Variation on a Theme, Book 6
Copyright© 2024 by Grey Wolf
Chapter 118: Onboarding
Friday, March 28, 1986
I packed enough for a two-day trip. It might make sense to just come back Sunday, depending on how Saturday went.
I would miss everyone, and they would miss me, but this was a preview of coming attractions. I was likely to be a business traveler, at least from time to time. Some of the others would, too. Interruptions and separations would be part of life. We wouldn’t accept roles that kept us apart for months at a time, most likely, but weeks here and there could happen.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder, so they say. We might be testing that. I suspected it would be good for us. My ex-wife and I might have suffered somewhat from ‘familiarity breeds contempt.’ Separate interests, and maybe even the occasional separate vacation, might have done us a world of good.
I hit the road after Martial Arts, having a quick (and light) fast food lunch on the way. I arrived at P.C.’s Limited a bit before three.
This was my first visit during a regular working day, and it was a reminder of just how much they had grown. The parking lot was full of cars, and they probably all belonged to Michael’s employees. Several buildings had P.C.’s Limited signs, and people were coming and going from all of them. Two big trucks were being loaded with white boxes with the company logo on them and pictures of computers on the sides.
Business was thriving, and I was stepping into a role that required me to help keep it thriving. That was daunting. It belatedly occurred to me that I now had the most senior role I’d ever had in any job over a nearly thirty-year career, and I had it at nineteen.
As usual: inconceivable, yet true.
I grabbed my badge from my briefcase and headed into the main building. The receptionist blinked at me, clearly not recognizing me yet recognizing the name (and the absurdly low employee number). She finally figured it out and sent me upstairs to find Alice, apologizing for the delay. I told her there was no problem, and there wasn’t. It was much better for her to hold up the occasional person who deserved to be there than allow people who shouldn’t be there to have the run of the place.
Alice was set up in the foyer of Michael’s office. She was literally, not just virtually, Michael’s gatekeeper. No one got into his office except by passing her.
“Hello,” I said, extending my hand when I got to her desk.
She rose and shook hands.
“Hello, Steve,” she said. “I remember you from the other visit. Go ahead — sit! That chair gets almost no use, so I apologize for the dust.”
I suspected that wasn’t true, but that most people who used it were waiting for Michael, not talking to her.
Once I was seated, she said, “You were fairly clear on the phone, so I’ll just say, this does seem like a good idea. I was just surprised.”
“There wasn’t a real reason to do this before,” I said. “We would occasionally talk on the phone, but that was about it, mostly because it was usually Michael calling me. I need to be ready for things to be different now that roles are changing.”
She nodded and said, “I’m guessing you didn’t expect this when you agreed to invest!”
“Well ... yes and no. I was pretty sure Michael would do great things. There being a Board two years later? That’s a surprise.”
“You’re at A&M?” she asked.
“Yes. I’m a sophomore in Business, minoring in political science and computer science.”
She chuckled a bit and said, “You probably won’t believe how I wound up here.”
“Oh, given how college can be, I might. Try me.”
“Art history,” she said, chuckling. “I went to UT on Plan II, kicked ass, then ... yeah, there aren’t a lot of art history jobs. I meant to get my PhD, and maybe I will, but things happened, and ... honestly, this is a pretty exciting job, and I feel like I’m making a difference.”
Plan II was UT’s honors program, more or less. That probably meant she’d gone in with grades and test scores similar to mine. I hadn’t underestimated her before, and I certainly wouldn’t now.
“Judging from how much Michael leans on you, I’m pretty sure you are,” I said.
She dimpled a bit, grinning.
We talked for about forty-five minutes, with just a few interruptions for people coming and going. Michael left once, shaking my hand when he did, but just bustled back into his office when he returned twenty minutes later.
By the end, I think we had a much better feel for who each other was. She might not be an executive assistant forever, but she had a solid future ahead of her. I could easily see her as an executive herself if she chose to stay in business.
As for me, I can only guess what she thought, but she either took me seriously or was damn good at pretending to. At one point, she suggested picking some slightly underutilized assistant somewhere at P.C.’s Limited and making them my nominal point of contact. I think she liked it when I said I’d be happier if she kept that job, at least for now.
We agreed to rethink it if I started getting any significant volume of calls. That could happen during an IPO, for instance. It probably wouldn’t be just bankers wanting to talk to me, either. I was pretty sure there would be pressure to put some more ‘adult supervision’ in place and add ‘outside’ Board members. I had some vague memory of Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, a fixture in the Austin tech community, joining the board. Admiral Inman had risen through the intelligence community, but his fame in technology came thanks to his role leading MCC (the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation, which was based in Austin and was, at the time, one of the largest research consortia in the United States). I’d never met Admiral Inman and suspected that would be interesting all by itself.
