Turn of the Century Page 3

  Iris’s head is suddenly in his office. “George! Your ten-thirty!”

  “Bye, Em,” he says, “see you this afternoon.” He turns to Iris. “My ten-thirty?”

  “Caroline Osborne,” she whispers loudly, surely loud enough for Caroline Osborne to hear.

  “Ah.” Caroline Osborne is Gloria Mose’s twenty-five-year-old daughter by a previous billionaire. Featherstone, when he asked George last week to meet with her, called her “the viscountess,” which may or may not have been a joke. She isn’t, technically, Harold Mose’s stepdaughter, but here she is, come to talk to George about working for NARCS as an associate producer. As soon as George sees her stepping up quickly, bobbling a little on her high heels, to shake his hand—even before he makes a point of pronouncing Magdalen College correctly and asks her about her job at Channel 4 in London—he knows this interview is just a courtesy, a formality. He will not hire Caroline Osborne to work in this office. It’s not just that she’s English (“Scottish, actually”), although that is part of his problem. It’s the way she looks and acts. His state of mind may now be in violation of city, state, and federal antidiscrimination laws. It’s unfair, he knows, even piggish in some convoluted way. But she is unacceptable. She’s too pretty, too bosomy, too beautifully dressed, too ripe, too smart, too funny, too flirty, and too tempting to have around all day, every day.

  2

  “Sorry, what?”

  “I said, how are your direct reports incented?” The tan ectomorph in his late twenties—Chad? Chas?—is sitting in Lizzie’s office questioning her. He is, he has said twice in the last twenty minutes, “the senior relationship manager, business interface, and technology liaison” at a software company outside Boston.

  Huh? “Incented?” What in tarnation do you mean by that, young fella? Lizzie is tempted to reply, but instead talks his talk, figuring that if the interview proceeds with maximum efficiency, Chad, or Chas, who has an MBA, will go away sooner. She says, “Bonuses, based on meeting revenue goals, maxing out at a hundred and fifty percent of base salary, plus equity, with two-year vesting that’s IPO-accelerated.”

  She dislikes the part of her work that requires conversations like this. During the second of her two brief periods of employment by big companies (ages ago, Procter & Gamble for nine strange months in 1987 and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation in 1994) she always complained that dealing with the human resources department was the worst part of the job. Now she realizes that having a human resources department, so she never had to discuss vesting and bonus targets and inpatient mental health benefits with employees and potential employees, was actually the best thing about the Murdoch job.

  Lizzie wants to hire someone to open and run a Fine Technologies office on the West Coast, because it’s halfway to Asia, where business is picking up again, and because the rest of her industry is there. She has been interviewing people for two weeks. According to Chas/Chad’s résumé, before he moved east (“back east,” as they say in Seattle) he worked at Microsoft and Starwave. And Chas/Chad is not the worst. Out in Seattle or San Jose, Lizzie knows, she could have seen half a dozen qualified people the first day. In New York, the candidates are ad agency account jerks looking for any way out, the hustler marketing partners from bankrupt web-site design shops, bullshitters (uninteresting bullshitters) and losers. George doesn’t like it when she uses the word loser, and neither does she, really—it’s so categorically harsh. But in her world, the losers seem to be multiplying. Partly this is a classic Ponzi-scheme latecomer phenomenon, where the logic of a mania finally requires a big crowd of failed contenders—the thirty-eight-year-olds who decided in 1998 that this online web thing looked like it was going to be big.

  The very worst, no contest, was the self-satisfied, hard-sell fat boy who came in just last Friday to show her the “A Is for Alzheimer’s” multimedia video wall that he “conceived, conceptualized, designed, and created” for the marketing department of a drug company. “Have you ever seen PET scans, MRI scans, 3D models, and CGI combined like this?” the fat boy said to her. “You have not, I guarantee you. Have you ever seen memory loss, disorientation, mood swings, and dementia depicted so intensely or so interactively? You have not.”

  By comparison, Chas/Chad is a charmer. Chas/Chad has said nothing for a few seconds, Lizzie suddenly realizes, so it must be her turn to speak. She stands up. “Well, thank you,” she says, smiling for the first time in the interview, as she walks around her particleboard desk, ostentatiously unostentatious like everything in the office, to shake his hand. “We want to have this figured out in a couple of weeks, so we will let you know.” In the first usage, we means I; the second we means Alexi, her assistant.

