Chapter 8

Bring donuts.

I stop at Dunkin' Donuts on the way into work and order a dozen random donuts, and a half dozen cream-filled chocolate glazed ones. Those are Phil's favorites, and he always gets his own personal supply whenever anyone makes a donut run.

Something is up at the office. We rarely ever have meetings outside of regular office hours, and the unusual time combined with the secure location can only mean big trouble at the ranch. I am in absolutely no mood for drama right now, and I can't help but feel a little dread in my stomach as I pull into the parking lot. I don't like conflicts at work; the everyday troubles of the job are more than enough excitement for me.

I make my way to the server room upstairs, swipe my keycard at the door, and try to not drop the donuts all over the faded carpet as I open the door. The crew is already there—Phil is sitting down on a stool in front of one of the server racks, Little Joe is leaning casually against the wall, Jessica is sipping a cup of coffee well away from the important server, and Adam is busy checking something on one of the consoles.

"What's going on, guys?" I drop the donut boxes on a nearby table, and Phil makes a beeline for the food.

"Mmmm, donuts. You're the man."

"Hey, Notes boy," Jessica smiles. "Have fun on your weekend out?"

"Yeah," I say. "Yeah, I did. I'm glad I went."

"Savor the happy memories," Little Joe says with a grin. "Happy times around here have been put on hold for the time being."

I shoot him a questioning look, and Phil walks up and pats me on the shoulder. Thankfully, it's the hand that doesn't have frosting on it. He takes a big bite out of his donut before he chimes in.

"Nick was made Grand High Poobah of the whole IT department yesterday."

"You've got to be shitting me," I say.

"Not a word of a lie," Adam says over his shoulder. "The Big Cheese announced it per email just before lunch."

"We're having a department meeting at ten o'clock," Jessica informs me, and her tortured eye-rolling leaves no doubt about her opinion of the event. "That's when we all get to pucker up and kiss Nick's ass. I hope you shaved today."

"Matter of fact, I did," I reply. "I'll be damned if I give that son-of-a-bitch the time of day, though. He's treated me like a brainless peon gopher every time I've had to deal with him. The man has an ego the size of a small country."

"Try 'continent'," Jessica says. "But he's your boss now, so you better learn to love that greasy, fat-lipped, ass-grabbing monkey."

Little Joe chuckles. "How do you really feel about Nick the Prick, Jess?"

"Oh, I want to have his fucking babies," she says without breaking stride. "'Cause, you know, brainless and greasy go so well together. It gets the womenfolk all hot and bothered."

"Well, that's a bit of shitty news," I say.

"That's the understatement of the year, brother." Phil stuffs the rest of his donut into his mouth and flashes a cream-stuffed grin.

I take a donut and plop myself down on one of the empty chairs.

"So what's the plan? Do we all just shrug our shoulders and secretly look for new jobs online?"

"I'd say that depends entirely on Nick," Phil says. "Let's just go to the department meeting and see what he has to say. If he has any brains at all, he'll realize that he can't run the place by himself, and that you don't get projects done by pissing off your worker bees."

"I wouldn't count on that," Jessica frowns. "Just wait—he'll try the stick before the carrot, because that's what he's been doing all his life."

"In that case, things are going to get interesting around here," I say.

The department meeting is not in our actual department, but in the super-sized main conference room over in the corporate headquarters building, where all the overpaid Blackberry addicts rub elbows while the peons do the actual work. This is a bad sign already—Nick sees himself as a member of the Inner Circle, not a part of the IT team. We file into the meeting room, and see that all the chairs have been stacked up at the back of the room, despite the fact that the room is easily big enough to have everyone sit in chairs with lots of space to spare. Nick is nowhere to be seen. We cluster as a group near the back of the room and exchange hellos with people from other teams. The mood is definitely tense, a roomful of people unsure of what the day may bring.

At exactly ten o'clock, the door opens once again, and Nick strolls in, followed by his entourage. He's a tall guy with a dark complexion. His eyes are droopy, and he always looks like a fat-lipped basset hound. He wears a dark suit, a departure from his usual khaki-and-white-unbuttoned-shirt setup.

"Dressing like a big boy now," I murmur in Phil's direction, and he shakes his head with a grin.

