The Corporate Runs

The Package Has Been Delivered

Terms like "industrial park" have been successfully dropped into the lexicon thanks to professional phrase softeners who are rewarded for keeping straight-faced as they coin these compound, contradictory and blatantly false descriptions. A "corporate housing complex" is rarely corporate, barely housing and hardly complex. Typically they are a cluster of identical, short, condominium buildings, laid out in rows. They invariably have names that include words like "Lakeside," "Lakeridge," "Rockridge," "Hilltop," "Fern-something," "Oak-something," "Maple-something," "Something-dale" or "Something-wood" designed to conjure images of nature where there is none.

Ignoring these ironies altogether, Chris had a more immediate problem: he couldn't see out of his windshield as he wend his way around the Sunny Fernwooddale corporate housing apartment complex even as his wipers vainly sliced away at the downpour.

And this is May, he complained to himself.

He turned the CD player off and consulted the print-out of the directions he had found online. He squinted through the rain pounding on the window and barely made out the numbers affixed to the buildings. He turned the car sharply and rolled into a space that was marked for residents only but he hardly cared about that now.

He jumped out of the car and ran up to the building, stopping under the first plastic-shingled awning, pushed the doorbell button and heard a nonresonant, two-tone electric chime. After several moments there was a call from behind the door. "Just leave the pizza at the door. I already put the tip onto my account with your boss. Go get it from him."

"Simon? Is that you?" Chris called through the roar of the rain.

"Who is it? Who's out there?"

Chris, flush with anticipation, recognized the voice as Simon's for sure. VP Hank Weiner had sent him on this recovery mission, but Chris doubted the VP ever made the connection between the timing of Simon's arrival at the company and Chris' departure soon after. But now Simon was on the outs and Chris was the one they asked to reel him back in. Vengeance, when legitimized by the powers of the company, was a powerful thing.

"It's Chris, from work."

After a pause, "OK, Chris who from work?"

Chris couldn't bring himself to answer. Where would he start? I'm the one who's been consumed by thoughts of you, changed companies twice because of you? Now they've sent me to bail you out of trouble?

But Simon didn't wait for his response. "Is Tripper out there with you?" he asked from the behind the closed door.

"What?" Chris asked, channelling his confusion.

"I said: Is Tripper out there with you?"

"No, no one else is here."

"What?"

"I said," he shouted over the torrential din, "no one is here with me!"

"Are you sure?"

"Look, I'm cold and wet will you just open the door? And let me in?"

Chris heard the crackle of latches from behind the door. A man poked his head out and upon confirming the lack of Tripperness opened the door wide. It took a second for Chris to even recognize this unshaven, tousle haired Draggard with a cigarette dangling from his chapped lower lip. When he said "Sorry but I couldn't take any chances. You know that Tripper is crazy ," Chris was sure it was Simon.

Simon's condo was a stinking mess. Brown and frayed pizza boxes were stacked everywhere, some used as ashtrays. In fact, almost everything in the place was being used as an ashtray. The walls were as bare (and dirty) as a baby's behind. There was even dirt in the cottage cheese ceiling. There were running computers, most without their cases, humming away. Monitors and laptops flickered with screen savers (Tex Avery to Frank Zappa, inclusive) and a small satellite dish was pointed toward the window. There was a stack of routers Chris guessed were being used as scramblers which would account for why the hackers in the company's data center took so long to track this place down. Snuffed out turds of cigarette butts were piled everywhere.

"What's going on here, Simon?"

"What do you mean?" He squinted as he took such a deep puff his whole face lit up.

"I mean, why are you living like this?"

Upon returning to the company Chris was relieved to hear that Simon was no longer a developer and had switched to program management. He was happy to hear that Simon had fallen out of grace with, well, just about everybody. He was looking forward to seeing Simon down but this was something else. Simon's cachexia awoke a pitying, depressing sympathy in him. (At sad moments like this he tried to keep his spirits up by flashing on better times. He reminisced about talking to that pretty sales girl in one of the many tchotchke booths at the last Promise Keepers event. She was nice, Chris thought. And cute too.)

"Ah, this place is OK. I'm getting a break on rent since I'm screwing the landlady."

Chris threw up his hands "I don't even want to know. That's just wrong."

"Hey, don't be such an absolutist..."

"Oh! I see where being a relativist has gotten you!" Chris heard himself say as he motioned around the apartment. "You're camped out in squalor, you look like hell and you seem to be living on nicotine, caffeine and pizza."

"Hey! Just like at work!" Simon said with mock cheer. "You know you've got some nerve..." he fumbled, "you... what was your name again?"

Chris was just coming to grips with the enormity of his miscalculation when he accepted this task.

Meanwhile Simon's expression broke with revelation. "Wait a minute, I know you. Aren't you the guy that walked out on my first project to go do a start-up right when the project just got going?"

"I guess."

"And you're back at the company now? Start-up went bugger?"

