The office to the right- (Continued)

“You have an unpaid promissory note. You please have to settle it by maximum tomorrow. Otherwise, we would have to report this, and we don’t really want to”

That was the bank. Actually one of their four banks since diversity in getting financing has always been encouraged, under the assumption that they will probably have significant leverage over at least one of them.

“Tomorrow? Are you serious?”

“Yes”

“You want us to settle 150,000 EUR tomorrow, not later, while the whole country is at war and we don’t even have a functioning airport anymore?”

“Yes”

And they weren’t joking. That was the day he realized that banks didn’t know what war was. It was not their fault. They had never read about it, never seen pictures or never heard the disturbing sounds it brought. Blame it on the parents. Or the lack of. The right answer however was amnesia.

What followed was a series of highly improbable and absurdly unfortunate events, with the sole purpose behind them to bring the country on its knees.

Two thousand and four. A year to remember. In red. On front pages. A year, blackened by the smoke rising from a car envoy. Block letters. Capital. Tourists beware, the season has ended. Please come back next year. Or Don’t.

They were all sitting in this tight corridor that was being referred to as “kitchen” when they heard the explosion. Shivering spines and eyes shutting down. A Hollywood movie-like moment that was announcing a revolving corporate nightmare: Having each fiscal year worse than the last, and the near impossible act of steering in a continuously foggy land, bare foot and bare handed.

Time seemed to be stopping. Wishful thinking of a “rewind button” somewhere. In the middle of nowhere. Or an undo would do. But how far back can we go?

Time doesn’t forget. Memory is its sole specialty. It is ironic how most companies seem to be continuously disregarding such a known fact. They think they can “start over”. A fresh new image. Pretending that the past is past. Only things are never that green on the next side of the time spectrum. Past mistakes count. They count a lot. Especially if they are costly and when resources are scarce.

He needed to organize his thoughts now since he was confusing things again.

The explosion. The war. The street protests. No let us start from the beginning..or a bit later, noting that some kind of happy thoughts was now long overdue: The golden years.

So he was transferred to the financial department and given a sub-title. And a plant. “The office would come later” they said. For now, he will be sitting in the IT department with all the wires and the dead screens that were hopelessly waiting for some kind of electrical CPR. Luckily for him, the IT guy was friendlier and more genuine than the other staff and they got along quite well.

Even though he had big shoes to fill without any internal or external guidance, he knew he would be up to the challenge. In fact their daily whisperings gave him the confidence he needed: “You are next in line, you should be prepared”. The dream of every fresh graduate, lacking experience: a quick ascension to the upper floor of the corporate world: the floor where you are actually allowed to ignore emails, have more frequent breaks, talk badly about your colleagues and most of all, the ability to influence “hire and fire decisions”, or in other words, starting to matter by losing your invisibility curse.

Cash was available and with it, comes the urge to spend and create windows of opportunities that are seemingly of minimal risk even when effectively they are none.

And then something broke his thoughts. A shivering hand on his shoulder.

“They are letting me go” she said before bursting into tears.

 

Chapter 3: The space to the left

They were all expressionless. What also made things worse was the fact that the air conditioner was off due to a recently adopted cutting cost strategy that had initially started as a green marketing initiative but ended up deteriorating along the way, with employees paying the price of it.

He was late, yet again, even though he had explicitly told them to be on time due to other engagements he had to attend to later in the day.

But this time, it was a bit too much. The clock was melting, heat was rising, hands were sweating, and shirts were starting to have a life of their own, chocking them around the neck.

“Do you think something happened to him?” Someone dared to ask.

They all looked at him, surprised of such an outrageous claim and finally decided to ignore him by not answering.

Someone coughed. Another dropped his pen and left it there in order to keep his head above the table, just in case something happened.

Then silence prevailed once again.

These meetings took place very infrequently and nobody knew exactly why. They were also meant to scare rather than to engage people via a dominantly accusatory atmosphere that rapidly degenerated into “It is not me..It was him..” or “I didn’t know..no one informed me”. Just like a kindergarten, but slightly more disorganized. The rules of the game being to stay hidden, arms wrapped around the knees just like a fetus, deep inside a cave as long as it was grey outside. Most of them survived this corporate battle till the end, but not without multiple scratches and punches on the face and abdomen. People got used to that after a while. A kind of “Hit me now so that I can go do something else” attitude.