He wasn’t the only one, of course. Just the one I could put a name to right now. I hoped that was the same, because I was pretty sure he’d been good for Dell.
I wouldn’t say Alice and I were ‘friends’ yet, but we were much more ‘coworkers,’ at least. That meant something to me, at least.
We parted with a handshake, and I left to check into the Hilton and change for dinner.
I hadn’t memorized the room number at the Hilton, but this might have been the same room. I could get used to traveling like this, and perhaps I would.
Maybe not this year, though. But ... soon? Life was changing rapidly, and I would need to change with it.
Two maxims common in my previous life — and, I think, also current in this one — came to mind: ‘Fake it until you make it’ and ‘Act like you’ve been there before.’ All of this was new. And, at nineteen, everyone would expect it to be new.
But, the more I acted as if it wasn’t new, and I was still ‘in my element,’ the better things would go. I’d already made a good first impression on Lee Walker, apparently, and likely made a good second impression on Alice Becker.
Making good impressions wasn’t new, either — it was who I’d been — but the territory was new. I had no map, and would just have to rely on my already-acquired skills to keep my footing.
That, or enlist help. Some of that would likely happen along the way. People like Lee would know I — we, counting either Michael or the girls — were new and might want to help us find our way. Or they might want to take advantage of us, perhaps.
I pitied the second group. They were probably going to be bitterly disappointed.
Dinner tonight was much more casual than Fonda San Miguel. We were meeting at Threadgill’s, an old favorite that somehow fit. It had once been a gas station, then a tavern, and had slowly turned into a restaurant. Along the way, notables like Janis Joplin had graced the place, and it had become an Austin landmark. It had finally closed not long before first-life Steve Marshall had also closed up shop. Thus, I’d once expected to never visit it again. Yet, here I was.
I arrived first, beating Michael by just a few minutes and Lee by about ten. All three of us were early, though. We all shook hands, then headed in and were quickly seated in one of the back booths, away from whoever their current performing artist might be.
Lee was clearly no stranger to the menu, but he lived in Austin, so that was no surprise. We picked out dinner. That, in itself, was amusing. The spinach casserole I cooked every year came from the Threadgill’s cookbook. It was the upscale version of the casserole they served in the restaurant. I had that, red beans and rice, and chicken-fried steak for my main dish. Threadgill’s was ‘Southern comfort cooking’ and also offered a wide variety of vegetables (of which you could have as many refills as you wanted).
The early part of our conversation was simple stuff: Michael thanking Lee again, Lee downplaying the significance of it all, and so forth. The first surprise came just after we’d ordered.
Lee looked at me and said, “Michael says I need to ask you more about your housemates. I gather there’s a story there?”
I chuckled and said, “Oh, there are about ten or twenty stories there. I’d try to deflect it back, but Michael probably has no story, now that his apartment isn’t P.C.’s Limited’s production floor.”
“My story is that I spend too little time in my current apartment and it’s too lonely,” he said, chuckling. “All in good time!”
“Definitely,” I said. “I got lucky with a head start.”
“Tell me about it!” he said.
“You mentioned a fiancée,” Lee said.
I got out my wallet and pulled out a picture of Jas and me from prom.
“This is Jasmine, my fiancée,” I said.
“Very lovely,” he said. “Congratulations!”
“She’s as smart as she is lovely,” I said. “And plenty of other good things.”
“You’ve been together a while?”
I chuckled and said, “Not a bad question to ask someone nineteen. We started dating four and a half years ago now, and have been living together for a year and half. We’ll have nearly three years of living together before we actually get married.”
“That’s pretty good,” he said, nodding.
“But that’s just one housemate,” Michael said, grinning.
Lee chuckled and nodded.
“I’ll start by saying my housemates are Jasmine, Angie, Paige, Cammie, Mel, Candice, and Sherry.”
“Six women?” he said.
“Seven. Mel’s a Melissa.”
“Seven women, one man. That sounds like chaos!” he said.
Michael chuckled a bit.
“If it helps — and it might — we have four couples,” I said.
“Oh!” he said. “That changes things a bit.”
“I’ve been friends with most of them since 1980. Jasmine, Paige, and Sherry are 1981. Most of us studied together. Candice changed schools, which is where she met Sherry. And Angie is my sister.”
He frowned a bit.
“So, you’ve known her since before 1980, anyway,” Lee said.
“Eh. Yes and no.”
“Yes and no?”
“I’m being intentionally confusing,” I said.
“He is!” Michael said. “Though he can only do that because it’s an example of the sort of complication that follows Steve around.”
