The Speculist

Chapter Twelve

Part II

Chapter Twelve

July, 2002

This is how the end of the world begins.

As the elevator doors slide closed behind me, I round the corner and observe that the office is noisy for a Monday morning. The sixth floor of the WorldConneX building is a standard corporate purgatory. Vast banks of cubicles are punctuated by clusters of restrooms, cramped meeting rooms, copy machine cubbyholes, and micro-kitchenettes suffused with that burnt, cheesy odor of poorly made coffee and an over-used microwave. The carpet is gray; the cubicle upholstery is gray-brown. Disgruntled sunshine finds its way through the tinted windows only around the periphery. The main body of the sixth floor resides in the glorious flicker and incessant hum of standard, late-twentieth-century fluorescent office lighting.

This floor is home to a group called Product Engineering and Development, comprising about 150 software developers and related staff. We’re one of six or seven (depending on how you count) software development groups in the WorldConneX family. It’s not entirely clear how we relate to those other groups. The managers from each work together on cross-functional leadership teams and technology focus task groups, where they sign off on joint mission statements and agree to open up channels of communication and share resources and information in a manner reflective of the boundarylessness referred to in the WorldConneX mission statement.

Of course, they all despise each other and mainly attend such meetings out of a fear of what might be said about them in their absence.

A few, however, are more positively focused — the ones who’ve read Sun Tzu or who are otherwise predisposed to view team management programs as a chess board on which they can execute their various Machiavellian strategies. For them, such meetings provide the chance to observe their opponents’ weaknesses, to reinforce alliances with their friends, and to take such small steps as they can toward the final coup that will establish once and for all who the real software development group is.

Monday morning is usually a quiet and reflective, often downright sullen time on the sixth floor. But what I sense as I step around the corner this particular Monday morning is excitement. People are gathered in small groups around the coffee machines or in the clearings at the end rows of cubicles, talking in an animated fashion. Offhand, it looks like the interested and moderately uplifted mood of a group that has learned of someone else’s downfall.

That kind of news is always good for a Monday morning pick-me-up.

As I approach my cubicle, I encounter a gathering of members of my own workgroup, TDP: Training, Documentation, and Process. (We represent some of the aforementioned "related staff" in the PED menagerie.) My boss, Frank Childers, notices me.

"Good morning, Emmett."

"Hi, Frank. What’s going on?"

"PED has been picked for the QC Protocols. Some of us are going to participate." The others nod knowingly.

QC Protocols. Everyone seems to know what this means. How is it that I’m once again completely in the dark? I fight to suppress my long-standing suspicion that there’s an e-mail list from which I’ve been deliberately omitted. Either that, or these guys are having secret meetings and not telling me.

But at least I’ve learned my lesson. This time I don’t pretend to know what they’re talking about. Last time I did that, I ended up in the hospital for two days after getting into a (really) bad chicken fried steak in Wichita — a city I would never even have visited had I known what the ATA Conference was before agreeing to attend. It turned out it was the Association for Telecommunications in Agriculture.

They weren’t a bad bunch, but I’m pretty sure I would have passed had I known in advance.

"So what are the QC Protocols?" I ask. "Part of the QMS, right?"

Any time you see the letter Q at WorldConneX, you know it’s got to have something to do with the Quality Management System. A few years ago, they put up these posters all over the building that read Q is for Quality. They were part of a set. There were others that read T is for Teamwork and M is for Measurement, plus the big double-sized one which explained that P is for Process, Performance, and People. The posters hung around for four or five years and then just mysteriously disappeared. It’s widely believed that the QMS team finally reached some kind of critical mass of complaints about the condescending Sesame Street approach to explaining their program.

Not true.

You see, they didn’t all disappear. The Q is for Quality posters are still around; it was the others that had to go. From what I hear, an executive was accidentally strolling the corridors of the lower floors of the building one day and was enraged by these signs. How could we say that T is for Teamwork when it was also his middle initial? (He was the CTO.)

T is for technology, damn it, and nobody better forget it. And P is for Product, not that other horseshit. Q? He didn’t give a damn about Q. It could still be for quality, as long as nobody bothered him with it.

And so, now and always, Q is for quality.

"I don’t think it has anything to do with the QMS," says Frank. "Apparently nobody knows what the protocols are. But Carl here was thinking maybe you would know."

"Only because you spent all that time at Corporate last month," Carl explains.

Carl Ravel is a whiny pustule of a trainer, the only member of the team whom I feel free to despise wholeheartedly. The dislike I have for my other colleagues at least carries a few reservations and qualifications, taking into account mitigating circumstances such as the (exceedingly rare) occasions when their efforts have been of some use to me or the fact that they are — a few of them, anyway — otherwise likable people whom I probably wouldn’t have minded had I met them under different circumstances. But Carl possesses that rare combination of total uselessness and utter pain-in-the-assedness.

My feelings for him are pure.

"We’ll try it again, Carl. I did not spend all that time at corporate last month. I was there for exactly one afternoon, and it was a complete waste of time."

"Yes, I can see how it would have been a waste of time. For you. Wasn’t that meeting intended for trainers?"

That’s an attempted barb.

Carl is part of the Training Team, but he doesn’t do technical. He specializes in what he calls "the human side," which means all the rah-rah-go-team and contemplate-your-navel type stuff. One of his workshops is called "Be It. Believe It. Walk the Talk." I took this one myself, fulfilling a training requirement, and learned the actual meaning not only of boundarylessness, but also delight the customer (which I was picturing very differently) and nurture long-term shareholder value. You think you have a good idea of how repellent a day spent listening to lobotomized corporate blather is going to be, but then they go and throw words like delight and nurture in there, giving the whole thing a creepy undertone that you never could have anticipated.

