“I’m going to New York on business,” I said flatly.
“Bah—this quality circle stuff is hardly business. Why did you set it up in the first place, when you’ve got a five-million-dollar division under your thumb? I know all about it—you’ve pissed off every manager at the bank.”
“I have an excellent reason,” I told her calmly. “I’m going to knock over the bank.”
“My ass,” said Pearl, sipping her drink with aplomb. “I’ll eat this emerald first.” She studied me, tapping a long red fingernail on the table. “By God, if I didn’t know you better, I’d think you meant it,” she added.
I let her stew awhile before I said quietly, “I do mean it.”
“You can’t be serious,” said Pearl. “You, the quintessential banker—‘Woman of the Year,’ ‘Girl of the Golden West’—you’re going to toss away everything your granddaddy ever wanted—”
She stopped in her tracks and gave that a little thought.
“By God, maybe you do mean it,” she said in amazement. “Making up for lost time and past injustice … But what on earth could drive an ice cube of virtue like you over the brink—that’s what I want to know.”
Just then, they called my plane over the intercom. I rose and tossed some money down for the drinks.
“Did you ever wonder, Pearl, why banks have so many educated, qualified, dedicated, ethical, and relatively underpaid middle managers like us—when at the very top, there’s a bunch of ignorant, greedy, boorish, self-congratulatory snobs, who are only concerned for their own well-being?”
It was the longest admission I’d ever made to Pearl—or anyone else—of how I felt, and she looked at me with wide eyes before she replied.
“Okay—why?” she said.
“Shit floats,” I told her.
Then I left to catch my plane.
THE MACHINE AGE
The machine discipline cuts away that ground of law and order on which business enterprise is founded.
What can be done to save civilized mankind from the vulgarization and disintegration wrought by the machine industry?
—Thorstein Veblen,
THE MACHINE AGE
It was nice to fly on the bank’s credit card, because I always flew first class, but on most airlines, even first-class food was enough to gag me. So I usually brought a picnic basket packed by my local trattoria, Vivande.
This time, the lifted napkin revealed a treasure trove of culinaria: cold caviar and white bean salad, a wedge of pancetta layered with crushed figs, a bitterly lemon tart, and a split of Verdicchio to wash it all down. I sat back, plugged into the Mozart track on my headset, and tried to erase all thoughts—but my mind kept moving back to my newly hatched scheme. And to what would happen with Tor.
Though I’d launched the quality circle with fanfare, piqued Pearl’s interest, and was now en route to Manhattan to initiate my mission, I knew it was still not too late to kick everyone off the bandwagon if I decided to get cold feet. At least, it wasn’t too late now. After I’d met with Tor, it might be.
Many years ago, he’d pulled me out of some sticky situations. But I’d known him long enough to realize that, even then, it had been his involvement that had stuck me there in the first place! Asking for Tor’s assistance with a computer problem was like getting Leonardo’s help in sketching: it seemed invaluable—until you got the bill.
And I knew that Tor believed in collecting his accounts receivable. For the first time in the many years since I’d last seen him, I had the sick and giddy feeling that I was standing with one foot perched atop the “debts called due” spindle, and the other on a roulette wheel. Not the favorite position of one who likes to remain in control.
When I’d met Zoltan Tor twelve years ago, I had been a computer bunny of twenty, fresh in my new job at Monolith Corp., one of the largest computer vendors in the world. Knowing nothing at all of the DP business (I thought IBM was the name of a clock and Honeywell that of a thermostat), I instantly received from my firm an impressive title, and was sent—as a “technical expert”—to install large-scale mainframe systems.
Naturally, it was quite a scramble to bone up on the myriad subjects my clients believed I already knew. Running at a hectic pace, I took prolific notes at each account, raced back to my office to find experts who’d help, and returned to the clients the next morning with the answers. I was always terrified of being unmasked, but for several months this routine seemed to be working. Then the rug was yanked.
One Monday, I arrived at my office to find my boss, Alfie, a flabby, whining fellow who disliked me, standing at my desk with lips pursed and hands on hips.
I’d been hired by someone higher up than Alfie and thrust on him as a trainee. He hated nothing more than training people he thought had better connections than he had; so instead of training me, he expended all his efforts trying to show up my incompetence. The more often I performed to the letter those assignments he threw at me, the more infuriated he became.
“Verity, I’d like to see you at once in my office,” he said in a sneering tone, looking around the suddenly silent floor to be sure everyone was noting my discomfort.
Alfie’s glass-walled cubicle at the rear of the floor afforded him an overseer’s view of the galley ship of desks, ranged in long, straight rows across the floor. From behind, he could make sure that each programmer was hard at work. If he ever caught us whispering to one another, he tapped a bell on his desk; and he counted the lines of code each of us pumped out every month, tacking those statistics to the bulletin
