SUNDAY AFTERNOON AT MARKETPLACE

A woman in her late 40s was summoned to a Sunday brunch at Marketplace, the suburban restaurant with renovated classic train station feel. She was situated at the end, across from her somewhat close friend, observing quietly, while Margie’s two children sat next and diagonally across to her. The kids didn’t mind that her mother brought someone along for lunch, meaning they would have to split her attention, and in any case Debbie was soft spoken. However, Debbie and Margie have been trying to get together for a long time and their schedules couldn’t quite align, in part because she had her own children to tend to.

Debbie was polite, and shared stories, information and baking recipes with Margie, occasionally asking the two girls whether they liked school and what their preferred subjects were, did they have any brothers or sisters? One boy who was the youngest by two years and naturally he was a brat. Debbie was careful not to talk too much, and also careful not to talk too little.

She was a friend, but significantly a psychologist collecting an hourly rate to observe without being noticed, and to pretend not to be paying too close attention or to be taking mental notes that she would occasionally, two or three times in total, excuse herself to the Ladies Room to jot down on paper. She was a ventriloquist able to speak without moving her lips. If she was an unassuming detective, she’d be the one who walks up to a stranger in a supermarket and asks a potential witness a seemingly innocuous question related to detergents, because “she can’t seem to locate any of the sales assistants,” but body language will tell all.

She was able to monitor their behavior while sitting on the end of the table and often while looking in other directions, or preoccupied with the menu, a fly or fan buzzing overhead, and once or twice a horselaugh or gasp from a neighboring table. Another topic of discussion was that, being relatively new to the region, albeit not that new, would Margie be able to proffer advice for a third-party counterpart who was thinking of moving in? This woman’s children were roughly the same age as Margie’s, whereas Debbie’s were older. Any suggestions, and Debbie will return the favor when possible, for example if and when her experimentation with Margie’s baking recipes is successful.

The class of kid that Margie’s daughters were, they were eager to please, and bore out a virtual Google Maps about the playgrounds in this and surrounding towns: which were the best movie theatres on an all-around basis (not just the films and comfort-level of the seats, the size of the screens and quality of the sound systems), and which were the teachers that instilled confidence or that should carry health warnings? Were there any petting zoos or working farms nearby? And how, they thought she wasn’t going to ask that!

Once all four had finished their desserts and Debbie paid the check, she shook the girls’ hands and closed with a “very nice meeting you,” but they had to separate at that moment because their cars were in differing directions. Later that evening, Debbie sent Margie an email which included an assessment of her children, along with details of the bank account to which she could settle the discounted invoice. Her conclusion was that the children were completely normal and typical, and their verbal and non-verbal movements were commonplace for their developmental stages.

There was no reason to be suspicious about anything her daughters did or said, and no reason to mistrust the veracity of any of their statements, beyond the archetypal and compulsory child to adult or parent gamesmanship, their words were entirely uninhibited and no body language from one to another which might be interpreted as “Remember, Daddy said not to breathe a word of this,” consistent but unsynchronized. Debbie was confident about her conclusions, because she had assessed countless numbers of children in her career and in all situations from staged to informal and inconspicuous, and was fluent in all their tricks, what they hide and try to hide, what reticence and what openness signify.

In other words, nothing to worry about. Margie breathed a sigh of relief and paid the invoice straight away, and made sure to include her estimate of the cost of the lunch, because Debbie should not be out of pocket when the invitation had been extended to her, and also inasmuch as she did not charge her full rate. Margie included the chocolate chip brownie recipe that was the girls’ number one most wanted, along with preparation hacks that would ensure her children would be coming back for more, but not too much more.

I was at the next table with Ed and Jim, giving vent to 21st century business gripes and war gaming near misses, although in my corner I did more listening than talking.

Jim began, but despite having been promoted through job change from district manager to small-c c-suite, this didn’t necessarily excuse him from minutia and the mundane. His grumble transported me to a cut-out, a bilateral meeting I once joined which turned out unbeknown to me to be a meeting to plan another meeting, the crux of which was to decide whether to connote weightiness in a statement via bold or color coded typeface.

Having been punch drunk in the past by such business irrelevance, I was up to the task of hanging on every word. Jim began his story by asking whether we browse through Metro as it’s called in some cities, or 20 Minutes in others, in reference to the free papers handed out to commuters to occupy them during their journey, if they don’t have a page turner to read, or a smart phone stocked with Angry Birds. ie, the journalistic Botox that passes for news intended to take 20 minutes to get from headline to weather page. ‘Ah yes yes yes yes yes,’ I confirmed, I ‘used to read the Daily Drool’ regularly, but I had it up to here with even the intelligence of Angry Birds fanatics being insulted, and went cold turkey.

This was not his point, but rather his starting point, rendering my defence of Angry Birds fanatics wasted. Rather, his juxtaposition was “The New 20 Minutes,” which measures the amount of time meaningless debates in his company take. The latest was an external survey of “investors” that his department had been asked to audit, and the substance being consigned to sometime later, his committee spent 20 minutes deliberating whether a particular survey category should be labelled “investor,” “financial investor,” or “portfolio investor,” or “financial portfolio investor,” or “financial/portfolio investor.” What, no portfolio/financial investor, I asked, while backing my head away in the event he got ideas about punching me. The experienced consultant drafted in by the end client was married to “investor” over his dead body and “financial investor” over his undead body, while the end client was partial to “portfolio investor.” Perhaps this was “muddled thinking over legalistic tax issues,” the consultant ruminated.