  “So on my end,” he says, rising, “there’s no action point?”

  An intelligent kid, Lizzie thinks, maybe the right person for the job. Asshole, she also thinks—

  “Because,” he says, “I’m leaving Sunday A.M. for Singapore—”

  Go.

  “—trying to jump-start a little fast-track consulting project for their CyberMart. I mentioned, didn’t I, that I was in K-L back in ‘97, consulting on their Multimedia Supercorridor? RIP. This trip I’m swinging through Vietnam—”

  Leave, she thinks, willing him to turn away, past Alexi, past the programmers’ sector of the office, past the huge SPARC workstations of the game designers, out. “A little consulting project. Multimedia Supercorridor. Fast-track. Jump-start. K-L. Vietnam.” Go now.

  “—but your guy has my e-mail. And I’ll be back in the States ASAP—no later than four-three or four-four. FYI.”

  Finally he is leaving. “Alexi?” she says as Chas/Chad walks out of earshot, looking over at the programmers’ whiteboards covered with rough-draft notions, half math, half German and English, scrawled in purple and red marker. “You”—she snaps her right forefinger and thumb into a pistol pointing at Alexi and winks—“are my guy.”

  Alexi is in the middle of a phone conversation in Spanish with a Mexican mouse-pad manufacturer. (Lizzie covets his new wireless headset, but knows she would never wear one.) Glancing at Chas/Chad, he rolls his eyes and, one hand to his mouth, daintily mimes vomiting.

  She heads toward the back of the loft for her daily midmorning encounter with Bruce Helms, who dresses every day in identical charcoal-gray Brooks Brothers suits and white button-down shirts. He isn’t a square—he’s a former morphine addict with a trust fund; he dresses like a square, a perfect 1965 WASP square, not exactly in a spirit of parody but as a function of his deep native sense of decorum, expressed … was it ironically? “No, um—maybe allusively,” Bruce said, obviously embarrassed, during Lizzie’s one conversation with him about his clothes. His business card calls him Chief Technology Officer. A few times, exhausted and in high spirits, Lizzie has introduced Bruce to outsiders as “Mr. Helms, our senior executive vice president, quality” or “Bruce Helms, our deputy chairman and president of pure research and advanced software engineering.” (The only time she felt guilty was when a pair of middle-aged executives from Japan bowed furiously, made notes, and insisted on arranging a conference call with their deputy chairman and president of pure research and advanced software engineering in Osaka for eleven P.M. Japanese time.) She plops into his bright green Astro Turf-covered armchair, the only piece of upholstered furniture at Fine Technologies, and leans back.

  “Man,” she says, shaking her head, “I don’t know, finding anyone here who can do the West Coast job is a nightmare.”

  “I hope you didn’t hire the Mormon.”

  “Shush. They’ll arrest us for discrimination. That’s ‘creed.’ ”

  “And race. Ultrawhiteness.”

  “I have seen nobody close to perfect.”

  “So interview out in Seattle. The job is vice president for Microsoft, right?” As he speaks, his right hand remains on his mouse, and only between sentences does he glance away from his twenty-five-inch monitor and look at Lizzie. His speaking manner, almost monotonic but
essentially sunny, is the way people their age and younger tend to talk. Whateverese, she calls it, and it reminds her of Huckleberry Hound’s voice or, as George said, Eeyore on antidepressants. “Go west,” Bruce says. “Get somebody predigested.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “And go see my friend Buster when you’re in Seattle. And hire him too. I’ve always said we should.”

  “Maybe so.”

  Bruce lifts his hand from the mouse and swivels finally to face Lizzie. “Your problem—if I may … ?”

  “Please.…”

  “Why would the right person still be in New York?”

  “You’re in New York. I’m in New York. Willibald and Humfried and Markus and—”

  “You’re here because of George and the kids. I’m here because my act would seem too much like an act out there.”

  Lizzie smiles and shakes her head.