When things tend to remain the same and when each meeting ends up being a duplicate of the previous one, everyone just stops caring. That is the problem with meetings almost everywhere: It is about finding a problem and dwelling on it until there is a victim, even when everyone already knows that the real core issue is being hidden somewhere very far away from here, just like a treasure in a fairy tale. In the modern corporate world, the concept of “The truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God” is nonexistent. It has been banished a long time ago, never to return. Find the elephant or don’t. Or maybe the elephant can crash you under its feet because it simply cannot see you. Don’t blame the elephant or at least try not to.

The door opened and he finally stepped in, looking tired and yellowish.

“I am sorry I am late..family issues..let us please begin”

“But..but”

“What’s wrong?”

“The laptop is not working..we have tried everything..” someone said, panicking and trying not to stutter.

His face turned red, despite his attempts to remain calm.

“Who can fix it then?”

No one answered.

He refrained from asking again, knowing in advance that it would most definitely lead nowhere. Like so many times before it.

“Let us forget about the laptop then and start with the sales figures, just a brief summary for now..”

“Ok…overall, we are still a bit far from the set budget…by around 20 %” answered the man on the left, salt and pepper hair, white shirt and red tie, without sounding very confident.

“20%...not very far? And what is your definition of far?”

“Uh..”

“Let me tell you something as I have a feeling that I haven’t been expressing myself well or loud enough: this is an extremely slippery road we are taking. All of us. And we are all on the same ship. You, us, your family and your kids. These figures are unacceptable and do not even reflect the reality of the local Market. Our competitors are growing and are even profitable, while we are not even able to maintain our last year’s figures. That only means one thing: every single person sitting here is not doing his job and assuming he is even trying to, which I seriously doubt, it also means it isn’t nearly enough!”

And then a mobile rang. Loudly. Some kind of amateurish Beethoven tune.

“GET OUT ! Now ! you, your phone..and take your damn chair with you !”

The skinny guy got up, dropped his phone and tripped before crashing on the floor.

Silence took over again, periodically interrupted by tension induced coughs and dry throats.

He found himself looking at them one by one, maybe not as subtlety as he would have liked. Were they aware of the urgency? Did they even know what a free fall would mean..did they even understand ?

The guy with the glasses. The one with the thick eyebrows. The rebellious. The “Laissez Faire”. The sneaky. The bastard. The liar. The vulnerable one. All the colors and shapes displayed right in front of him like in an art museum. Modern Art that was probably too abstract and too spontaneous to follow. Maybe too dangerous as well. They surely had no idea of what was at stake. They were just sitting there, like idle lamp posts. Focusing on the wrong side of the equation. The sidewalk instead of the street, with the fear of being hit lingering in their mind, blinding their vision and distorting their thoughts and actions. 

Were they always like that or did the plague find them at some point, around a dark corner in one of the offices at the end of the half lighten corridor? He knew it was time. Time for everyone to stop sleep-walking. They have all had too much sleep and too much pie. Time to step up. Otherwise, he would be falling with them.

Such meetings made him even more aware of his own loneliness. On the streets of the capital by himself. A prisoner by will of the hidden traps of modern life. The traffic mostly. The traffic especially. And the radio that hits you with static waves and sounds.

Chapter 4: Re-wiring attempts

There was a laptop on his desk. Without any note, sign or hint for him to try to understand why.

He looked around him: This narrow office was starting to look like an attic, filled with broken and useless machines that were at least twenty to thirty years old. Nearly as old as he was, actually. The irony of time: taking everything from you and not giving much in return except for blurry images and the bitter taste of nostalgia.

He was referred to here as the “new IT guy” and had just finished his probationary period, without hearing back from them. Not even a “welcome to the team” email. Armed by the proverb that “no news is good news”, he just kept doing his job, hoping that feedback would eventually reach him sooner or later, most probably by post, or even via an intensively trained homing pigeon, if they wanted to be creative. Chances were naturally slim, but he didn’t want to lose hope just yet.

The Human resources manager was also nowhere to be found, which he thought was very surprising and unusual to say the least. His office was there, it was the third on the right but the swiveling chair got used to being empty and the lights turned off. As if it was something similar to a cloud department operating remotely. Remotely..he liked that word and concept: being both present and absent. At the end of the day, wasn’t the result the only thing that mattered?

The hardware was old. The wiring was a mess and he didn’t even know where to start.

“Budget Deadline”. Another email and reminder from the finance people. In most of the companies he worked in, budget was just a buzz word. The false impression of a structure where there were really none. Why would that one be any different?

