The Weed Agency (20 page)

JULY 1999

Ava flew cross-country to Florida, where Jamie was marrying her Marine boyfriend; soon she would be Jamie Caro-Marcus; Ava joked that said quickly, her name sounded Greek.

Ava and Lisa ended up sitting at the same table. Ava wondered if Jamie’s wedding seating chart secretly intended to force some détente or reconciliation between the two women, but it merely reflected that her parents had obliviously lumped the brides’ “Washington friends” together at one table.

Lisa and Ava finally did find each other in a hallway off the hotel ballroom … after several glasses of wine and two champagne toasts.

“I’m really sorry the way we left things,” Ava began.

Lisa relaxed a bit. “I’m really glad you said that,” she said, “because I wanted to be happy for you going out to California, and after what you said, I couldn’t. I felt like you were laughing at us.”

“I would never do that!” Ava said. “I love you guys! We’ve been through so much crap together!”

“Ladies, use your inside voices!” said one of the older guests.

“I know!” Lisa said, ignoring the complaint. “And I want you to find your dream job!”

“Thank you! I think this is my dream job—I mean, if the launch goes right. Otherwise, it’s my nightmare job.”

They embraced, until a couple of the groom’s buddies started hooting and hollering.

“So, what’s new at the agency?”

Lisa thought for a moment. “Um …” She paused, then sighed. “Nothing, really.” The girls laughed.

Lisa attributed her assessment to the amount of alcohol she had enjoyed so far—but she had a nagging sense that if sober,
she would have still been groping for anything that qualified as new, or different, or interesting enough to share.

AUGUST 1999

EasyFed’s launch date loomed, less than a week away.

The Saturday evening before it, GlobeScape rented a 53-room mansion in Burlingame, California, for the launch party.

The two hundred GlobeScape employees working on the EasyFed project, another hundred spouses and dates, and easily three hundred guests crammed into the mansion and its grounds. The group ran out of the complimentary fleece jackets with the EasyFed logo. “Swag bags” of key chains, mouse pads, and other tchotchkes with the EasyFed logo were distributed as well. Tuxedo-clad waiters brought around silver platters of hors d’oeuvres and canapés, and the line at the open bar was long.

“This is … so ostentatious,” Ava gasped. “Even Gatsby would tell us to tone it down a little.”

“It’s all about generating buzz,” Willow said with a giggle. “Everybody’s going to be writing about us—
Red Herring, Business 2.0, Salon, Slate
.”

Even Drew had loosened up. “This is totally going to show those hotshots at Pseudo.com.”

The mansion’s tennis courts were functioning as a helipad for the evening. Silver’s helicopter, sleek and the color of his surname, landed, giving the executive an entrance most Hollywood action heroes would envy. He strode to the assembled partygoers like a conquering hero, reveling in their already-inebriated cheers for a few moments before beginning some remarks.

“My friends, this evening we celebrate a dawn!” Silver roared, as the partygoers applauded a thoroughly dysfunctional metaphor. “We stand on the precipice of a new age. We are not merely some dot-com dreamers; we are revolutionaries!” More cheers.

Silver spoke from the edge of a large, padded platform.

A row of about a dozen men in red ninja-like costumes marched in a line behind him, each holding a rolled-up piece of scarlet cloth.

“What’s with the Mortal Kombat guys?” Ava asked.

“Silver brought in some Chinese dance troupe to perform—‘Tie My Wee’ or something,” Drew cracked.

Willow had found a program for the evening. “The Qing Yi Yin Xiang Shen Ke Dai Zi,” she read aloud. “They’re supposed to be some big performers over in Shanghai, doing a West Coast tour. They perform the ‘Dance of the Crimson Banner.’ ”

Then the crowd laughed, because Silver had said something he thought was funny, and most of the partygoers were drunk.

Silver concluded, “You’ve all done a lot of work to get to this point, and our revolution has already begun!” He turned to the short, limber men behind him and nodded.