Nick walks briskly to the little raised platform at the front of the room, and sticks one hand into his pocket as he steps up onto his stage. His enormous gaudy gold watch is dangling from his wrist in a very obvious fashion. All that's missing is someone following him with a boom box that plays the fanfare from Rocky. Nick raises his hand, and the room grows quiet almost instantly. I can tell by his expression that he is enormously pleased by this.

"Good morning," he says.

"I scheduled a department meeting to let everyone know about the changes I'll be making. I'm your new Director of Information Technology," he adds with a smile, as if that information isn't completely gratuitous at this point.

"I'm not going to lie to you just to make you feel good. I want top producers on my team. If you're not a top producer, I have no use for you."

"'Top producer'?" Jessica whispers into my ear. "Where have I heard that term before?"

I think about this for a second, and then I have to restrain myself from slapping my forehead in disbelief.

"The fucking ERA real estate ads," I reply. "What do you want to bet Nick just went through them for his new house?"

"Top producers," Nick says again, this time louder for added emphasis, as if we haven't heard the stupid phrase the first two times. "We're going to take on some important projects in the next few weeks, and I want everybody on status reports. Daily."

There is murmuring in the room at this, and it's not a happy kind of murmur. Nick holds up a hand again.

"I'm not going to micro-manage you. You'll be sending your status reports to your supervisors, and I'll check with them as needed. I just want to figure out who my top producers are, that's all."

"Sure you do," Little Joe murmurs. Such a measure is usually done prior to a firing spree, because status reports give the firer a reasonably lawsuit-proof alibi. Nick is out to cull the herd, and maybe net himself a bonus for streamlining the payroll and saving money. I don't know what's more insulting: the prospect of having to submit daily "What I Did at Work" missives like a grade school kid, or Nick's assumption that we're all too dim to see what he's really doing here.

Even Nick has enough smarts to realize that the mood of the crowd is suddenly turning against him, and he holds up his hand again and gives us an entirely unconvincing smile.

"Look, we're going to set this place up to impress a whole bunch of important people. If we pull off the projects that are coming our way, there might be a bunch of bonus checks coming our way. I'm sure nobody here would mind some extra money, right?"

Of course nobody in the room would mind some extra money, but most of us know Nick well enough see his carrot for what it is. There are some murmurs of agreement, but they're mostly just polite appeasement. Our group is well in the back of the room, shielded from Nick's view by most of the department members, and we abuse our location by making faces and rolling eyes at each other. If this is supposed to be a motivating pep talk, it's an abysmally bad one.

"Such a people person, that one," Adam scoffs, playing with the piercings in his eyebrow. His chin beard is now long enough for him to braid it. The braid together with the multitude of metal bits in his face makes him look like a cross between a pirate and a Hell's Angel.

Nick drones on, but I have started to tune out, and I can tell from the restless shifting around me that I'm not alone. After a half hour, his blather sounds much like the unintelligible utterings of Charlie Brown's teacher: mwah-mwah, mwah mwah. Finally, Nick has decided that we have been exposed to his glory for long enough to be rejuvenated, and he dismisses us with a fat-lipped smirk and a casual wave of his hand. As we trot out, we can hear suppressed chuckles all around us.

"Well, that was fun," Phil says as we walk out into the street to head back to the parking garage.

"You know what was missing from that meeting?" Jessica asks, stuffing her hands into the pockets of her jacket and blinking into the late morning sun.

"Um, a sudden blockage in the brain of the main speaker?" Little Joe offers, and we all chuckle.

"No, dummy. Who did you not see in the room?"

"Benton," I say. "You think Nick has already fired his ass?"

"I wouldn't put it past the guy," Phil says. "He has a history of surrounding himself with his cronies. Get them a bigger paycheck, and they'll stay loyal to you. Empire-building at its finest."

It's a little too early to go out for lunch, so we all head back to the office separately. On my way to my desk, I stop by at Benton's office and take a peek inside. Benton is not at his desk, but it doesn't look any different today—no cardboard boxes stuffed with personal things, no orphaned network cords bearing witness of a desktop support guy coming and reclaiming company hardware. Benton's name plate is still sitting on his desk, and his laptop is in its docking station, the green power light blinking.