The customer is always right? “Customer” possibly, but this was a “client.” Jim was patient in this dispute but not an active participant, fortunately as it turns out because one of his co-workers gave the consultant a subtle “you choose” nod and offered to break the tie with the possibility that “financial” and “portfolio” could be considered interchangeable. “But no,” the consultant rebutted, the choice of words was highly significant and therein the debate continued until its allotted 20 minutes ran out. I asked which word or phrase was ultimately selected, though Jim had to confess that even if he were a betting man, he can’t recall. For the upshot was that the mother of all conundrums was unresolvable because hardly anyone replied to the survey, there being only a handful of individuals for whom it would prove relevant. Did this put perspective into the mind of the consultant, I asked Jim. Probably not, Jim, replied, because win, lose or tie, it was all about principle. Touché, I indicated, and raised a glass toward him.

In my experience, if you’re patient and trusting in a bureaucratic business environment, you’re viewed as passive. If you’re not patient, you’re viewed as irritable, which is no different, because the judgers are the people who can do no wrong - but as they’re too perfect for this earth, please someone replace her with a more personable robot tomorrow. When you work for a bureaucracy, if they say they “need it right away,” take that as a nudge nudge, because they don’t, it means when you feel like it or with the third reminder, whichever comes first. If it “absolutely has to be completed by April 15,” this means basically, whenever, just like my tax returns (though if the IRS is convinced you owe them money, you’ll receive the warning letter after the payment deadline has passed).

Ed’s story was completely different, and one in which the toast would be offered at the opening, rather than at the conclusion. When Ed was a few years into his career, he was a financial trader and so that he could conduct business anonymously with other traders, he bought and sold through brokers, of which he personally maintained a list of six or eight. He felt particularly lucky with one that had been assigned to him, because this was a former athlete, famous across the country for his collegiate skills and accomplishments, and clutch play above all. In a word, Ed was thrilled. Ed didn’t stop to wonder how someone still relatively junior, a trader in his mid to late 20s, could have drawn this long straw, because he was, in a word, thrilled.

He told his sports-mad brothers, and they were jealous of his coup, because Gary’s Final Four achievements – as more or less a favorite son talent - remained fresh, as did the excitement of being verifiably drafted by the pros – not too shabby for an up tempo six foot guard with more spunk than seeing eye shots. Gary exchanged Converse All-Stars, or Adidas or Pumas, for three-piece suit when an ankle injury all but ruled him out of the big dance, while he kept in shape by “playing against inmates at a correctional facility in the borough of Queens, where he says he faced some ‘great players.’” As he informed sports and general interest journalists, and clients such as Ed, this Communications major was “content with his life.”

Meanwhile, not only was Ed on the phone with Gary several times per day, some days, part of the job of being a broker was to wine and dine customers, of which Ed was one of course. Not too often of course, because Ed had to spread the human capital and be entertained by other brokers, wine and dine his own clients, as well as court prospective wives to be. Still, a surf & turf dinner in Manhattan every six weeks or so was a right worth bragging about, particularly as Gary was able to share stories from the roundball trenches. For example, which of his teammates claimed the highest vertical leap, and what is the genuine nature of locker room banter? And oh yeah, are the refs really that blind, and is it true they hop through hoops for the superstars? Did I say wine and dine? I meant wine and wine, because Gary could put it away, and not just wine, but cocktails too.

In the opinion of Gary’s senior management, it was preferable to spend $1,500 on playoff tickets for the Knicks, purchased for clients from scalpers, than to give rank and file employees an annual raise of $1,500. Gary’s clients, and Gary, were completely OK with this fine line calculation, and we’ll see why shortly.

When was the last time the Knicks made the playoffs.

However, the tower came tumbling down late one morning, when Ed received a call from a compliance officer at Gary’s firm (let’s not pretend the compliance function was high minded, because legend has it a new employee at Gary’s brokerage could have downed two bottles on the morning of his get-to-know-you physical and still passed). Did Ed and Gary go out for drinks last Thursday? A Thursday, true, but not last Thursday. How about the one before? I think not, more like four or five. Apparently, Gary had been submitting fictitious dinner, drinks and taxi expenses and cutting deals with the maître d’s and drivers for cash, so that he could use these proceeds to purchase cocaine.

If the phantom taxi ride to the suburbs, where Ed purportedly lived, was $50 including tip, Gary would keep $40 and the taxi driver $10. Not bad for doing nothing, nice work if you can get it, nice little earner, unless and until they got caught. A legend falls and a lesson learned, which is that all that glitters is not gold, except for Goldschläger perhaps. In deference to Gary’s ensnarement and humble recovery, we opted for cocktails only during the tale and after, and no beer or wine. And so that’s how Gary adopted the tagline of Cocaine Broker, and how he was able to spin his second career into a third as a motivational speaker. One of his running themes was “The slow show,” meaning that a successful career is the product of years of hard and unglamorous work, and the average Joe should not strive to be an overnight success, the quick and nasty buck is not where it’s at.

Hypothetical Q&A with Gary

“With the benefit of hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have shot the sheriff.”

“How about his deputy?”

“Howaboutism.”