JPod (17 page)

Part Two

Steve's Grand Adventure

Canadian Press

The afternoon the RCMP found Steve's car, we were having a soul-crushing meeting in which we hammered out the next phase of the BoardX production schedule. The good news is that months of marketing studies have convinced the company that the whole Jeff the Turde thing is an unappealing idea. This was presented at today's production meeting.

Here's my theory about meetings and life: the three things you can't fake are erections, competence and creativity. That's why meetings become toxic—they put uncreative people in a situation in which they have to be something they can never be. And the more effort they put into concealing their inabilities, the more toxic the meeting becomes. One of the most common creativity-faking tactics is when someone puts their hands in the prayer position and conceals their mouth while they nod at you and say, "Hmmmmm. Interesting." If pressed, they'll add, "I'll have to get back to you on that." Then they don't say anything else.

The uncreative people who run a meeting say such things as,
Does
anybody here have something to say about Ethan's idea?
The ensuing silence makes even a good idea look stupid.

Or they'll say,
That's an interesting idea, but let's focus on matters at hand.
Many people think that the best way to make meetings tolerable is to walk into the room and fire away with lots of ideas to get juices flowing. Such ideas goad uncreative colleagues into building more elaborate strategies to conceal their lack of creativity. You think you're giving away all this great material, but all you're really doing is generating fear and envy.

In a way, the best meetings are the ones where nobody is creative and nobody has any ideas about anything. People sit around, stare at their notepads, and then, after a plausible amount of time has passed, everyone leaves. Everybody's happy because nothing was demanded of them, and nobody was made to look badvin front of the others.

Knowing all of this doesn't make meetings any less numbing, but at least now you know why they're numbing.

In general, if you have been stupid enough to venture a new and possibly good idea during a meeting, you may as well kiss it goodbye. On the other hand, you might as well enjoy the behaviour of your co-workers as they try to attach their names to your idea, while at the same time distancing themselves from it. Co-workers will generate an email trail of bland musings that can function as good evidence or bad evidence.

Hi, Ethan—interesting idea you reminded Glenn about—racking up the CPUs in a Kendall formation may just work. Let's maybe talk about it some time. Did Sheila get you those upgrade cards like I asked?

The above email 1) took almost no work to do; 2) leaves a connective trail to you and your idea; and 3) gives the illusion of friendship and caring.

After I had my moment of grand insight about creativity and meetings, Bree looked at me and said, "Ethan, you've done something—I can see it in your face. Are you on drugs?"

"Moi? No."

"Bullshit. You suddenly look peaceful. That's not possible in a situation like this. What gives?"

"Whatever do you mean?"

Bree BlackBerried Cowboy.
Ethan is looking far 2 peaceful all ofa sudden. Cowboy, did U giv him some Robitussin?

Nope. I'm trying 2 clean out my system. He DOES look suspiciouslyat peace.

It was fun watching everybody squirm.

. . .

Peaceful as I was with my new theory about meetings, I still had to flee the boardroom about an hour before that one ended—I started getting that itching-from-the-inside feeling, like ants were collecting bread crumbs around my cranium—and the ants were growing bigger and angrier.

Kaitlin thinks I'm claustrophobic, but that's not true—I love elevators and small cars. What I
don't hkc
is being exposed to unfiltered social contact, like at parties or meetings, when just anyone can talk to you with no other reason than that you happen to be there. She and I discussed this after the meeting.

"Ethan, I think you have mild autism."

"What?"

"You have to admit, half the people who work here are mildly autistic: poor social skills, the ability to obsess on anything numerical or repetitive, the odd outfits, the paranoia and the sense of continually being judged and measured. Autistics almost always can't stand being touched or approached by other people."

"Then what do you make of our sex life?"

"Good point. Strike that—autistics often can't stand being touched by
strangers.
Also, Ethan, you spend way too much time playing Manhunt, which is the goriest game of all time. It signals your detachment from humanity."

"Players of Resident Evil: DC might disagree with you. Or The Suffering."

"Ethan, watching you play Manhunt is like watching a steak being carved at Benihana."

"It's only pretend gore."

"With characters customized to resemble people here at work?"

I changed the subject. "Evil Mark was being slightly secretive at the meeting."

"I saw that. What was he doing?"

"I craned my neck and checked it out—he was practising new signatures."

"What?"

"I know. Grown-ups don't do that." I tried to remember when I came up with my own signature, but all that came to me were flickering images of killing time in high school English classes. I asked Kaitlin if she remembered inventing hers.

"Absolutely. I used to have loopy teenage-girl handwriting—the kind that scares away guys—but late in high school I went tagging with friends from the school's smoking area and got radicalized. That's why my signature looks like a tag. And why my handwriting's illegible."

"I can't believe people still write anything any more. I grew up expecting machines to do all of that for us, and I think we're actually close to that point."

"I hope. And I wish they'd hurry up with language translating machines, too. I'd like to visit Europe, but I always think about the language issue and say,
Maybe next year"

I was about to make yet another Cheerios run for Gord-O when Kaitlin called me over to her screen. "Check out what just came down the Chute . . ." She was looking at blueprints for a machine that resembled a piece of gym equipment. "It says here that autistics are calmed down by the sensation of pressure on their skin from non-living sources, such as heavy blankets and, apparently, these hugging machines."

