Chapter Two
Alan, the CFO, was a mean, tiny man whose insecurity in his physical stature drove his need to rule and fueled a genetic predisposition for power, greed, and ambition. Growing up, Alan emerged from puberty no different than he had entered, with the notable, and unfortunate, exception his hips were wider than his shoulders and he sported a small pot belly. Protein shakes, weight lifting, and karate, all proved equally ineffective in changing his girlish, childlike figure into that of a man. At 5ft 1in, and 45 years of age, he had spent a lifetime handed kids menus, and endured an ongoing plague of random children asking if he wanted to play. As Alan entered his forties, he adopted a peculiar habit of resting his thumbs under his chin and drumming his fingertips together in front of his nose. The overall effect was bug-like and highly unsettling. Alan knew he was on to something when children instinctively ran from him, and wait staff stood uncomfortable in his presence, avoiding eye contact and discourse. Alan was certain it was far better to order with no menu, than to be handed a kid’s menu.
Angry at the world, Alan consumed the majority of his days daydreaming about the ass he would kick were he not trapped in a child’s body. His mind replete with fantasies of one punch knock outs at all who impugned his manhood - the tailgater on the highway, the teen that cut in front of him at the self checkout, the staff that called him Napoleon. There was an endless list of those who slighted him given his small build. In his fantasies, he left behind a world littered with the unconscious. Their inert bodies lay on the sides of roads and the aisles of grocery stores waiting to be claimed by their loved ones; humiliated and in a world of shame for Alan had served them a crushing defeat.
To survive and excel, personally and professionally, Alan honed his skills at verbal abuse and belittlement. His powers lay in his gift of public humiliation; an asset that served him well in business but had him running for his life in high school. More often than not his verbal tirades escalated to the point of sputtering, his anger so deep he lost the ability to enunciate. Eyes closed, spit flying, and fingers pointing accusingly, he struck with his signature phrase, “Stupidity is your medium, and with it you become Michelangelo.” Alan did well in the corporate world where the risk of physical confrontation was virtually non-existent.
The Board considered Alan’s penchant for reducing subordinates to bumbling, sobbing shells of their former selves valuable leadership traits. Alan’s cost reduction initiative further cemented The Board’s perspective. At the 2005 Board Meeting, Alan showcased his business acumen and mental acuity by mandating orders that currently shipped in separate boxes, to the same address, be combined in the same box. While this might seem intuitive, it ran in direct opposition to the COO, Cuddy’s, earlier program aimed at growing orders.
Under Cuddy’s earlier 2002 Separate Orders program, products that would logically ship in the same box shipped separately, albeit with a threefold increase in the number of orders and shipping costs. When Alan announced his Combine Orders program The Board patted each other’s backs and gurgled in ecstasy as the cost of service fell. The order volume and shipping costs were now exactly as they had been before Cuddy’s program, but The Board celebrated in their declaration to Wall Street they had cut costs. Alan celebrated too, for he emerged as the lead candidate to be the next CEO. He also took the baton from Cuddy, the previous front runner. With the adulation bestowed upon him Alan puffed up, grew more pompous, and like Satan, the angel who would not bow to God, began to covet Doug’s job as CEO.
Furious at the turn of events, Cuddy had Wayne raise all the urinals a half foot so Alan would not be able to use them. If Alan wanted to piss at work, he’d have to piss in the stall like a girl. Alan was too mean to piss like that, and instead began surreptitiously pissing in the corner of Cuddy’s office.
Doug too saw Alan’s potential and sought to sabotage the emerging threat. To defend his kingdom, Doug cast Alan into ‘the lake of fire’ and assigned him an IT project certain to destroy his career, and torture him ‘day and night, forever and ever’. Alan was not the first person Doug cast into ‘the lake’. In 2002, Doug tossed Cuddy in when his Separate Orders program positioned him as Doug’s likely replacement.
To reward Cuddy, for Separate Orders, The Board granted his wish and gave him control over Facilities. It was the first time in the history of corporate America that anyone sought control of Facilities. However, a long life of bullying taught Cuddy never to underestimate the leverage physical discomforts exert on your rivals, and Cuddy saw Facilities as an underleveraged resource in the battle for corporate control.
