Variation on a Theme, Book 6
Copyright© 2024 by Grey Wolf
Chapter 116: Get On The Train!
Sunday, March 23, 1986
Michael looked a bit dejected when he arrived at Kerbey Lane.
“Lee turned me down,” he said. “Said he was flattered, but he didn’t think he could help.”
“Well, that stinks!” Jas said.
Once we were seated and had ordered, Michael said, “I’m trying not to give myself false hope, but he made me feel like he was going to think about it a bit. I mean, it was phrased as a flat-out ‘no,’ not an ‘I’ll think about it.’ But ... you saw him. I think he’s a guy who says what he thinks and then sometimes changes his thinking.”
“That’s true,” I said. “He did that a few times last night.”
“I told him to call you if he has any questions. But also that you have a college-student schedule. He’s got your pager number, too.”
“I’ll put it on vibrate,” I said, chuckling. “I always do.”
“Yeah. Me, too,” Michael said. “Damn thing is loud! Only about ten people — including you, of course — have that number. Everyone else has to go through Alice. Or one of the ten, in an emergency. There are times when I need to know now, and can’t even wait for Alice to tell me.”
“I get it,” I said. “That feels like a critical skill, and guess what’s not in the curriculum?”
“Time management!” he said, chuckling. “Got it! I know you can do that, but a lot of people can’t. Heck, you might be better at it than I am!”
“I did an awful lot of schedule-juggling in high school. The whole ‘two major extracurriculars, plus studying’ thing forces you to learn. Well, or crash and burn. The people who try to burn the candle at both ends usually crash and burn sooner or later.”
Jas nodded right along with me.
“A lesson I’m trying to learn without quite so much fire!” he said, nodding. “Alice says I’m doing better. I told her to be a nag and push me if I’m doing too much. Sometimes I have to say, ‘Yeah, but this really is critical.’ Sometimes, though, it’s ... yeah. It can wait.”
“So, if Lee breaks our hearts...?” I said.
“Gregory. Grudgingly. He’s better for where we are now. That ... it wasn’t the best interview. But he could carry us for a year or two, maybe more. I really don’t know how well he could do with all of the distractions, but he might surprise me.”
“He might.”
“I’m hoping Lee changes his mind. I also called our mutual friend — Patrick — and told him to lean on Lee. Very politely! Patrick is always polite. He’ll lean and it won’t feel like leaning.”
“That sounds good,” Jas said. “Sometimes it just takes time. I’m optimistic.”
“I really am, too,” Michael said. “The thing is, Gregory can do it. I’m not screwed. We’ll have someone, and quickly. But Lee just feels like someone who’ll fit in and would get me.”
“That’s the picture I got,” I said.
“Driving back today?”
“Right after brunch, actually,” I said. “We’ll be around if he calls today.”
“Awesome!” he said. He paused, then added, “I think this would have gone similarly without you, but the two of us have a better chance of landing Lee than I do by myself. Plus ... I mean, you were there. That was something, and I felt a bit weird about picking him. It just felt right, though.”
“Definitely. Like I said, your gut hasn’t let anyone down. Sometimes you can’t trust your instincts, but you need a good reason not to, and there isn’t any right here.”
“We’ll touch base as soon as we know something, I guess,” he said.
“By the way, and unrelated: you should go to Houston the weekend of the fifth,” I said.
“Oh?”
“Big concert, and I mean physically big. This French artist, Jean-Michel Jarre — you might or might not have heard of him; he does a bunch of synthesizer-based music — is playing downtown. Meaning, he’s playing downtown. Thirty-story projection screens, fireworks launching from rooftops, the whole thing. They’re saying it could have more than a million people watching.”
“Huge!” he said, shaking his head. “Normally not my thing, but ... yeah. I might do that. That sounds like one of those once-in-a-lifetime things, and it’s just a few hours away.”
“We’ll be in the French Consulate’s section,” Jas said. “You’re welcome to join us, or hang out on your own. From what I’m hearing, I think anywhere to the near west of downtown will be good.”