As one, the dancers unfurled small red flags in each hand and began to spin. The dancers probably cost a fortune, but they did know how to put on a show. Their act accelerated as it went on, as each performer began demonstrating spectacular leaps, flips, cartwheels, and other acrobatics. Their crimson banners snapped and fluttered dramatically with each move, and they departed by backflipping and cartwheeling through the crowded audience on their way to their vans, to roaring, drunken cheers.

Ava, Willow, Drew, and Raj drank until the booze ran out,
and then waited for the small fleet of taxicabs that GlobeScape had called in advance.

It was only on the way out, stuck in a traffic jam upon the driveway, that Ava realized that EasyFed had celebrated its debut with a parade of waving red flags.

AUGUST 1999

U.S. National Debt: $5.6 trillion

Budget, USDA Bureau of Invasive Species: $162.33 million

EasyFed.com was scheduled to launch at 6:00 a.m. Eastern time—3:00 a.m. local—on Wednesday, September 1. When the hour arrived, the
UNDER CONSTRUCTION
sign was gone … and a blank screen greeted visitors. For about one hour, absolute pandemonium reigned in the Palo Alto headquarters, as some unforeseen technical glitch delayed the much-touted debut. Thanks in no small part to Ava, the bug was identified and corrected and the site went live, a mere two hours late.

OCTOBER 1999

From time to time, Silver liked to bring people into the conference room for what he called ‘vision talks’—what he undoubtedly believed were inspirational speeches. Ava, Willow, and Drew found them increasingly hard to follow or bear.

The early traffic numbers had been good but not great—other than the 0 visitors successfully logged in during the initial two hours. But month by month, details of the GlobeScape
IPO became scarcer and scarcer. Finally, around Columbus Day, the company announced that it had been pushed back into 2000, “when the market won’t be so crowded with IPOs.”

Word in the GlobeScape hallways was that Lennon Silver was particularly cranky lately. When news came that another vision talk was hastily scheduled, the office’s temperature seemed to drop ten degrees.

The EasyFed team stood around the conference room with a new pensiveness.

“Money does not motivate me …” Silver began. “Revolution does.… But our investors need results, they need reassurance about their return on investment. They’re proving less patient than I expected—quite reasonably, I would add. So, if I cannot show them ROI, I can show them signs of the revolution advancing.”

He looked out on the collected employees, everyone vaguely concerned but not sure what, exactly, constituted a sign of the revolution advancing.

“Are we revolutionaries?” Silver bellowed.

The response was insufficiently enthusiastic.

“I said, ‘Are we revolutionaries?’ You, are you a revolutionary?” he pointed to Chin-Ho Kyun. He was one of the new hires, a rather intimidated South Korean immigrant. He looked mortified to be called upon in front of everyone, and his eyes bulged in fearful confusion.

“I am … a programmer,” Kyun stammered.

“That’s NOT GOOD ENOUGH!” Silver pounded the conference table. “Clean out your desk!”

“But he’s—”

Silver shot the objector a furious look. Kyun lowered his head and quickly exited the room.

He pointed to another terrified employee. “Are you a revolutionary?

This one had learned from Kyun’s painful lesson: “YES!”

Ava marveled at what she saw. She exchanged an uncomfortable glance with Willow. Could an employer do this? What was the point of this insane ritual?

Kyun had barely been here a month, and seemed to be doing good work. She realized Silver had no idea who Kyun was, and didn’t realize he had just fired one of his better employees. He appeared to be firing people for the sake of firing people, or to motivate the rest of them.

Silver went to the deputy head of marketing. “Are you a revolutionary?”

“Yes,” said the unshaven twentysomething, barely able to repress a roll of his eyes.

“I want to hear it in your voice! I want to see it in your eyes! We are about overturning old, established authorities! Show me your revolutionary spirit!”