I chuckled at that, and said, “Angie is also my cousin. She’s my dad’s brother’s daughter. He passed away in 1979. Her biological mother couldn’t care for her, so my parents fostered her in 1980. Pretty much on the day she was eligible for adoption, they adopted her, so she’s now my sister. And, since she was in Chicago prior to all of this, we saw each other more the first day she lived with us in Houston than I had in her entire life before that.”
“That accounts for the ‘yes and no’ part. I’ll jump to another thing you said. Warren Buffett?” Lee asked.
Michael perked up and said, “I’m not sure I know whatever story this is.”
“Jas, Angie, Paige, and I went to the Berkshire Hathaway shareholders’ meeting last year. We’ll probably go every year. Mr. Buffett had just been saying that you usually learn more reading about a company than talking to people who work there. Angie’s question — I might not really do it justice — was that, obviously, companies manipulate their financials to cater to the market, and also that investors get things wrong. So, if reading says the company is good, but the stock price is low, how can you tell if investors or the financials are wrong?”
“That is a good question,” he said, nodding. “What was his answer?”
“The answer took about five paragraphs, and I’m not kidding. The gist of it was that the stock market often gets things wrong and you have to buy and sell based on your idea of value and what you think the stock should cost, largely ignore other people, and not try to time the market. Doing that can often act like gambling.”
“All of which makes perfect sense, but it’s nice boiling it down that way,” he said. “What’s she studying?”
“She’s a dual math and finance major. Quantitative analysis, more or less. If the market is poker, Angie wants to find a system that works.”
He laughed uproariously, then said, “If she does that, she’ll kill us all, but she’ll get rich doing it!”
“Actually, she knows about the ‘killing us all’ part.”
“Smart! The others?”
“Just running through them: Jasmine’s in Journalism. She’s aiming for something like public relations or corporate communications. Paige, Cammie, Candice, and Sherry are all in business, specialties to be determined except for Cammie. Mel’s in Mechanical Engineering, which probably won’t be what she does but will get her a good background. She and Cammie are a couple, and their thing is real estate. Cammie has her real estate agent license and has a few transactions under her belt, and the two of them run a little business that has four rental houses right now.”
He shook his head and said, “I think I see how this works.”
“We’re all book smart. Everyone in the house has a full-ride scholarship, great grades, great test scores — all of that. Except for Cammie, we’re lacking in experience, though she still is compared to most people. But we make it work, and we’re ambitious. Sherry and Candice are really much less connected to the rest of us, but ... it’s a long story. They’re very close friends, but not as close.”
“Well,” he said, “If I can’t get some point through to you, I know who to phone. Seven women! Someone will know how to get through to you.”
Michael laughed loudly at that.
“Oh, definitely!” he said.
“Thanks for setting up that question, Michael,” Lee said. “It really helped. The thing is — where we are now? This is going to work. You’re both young, and you’re in a position to think you know it all, but I’m not getting that feel. If you think you don’t know enough, that’s a different problem, but this will work as long as we’re all serious and focused on working the problems.”
I nodded and said, “That’s where I am, too. If I start pretending to know it all, Jasmine or Angie will cure that. So will the others — Cammie is the next best bet, since she was my debate partner for three years — but those two have the most direct line.”
“Debate, eh?” he said. “You seemed well-spoken. Do well?”
Michael snorted a bit.
“National champions our senior year,” I said. “Many, many hours of work, and then some luck in the final rounds.”
He nodded.
“It was basketball for me. Not so academic, but I think having a sport or an extracurricular makes a big difference. For Michael, I already know it was building businesses.”
Michael grinned and nodded.
“Many of us had two,” I said. “Jasmine, Angie, Paige, and I were also in drama. Jas and Paige were from the drama side of the wall — literally — at Memorial. Angie set Jas and me up on a blind date. Jas figured out that I could sing and twisted my arm to audition for ‘Brigadoon’. I, in turn, twisted Angie’s arm, which wound up working well for her. She found a fiancée in drama — Paige — and also won a national championship in Humorous Interpretation.”
“Manage drama performances, debate, and keep your grades up and you were doing something right,” he said. “Keep that! And, for what it’s worth, don’t use me as an example. Time management is a strength of mine, but keeping to boundaries isn’t. Michael and I share that, I think.”
Michael laughed, and said, a trifle ruefully, “Guilty! I’m no longer working sixteen-hour days, though. Or at least very seldom.”
“I do keep reminding him: delegation, delegation, delegation,” I said.
“That’s how we get to this dinner!” Michael said.
Lee chuckled and nodded.
“Tomorrow, let’s pull out the most recent reports you have and go over them all. Also, I think your lawyer and my lawyer have agreed on the paperwork, so we can get that NDA covered and I can find out what you two have cooking that you can’t share yet,” he said.
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