“I might take some of the team down, maybe. I’ll let you know if I need a seat, but if ten or twenty of us are going, we’ll just get some space somewhere along Allen Parkway or the like.”
“Makes sense!” I said.
“Have a safe drive home!”
“Thanks! You have a safe drive, too!” Jas said, with my echoing it.
Once we were on the road, Jas said, “You don’t think it’s over, right? With Lee?”
“I’m guessing not. He said no, but he’s a guy who’ll do his due diligence. And anyone who does their due diligence will probably change their mind. Honestly, if he doesn’t change his mind, he’s not our guy. Anyone who would pass on the chance to take a $200 million company and make it a $1 billion company isn’t ambitious enough, and that’s a realistic target for the next few years.”
Jas shook her head.
“And we knew them when it was a few guys in a dorm room. Two years ago!”
“Two years,” I said. “It really is mind-boggling.”
There were no messages when we got home, and nothing came up before bedtime. Angie and Paige arrived around five. We called Mom and Dad to confirm we were all home and a candidate for COO and President had been identified. Whether he would take the job or not was, as yet, unknown.
Paige pulled Jas and me aside briefly and told us that she’d talked with Jess, who was on board with what we’d discussed on the way to New Orleans. Who Jess dated was entirely different, but she likely would have asked us anyway. Us not liking someone she was thinking of dating would be a red flag, and she would want to know that.
On the flip side, she would be very happy to meet anyone any of us dated, but didn’t feel like it was urgent, simply because she wouldn’t be in our lives day-to-day. We would value her insight just as much as she valued ours, though. If she saw something off, it would mean something.
The six of us had dinner together. After dinner, Jas, Angie, Paige, and I got together and I went over the interviews.
Once I went over the second interview, Angie said, “That’s freaky.”
“It is?” I said.
“That baseball story. The Brooklyn Dodgers. I read that! That happened!”
“Huh,” I said. “Well, that means it was the same interview, only different.”
Everyone giggled a bit at that.
“Had to have been. His turning Michael down isn’t a surprise. It didn’t stick,” Angie said.
“We’ll have to hope it doesn’t stick again,” Jas said.
“I bet it doesn’t,” Angie said. “Just because ... same guy. Different interview, but also kinda the same. And it’s a more attractive opportunity this time. Maybe not — it’s different, in a different universe — but I’ll bet he winds up taking the job.”
“Fingers crossed!” Paige said.
We all agreed.
The rest of the evening was quiet. We hung out (and I tried to avoid waiting for the phone call that never came), then went to bed.
Studying would ramp back up next week, almost certainly. Distractions or not (and P.C.’s Limited was a huge distraction), we needed to study.
Monday, March 24, 1986
I needed to get my weekly plans put together, and that started not with Amy or Darla but with ‘Brigadoon’. We were seeing that on Wednesday night. Thursday was also out, thanks to the Labèque sisters’ piano concert.
If there was a ‘fortunately’ to all of this, it was that Darla wasn’t expecting a night this week. We could, even on the weekend, but next week would be soon enough for her.
Amy would have Friday, most likely, unless she wanted Saturday. Or, perhaps, Tuesday.
I checked in briefly with Amy at lunch. She was good with any of them.
I also checked in with Darla during Accounting. She had some stuff to talk about, but we agreed on a lunch date tomorrow, since I told her I might be expecting a phone call and didn’t want to interrupt a conversation with her because of it.
The biggest other part of the day was getting my ‘Howdy is for Everyone’ shirt. Cammie wound up bringing all of ours home. From what I heard, people had already ordered six thousand shirts — far more than I had expected — and they had thousands more to sell.
I saw four during the day. Not many, but it was the first day.
My pager didn’t go off throughout my classes. I was starting to give up hope when I got home and saw the machine didn’t have any messages.