"So?"

"So I'm going to build one here in jPod and let it be used for the communal good. We could be the world's first tech company with its own hug machine."

. . .

Steve remained vanished, and we were all still unsure if that was good or bad. We scoured the Toblerone website for clues, but all we got was hungry. That, and we found out that Kraft Foods owns Toblerone. Cowboy also discovered in one of Toblerone's many chat rooms that Campbell Soup owns Godiva Chocolates. We are disillusioned. Our Wonka daydreams have died.

. . .

I keep on receiving spams where they've put random words inside the body copy to trick anti-spam programs into thinking it's a real letter. There has to be some other form of coded message in operation here.

clams evil garage clowns bogey lie saran in depart wait celery droolingpuncture at bartend the pronto thought luxurious of earthmoving
ripping arabesque at hypodermic your orchid lazy carrion humanrecriminatory flesh never bulkhead mock eleventh my rifleman clownthermal rage wan or gorse my octopus darklings airlift will cozy tormenteightfold your aphasic spawn revelatory until collard your montagesun irresistible burns frog supernova sterile

. . .

Bree told me this great story. She was assigned to show around a visiting middleware consultant from France. Nobody was sure if he was gay or not. His name is Serge Duclos—which is sort of funny in itself, because in high school, the fictional guy in my French textbook was Serge Duclos. Everyone my age in my school district has this same Serge Duclos guy in their heads, forever asking where the Métro is.

"It turns out Serge isn't gay," Bree said, "so we had a bit of a fling, and he spent a few nights at my place. Then he really started to get on my nerves. Fortunately, his boss flew in, and he had to move back into his hotel—just in the nick of time.

"So I came home from work, and there was a beautiful cashmere shawl inside a FedEx envelope on my front stoop. I thought,
Shit, now
I'm going to have to get him something, too.

"And then I read the note attached to the sweater, and it turns out he's staying here longer because he has to implement his middleware into the company pipeline. Aargh!

"I asked my dad for a gift suggestion. He's a urologist, and people give him stuff all the time. He handed me a bottle of red wine a patient had given him. It seemed kind of lame as a gift, but it was better than nothing.

"So I gave him the wine, and his face dissolved and he just wept.

"He said,
You could have given me platinum cufflinks or a new car, and I
would have thought it was a vulgar North American gesture, but
this— he cradled the botde like it was a newborn—
This magnificent bottle of
1970 Chateau Latour Bordeaux
—
I'm speechless.

"The moment he was gone, I looked online, and it turns out the wine was worth seven hundred bucks. Shriek! When we met the next day, he treated me like a classy
layyyyyydy,
which no one's ever done before. Everything I say to the man is wise, and everything I do is chic. And now I'm falling in love with him, and it's all because of that bottle of wine."

. . .

On the way home yesterday I stopped at a Ricky's Pancake Hut for a cheeseburger, fries and Coke. It's not what I usually order, but for a short while I wanted to pretend I was living inside an Archie comic—don't we all feel like that at some time or other?

When my food arrived, the Coke glass had a slogan on the side in cheerful fake-1950s lettering:

Coca-Cola

Free Will!

I thought to myself,
Wow, it's great that Coca-Cola is now sponsoring
independent thinking at the most grassroots of levels. Maybe global corporations
aren't evil at all. Maybe they represent the future of knowledge and the transmission
of culture to future civilisations. Maybe I've been too hard on them all
these years!

I looked more closely at the glass, and realized it didn't actually say Free Will!, but rather, Free
Fill! I
asked the waitress what that meant, and she said I could drink as much Coke as I wanted on that one drink order.

I told John Doe, who had an interesting thought. "I used to yearn for Coke when I was growing up in the lesbian commune. And I yearned to try Pepsi as well. I thought that being a cola virgin was a great opportunity to offer the definitive taste test. So I snuck out and walked to the bait shop, which was maybe three miles from home, and bought a Coke. They didn't have Pepsi, so I brought the Coke home and hid it in the backyard beneath a stump beside the communal talking circle, and the next week I was able to hitch into town, and I found a Pepsi and brought it home. I snuck out into a birch glade, opened them up and had this big woo moment when I tasted them."

"And?" We were all curious to find out which was better.

"They both tasted like crap."

"But wasn't one better than the other?"

"Does cat shit taste better than dog shit? The weird thing was that neither of them tasted as sweet as I'd anticipated. So that afternoon, when my mother was going into town to do her monthly 'Look, I don't shave my armpits' challenge to the locals, I went along and snuck into a diner and stole sugar and NutraSweet packets. When we got home, I took two glasses and a spoon into the glade and added sugar to what was left of the two colas."

"What happened?"

"The weird thing is,
nothing
happened."

"Huh?"

"It doesn't matter how much sugar or aspartame you add to a Coke or Pepsi, it can't get any sweeter than it already is. That's their secret formula. It's not some secret ingredient —which, by the way, would have to be registered with federal food and drug administrations, so let's scotch that little urban legend about Secret Ingredient X7—it's that their beverages are already supersaturated with sweeteners."