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By Tgreen, April 27, 2016 11:11 pm

There came a day when a small web-based company of no particular note in a small city of no particular interest found itself on the brink of losing two of its biggest clients. The spark was gone, the work was bland, and the clients were cheap. It was a dangerous combination and the small company could not afford to lose both clients. It couldn’t afford to owe either one, really, but there was a secret contingency plan to lay off half the company and do some anonymous side work for one of the more reputable porn sites until better clients could be landed. The three execs who knew of this plan didn’t ever want to have to implement it, but each one of them had large mortgages and unhappy marriages to support and they were willing to sacrifice whatever was necessary in order to keep that money coming in.
One of the middle managers at the company, a harried man of 40 named Gil, took it upon himself to get an outside perspective. Since he didn’t know about the secret contingency plan he didn’t know that he was one of the lucky ones who would not be laid off. He also didn’t know that this would prove to be a mixed blessing because he was actually a paying customer of the reputable porn site in question and it would have taken no more than three days for this information to work its way through the now much smaller company. But without knowing any of this, he came to the office one day with a plan to fix things and a new consultant to potentially fix more problems in the future.
It soon became obvious that while his coworkers were happy to have the idea that solved the immediate client problem, none of them appreciated that Gil was now bringing in an outsider on a regular basis. Some of them didn’t want the competition and some of them were afraid the consultant would be able to take one look at them and see just his little they did anymore. And others just didn’t want to be bothered learning another name and sharing the office snacks and having another person whose weekend they now had to ask about. And so the first meeting with Lou the consultant went poorly. No ideas were shared and no weekends were laughed about and no plans were made to put together a Happy Hour to welcome the new guy.
Gil felt responsible for this problem, because he was, and so he set out to fix it. Since he’s fixed the original client problem, he thought maybe he was on a roll and it was probably best if he struck now while he was on a hot streak. He set out to gather his brain trust around him to come up with a plan on how to deal with Lou, realized he didn’t have a brain trust, and so he forced the people who reported to him to gather in a room late one afternoon to discuss the situation. Within minutes he learned that while the group had several different reasons for not liking Lou, the one thing they all agreed on was that Lou knew nothing about their business, and possibly knew nothing about any kind of business. Kevin, who’d taken on the role of ringleader at this meeting, kept calling him an idiot savant without the savant, and it only went downhill from there.
“Where did you even find this guy?” Kevin asked.
“I met him at a party,” Gil said. “We got to talking about work and I mentioned some of the problems we were having and he had some good ideas. So good that I asked if he’d be interested in a consulting gig. And he was.”
“You seriously offered him a job after meeting him at a party?” Kevin said.
“Yes.”
“That was a terrible idea.”
“Why?”
“No good has ever come from anyone you meet at a party.”
“I don’t agree,” Gil said.
“I met my wife at a party,” Martin said from his seat at the end of the table.
“There, see?” Gil said with an air of triumph.
“See what? He’s agreeing with me,” Kevin said.
They all looked down the table at Martin. “Who were you agreeing with?” Gil asked. “Me or him?”
“Him.”
“There, see?” Kevin said. “It’s unanimous. Get rid of him.”
“The two of you agreeing doesn’t count as unanimous,” Gil said.
“Then let’s take a vote.”
“No vote.”
“Oppressor.”
“I’m not oppressing anything. It doesn’t matter who wants to get rid of him. The contract is ironclad. If we fire him we still have to pay him everything.”
This was true. What Lou lacked in business acumen he made up for with his uncanny ability to negotiate a good contract. Besides guaranteeing his fee, plus a fat early termination penalty, his contract stipulated he was only required to come to the office once a week, he didn’t have to answer every email he received, and while he was expected to offer advice and solutions, he didn’t have to offer good advice or solutions, or say anything that was remotely helpful. It could be argued that by signing this contract the company was proving it deserved every hit it had taken recently, but Gil refused to consider that possibility.
“All I want you to do is talk to the guy when he’s here,” Gil said. “He offered me good advice at the party, so he’s not a moron. Maybe he’s just unmotivated. Maybe he just needs to loosen up and feel more comfortable with us.”
“Yes,” said Phil from his seat at the other end of the table.”
“See, Phil knows.”
“No, it’s not that;” Phil said as he held his phone up for all to see. “I knew that advice he gave you sounded familiar.”
