Trapped in the conference room and thinking about Audrey’s perfect lower lip, I come to an easy conclusion.
I need to get out of here.
Now my heart is racing. That’s what happens when I have a plan, when I know I’m about to pull a Bob Watson. I bite my lip and tap my foot as I wait for an opportunity to initiate a Bob Watson launch sequence.
That’s right. After you’ve made yourself visible and present, after you’ve validated speakers and attendees, after you’ve made those emotional and mental imprints, you must gently toss to the center of the room a smoke bomb of sorts—a distraction. “Cover” that allows you to slip out. Usually it’s an “innocent” comment or question that quickly leads people to a subtopic so inflammable that no one can resist weighing in. Which is when you get up and leave, unnoticed.
Janice says, “Which is why—if you look at row seventy-eight on the chart printout—you can clearly see how the subtiers of the P-FID fluctuate.”
I raise my hand and offer my stupid look. “But what about the SysCON?”
Janice stiffens. Everyone else groans.
The SysCON is her catnip.
“It’s quite simple.” She steadies herself, and her cheeks redden. “We shall—God as my witness—leverage the SysCON for the richest ROI this industry has ever seen.” She turns to the whiteboard, where she starts to draw out a hexagon, labeling each corner. “And I’m talking about the L-PAR, HyperPHY, AGRO, a variety of industry-standard M24s, and the whole range of J-4s in the FOD.” I notice two people fighting off sleep, three others checking email, and one poor soul somehow—against all odds—paying full attention. “We must strip it apart—do a complete K-KAR on this baby—and put it back together, but with things like the J-8s and AGRO rationalization.”
Crickets.
“And we will K-KAR and K-KAR and K-KAR as long as it takes. And only then will we feed it into the SysCON.”
I raise my hand. “So it really is a deep, full thrust with the K-KARs and the L-Docs?”
Janice lowers her eyelids. “We’ll drench the K-KARs with L-Docs and the SysCON and B-24s, and then spreadsheet the whole thing.” She seems to have transported herself to a curious, acronym-rich dimension I hadn’t thought possible. “And it’s K-KARs in the RAD, K-KARs in the—”
“Janice Janice Janice.” I’m like a traffic cop, with my arms out—Stop. “Sorry to interrupt, but . . .” She’s frozen, and the attendees look up. “. . . I just have to step in here. Please.” I approach her and pluck the marker from her hand. “I’d like to draw something out.” I move to the whiteboard under a growing din of murmurs. “Because I’m starting to feel we’re thinking about this all wrong.” I look at her open mouth, then at the attendees, all eyes on me—what drama, what an interesting break from normal programming. “And our problems start with the K-KAR.”
You could’ve heard an ant burp.
“The problem is . . .” I write out K-KAR in giant letters. “. . . the K-KAR is limited in scope.” I make a big show of crossing out the K-KAR with the marker, “slashing” it with long, dramatic swipes, adding little curlicues at the end. “The K-KAR is—forgive me—the largest Chihuahua.”
Gasps.
“Here’s what I think of the K-KAR.” I keep crossing out the K-KAR, like I’m committing a crime of passion. Janice takes a step toward me, stops. Bites her lip, her chest heaving. “I’m sorry, but the K-KAR is like your grandpa’s landline telephone—an out-of-date relic.” I turn and look at Janice, then the others. “And yet we need the K-KAR. We all know that.” I look at Janice again, giving her the serious eyes. “But we also need the SysCON and the L-Docs.” I turn to the attendees. “So what do we do?”
Silence.
I wipe the board clean. “What we do is—and I’m serious—something I’ll call . . .”
I make them wait a sec.
“. . . process husbandry.”
Hushed murmurs. Janice sways.
“Yes.” In a fit of creativity, I write out the K-KAR diagonally. “That’s right. It’s time to . . .” Under the K-KAR, I write “SysCON” as if the former is mounting the latter. “. . . mate the K-KAR with the SysCON.”
You would have thought I’d just dropped my pants to reveal a banana sling.
“We need to put the K-KAR in a room with the SysCON.” I offer them the serious eyes again. “And we need to lock that door. And we won’t let them out until the SysCON is knocked-up, so to speak. Knocked up with their love child—a zygote ready to incubate into a new breed.” I turn and stare at Janice, then at the attendees. “I’m talking about a love child that will evolve bottom-tier data transformation into a new kind of species. I’m talking about a new era.” Under the SysCON, I draw a crude, asexual orifice, and out of it I produce a waterfall of fluid. Atop the small pool of discharge, I write out a new acronym—K-CONKAR. “The era of the K-CONKAR.”