That changed ten minutes later, when the pager started vibrating in my pocket. Checking it, the callback number looked likely to be in Austin. I headed into my bedroom, then called back.
“Lee Walker,” he said.
“Howdy, Lee. Steve Marshall,” I said.
“Quick callback! I’m impressed!”
“I just got home from classes. Easy to call back.”
“Are the phones still at the end of the halls?” he said, chuckling.
“I wouldn’t know, actually. I’ve never been in any of the Corps dorms. We actually live in a house in the Northgate area.”
“Up near the Chicken?”
“A few blocks from there,” I said.
“Nice location! Business school’s up that way, I think.”
“And most of Engineering, now. If you haven’t been here in a while, it’s changed.”
“Last time was... ‘78, I think,” he said.
“You’ll hardly recognize the place. Well ... you’ll recognize the older stuff. There’s just an ever-growing collection of newer buildings.”
“I’ve gotta get back there,” he said. “Anyway! We’ll reminisce later. I’ve been doing some checking and ... tell me, Aggie to Aggie, why should I get on this train?”
“Honestly, because it’s an express train and we need an engineer, Lee,” I said. “Michael’s been doing two jobs, CEO and COO. He can’t do both. Jasmine — that’s my fiancée — and I were talking about it as we left Austin yesterday. Two years ago, we visited Michael in his dorm room. Four or five guys, racks of parts, and half-assembled computers. He started the whole thing with $1,000 and some parts. On the strength of that, we put in forty thousand. Within a few months, Michael and company hit a million in quarterly revenue. Last quarter it was over $75 million. Compaq officially grew faster, but they had a funding round and millions in the bank. Except for my forty grand, this is all pulling up the business by its bootstraps.”
“And you think it’s going to continue.”
“I do. Their biggest challenge is short-term financing, honestly, and that’s solvable. It’s not solvable the way it’s happening now, though, to be frank. Texas banks are shaky and getting worse, and I don’t have a lot of confidence in them fixing things. But there are more options than thinking locally.”
There was a pause, and then he said, “You might have just sold me, at least a bit. Not on the job, yet, but on you. I have to admit, working for a company where the Board of Directors’ ages added up is less than mine is ... unusual.”
I chuckled.
“We know, believe me!”
“Still, you nailed it. I’ll tell you what I did today. I’ve got acquaintances all over Austin. One of them’s a banker. I asked him if I should take the job. He said no, that they were going to run out of money, crash, and burn. It sounded too certain, so I talked to another friend. Turns out, it’s the bank that’s threatening to crash and burn. You’re obviously tuned into that, which is impressive for an undergrad living a hundred miles away.”
“I’m following the weekly reports, but mostly I’m trying to keep my head in the clouds and look longer-term. Not just for P.C.’s Limited, but overall. Banks are tight, the real estate market is hurting, petroleum’s down. It looks like a state-wide recession. Ordinarily, I’d say that means rough sailing for Michael. His business is quickly nationalizing, though, and computers are a great way of juicing productivity without increasing headcount. That’s if you do it right. Do it wrong, and they’re the biggest time-sink imaginable. But, say, if your accounting team is on a mainframe or, heaven forbid, on paper ledgers, a spreadsheet program will put them into overdrive. For P.C.’s Limited, if they don’t take a big hit in sales in a slowdown, they’re about to have to expand again. A weak real estate market pushes rents down and offers up better locations.”
“Again, that pretty much matches what I’m thinking. You’re saying they have to expand soon?” he asked.
“Can’t double sales without doubling production. It’s not just that, though, but ... I can’t go into detail on the other thing. Michael’s let me know it’s buried under a foot of NDAs, but I don’t actually know what’s in them. I’m already covered in the governing documents. Anything I learn as part of the board is NDA’d if Michael says it is, pretty much.”
“Smart of you. Or your lawyers, either way.”
“I’m quite happy with my lawyer, and he thinks Michael’s is good, so I’ll share plenty of credit there,” I said.
“Give me an estimate of where you think things are going.”
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