Meanwhile, far away in New York, I could also see that the great mechanisms of the business world were churning furiously on the twenty-third floor of a smoked-glass high-rise. The conference room for nonsmoking executives was buzzing symphonically. On the other side of the corridor, the conference room for smoking executives was dangerously close to setting off the overhead fire alarm and sprinklers. Nonsmoking and smoking executives communicated between conference rooms via closed-circuit TV. Unknown to anyone, an inconspicuous cable had been hooked by a courier in the interoffice mail run to a private television in the basement. The janitors and the mail couriers drank cokes and ate chocolate chip cookies during quarterly reports and cheered on the opposing teams—smokers VS. nonsmokers.
On the street below, union members paced the street in front of the revolving glass doors with the inevitable signs. A bouquet of helium balloons with the messages “Unfair to Employees” and “Strike!” and “Equal Pay for Equal Mentality” floated in a mass up to the windows of the twenty-third-floor conference rooms. The strikers cheered hysterically. In the basement, the couriers and janitors saw the balloons and cheered too.
Secretaries and administrative assistants rushed to and fro over the spongy carpets outside the president’s office, exchanging copies of the same memos and drawing breaths of impatience while queuing up before copy machines. Several fights had already stirred the last hours before lunch break, when certain secretaries had had the audacity to cut in line to make urgent copies for their own files. Consequently, the human resources department was in an additional upheaval, trying to handle the delinquent employees while preparing the paperwork for reopening negotiations with the union after the inevitable and eventual loss of zeal by union members in the hullabaloo over the strike.
Research marketers on the tenth floor were busily putting together their new packaging proposal, along with smaller, sample giveaways and a sleek new brochure. In another room, a couple of managers were editing a series of one-minute commercials, while an assistant anxiously pressed the fast-forward button.
A few floors down, dressmakers were hemming gowns on models, while a designer swept around with a clipboard and made monosyllabic comments and gave orders. A woman in tricolor hair coaxed the models to sashay into line and hurried them up the elevator to do their show for the board of directors during dessert.
The accounting department was busily printing checks and sifting through and stamping invoices. Their computer spreadsheets had fiscal plans for the next ten years, and the director of fiscal management was wiping coffee off the FY2002 spreads.
The research and development department was deep in conference over a five-year proposal to move into accessory areas—everything from clothing to cars—that would enhance and complete the desired look. The department had drawn up graphs to show where and when infiltration into the domestic and international markets could be expected to peak.
The research theorists had prepared extensive personality breakdowns of potential buyers, their attitudes, credit histories, morals, and life philosophies. These theorists had also formulated a new philosophical makeup for potential users based on a combination of computerized biorhythms and earlier editions of Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care.
The commissary was shuttling crepe pans and peach brandy up to both conference rooms, and employees enrolled in the aerobics program were rushing to the showers from the badminton courts. A phys-ed instructor employed by the company was hustling in the 12:30 bunch for stretching and muscle toning. A sign said, “PHYSICAL EXERCISE FOR GOOD MENTAL EXERCISE. —GGG Fit Employee Program.”
All in all, it was a normal day at GGG. Except for the strike, the secretaries’ tussle, and the board of directors’ luncheon on the twenty-third floor, business went on quite as usual. GGG was one of those business miracles springing from a small one-computer office with two pushbutton phones into a multimillion-dollar operation with one hundred thousand employees in branch offices across the nation, all this in a period of five years. The founding couple, Georgia and Geoffrey Gamble, had already been kicked out of their own business in a simple vote of stockholders and upheld by the board of directors. The chairman of the board looked sympathetically at Georgia and Geoff: “I’m sorry, it’s just gotten bigger than you can handle. That’s the way of the free market, you know.”
Georgia and Geoff Gamble were hardly surprised by the decision. Georgia adjusted her Dior spectacles, and Geoff pushed his hands into the pockets of his tweed coat and smiled blandly. GGG had certainly surpassed their mad brainstorm over albacore at a sushi bar one afternoon in 1990. Georgia had even predicted their forced resignation, but Geoff had sneered at the time. Even so, Geoff had, early on, decided to keep in the pocket of his tweeds a single card, to which he now turned with a vengeance. Georgia looked at Geoff significantly, and the couple took the elevator down twenty-three floors to the revolving glass doors. By the time they reached the bottom, the computer had already deleted their names from the company hierarchy. However, the card in Geoff’s pocket was not only deleted but irretrievable, and, although its absence could not destroy GGG, it could wreak its own particular havoc. It was more than the missing microchip in a personal computer—it was the pea under twenty-three mattresses in the bed of a princess, the missing product.
The marvelous thing about the card in Geoff’s pocket was that GGG had gotten along without it since the very beginning. In fact, according to Georgia’s calculations, GGG could probably go on almost forever without it. That had been the very brilliance of GGG’s conception. Geoff tore the card in half and tossed it into a nearby gutter; it was gone forever.
Meanwhile, on the third floor, in one small understaffed department, cryptically titled development resources research and viability, a single director and his clerks waded through papers and filed everything in steel cabinets, which were in turn locked in an enormous walk-in vault. Monthly, a manager would wade through the files and remove those containing discarded or rejected subjects and shred them.
There was a second vault with boxes and boxes of junk—everything from silver-plated hole-punchers to quartz shopping-list calculators. At this point, most of the objects were small enough to put in a handbag. The viability commission, an outgrowth of development resources research and viability, had narrowed down product viability to handbag size, and the clerks had had to get the maintenance men to remove the large equipment, such as personal copy machines and chairs with heated seats. The department director was relieved because his request for warehouse space had been denied in the last fiscal budget, and he did not relish the idea of giving up his office space for storage.
Actually, he was not yet aware of the commission’s plans to remove even things like the silver-plated hole-punchers because of the price of silver on the international market and costly overhead for insurance and freight. Every week the commission had some new strictures on product viability. They had finally, after five years, however, narrowed the retail price to $9.99 with latitude for inflation. At $9.99, silver-plated hole-punchers were out.