"Yeah, I guess."

"Wow, did you piss a lot of people off."

"What do you mean?" Chris puzzled. He had worked hard at leaving the company on good terms. He was surprised to hear otherwise.

"There was a real scramble after you left. No one could figure out how your code was supposed to work, or even what it was supposed to do if it worked. A lot of people took it personally when you promised to clean it up and then left."

Chris caved quickly to the moment to do some opportunistic prospecting. "Like you?" he asked.

"Fuckinhell!" Simon shouted. "Are my diapers showing? Do you think for a second that I'm some damn crying-for-mommy-baby because you left the company? All I was saying is that you burned a lot of bridges, buddy boy," he said, shaking his cigarette scoldingly toward Chris, flinging ashes in the process.

"Look who's talking! I haven't met anybody since I've been back who doesn't want a piece of you." I must have bought two of everything she had in that booth.

"The difference is," Simon said straightening his back and raising his chin, "they want me back. You, on the other hand probably had to crawl back on your carpet-burned palms and knees..."

Chris lashed back. "I gather they want you back because you stink at poker, you're an easy mark and you owe a king's ransom."

Simon's mood suddenly down-shifted. He went quiet and looked down at the floor. There were a few tell-tale tremors as he tried to suck the life out of the tiny remains of his cigarette. Looking up slowly he said "You strike me as someone in a lot of pain, Chris."

Chris stomped his foot and let out a high-pitched grunt of frustration as he pivoted away from Simon, much like the toddler in the toy store who's just been told he can't have Zelda and Mortal Kombat.

He turned slowly back to Simon and hesitatingly said, "You know I wasn't going to tell you this but Jerry offered me two hundred dollars to notify him first when I found you. Now, I don't know what that's about but I'm assuming that means something to you."

"I'll give you twice that, right now, to turn around and walk away."

"Oh, Lord," Chris sighed. "I'm not taking your money, and I'm not taking Jerry's and despite everything I've seen here I'm not walking away because you are coming back to the company with me right now."

"Or what? You're going to cry? You've lost the other oar if you think I'm going back to that place, not even if they send that Tripper goon after me with an Australian football team. It was bad enough when I started out programming, but when I switched to program management, things really went to hell. You have no idea what it's like. When you're surrounded by smart people on some collective corporate mission, you assume they have reasoned out the mission, even though you can't make heads or tails out of it, so you go along with it. 'Simon go make them change the spec' or 'Simon go make them stop changing the spec' or 'Simon go make them throw the spec out' or 'Simon this' or 'Simon that.'"

Chris was actually starting to worry. I think she was flirting with me.

"It's like they hand you a package," Simon continued, "then they say 'You see that clearing in the forest over there? I want you to stand in the middle of that clearing and open this package.' So you blindly start out on this next piece of bullshit, but on your way out to the middle of the clearing you notice that all of the grass is flattened and charred, all pointing away from the middle of the field. Then you start to notice little bone fragments of all the moron program managers who came before you, sent out there to open their packages! The 'collective corporate mission' turns out to be this corporate conspiracy to make you take all the ugly chances and eat all the shit when it blows!"

I should have asked her for her number. I really should have.

"Forget going back to that asylum because even when I complain to the CEO he just starts quoting the Art of War to me: 'First feign disorder, then crush your enemy!' Well, they certainly got the 'feign disorder' part right! 'Feign anarchy' would be more like it."

The cell phone buried in Chris's jacket rang, muffled, but apparently loud enough to make Simon jump back two feet, eyes bulging in fear.

Chris retrieved and flipped the phone open. He took the call and quickly hustled off into a corner, facing away from Simon, mumbling discretely into the receiver. After a few moments he emerged from the corner and walked right up to Simon, cell phone extended out toward him. "He wants to talk to you."

Simon grabbed the phone, covered it tight with his palm and in a loud whisper gasped "Who does??"

"Hank."

"Weiner? He sent you? What does he want?"

"I have no idea. Even if he told me I doubt I'd understand what he was talking about. Just talk to him."

Simon slowly took his hand off the phone, put it to his ear and said "Yeah?"

Simon's half of the conversation with Hank (the only half Chris could hear) was not much more than "You understand my position, don't you Hank?" and "Really?" a couple "OKs" and one "Sounds good." None of which prepared Chris for what followed.

Simon signed off with Hank and handed the phone back to Chris. Then he walked toward the door, put his hand on the doorknob and said "Right. Are you driving or am I?"

Chris was confused, one more time. "Driving where?"

"Duh! To the corporate campus!"

"Just like that?"

"Why not?"

"OK, I guess. Do you need to stop somewhere on the way? Pick up a pack of cigarettes? Rob a bank?"

"Come on, dry your eyes and let's go already." Simon swung the door open. "And look at this, buddy, it's not even raining anymore." he said flinging the cigarette butt out the door and smiling broadly.