by
Po Bronson
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After Andy gave his pitch, there was an awkward moment for both of them. Jimmy Porter kind of sighed, and then he just started chatting to fill up the vacuum. He said something about how half his line workers had called in sick that morning, but he knew better. It was the first day of king salmon season, and if you took a skiff out on Monterey Bay and puttered around the kelp beds, you would see a lot of guys wearing San Juan Cast & Die baseball caps to shield their eyes from the sun. He said most of his workers were lower class, who only cared about three things: fishing, hunting, and fucking. Jimmy Porter said that he got two Laotians in here once and put them on the line, and boy were they hard workers! But when it came time to shut the line down for coffee break, they wouldn't leave their stations. Two weeks like that, never left their stools. Finally, Porter got a translator to come by the plant, and it turned out the two Laotians were afraid if they left their stations, someone would take their place. Porter was so impressed that he got himself two more Laotians, and suddenly the productivity plummeted.
'What do you think it was?' he asked Andy.
Andy leaned forward. He could smell Porter's aftershave.
'Maybe two men and two women?'
That wasn't it. Porter brought the translator back, and it turned out he didn't have four Laotians after all: he had two Cambodians and two Laotians, who apparently are like oil and water, can't work together. His story finished, Porter laughed, then settled down and looked hard at Andy's specification sheet. His eyes looked up.
lmao
'What is it like to look at yourself in the mirror every day, Francis?'
'Oh, don't give me that again. It doesn't work on me. I'm not thirty years old anymore. Every successful person in this town is just as ruthless as I am. And in five more years you probably will be too. You've done a good job, a bang-up job. And now I'm giving your code a chance to live. If it weren't for me and it weren't for me bringing in Lloyd, you would suffer a far worse humiliation than what's going on here. You'd have built a superior product that got no more attention than some undergraduate's senior thesis. I'm going to take your work and make it famous, and I'm going to give it a chance, and for that you should be goddamned thankful.'
'Don't expect to get a Hallmark anytime soon.'
'Getting screwed is part of the ritual, Andy. At least I'm not going to dumb down your technology. I'm going to make it better. I promise you that. When J was screwed, I designed a Falcon chip that was saddled with sixteen-bit software that made my chip design look slow. Wall Street analysts who used to look up to me stopped doing so - from their point of view I had delivered a chip that was faster, but not exponentially faster. They didn't care it was the software holding it back. I promise you that nobody will ever think of you that way. I promise you I will serve your work with respect, and if you can't recognize the importance of that, engineer to engineer, then you're not the man I thought you were.'
'Hey, what gives? You should be excited. This is your moment to be on top of the heap.'
'It's just been a long haul It's taken a lot out of me. I thought I would be excited, but feel my pulse - it's like I just woke up. You know what I really want to do right now? I want to order a burger from room service and see if there's a game on television. Or maybe go down to the bar and flirt with the German tourists. I could take this or leave it. I can't understand it. I cheat, bully, and lie to get what I want, only to find all the pleasure's already been squeezed out.'
Lloyd and the two guys in New York began discussing how much of the Everyware shares should be reserved for employees. Lloyd seemed to think it was customary to set a big percentage aside, but the two guys in New York seemed amused by that idea.
'This isn't 1986 anymore,' one said.
The other added, 'Don't give away the farm unless you have to.'
Francis turned to Quentin Black and whispered, 'I thought most employees always got shares.'
'Top managers, sure. But the days of secretaries retiring at age thirty-five are over. Give 'em a set of steak knives at Christmas, they'll be happy.'
Francis stood up again. 'Excuse me,' he said. 'Excuse me, hold on here.' He walked forward to stand beside Lloyd. 'Maybe you all are right about what we can get away with if we want to, but J don't want to. I want shares for the employees. I want to be able to hire people, engineers out of college, and say to them, "Here's a piece of the action."
hmm interesting periodization
'But it's a realistic one. I don't want to fight the market on this one. You want to understand what we're up against? Microsoft dominates the operating-systems market for desktop computers, and they're gaining in the race to control big iron. They've become the gatekeeper, and it's nearly impossible to compete with them. Maybe the only way to break their stranglehold is to invent a new box, a box that makes the operating system irrelevant. That's what I want your technology for. I don't care what price the box sells for. That's not important. We'll sell it for whatever consumers want to pay for it. What's important is that the box, at whatever price, doesn't have to kiss Microsoft's ass. So you want vision? That's my vision. I want to stop kissing Microsoft's ass, I want to return this industry to a level playing field, I want to smash the gatekeeper. How's that for vision? Huh? What do you want, Andy? Let's talk terms, huh? What do you want?'
respectable tbh
'What am I afraid of? You're going to start wearing sport coats and ties to work and you're going to get a nice house in Los Altos Hills, which you will rarely visit because you're always in Tokyo or Austin working a deal and you'll start saying things like "Jeez, a Mercedes is a very functional car" and you'll start golfing with your broker on weekends.'
'Your imagination is running wild.'
'Andy, there are certain kinds of women who look perfectly at ease in a black dress, sitting at a linen-covered table in the middle of a fifty-dollar-a-plate restaurant but I am not one of them.'
At dinnertime I asked Clee if she wanted to join me for chicken and kale on toast. If she was surprised by toast for dinner, I was going to explain how it’s easier to make than rice or pasta but still counts as a grain. I wouldn’t lay out my whole system at once, just a little tip here, a little tip there. She said she had some food she’d brought with her.
“Do you need a plate?”
“I can eat it out of the thing.”
“A fork?”
“Okay.”
I gave her the fork and turned up the ringer on my phone. “I’m waiting for an important phone call,” I explained. She glanced behind herself, as if looking for the person who might be interested to know this.
lmao
At the Ethiopian restaurant I requested a fork. They explained that I had to use my hands, so I asked for it to go, got a fork at Starbucks, and sat in my car. But my throat wouldn’t accept even this very soft meal. I put it on the curb for a homeless person. An Ethiopian homeless person would be especially delighted. What a heartbreaking thought, encountering your native food in this way.
chuckled at this
But most nights we didn’t do anything. I cooked, took a bath, read in bed; she talked on the phone, watched TV, heated her frozen meals. We ignored each other with a feeling of fullness and ferment. Phillip texted (KIRSTEN WANTS YOUR PERMISSION TO DO ORAL. ???! NO PRESSURE. STANDING BY UNTIL YOUR GO-AHEAD) and I felt no animosity. Oh, Kirsten. Maybe she was our cat for the past one hundred thousand lifetimes, always on the bed, pawing around in the covers, watching us. Congratulations, kitty, you’re the girlfriend this time—but I’m still in charge. I felt limber and generous. Phillip was working through something—that’s how I might put it to a close friend, in confidence. I’d permitted him to have an affair with a younger woman.
dying
But a funny thing happened on the way to the front door.
“Yum, yum, yum,” said a voice from the shadows. She swaggered out and put her hand on the small of my back. She was wearing a backward baseball cap.
“Step away!” I barked, and she hung back for exactly one, two, three seconds before lunging. The next five minutes proved that my neighbors didn’t care if I lived or died.