With Cuddy’s kingdom growing, and his emergence as the leading candidate to replace Doug as the CEO, Doug realized his best defense was a good offense and made a compelling case to The Board to build a new computer system. The project’s vaguely worded charter was to replace the outdated system, note cards, and Excel worksheets, the business currently ran on with something better. The promised new system would automate everything and enable the firing of hundreds of employees. Masquerading behind this pretense, and not his true reason of incapacitating those that would seek to replace him, Doug made his pitch. The Board vehemently agreed that firing people was an enjoyable and necessary thing, and approved his request, anxious for the bloodletting to begin.
Doug immediately absolved himself of direct accountability, by placing Cuddy directly in the line of fire and assigning him as the project’s lead. Not that it was Doug’s concern once he assigned the project to Cuddy, but The IT project Doug proposed had an exceptionally low chance of succeeding.
Ninety percent of these types of initiatives are abject failures by the time funding is cut and whatever code is written is forced into production, or the plan abandoned and the business continues to run on whatever existed at the time the project began. Whoever Doug afflicted with the IT project faced several insurmountable hurdles. First, collecting business requirements to document the computer system’s features and functions from those so challenged with structuring thought that explaining where they parked was a Herculean task, would be impossible. Second, there was no way the peers of whoever was leading the project would agree to sign-off. To do so would concede their claim on the throne. It’s rare all those assigned to a large systems project were still with the company when the project was ‘completed’. Once saddled with the project, the best to be hoped for was gainful employment when the inevitable idiom, “epic fail,” was declared.
Intended, or otherwise, Cuddy’s bullying and duplicitous nature and an instinctive propensity to over engineer and complicate the simplest of ideas proved the projects undoing. On calls with the development team in India, Cuddy’s warlike nature travelled around the world, verbally haranguing the programmers as he forced them to produce a system with endless flexibility and unbounded functionality. Cuddy declared it of paramount importance the system anticipated every possible situation. As Cuddy barked his unreasonable demands, the CIO, Srini’s, head lolled on its axis in a lemniscatic pattern. In Srini’s native India, the waggling of the head is a conscious mannerism, intended to signify active listening and deep cerebral engagement. In this instance, it was better read as a subliminal declaration that the time and cost to complete this project were infinite.
The obvious objections that an IT project requires scope, rules, and logic, fell on Cuddy’s deaf ears. The resultant ‘system’ that appeared at the end of three years was a series of disjointed data elements and a pile of code whose notable flaws included the inability to produce a customer list, report the status of an order, or post financials that could survive the simplest of audits. The combination of Cuddy’s tormenting nature, and Srini’s subservience, meant the company might as well have piled money in the parking lot and burned it. It might even have saved Alan’s life, should he have landed on the pile, although Alan would have likely had to relearn such rudimentary tasks as eating with a spoon.
For thirty-six mo
nths the business waited the second coming of Christ, not realizing it was Godot for whom they hung around. When The Board learned the IT project Cuddy shepherded was no closer to completion than the day it began, The Board demanded an accounting of the project at the 2005 Board Meeting.
In a last ditch effort to claim victory, weeks before the big meeting, Cuddy forced the system into production. The debacle ended when the staff staged a massive sit-in. During the sit in, Nels tossed a computer through a fourth floor window in a fit of rage, and nearly killed Doug as he escaped work to play basketball. Management never learned the name of the perpetrator which threw the computers, although many correctly suspected it was the resident anarchist, Nels.
No longer considered CEO material, and with an ‘epic fail’ on his hands, Cuddy embraced the only tactic he knew to save his job. He publicly shamed and then dramatically fired Srini, his first in command. It was Cuddy’s artistic mastery of Srini’s termination that kept him employed. In Cuddy’s presentation to The Board, at the 2005 Board Meeting, slide 6 was a picture of the poor bastard, Srini, sobbing upon notice of his termination. Slide 7 was a picture of Srini leaving the building, security guards on both sides and cardboard box with personal effects in hand, as tears ran down his sad, exhausted face. In the background of both pictures stood Cuddy with his hands folded in gangster origami and head tilted in disrespect to the now unemployed CIO.
The Board, twenty old men that had each downed the proverbial tumbler of fracking water at some point in their careers to prove their corporate fealty, sat and listened as Cuddy tried to explain where $100 million and three years had gone. With his back to the audience, Cuddy pointed at the picture of Srini and defended his life, “It was his fault! He screwed up! Wasn’t me! I didn’t’ do nothing.”
Prone to uniformity and the ability to get behind anything that made money, The Board booed loudly when the pictures of Srini were shown.