The room explodes into a chorus of cheers and gasps. Janice charges, swipes the marker from my hand, lifts her lip at me, and heads for the whiteboard, taking the eraser in the other hand. People at the table are debating, excitement in their voices, as Janice works frantically to erase my explicit suggestion. Slowly, I step back, out of the spotlight, and look at my phone—nothing.
Janice is trembling as she attacks the whiteboard. “The K-KAR . . .” She shouts. “Cannot . . .” She stops herself, takes a big breath, and lets it out slowly. “. . . be crossbred.”
The attendees hush for a moment, then explode into debate. Floyd thrusts an index finger into the air, nearly shouts over the din, “We need a committee. A K-CONKAR exploratory committee.” The words are hardly out of his mouth when a cadre of K-KAR purists pounce on him, their teeth showing, their shoulders leaning forward, their eyes glaring. The notion—no, the blasphemous, perverted, nearly incestuous suggestion—of a process called the K-CONKAR has half the room foaming at the mouth, mindless of the fact that, two minutes ago, they were listless zombie slaves. Now, they’re alive—their faces flushed, their hearts thumping, their throats tight as they prepare to interject a rapid, buttery flurry of L-Docs, J-23s, and HyperPHYs into the dialogue. Don’t they know they are back on the bottle? Bolstered, invigorated—propped up—by a rare and short-lived tonic drawn from the very insulated, antiseptic, corporate monotony that just minutes ago had brought them to their knees, their heads bowed, their clasped hands begging for the executioner’s special brand of swift mercy?
This high? This K-CONKAR high of theirs? Oh yes, it will crash. And when it does—when my poor colleagues awake in a sea of their own empties, reminded of their relapse, their obsessive-compulsive binge into bottom-tier data transformation—I will be long gone.
They bark at each other, nod, fold their arms, and scribble.
Slowly, I backpedal to the conference room door. “And once we complete the L-PAR thrust,” I say, “we penetrate deeper with the HyperPHY. And we must go so deep with the HyperPHY, it hurts.”
Hank says, “And once we’re in with the HyperPHY, we can—and we will—pound away.”
I take another step back as Janice pounds her first into her palm, creating a rhythmic listing of acronyms—“First, it’s the R-PID . . .” Fist pound. “Then it’s the L-Docs . . .” Fist pound. “And then it’s the L-PARs . . .” Fist pound. “. . . and the J-22s . . .” Fist pound. “. . . and the A-100s . . .” Pound. “. . . and then that deep thrust with the HyperPHY—over . . .” Pound. “. . . and over . . .” Pound. “. . . and over again.”
Floyd says, “You can’t create a K-CONKAR with the HyperPHY.”
Someone says, “We must hyperscale the HyperPHY.”
“No,” Janice snaps. “We must milk the HyperPHY.”
“Which is why the HyperPHY must not be soiled by the K-KAR.”
“The HyperPHY has no place in this discussion.”
“Are you kidding? The HyperPHY might very well be our Lucy.”
“Lucy?”
“The Australopithecus of all Robards International processes.”
“Why are we even having this discussion?”
“Because the K-KAR has been R-POD’d and L-Doc’d to death.”
“What the HyperPHY needs is much more of that.”
“You have got to be—”
“The HyperPHY needs a good soiling by the SysCON.”
“A rogering.”
“Or the K-CONKAR. The K-CONKAR could do that.”
“The point is—and I’m serious—the HyperPHY has been wearing a chastity belt of sorts.”
“Folks. . . . Folks. . . . Guys. . . . Let’s keep the tone—No need for—”
“Listen, you think the HyperPHY is some protected, virginal princess?”
“No. I know it’s—”
“Dude, the HyperPHY is a cougar. A chain-smoking, whiskey-drinking cougar.”
“I don’t like your tone, mister.”
“Try this on for size—I don’t like you.”
“Well, you can take the K-CONKAR and shove it up your HyperPHY’d—”
“Shut your trap, you raspy bag.”
“SysCON hugger.”
“HyerPHY dittohead.”
“Hyperslut.”
“Asshole.”
“Prick.”
“You want the SBC Office on your ass?”
“People.”
“I’ll HyperPHY your ass right out of this company.”
“Guys. Stop.”
“The K-KAR is a simple, dull sloth.”
“And the SysCON is a flatulent old whore who doesn’t bathe.”
Janice shouts, “We need an L-Doc on the innards of the K-CONKAR ASAP.”
“The K-KAR is an overfed pedophile living in a desert trailer.”
Janice says, “Rick, help me with these people.”
I address the group. “It seems like the L-Docs may not be aligned with the K-KAR. And maybe that’s our problem.”
Janice pauses, touches her chin. “I know we had a break scheduled, but I think we’re getting over the initial anxiety about the formation of a K-CONKAR, and this discussion seems to be becoming productive. So we’re gonna cancel the break and keep going.”
But of course the door is already shutting behind me.
Gently.
Graciously.