The deputy head of marketing reached his limit. “Oh, screw this,” he said, brushing past Silver and heading to the door. “I’ve been in talks with Yahoo!, I don’t need to take this crap.”

Silver’s face registered betrayal for a split second, but then he resumed his messianic pose. “Good! Go ahead! I don’t need counterrevolutionaries who hedge their bets! I need true believers!”

From a standing position, the surprisingly spry Silver leaped onto the conference table.

“ARE YOU A REVOLUTIONARY?”

“Yes!” the assembled employees shouted, in a mix of enthusiasm and fear that they were witnessing a nervous breakdown.

“I SAID, ARE YOU A REVOLUTIONARY?!”

“YES!”

As she chanted her approval alongside Willow and Drew, Ava realized the predictable boredom of the Agency of Invasive Species had never looked so good.

NOVEMBER 1999

The traffic numbers slid a bit, to the merely mediocre, but not all of the news was bad for EasyFed that autumn; on Thanksgiving, the “Squiggy the Squicken” balloon made its debut in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, right between Lou Bega and Charlotte Church. While that traffic spike proved short-lived, the marketing department assured everyone that the site’s biggest publicity effort would shock and amaze.

JANUARY 2000

A gigantic chunk of the advertising and marketing budget for EasyFed.com—$1.1 million—was spent on the airtime for a thirty-second nationwide ad during the broadcast of Super Bowl XXXIV on January 30.

The ad began by showing a harried Ernest Borgnine at his desk with a computer, his tables strewn with paper, and lamenting, “File my taxes online? Apply for a small business grant through the Internet? I can’t understand any of this stuff!” At no point did the ad-makers feel any particular need to explain why the star of
McHale’s Navy
and
Airwolf
was applying for a grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce.

A computer-generated Squiggy, about the size of a traffic cone, popped out of Borgnine’s coffee cup, and immediately began waving his tentacles toward Borgnine’s computer keyboard.

“I can help, Ernie!”

Instead of immediately beating the strange, pinkish-purple, one-eyed beaked cephalopod to death with his shoe, as most people’s instincts would dictate, Borgnine exclaimed, “Squiggy the Squicken!” in joyous recognition. Apparently it had taken
the actor several takes to get the portmanteau correct, and the director had to keep explaining it wasn’t a “Squidge-ken.”

“Have government Web sites got you seeing red? Try EasyFed!” chirped the unnervingly happy squid, with an eye that the Taiwanese computer animators had depicted with perhaps a bit too much realism. “EasyFed.com helps you get the information you need, and fast! Simple, easy and quick!” as the tentacles typed with blurring speed.

GRANT APPLICATION APPROVED
! appeared in giant letters on Borgnine’s computer screen in a font no government Web site had ever used. Underneath the actor’s beaming face, fine white print clarified, “Results not typical. EasyFed.com is not responsible for the results of any interaction with any agency on its customers’ behalf, and government response times vary greatly.”

“Thanks, Squiggy!”

“Remember, there’s no need to dread! Try EasyFed instead!”

The squid did a cartwheel on its tentacles off the desk and past a window, where an aging Michael McKean and David Lander appeared as their characters from
Laverne & Shirley
. “I remember when I was everyone’s favorite Squiggy,” lamented Lander.

Across America, roughly eighty-eight million Super Bowl watchers, previously enjoying the St. Louis Rams build a 16–6 lead over the Tennessee Titans, all simultaneously turned to each other and asked, “What the hell was that thing?”

The
USA Today
ad-meter reviewing the commercials the following morning suggested that test audiences and online respondents graded the ad medium-to-bad, suggesting that the audiences liked its protagonists and remembered it, but found it bizarre and were vague on the actual product being sold. But the ad scored off the charts with the advertising professionals, who praised its humor, creativity, and unpredictability.

The ad garnered a lot of mockery from the likes of Dennis Miller, Dave Barry, and James Lileks. George Will declared, “It is long past time for mandatory drug testing of Madison Avenue’s creative staff.”