanted, huh?”

“That right?” Oh, great.

“Nora wanted to fill the slot internally, but no one qualified wanted to work for her. Alana, the woman whose job you’re filling, actually begged to get out from under her thumb, so they moved her somewhere else in-house. Word on the street is, Maestro’s on the bubble.” I could barely hear him; he was muttering quietly as he strode toward the elevator bank. “They’re always quick to pull the plug when something’s failing. Around here, you catch a cold and they’re measuring you for a coffin.”

I nodded. “The product’s redundant.”

“A piece of crap. Also doomed. Trion’s also coming out with an all-in-one cell phone that has the exact same wireless text-messaging packet, so what’s the point? Put the thing out of its misery. Plus, it doesn’t help that Nora’s a bitch on wheels.”

“Is she?”

“If you didn’t figure that out within ten seconds of meeting her, you’re not as bright as your advance billing. But do not underestimate her: she’s got a black belt in corporate politics, and she has her lieutenants, so beware.”

“Thank you.”

“Goddard’s into classic American cars, so she’s into them too. Owns a couple of restored muscle cars, though I’ve never seen her drive any of them. I think the point is for Jock Goddard to know she’s cut from the same cloth. She’s slick, that Nora.”

The elevator was crowded with other employees going down to the third-floor cafeteria. A lot of them wore Trion-logo golf or polo shirts. The elevator stopped on every floor. Someone behind me joked, “Looks like we got the local.” I think someone cracks that joke in every single corporate elevator around the world every single day.

The cafeteria, or employee dining room as it was called, was immense, buzzing with the electricity of hundreds, maybe thousands, of Trion employees. It was like a food court in a fancy shopping mall—a sushi bar, with two sushi chefs; a gourmet choose-your-own-topping pizza counter; a burrito bar; Chinese food; steaks and burgers; an amazing salad bar; even a vegetarian/vegan counter.

“Jesus,” I said.

“Give the people bread and circuses,” Noah said. “Juvenal. Keep the peasants well fed and they won’t notice their enslavement.”

“I guess.”

“Contented cows give better milk.”

“Whatever works,” I said, looking around. “So much for frugality, huh?”

“Ah. Take a look at the vending machines in the break rooms—twenty-five cents for peanut satay chicken, but a buck for a Klondike bar. Fluids and caffeinated substances are free. Last year the CFO, a man named Paul Camilletti, tried to eliminate the weekly beer bashes, but then managers started spending their own pocket money to buy beer, and someone circulated an e-mail that set out a business case for keeping the beer bashes. Beer costs X per year, whereas it costs Y to hire and train new employees, so given the morale-boosting and employee-retaining costs, the return on investment, ya de ya de ya, you get it. Camilletti, who’s all about making the numbers, gave in. Still, his frugality campaign rules the day.”

“Same way at Wyatt,” I said.

“Even on overseas flights, employees are required to fly economy. Camilletti himself stays at Motel 6 when he travels in the U.S. Trion doesn’t have a corporate jet—I mean, let’s be clear, Jock Goddard’s wife bought one for him for his birthday, so we don’t have to feel sorry for him.”

I got a burger and Diet Pepsi and he got some kind of mysterious Asian stir-fry thing. It was ridiculously cheap. We looked around the room, holding our trays, but Mordden didn’t find anyone he wanted to sit with, so we sat at a table by ourselves. I had that first-day-of-school feeling, when you don’t know anyone. It reminded me of when I started Bartholomew Browning.

“Goddard doesn’t stay at Motel 6s too, does he?”

“I doubt it. But he’s not too in-your-face about his money. He won’t take limos. He drives his own car—though granted he has a dozen or so, all antiques he’s restored himself. Also, he gives his top fifty execs the luxury car of their choice, and they all make a shitload of money—really obscene. Goddard’s smart—he knows you’ve got to pay the top talent well in order to retain them.”

“What about you Distinguished Engineers?”

“Oh, I’ve made an obscene amount of money here myself. I could in theory tell everyone to go fuck themselves and still have trust funds for my kids, if I had any kids.”

“But you’re still working.”

He sighed. “When I struck gold, just a few years after I started here, I quit and sailed around the world, packing only my clothes and several heavy suitcases containing the Western canon.”