He was newly married, which meant he had an unusually high level of expenses to cover and a lot of headaches to deal with and overcome. In other words, he needed the job. And he needed it to be a secure one.

This company was a different kind of “weird”. You actually had to be in it in order to uncover its carefully hidden skeletons. Mondays were purgatory like. Tuesdays had been very closely compared by highly influential and knowledgeable people to a fire storm. And Wednesdays were…what’s the word…just not..not days. They were like a bridge. A virtual one of course, in the same universe and with the same people, but with something different in the atmospheric layers.  As the week progresses towards its end, the wind speed changes and the visibility improves considerably. But as days went by, and as he got closer to his co-workers and upper management, he found out that the frames of his calendar were completely wrong. Mondays stayed the same as initially thought of, because of the regular meeting that took place early in the morning, before anyone could have the time to sip their coffees or digest their light breakfast.

Before he knew it, it was already midnight, and he was lying in bed, eyes open, next to his sleeping wife who grew tired of waiting for him every single night. If he could only have his eight hours tonight, instead of continuously trying to build and assemble these wireless virtual networks and combinations in this stubborn head of his. Eight hours..or even seven. Once they will have kids, sleep will vanish from their daily routine, meaning that he’d better get some now, before it is too late.

And then his phone rang, forcing him to get up and head to the living room.

“Hello?”

It was the chairman’s secretary.

“Sorry to bother you that late..but we have an issue with the email server..so I have been told to contact you”

Chapter 5: The office to the right

The right carpet. The right degrees on the wall, perfectly aligned. The right space between the chair and the desk. The right temperature no matter the season. The right pen with the right shade of blue.

He signed the first check and then his mind started wandering…this stubborn feeling that he had forgotten something…at home with the kids, with all the noise that was constantly distracting him. Why do they only shout during his phone calls? And why was she that spoiled? Before they got married, he thought she was slightly different. Less demanding. She was his second wife, and he was already regretting he had done it again. But at least he wasn’t alone. He had someone to come back to.

“He is currently in a meeting. He said he will call you back”

That was his assistant. His new one to be more specific. The one before had decided to retire early in order to spend the rest of her days in some rural area in Europe. He just needed to get used to her absence, which wasn’t as easy as he thought.

She used to do everything for him. The closest and finest definition of loyalty. And now that she was no longer here, he felt completely alone, surrounded by a different and younger generation that he couldn’t seem to understand.

Another day loaded with problems pilling up so fast that neither the base nor the top were visible anymore.

This morning, while staring at his face in the mirror, he thought he saw someone behind him. A blurry shape, completely indiscernible except for the eyes. The reflection of a deep rage that has been dormant for too long, and that was now demanding attention, no matter the consequences.

In a few days, he would turn 65. The entire staff will celebrate it with a cake or a tart. Either was fine. But what’s to celebrate really? It was such a bad year.  The worst that he had seen in decades.

Sales were plunging, followed by the company’s margins. Debt was at an all-time high and banks were starting to see smoke everywhere.

Those bankers..with their “smart” questions. Hitting you in the face with their arrogance and white collars. How little did they know..and how fast can they issue judgments based on their awfully narrow tunnel vision..

He started this company from scratch during the civil war back in the 80s, with three other people. Three became nine then twelve…at some point they were as high as a hundred. The golden years were surprisingly fast and brief and then came the black ones. Sticky and spoiled. Depressed and bitter. Loud but not clear. The years of the fog.

Was he the reason behind all what happened? at least his daughter thought so. His only daughter. His own flesh and blood. Quite ungrateful to say the least..Was he talking to himself right now? Maybe age does this to you.

The finance manager was once again in front of him. The bearer of bad news mostly. The crow, if one wanted to exaggerate.

The animal world was not much different from the human one. Scarcity brought hunger, and hunger led to mutilation, even between members of the same pack.

This persistent headache, once again attacking him in waves, starting lightly, like a tiny needle before turning into a rhythmic hammer aiming both nowhere and everywhere. Doing business in this country was similar to fighting a daily war with enemies you can’t even see. He was both fed up and tired of this chronic blindness. Maybe a bit too old to endure another day in the office. Another day in one of the deepest level of purgatory. The heat waves. The aches in the head. The phone calls and the emails. And the finance manager still in front of him. He stood up, and after nearly tripping on the carpet, grabbed his jacket and left.