Company - Max Barry [61]
“Just go,” Jones tells the driver. But Eve is a beautiful woman in a figure-hugging dress, and apparently this carries more weight with the cabbie than Jones's opinion. When he realizes the car isn't going anywhere, he rolls down the window.
“Ask Klausman to tell you about Harvey Millpacker. They started Project Alpha together way back when. Just the two of them and twenty ignorant employees, until Harvey got an attack of the guilts. One day, out of the blue, he comes in to work and announces it's all a sham. An experiment. Klausman had no idea it was coming, no chance to stop him, so that's it, experiment over. The company folds and everyone's laid off. The workers went nuts. There were death threats. But you know what? They were angriest at Harvey. Klausman had lied to them, but he'd given them jobs. Harvey got them sacked.”
“Is this a morality tale?” Jones says. “Because coming from you, it's a little hard to take.”
“The business manager was Cliff Raleigh. Fifty-eight, divorced, not much in the way of friends or family. But at work he was a living legend. It's a disgrace how hard it is for older workers to find decent work these days. It's something Alpha wants to address.” She shrugs. “Three months after he lost his job, Cliff shot himself.”
Jones clenches his fists. He has always considered himself to be a peaceful person, so he is unprepared for the violence of his reaction. He wants to get out of the car and hit her so badly that he can taste it in the back of his throat.
“You,” Eve says, “should think really carefully about whether you want to be another Harvey Millpacker.”
“Go,” Jones says to the driver, and when this elicits no action, he roars: “Drive!” But the cab doesn't move until Eve takes her hand off the door and steps away. Jones doesn't even get to leave until she approves, and, bottom line, he guesses that's about right.
On level 2 of the Zephyr building, Senior Management sits around the board table. It's been a long day for Senior Management. There's no rest for the executive. With darkness outside the floor-to-ceiling windows and a thunderstorm brewing, Senior Management puts the final touches on the consolidation plan.
There are two ways to look at Senior Management. One is that it's a tightly integrated team tirelessly pulling together in the service of whatever's best for the company. The other is that it's a dog pack of power-hungry egomaniacs who occasionally assist Zephyr as a side effect of their individual campaigns for wealth and status. Nobody believes the tightly knit team theory anymore. Once, a long time ago, it may have been true, but the instant a dog-pack person made it into Senior Management, it was all over. It's like a fox getting into the chicken house; pretty soon there are only foxes and feathers. If Senior Management was ever made up of selfless individuals who put teamwork ahead of self-interest—and this is a big if—they were long ago torn to pieces.
It's important to understand this, because it's a prerequisite to making sense of Senior Management decisions, like the consolidation. The initial goal was to streamline Zephyr's business operations. But that was a week ago. Since then, it has been about empire expansion. Senior Management camps have waged fierce and bloody war. Departments were lost, claimed, and lost again. Many fine, decent ideas were lost in the mayhem; many innocent, hardworking employees, none of whom know it yet, were caught in the cross fire. It has been a week of senseless tragedy and mindless destruction, and now even Senior Management is a little tired of it.
But at last it's over. The final plan, which gives every employee something to be happy about, so long as they work in Senior Management, reduces the number of Zephyr departments