“The western cannon?”

He smiled. “The greatest hits of Western literature.”

“Like Louis L’Amour?”

“More like Herodotus, Thucydides, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Montaigne, Kafka, Freud, Dante, Milton, Burke—”

“Man, I slept through that class in college,” I said.

He smiled again. Obviously he thought I was a moron.

“Anyway,” he said, “once I’d read everything, I realized that I’m constitutionally unable not to work, and I returned to Trion. Have you read Étienne de la Boétie’s
Discourse on Voluntary Servitude
?”

“Will that be on the final?”

“The only power tyrants have is that relinquished by their victims.”

“That and the power to hand out free Pepsis,” I said, tipping my can toward him. “So you’re an engineer.”

He gave a polite smile that was more of a grimace. “Not just any engineer, take note, but, as I said, a Distinguished Engineer. That means I have a low employee number and I can pretty much do whatever I want. If that means being a thorn in Nora Sommers’s side, so be it. Now, as for the cast of characters on the marketing side of your business unit. Let’s see, you’ve already met the toxic Nora. And Tom Lundgren, your exalted VP, who’s basically a straight shooter who lives for the church, his family, and golf. And Phil Bohjalian, old as Methuselah and just about as technologically up-to-date, who started at Lockheed Martin when it was called something else and computers were as big as houses and ran on IBM punch cards. His days are surely numbered. And—lo and behold, it’s Elvis himself, venturing into our midst!”

I turned to where he was looking. Standing by the salad bar was a white-haired, stoop-shouldered guy with a heavily lined face, heavy white eyebrows, large ears, and a sort of pixieish expression. He was wearing a black turtleneck. You could sense the energy in the room change, rippling around him in waves, as people turned to look, whispered, everyone trying to be blasé and subtle.

Augustine Goddard, Trion’s founder and chief executive officer, in the flesh.

He looked older than in the pictures I’d seen. A much younger and taller guy was standing next to him, saying something. The younger guy, around forty, was lean and really fit, black hair run through with gray. Italian-looking, movie-star handsome like an action hero who was aging really well, but with deeply pitted cheeks. Except for the bad skin, he reminded me of Al Pacino in the first couple of
Godfather
movies. He was wearing a great charcoal-gray suit.

“That Camilletti?” I asked.

“Cutthroat Camilletti,” Mordden said, digging into his stir-fry with chopsticks. “Our chief financial officer. The czar of frugality. They’re together a lot, those two.” He spoke through a mouthful of food. “You see his face, those
acne vulgaris
scars? Rumor has it they say ‘eat shit and die’ in Braille. Anyway, Goddard considers Camilletti the second coming of Jesus Christ, the man who’s going to slash operating costs, increase profit margins, launch Trion stock back into the stratosphere. Some say Camilletti is Jock Goddard’s id, the bad Jock. His Iago. The devil on his shoulder. I say he’s the bad cop who lets Jock be the good cop.”

I finished my burger. The CEO and his CFO were in line, paying for their salads, I noticed. Couldn’t they just walk out without paying? Or butt to the front of the line or something?

“It’s also very Camilletti to get lunch in the employee dining room,” Mordden continued, “to demonstrate to the masses his commitment to slashing costs. He doesn’t cut costs, he ‘slashes’ them. No executive dining room at Trion. No personal executive chef. No catered lunches brought in, not for them, oh no. Break bread with the peasants.” He took a swallow of Dr Pepper. “Where were we in my little
Playbill
, my Who’s Who in the Cast? Ah, yes. There’s Chad Pierson, Nora’s golden-haired boy and protégé, boy wonder and professional suckup. MBA from Tuck, moved from B school right into product marketing at Trion, recently did a stint in Marketing Boot Camp, and no doubt he’s going to consider you a threat to be eliminated. And there’s Audrey Bethune, the only black woman in . . .”

Noah fell silent suddenly, poked more stir-fry into his mouth. I saw a handsome blond guy around my age gliding quickly up to our table, a shark through water. Button-down blue shirt, preppy-looking, a jock. One of those white-blond guys you see in multipage magazine ad spreads, consorting with other specimens of the master race at a cocktail party on the lawn of their baronial estate.