clients, the shareholders, the stock analysts, and the employees themselves—from the true failings of our product.
Maybe most important of all, in laying out the details of a hidden operation only I understood, the spreadsheet also showed how the original model used to launch Core Communications had not just been incorrect, it hadn’t simply been a grand and complicated mistake. Instead the hidden document showed how the original spreadsheet and the company it described had, from the beginning, formed an extremely intricate, carefully crafted lie.
The system would fail. I’d known it from the beginning.
I didn’t know when it would happen. And so all I could do, every day, every night, was work to keep the company alive.
Monday at nine, and the office was in motion. Chairs being rolled into conference rooms for overcrowded staff meetings, voices calling out across walkways and workstation walls, people running down open stairways as the white light from windows all around us shifted from floor to wall to desk to door.
And I was moving too. From the senior staff meeting that had started my day, to the list of e-mails building up on my computer, to a financial overview meeting in a conference room on the nineteenth floor. Walking now with Cliff beside me, from the finance meeting back to my office, crossing through Accounting, and my movement seemed to slow amid the long steel rows of low black file cabinets.
Cliff held three checks totaling over $8 million. In his other hand, he held a large donut covered in an unnaturally blue frosting.
I nodded toward the checks. “Don’t we have proper procedures for handling checks such as those?” I asked him.
“Actually,” he said, smiling as he delicately shook loose frosting from the donut, quietly leading to a punch line we both knew he’d deliver, “this is the proper procedure.”
I tapped on a file cabinet. We turned down another aisle.
Core operated from a building that had long been used by a series of quasi-legal sweatshops. The ceilings were high, the walls were filled with tall, multipaned windows, black ceiling fans and silver air-conditioning ducts hung high over everyone’s heads. Every floor and room was lit by a mix of floor lamps, desk lamps, and track lights hanging among the exposed ducts and spinning fans. All of it combined with the light from the multipaned windows to cast shadows and streaks of white across the desks, workstations, open meeting spaces and wide walkways covering every floor of the building, the light itself frequently caught in the steel and glass partitions separating rooms and work areas, so that now, as I walked with Cliff, even the stoic and conservative white-shirted CPAs spread around us in Accounting were cast in an almost brooding, anxious light.
It was all I could do to not start floating again.
“And maybe,” Cliff started to say, pausing to swallow the last bite of his donut, stopping in a hallway before turning away from me toward his office. “Maybe,” he said slowly, his lips tinged blackish blue from the donut’s smooth frosting, “what I really meant was a Caesar salad.”
Cliff was a man of TV trivia and detailed balance sheets, the forty-year-old arts major with a gift for numbers and finance. Even for me, this fed into the uncertainty over which food Cliff really was. Because Cliff was without question the salad among us, but exactly what kind of salad might never be determined.
To my office and the two hundred e-mails waiting from the morning. Sixteen voice mails. Ten handwritten messages taken by my assistant. The messages in all their forms came from bankers, lawyers, outside sales representatives who’d found their way up to me, analysts from six large mutual funds in Boston and New York, employees from all departments and levels of the company, my life insurance agent, my dry cleaner, a man trying to sell me long distance for my home. It was a twisting kaleidoscope of requests, comments, complaints and chatter.
Twenty minutes and I’d responded to or deleted half of the messages. Quick conversations and short e-mails.
Yes.
Today.
Let me find out.
Talk to Julie, but sounds fine to me.
Unfortunately, no. Which I hate to say. But that’s my only conclusion.
Thanks, but no.
Thanks, but no.
It’s a tax issue.
He’s got it wrong.
Great news.
Yes.
If you think so, then yes.
Unreal.
No.
No.
Thanks, but no.
Nine-thirty, and I was passing through meetings between teams from R&D, Strategic Planning, Technical Development, Production, Operations, Customer Service and Tech Support. Most Mondays I made brief, unannounced appearances at a handful of staff meetings. I nodded and smiled at group VPs, section managers, entry-level employees still learning to use their voice mail. I shook hands. I dispensed Hello s. I asked for the names of the many people I had never met. I told them to go about their business as usual, leaning against a high window or a green glass wall, sometimes sitting down in a corner next to a group of latecomers to the meeting, knowing I needed to sit silent, motionless, fading from the minds of the attendees around me, and hopefully they’d begin to sit back in their chairs or stand up to talk as if I weren’t there, some of them flicking bits of paper at their neighbors, others doodling in their planners or swearing at the person writing too small on the whiteboard, and I watched as the group followed a sometimes well-designed, sometimes undefined path toward decision, compromise, acquiescence and assent.
“If the Germans can come through, then yes,” said a financial analyst in one meeting.
“Not that I’m skeptical, but can we see it on a Pert chart?” said a programmer in another.
“Ergo, I give to you six months of research,” said a marketing assistant.
“Beneath my clothing, I, like you, am naked,” said a trainer from Tech Support.
This was not a normal company.
By eleven A.M., two business reporters were following me across the sixteenth floor. It was a puff-piece interview arranged by our Public Relations department, which had spent the last three years pitting the business papers against TV, cable against the networks and the networks against the newsmagazines in order to keep the name of Core Communications and Robbie Case, its poster-boy CEO, in every possible media outlet.
“This kind of growth is what we always said we wanted,” I told one of the reporters as we walked down a hall toward Strategic Planning, where I would pass them back to our PR group. “Still, anyone who tells you they’re ready for this is, I think, lying.”
It was one of my standard lines.
“By your saying that,”