I make my way to my desk and sit down, turning on the computer as I swivel on my chair and take a look around. There's the usual motley collection of user manuals and books on the shelves overhead, assorted personal paraphernalia strewn about my desk, and certifications tacked to the wall to impress the yokels.

I find myself pondering how I would feel if Nick and the HR enforcer walked into my office right now to escort me to the door, and I am strangely relieved when I realize that it would not bother me in the least. On the contrary, I'd probably whistle a jaunty tune on the way to my car. All the stuff in this office belongs to the company, save the diplomas, and I couldn't care less about those.

Jessica walks into my cubicle and follows my gaze as I study the crap hanging on the wall. There's a MCSE certificate, several Lotus diplomas, and assorted odds and ends from years of company-paid Geek U courses. If I stick with this job for another five years, there'll be twice the number of paper certificates on that wall, and I'll still feel exactly as smart as I do now.

It occurs to me that the path on which I have put myself leads straight to the end of a mediocre life. I'll always be smack dab in the middle of average territory, waiting for my real life to begin.

"What are you thinking about?" she asks.

"You know, I think I've been pissing my life away," I say.

"Oh, boy." Jessica pulls up one of my chairs and plops herself down on it.

"Thinking about hanging up the old pocket protector and going off to Key West to be a beach bum until the savings run out?"

"Not precisely," I smile. "Truth be told, I have no idea what I really want to do. I'm just pretty sure I don't want to be doing this." I wave my hand towards the diploma wall.

"I mean, what am I going to have to show for all this crap in another ten years?"

"Where else do they pay you sixty grand a year to sit on your ass and play with computers all day? I mean, so you think you're going to be happier painting stuff on sidewalks in downtown Boston and eating at the Salvation Army soup kitchen?"

Jessica leans back in her chair and props her feet up on my desk.

"I'm not too long out of college," she muses. "I still remember how much it sucks to have to share your pad with a slob because you can't make the rent by yourself, or doing laundry at the Laundromat two blocks down because your place doesn't have a washer and dryer. Nothing like having to turn down dope dealers while you're folding your undies, I tell you that. Now I get paid to sit on my ass, and I can pad my savings account and preserve myself for later."

"Preserve yourself for what?" I ask. "What are you going to do in another ten years? Are you still going to ride herd on some servers and listen to idiots like Nick?"

"Shit, no. In another five years, I'll be fully vested in my retirement money, and then I'll tell Nick where to shove it." She leans closer and drops her voice, even though we're all alone in the office.

"I tuck away half my paycheck every month, and sticking it in low-risk stuff with moderate and steady returns. By the time I leave, I'll have enough money put aside to do whatever the hell I want. This is just purgatory, Frank."

"Waiting for your real life to begin," I murmur.

"Isn't everybody?"

"Maybe so. But I think most people never stop waiting until that train has left the station. I don't want to wake up and realize that I am fifty and balding, and that I've been spending a quarter century kissing asses just so I can get a corner office and some stock options."

Jessica looks at me with incredulity, and then smiles in that lop-sided ways of hers.

"What happened to you all of a sudden, Frank? Did you hit your head under a desk out in California and have an epiphany or something?"

"Not exactly." I hesitate for a moment, and then shrug my shoulders. I need to talk about the weekend, and Jessica has always been a good listener.

"Let's go into the server room for a second."

We walk over to the server ranch, and Jessica opens the door. The room is empty save for the hum of the case fans, and the ever-present droning of the dedicated air conditioning unit. I step into the room and close the door behind us. Jessica grabs one of the rolling stools and sits down on it, looking at me expectantly.

"Alright, spill the beans."

"Here's what happened last weekend..."

Jessica listens to a mildly sanitized version of my weekend with interest, only interrupting me a few times to clarify things. By the time I have finished my tale, it's pretty close to lunchtime.

"So what do you think? Am I just irrational?"

She looks at me with a smile and makes a tsk-tsk sound.

"Frank, Frank, Frank. This has nothing to do with being rational. If you were rational about this, you wouldn't sit here wishing you were on a plane to New York instead. You'd be sucking it up and keep swinging the pickaxe like the rest of us."

"I'm not wishing I was in New York," I say, but Jessica rolls her eyes at this comment.

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