  “The Germans don’t know any better. They love nicotine and decay too much to leave New York—plus, since they’re communists, or anarchosyndicalists, or whatever, they would never work for Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs even for twice what you’re paying them. Madeline obviously can’t leave.” Madeline, who runs sales and marketing, is married to a city councilman. “Alexi is gay—”

  “He is?” Alexi’s lover, Tony, is the building’s landlord, and Alexi wears a baseball cap imprinted with the words GO HOMOS in bright orange letters.

  “—and he thinks he’s in some kind of Preston Sturges movie—”

  “I think it’s more like The Brady Bunch—”

  “And you’re Rosalind Russell and he’s—”

  “Ann B. Davis?”

  “Thelma Ritter.”

  “Same thing. But I am not Rosalind Russell. Katharine Hepburn. Maybe Barbara Stanwyck.”

  “Lance has his mother on the island. Boogie …” he says about their chief game designer, “Boogie I don’t really understand. Maybe his incubus overlord assigned him to Manhattan for a tour of duty. And Karen, well, to Karen this is some kind of digital Real World, turn-of-the-new-century thing. Spice Women. Vulva power. You’re her hero.”

  Lizzie almost blushes at the workstation intimacy with Bruce, her first employee and de facto partner.

  “So you’re saying that the only reason everyone here isn’t in Redmond or Mountain View or Los Altos or somewhere is that we’re each occupying our own little black-and-white Manhattan fantasy realm?”

  “Well …” he says, chuckling in that not-quite-jaded way of smart young men, “yes. We’re optimizing instead of maximizing. It’s Tweeville. Why do you think we only have twenty-percent turnover? The Germans and Datuk and Chairyawat and the rest of those guys are also here because you’re paying for the green-card lawyers.”

  “Who’s Chairyawat?”

  “Gaz. That’s his name. Plus, I don’t like to drive. And also, speaking for myself, but maybe also for you, because we don’t want to live in a company town. We like being fish a little bit out of water. Optimizing versus maximizing.”

  “Yeah, well,” she says, “sometimes I think I could get used to being a fish in water. You know?”

  Lizzie swings her legs down off the arm of the chair, and as she sits forward both feet fly—thwack!—onto the grubby yellow pine floor, a hundred-square-foot patch of which remains exposed, like an archaeological exhibit, only in Bruce’s office, at Bruce’s insistence. Her stomp is a half-conscious device to help her change the subject to the business of the day. It’s what George calls her jump-cut, and Bruce her double-click, the segueless conversational shorthand among colleagues in twitchy new businesses, the kind of cheerful-hysterical brusquerie endemic to the digital Northwest, but still uncommon in New York and nonexistent in old Hollywood. “Excellent news,” she says. “We shipped thirty-six thousand four hundred YAKety-rex”—this is how she pronounces Y2KRx—“in the fourth quarter—nineteen thousand of those downloaded at fifty percent above wholesale. Thirty-six thousand copies, Bruce. The budget was twenty-nine.”

  Lizzie’s company made most of its early money from something called automatic speech recognition. They perfected and licensed to a bigger company a piece of software Lizzie called Speak Memory, which was permitting strangers—young and old strangers, stupid strangers, strangers with funny accents—to call a corporate phone number, ask a talking computer for any one of the corporation’s hundred or hundred thousand employees by name, and be connected to the employee’s extension automatically. (Lizzie’s friend Pollyanna Chang once asked her if she felt guilty about putting thousands of operators and receptionists out of work. No, Lizzie said, for three summers she worked the fucking switchboard at Chiat/Day in L.A., and she is proud to help make that fucking job disappear.)

  As for Y2KRx, Lizzie first conceived of it years ago, when Louisa was a baby, before Y2K was a buzzword, before anyone but a few cranks and information-technology nerds was worried about the inability of certain computers to tell the difference between 1900 and 2000, or 1901 and 2001.

  “Do-it-yourself millennial hysteria,” George called the two years of anticipatory Y2K fuss. Bruce’s first idea was to write a piece of software that would turn any computer’s serious Year 2000 problem into a negligible Year 1900 problem. That is, his software would instruct a computer to interpret every aught year as a twenty-first century date. Under this scheme, the first decade of the twentieth century would become digitally unrecognizable on January 1, 2000. Everyone would agree simply to ignore the years from 1900 to 1909. For at least the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Y2K problem would disappear by means of an act of collective will, to be addressed again in 1910. “When they changed to the Gregorian calendar in 1582,” Bruce said, “they dumped fifteen days to make everything align properly. This is the same principle.” “But I’m not the pope,” Lizzie replied.