“Let me guess, he got it off of one of those motivational poster sites,” Kevin said.
“No, not even close,” Phil said.
“See, give me some credit here,” Gil said.
“He got it off an episode of The Office,” Phil said. “I’ve got it queued up right here if you want to watch it.”
“We’re taking our business advice from episodes of The Office now?” Kevin said. “Is that ironic or pathetic or some new level of bad we’ve never seen before?”
“Was it at least a good episode?” Carol asked. She rarely spoke up at these meetings because she had a hard time masking her contempt for Gil’s management style. In truth, she was usually so quiet Gil would forget she was even present, and today he spun his head around in surprise at the sound of her voice.
“Trick question,” Phil said. “There are no good episodes of The Office.”
“That’s not true,” Carol said. “It was really good for a couple of years.”
“British version was way better,” Kevin said.
The debate continued for the better part of an hour, and only ended when Kevin noticed that it was time to go home. They were unable to agree on the quality of The Office or which version was better. They also realized that the debate about The Office had distracted them completely from the matter at hand, and left them with no strategy on how to handle Lou’s upcoming visit.
“How can I even talk to the guy now that I know his advice came from a TV show?” Gil asked. “You guys are gonna have to talk to him.”
“How can you not talk to him?” Kevin asked. “Will you just hide all day?”
“Maybe I should call out sick.
“If you call out sick I’m calling out sick too,” Phil said.
“How can you do that? You won’t even know if I did it until you come in to the office yourself,” Gil said. “You can’t call out sick once you’re already here.”
“I’ll just say I’ve got whatever you have.”
“Like an epidemic,” Kevin said.
“Don’t say epidemic,” Gil said. “Not after last time.
The last time the office thought there was an epidemic came the day after Karen from Accounting threw a Game of Thrones season finale party that ended in one case of alcohol poisoning, a half dozen sick calls, and a rumored pregnancy scare. Pictures from the first half of the party were featured on the company’s social media page. Pictures from the second half were almost universally deleted upon viewing. Since no one was willing to admit how far things had gotten out of hand, though, everyone claimed to have a virus and the HR department came within an hour of implementing the company’s pandemic plan. This plan involved a contact with a company in Mumbai that promised to seamlessly continue the company’s work with an expansive group of outsourced employees. Ironically, it was later acknowledged that had the pandemic plan actually been implemented, the company would have turned the largest quarterly profit in history. Thus there as an unspoken rule that no more than three employees could call out sick at the same time.
“I’m reserving the right to call out tomorrow,” Gil said. “So you bastards better show up. You too, Carol.”
“You can’t include her in the blanket bastard statement?” Kevin asked.
“I’m just playing it safe. I’m not sure where HR came down on that one,” Gil said. “I failed their last two quizzes so I feel like I’m on very thin ice with them. Best to behave myself.”
“But calling out sick to avoid your contractor is fine?”
“It’s a strategy.” Gil gathered his tablet and his notepad and stood. “I trust you guys to talk to Lou and get something out of him. Then, when I’ve recovered from my 24-hour flu, we can discuss it at length and figure out our next step.” Before anyone could say anything else, he hurried from the room. People could say what they wanted to about Gil, but he could leave a room faster than anyone else in the company when he was motivated.
The rest of them looked at each other, wondering who was going to call out sick tomorrow and help start the next epidemic scare.
“You think this guy watches The Walking Dead too?” Carol asked.
“Why?” Kevin asked.
“Maybe he could offer some advice from that show.”
“Okay, now we’ve got a plan,” Kevin said. “Good meeting, everybody.”

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By Tgreen, October 19, 2012 8:55 am

Writing experiment time! No, I haven’t hired a pack of monkeys to read my writing, mostly because I’ve seen every Planet of the Apes movie and so the last thing I’d ever want to do is piss off a pack of monkeys. No, this experiment is in response to that storyish excerpt I posted earlier this week. On that one I got busted by coworkers both current and former for writing something that sure as hell seemed like it was, at the very least, strongly influenced by a certain employer of ours.