At the head of the table, leading the charge, sat The Chairman. The sole black man on campus, he was prone to dressing as a 1970s pimp and to the meeting wore a canary yellow, zip up bell bottom jumpsuit of velour. Although all the board members anxiously fingered the cigarettes they held, none had The Chairman’s balls. He smoked indoors and unapologetically. The movie Shaft a more formative influence on his life than perhaps even he realized. When he saw Srini’s picture on the screen he exploded, “Jive turkey! dumb ass, mofo!” When he finished his apoplectic rant, he blew a cumulus cloud of smoke over the table and repeated himself, “Jive turkey! dumb ass, mofo! That’s one lazy ass son of a bitch!” He shook his head, disgusted that he shared the earth with this incompetent vermin.
The other board members bounced up and down, like cymbal banging monkeys, and repeated after him. All wanted to be like The Chairman, and from every corner of the room, “dumb ass,” “mofo,” and, “son of a bitch,” rang out.
Unable to let it go, and still fuming, The Chairman fired off another salvo, “Punk ass fool! One hundred million freaking dollars! Who gonna pay that back? Huh? Who gonna pay that back? Three years! Who gonna give me back my three years?” He exhaled another cloud of smoke as he waited an answer to his unanswerable question. Realizing the money and time lost, he adjusted his purple headband and pushed his afro to new heights.
A couple of the board members, excited by the fresh kill, imposed on Cuddy to restage the poses in the pictures. Cuddy willingly complied and ran to the front of the room where he leaned forward, cocked his head at a rakish angle, and stacked a series of hand signs, palm outward and fingers splayed. He looked gangster and The Board cheered enthusiastically. Cuddy would survive this debacle, but he would hang, Hussein style, if it happened again.
While recreating the scene a wizened board member, The Racist, whose presence was historically limited to prejudicial remarks and sucking his gums while his rheumy eyes leaked, misunderstood the demented hand Cuddy pinned to his chest and spoke to the room at large in his phlegmatic voice, “Cerebral palsy? Is that cerebral palsy? I didn’t know the fat one had cerebral palsy.”
As Cuddy returned to his seat, having barely kept his job, Doug went on the offensive and re-assigned the IT project to Alan. Alan seethed at the announcement, realizing he’d been outplayed and was destined to fall out of favor as the lead candidate to be the next CEO. Even the brilliance of his Combine Orders program wouldn’t be enough to save him from this Sisyphean task. Faced with the impossible, Alan slumped low in his chair and took on the posture of a pithed frog; as if Doug had speared him through the back with a trident. Alan knew Cuddy (COO), Mary (VP of Sales), and Doug (CEO), had no interest in seeing him complete the project. Alan’s success would position him as next CEO and lead to Doug’s ouster. Mary and Cuddy saw themselves as the next CEO. Further complicating the situation, Doug wasn’t ready to retire; he hadn’t made enough money yet. There was no way Alan was ever going to complete the IT project.
After Doug’s announcement, The Racist leaned into Alan and spoke in a gravelly voice, “Get another Indian. You want an Indian that can talk to Indians. The race is prone to dishonesty and misrepresentation.” His breath was blinding, an acrid mixture of rotting dentures and cigarettes. Cuddy liked to sit by the old man because it reminded him of his childhood pig farm. Alan winced, nodded, and scribbled the directive in his notebook. A week later, Alan hired Shap, unaware Shap was Native American, had never been to India, and only spoke English. Realizing failure a certainty, Alan also hired Mike.
Two degrees of separation is the formally recognized boundary within business by which people were fired for mishaps, and the Mike-Shap combo gave Alan the safety buffer he’d need when the IT project tanked under his watch. The Board would demand its pound of flesh, and Alan planned to save his job by firing them both. To that end, Alan simply picked the two resumes that were on the top of his desk when he was assigned the project. Mike and Shap seemed as worthy as fall guys as anyone. Alan knew the art in selecting a scapegoat lay in deciding when to go external, versus internal, and figured with millions circling the drain a second time he’d want experts brought in with, ‘fresh eyes and proven track records,’ to take the fall.
As Alan predicted, his attempt to complete the IT project, to all intents and purposes, ended as an officially recognized disaster roughly a year after he was afflicted with the assignment. Alan had been conveniently withholding this fact when he continually presented the project’s status as, ‘green,’ for the last twelve months. With the 2006 Board Meeting looming, Alan was certain to fall from favor as lead candidate to replace Doug when The Board demanded an accounting of the project. Alan hoped to survive the debacle by combining the firing of Mike and Shap with the time proven, ‘none more indignant than I,’ defense. An employment strategy in which the perpetrator of the crime is the most offended. Politicians, Baptist preachers, and business leaders, have proven this survival strategy time and time again.