  Bruce refused to admit he was joking, or that his idea was unworkable. But one morning, as she stooped to sponge Louisa’s carrot puree off the cat’s head, she realized that her wiping was making the cat a lot unhappier than the baby’s spilling. It started Lizzie thinking about the messes that would inevitably result from half-baked Y2K solutions. Thus their product: it diagnoses and attempts to fix any new software problems unintentionally created by software meant to fix the core problem. Bruce wanted to call it the Root Doctor, as a joint allusion to the Mississippi blues (his hero, the singer Robert Johnson, had consulted an herbalist “root doctor”) and the deep code in computer programs. The medical reference led Lizzie to Y2KRx, which she sometimes describes in sales presentations (to buyers who don’t really understand technology) as “good medicine to protect against bad medicines.” She also calls it “disposable enterprise software” (to buyers who fancy themselves tech-savvy) or “retro-remediation” (to the information-systems geeks) or “the Y2K metasolution” (to the press).

  When Al Gore’s presidential campaign adopted Y2KRx for its computer systems last summer (George’s partner, Emily, gave a copy to the campaign director) and the candidate mentioned it in an important stump speech, making it a symbol of pragmatic, nothing-to-fear-but-fear-of-the-twenty-first-century-itself optimism, sales increased by 300 percent in a month.

  “So as our official Year 2000 professional services regional support and project manager,” Bruce says, “you have determined that we’re happy?”

  “We are happy,” Lizzie says. “Optimally and maximally. That’s more than enough over budget to float us through the middle of the second quarter. By which time we’ll have the Range Daze alpha—”

  “No.”

  “—when I hope we’ll have the Range Daze prototype. And in any case the Microsoft deal should be closed by the end of this quarter, God willing, and we can all relax a little.” Lizzie has been talking with Microsoft about selling them a piece of Fine Technologies, 20 percent, plus warrants giving them the right to buy another 20 percent. Warrants! The deal makes her feel as if she has finally crossed to some other side. During her time as a not-for-profit fund-raiser sh
e used to look down on her business school classmates who went straight to Wall Street and into M & A, the jerks who practically couldn’t let a conversation pass without mentioning roll-ups and debt tranches and mezzanine rounds and secondaries and warrants. (Particularly the women, she hated realizing. Particularly Nancy McNabb, who, she knew, looked down on her, reciprocally, during the entire four years Lizzie worked for the children’s foundation. Nancy used to call Lizzie once a year to solicit a donation to Harvard. Now she calls every month or so on one pretext or another, which Lizzie knows is silly to find flattering.)

  “Shouldn’t Microsoft, of all people, be sympathetic to an, uh, over-ambitious production schedule? Their test phase on this would be longer than our whole development time. But, yes, we’ll have something. Boogie’s pretty sanguine.” Sheldon “Boogie” Boffin, their game-design auteur, is a twenty-seven-year-old with shoulder-length red pigtails and prosthetic horns made of barnacles implanted under the skin of his forehead. “And listen to the Germans,” Bruce adds, nodding toward the center area where the thirty-two full-time programmers and game designers sit, three million dollars’ worth of salary—almost three and a half including Boogie. Four of the programmers were classmates at the Technische Universität in Berlin. “Lately it’s all ‘Achtung ich bin ein Range Daze Fassbinder kunstwerk.’ They’ve abandoned English. We’re cranking.”

  Seven of the programmers are from Asia. Every two weeks, when Lizzie signs the payroll, she marvels at the alien names of so many of her employees, among them Djiwandono Ahmad, Jaikumar Wibulswasram, Rangaswami Chairyawat, Soedradjad Khosla, Datuk Chandrashekaran, Sudeshna Vangarha, Goyigit Madhavan. Since all of them except Ahmad use Americanized nicknames in the office—Jake, Gaz, Soho, Date, Suds, and Goy—she has no idea how to pronounce most of their real names, and is never clear about which are first names and which are last. Occasionally, when the Asians and the Germans have one of their noisy, emotional group debates about an engineering problem, none of them speaking in their native tongues—