Anyway, last month Carl was booked solid giving his "Agents of Change" workshop right when the Head Office down at Glen Meadow called for an emergency Diversity Seminar. Nobody was clear on what events had led to the diversity emergency, or even what exactly a diversity emergency was, but it isn’t for us in the divisions to ask such questions. When called upon by Corporate, we jump first and say 'how high' afterwards. You get the idea. Every training group in the company was required to send a representative, and I was the only person with a fairly clear calendar that week.

So Frank sent me.

I’m the first to admit that I’m no trainer (I have a little self-respect), but I am part of a training group. Now that was good enough for Frank, and it was good enough for the Head Office, but no way will it ever be good enough for Carl. There I was soaking up all that rich diversity knowledge and making all those wonderful intra-company connections, not to mention eating the excellent Danish rolls and chocolate chip cookies that the increasingly rotund Glen Meadow staff munch on every morning and afternoon…and it should have been him, damn it.

It should have been him.

Actually, I never did soak up any diversity knowledge. There must have been a mix-up of memos or something, because the meeting turned out not to be diversity crisis management, but rather how to present the 401K plan next year. As I don’t ever actually do that — present the 401K plan, that is — and as I am long since resigned to grudging participation in, with no real true understanding of, the 401K plan, I found that (cookies and Danish notwithstanding) my one and only visit to corporate HQ was even more a waste of time than I thought it would be.

And that is saying something, folks.

I decide to take the high road on Carl’s baiting. Ordinarily, there’s nothing that shakes off those weekend cobwebs like a good Monday morning pissing match. But I want to get to the bottom of this thing.

"No, the QC Protocols never came up."

I turn to Theresa Sandoval, a technical trainer who happens to be friends with some of the administrative assistants up in the executive suite on the 22^nd floor. (She used to be one of them, before being "promoted" to PED.) Because of her connections, she’s a steady source of gossip. And a fairly reliable one, at that.

"What have you heard, Theresa?"

"It’s a test, that’s all I know for sure. They show you two boxes and ask you to pick one or the other."

"That much we all know," says Frank, giving me credit for knowing things that I don’t, "but what’s inside the boxes?"

"What I heard," says Lisa, another technical writer, "is that there’s a promotion in one, and a pink slip in the other."

"Oh, bullshit," says Frank. "No way. Think of the lawsuits."

"Yeah," Theresa agrees, "they like toying with us, but never that blatantly." She laughs. "That sounds like Catbert, Evil HR Director."

Carl clears his throat. The awkward silence is palpable.

Ha. What a coincidence. Speaking of diversity crises.

Theresa has apparently forgotten that in the latest round of Diversity Training, we were warned against engaging in the kind of "gross professional stereotyping" found in "a certain comic strip." So now Carl, who of course has not forgotten, would like to call Theresa on her inappropriate behavior, but he’s not sure he wants to say anything to her because she’s Hispanic and he’s a white guy.

There’s been a good deal of covert speculation on the team as to Carl’s sexual orientation. I’ve never had much of an opinion on the matter, mainly because his personal life is a subject about which I have zero interest. But just as a matter of intellectual curiosity, I think Carl’s quandary supports the not-gay thesis. A gay guy would have no qualms about taking a stand, here. I mean, surely gay trumps Hispanic. But no one can say for sure, since a clearly delineated PC-sensitivity ranking is exactly the kind of useful information they don’t give you in Diversity Training.

"All I know is what I hear," Lisa continues, ending the mini crisis without even realizing it had occurred. She pauses for a dramatic sip from her decaf. (Lisa also has admin connections, but with a much lower hit rate than Theresa.) "And what I heard is that a bunch, not just one or two but a bunch of people who’ve done this thing are gone now. Now you tell me. If it isn’t pink slips, what is it?"

Jeff Simpson, the quiet older guy who usually sits these things out, clears his throat. All eyes turn to him.

"It’s layoffs," he says.

Everyone listens to Jeff when he uses the L word. He’s been with the company more than 20 years. Most of us were working here when WestConnect became WorldConneX, but he can even remember the days before divestiture, when WestConnect was called Bell West. He’s seen his share of layoffs and survived them all.

"What have you heard?" asks Frank.

Jeff shakes his head.

"I haven’t heard anything. But I can feel it."

"Feel it?" says Carl. "You’re saying that you can feel it when we have lay-- uh, restructuring?" Carl manages to catch himself in time. We’re never ever ever supposed to use the L word. Even if it weren’t verboten, most people are superstitious about it. Come to think of it, Lisa’s reference to "pink slips" was also out of bounds. That’s one of the problems working for a company like WorlConneX. It’s hard to keep track of everything you’re not allowed to say.

Jeff nods solemnly.

"In my knee," he says.

Nobody laughs at this. You’ve got to respect Jeff’s knees. He used to climb telephone poles with them.

"Well, then, what about the boxes?" Theresa asks. "Who ever heard of a layoff where you have to choose a box? What is this, Let’s Make a Deal?"

Jeff shrugs.

"I don’t know anything about boxes," he says.

Apparently none of his joints are tuned to that frequency.

Frank looks at his watch.

"Well, I guess we can stand here and yack or we can all go try to get some work done."

"But what about these QC Protocols?" I ask.

"What about them?" says Frank. He turns and heads off to his office. The rest of the group disperses, leaving me standing there to reflect: you may never be sure what you’re allowed to say at WorldConneX, but it’s almost always safe to answer a question with another question.

Posted by Phil at March 1, 2004 12:00 AM | TrackBack