For now if I decide to write any more office-based stuff, I’ll do it the way I always have — I’ll run it through a filter of nearly a quarter century of office life. That way if you see something familiar, you can think you know what it’s based on or you can wonder if that same insanely stupid shit you lived through really also happened somewhere else. Trust me, most times it’s that second one. So if all this rambling hasn’t scared you off, I’ll have my assistant dim the lights and we’ll see just how much of a Frankenstein’s monster we’re dealing with here…

Ben scrolled through the endless list of emails in his inbox, wondering if he was ever going to figure out how to prioritize this stuff. Most of it was too new to him, so it all looked the same. Every one of these emails could’ve been equally worthless or equally important and so far he had no way of knowing the difference. The only thing Yank had told him about it was to ignore any email marked Urgent.
“Everyone uses that in every email, so the word has no meaning anymore,” Yank had said. “Ignore it enough times and maybe people will learn their lesson.”
Yank had a long list of lessons be wanted people to learn, and Ben was so far unable to figure out that list either.
Ben turned away from his emails to give his eyes a break and he noticed Yank walking toward his desk at a fast pace while looking over at the far end of the office where the conference rooms were located. He didn’t actually look in Ben’s direction until he dropped into the nearest empty chair.
“Hey, Ohio, you know all that good advice I’ve been giving you?” he asked.
“No,” Ben said.
“Well, I’m about to give you some of the most important advice I could ever pass along.”
“And what’s that?”
“Run like hell right now,” Yank said. “Run and don’t look back. See you tomorrow.”
“What? Why?”
“There’s no time. Just get the hell out of here before it’s too late.” Yank jumped from the chair, turned his head to survey the whole office, and then started backing away. He got about three steps when the familiar voice of their tech manager called out from behind them.
“Yank, got a second?”
Yank stopped backing away and said something Ben couldn’t hear that was probably profanity of some sort.
“I’ve got about one second, Kevin. What’s up?”
Kevin nodded at Ben and slouched against a nearby pillar. “You work on that theme park job?”
“Nope.”
“You didn’t ask me which theme park job.”
“Because I haven’t worked on any theme park jobs, so by definition I haven’t worked on whatever job you’re talking about.”
“This was one of Eric’s projects,” Kevin said.
“Eric who quit Eric?”
“Yes.”
“Then I can’t help you, Kevin. He didn’t let me work on his stuff.”
“You refused every request to help him out.”
“What can I say, we had a perfect working relationship,” Yank said. “I miss that guy already. You shouldn’t have let him go.”
“You were at a meeting for this one,” Kevin said. “I know you were.”
Yank cocked his head and appeared to be staring past Kevin as he considered this. Then he frowned.
“Oh, that meeting. I was only at that meeting because there were free sandwiches. I didn’t actually pay attention to anything.”
“Still puts you ahead of anyone else left here tonight,” Kevin said.
“Once again my love of a good sandwich comes back and screws me. Ohio, write that down.”
“Just duck your head in the conference room. See if you can help,” Kevin said.
“What’s wrong?”
“Site’s broken.”
“Which page?”
“All of them.”
“Of course all of them. Why do I even ask? What about Ohio here?”
“What about him? Ben, did you work on this site?”
“He spearheaded it,” Yank said before Ben could say anything.
“We started this site six months before we hired him,” Kevin said. “But an extra set of eyes couldn’t hurt. Ben, do you mind sticking around?”
“No problem.” Ben left his chair and followed Yank across the office
“You just totally sold me out,” he said.
“Maybe that’ll teach you a lesson,” Yank said. “Run when I say run. At least you got asked.”
“Yeah, but it felt like one of those requests you can only say yes to.”
“Look at that, Ohio, you’re learning a new lesson every day.”
There were only two men seated in the conference room. Nate, their lead programmer, and Barney, the guy who owned the place. Ben barely knew either of them, but Barney scared the hell out of him. Not because he was some kind of imposing presence — Ben towered at least half a foot taller than him — but because Ben was not capable of relaxing around anyone who could, in theory, fire him on a whim. He appeared to be a perfectly pleasant man, but Ben steered clear just the same.
Yank pushed the glass doors open and looked at the website displayed on the big screen on the wall.
“All I wanna know is, who broke it?” he asked as he took a seat at the end of the table. Ben circled around and sat to his right.
Yank squinted up at the screen. “This thing looks fine. What’s the problem?”
“You know the name of the park, right?” Nate asked.
“Yep.”
“What’s the website say?”
After a moment’s pause, Yank’s eyes snapped open. “Well now, isn’t that interesting?”
“So interesting I’m screaming right now,” Barney said. “You can’t hear because I’m screaming in my head, but trust me. Screaming at the top of imaginary lungs.”
“Have we ever put up a website with the wrong company name on it, or is this virgin territory for us?” Yank asked.
“I think this is new,” Nate said.
“Then this is a proud moment,” Yank said. “Ohio, when you consider all of the many ways this company has fucked up over the years, I hope you can appreciate what an honor it is to be here when we’ve discovered a brand new way to fuck up. Anyone wanna pose for a picture to capture the moment?”
“Yank, that’s enough,” Barney said. “There’s problems on every page. Wrong artwork, updates that are missing. Who knows what else. We need to go through the whole thing and fix it all.”
“What about Eric’s replacement?” Yank asked. “She seemed like a nice woman. Just the kind of person you’d expect to jump at the chance to help out even if it wasn’t, oh, I don’t know, her fucking job. Where the hell is she right now?”
Nate averted his eyes and Barney shook his head. “She actually quit this morning,” he said.
“How did that happen?”
“She said she couldn’t deal with the late hours, so she walked.”
“Jesus,” Yank said. “She wasn’t here two weeks and she quit? We really need to do something about people like that. If they’re smart enough to quit after two weeks, we should immediately promote them to management, because they’re obviously smarter than the rest of us and probably know things.”
Ben didn’t like the way the vein on Barney’s left temple was pulsing. He wondered if Yank’s strategy was to get the boss to stroke out right here at the table. Then he remembered that Yank and strategy were two words not very well acquainted.
“Yank, seriously, shut up,” Barney said. “I want the next words out of your mouth to be something productive. If they’re not, you can go home and you can stay there until I tell you to come back in. Clear?”
Yank stared at Barney for a long moment, and Ben felt his stomach roll over. He didn’t want Yank to say anything because he was sure these next words would blow everything up. Then Yank turned to look up at the big screen, and he took this in for an uncomfortable minute. He looked back at Barney with a frown.
“I don’t know a goddamn thing about how this site is supposed to look,” he said. “I’m not learning in the next five minutes either. So what we’ll need is printouts of what we’ve got and printouts of everything we were told to do. I’ll compare ’em and I’ll tell Nate here what he has to fix. He’ll make the fixes and in the morning you’ll have something to test.”
“I can get you those screen shots,” Barney said as he rose from his chair. “You need anything else?”
“Ohio here is gonna need a snack in a little while,” Yank said. “He’s gonna be up past his bedtime and he gets cranky if he hasn’t had something to eat.”
Barney shook his head as he left the room.
“He’s not gonna be here the whole night, is he?” Yank asked.
Nate shrugged. “He told me he’d do whatever we need him to do.”
“We fucking need him to go home is what we need him to do. Does he honestly think he’s the lynchpin in this plan?”
“I told him we can handle this,” Nate said. “I don’t know if he’ll listen.”
“You told him too early,” Yank said. “There wasn’t a plan yet.”
“Now that the plan came from you, you think he’s just going to walk out of here?”
“You can’t tell him you can handle something before you can tell him how you’re gonna do it,” Yank said. “You know he gets paranoid. You’ve gotta back your bullshit up or you never get rid of him. Rookie mistake, Nate.”
Nate shrugged.
“Speaking of which, any idea how this got so fucked up?”
“Nope. Usual reasons, probably. It’s like nobody was in charge of the site since Eric left,” Nate said. “This is what happens when nobody’s in charge.”
“Dirty little secret of this place, Ohio, is this is also what happens when somebody’s in charge. Don’t be the somebody that fucks up this bad.”
Ben reached across the table to snag one of the sets of stapled printouts. It was a list of the errors on the site. It was nearly ten pages long. Yank didn’t look at one but he gestured toward the pile.
“I’ve said it before, this is what happens when we hire people who can’t write and people who can’t read and let them work together,” he said. “No one wants to hear that.”
“Charlie was the programmer on this,” Nate said.
“I don’t care. Didn’t Charlie spell his name wrong in his email signature and not notice for three weeks? He’s your example?”
“I’m not arguing with you,” Nate said. “I just wanna fix this and maybe get home while it’s still today.”
“That’s another problem,” Yank said. “No one ever wants to argue about this. Ohio, one of these days we’ll learn our lesson here. Maybe one of us will even be around to see it.”