Alan had been rehearsing his speech for weeks. As he stood at the podium of the Board Room, on an inverted garbage pail, Alan hammered his tiny fist and shouted into the empty room, “I assure you, regarding this disaster, no one is more indignant than I.” For greatest effect, Alan planned to fire Shap and Mike at the conclusion of his speech, live and in person, thereby going one better than Cuddy’s humiliating pictures of Srini.
As the 2006 Board Meeting drew near, Alan’s stress at losing his grasp on the executive office put him into a permanent state of ill humor. His warrior fantasies grew, but he never considered the alternate outcome in which he takes the beating after initiating the fight. This was exactly what happened.
While cutting across the field in a local park, on his way to get coffee, Alan was struck in the head with a football. In a fit of anger he pitched the ball into the small woods on the side of the park. The kid that threw the football intended no meanness. From the child’s perspective he was throwing to a classmate, not at him. A joyous gesture meant to incl
ude not harm. However, once Alan threw the ball into the woods playground protocol dictated either Alan retrieve the football, or the two fight to address their respective slights; Alan being struck, and the child’s ball missing in the woods.
Running up to Alan the child demanded he retrieve the ball. Alan, realizing for the first time in his life he was in a confrontation in which he held the size advantage, pushed the child in the middle of the chest with a pointed jab from his right index finger. Alan testily yelled at the child, “You simian creature! Your IQ is that of an idiot, likely in the low twenties, and your mental age that of a three year old. The best part of you dripped from your mother’s chin onto the floor of the bus terminal where you were conceived.” Alan was thrilled at the chance to destroy this hoodlum, verbally and physically. He was certain he would emerge victorious given the years and thousands of dollars he had invested in martial arts training. As the child stepped back, lowering his jaw and balling his fists, Alan’s mind raced with the revisionist possibilities re-telling the tale offered. That he’d poked a badger with a spoon didn’t occur to him.
Standing in front of Alan was no ordinary sixth grade reprobate, AYSO drop out. As his fists rose, Alan noticed each hand sported words written in indelible black ink. On the right hand, written in the spaces between the knuckles, the letters E.A.T. On the left hand, written on top of each knuckle, the letters S.H.I.T. The letters were penned in an olde English font, a style consistent with the tattoos favored by cons, thugs, and those destined for a life of violence, petty crime, and betrayal. The child was well schooled in controlling the playground, an early student of respect through fear, and he spoke softly, comfortable with the impending violence, “Holmes, me and my lonesome gonna fuck you up.”
In front of the child in a ludicrous karate stance stood Alan, taunting and naïve to the reality of the situation. Not knowing what to do Alan jabbed him a second time in the chest, whereupon the kid unloaded like hell’s fury. The child fought old school style, a bare knuckle brawler from the days when kids settled their differences between themselves. No verbal taunts, no guns, no parents. The kid’s short crisp punches were from the shoulder, not telegraphed, and thrown with bad intent.
At the end of the UFC regulated time limit for a non-title fight bout, exactly 15 minutes after the second chest poke, Alan sported two black eyes and a bloody nose. His sixth grade opponent sported a scraped knee and ripped shirt. After the kids initial barrage, the remaining fourteen minutes and forty five seconds were spent with the kid chasing Alan around the playground equipment as Alan sought to escape from what was certain to be an untimely death. It was while chasing Alan that the kid ripped his shirt and scraped his knee. Eventually a couple of mothers intervened, separated the two, and formally ended Alan’s shellacking.
Alan felt he had put up one hell of a fight as the kid’s knee was really scraped, and he was pretty sure the kid’s shirt was ruined. Also, it took the kid nearly 15 minutes to find his football, during which time Alan gloated from behind the slide. Buzzing with adrenaline and the metallic taste of blood in his mouth, safe under the watchful eyes of the policing mothers, Alan decided to continue to the coffee shop and leverage the opportunity to show the barista, for whom he longed, his rough side.
Like most middle aged men in suburbia, with fat wives and screaming kids, Alan had a constant hard on for the young barista that poured his morning coffee. Alan also faced the same lamentable situation the rest of the middle aged male population did in their acid washed jeans and outdated polo shirts; he was unable to recognize the point at which he became invisible to the young of the opposite sex, and began confusing the requisite friendliness of those in the service industry with desire. Surely this hot young barista with the pixie cut didn’t greet everyone with a smile, banter jokingly about the day, and wish all a good morning? Alan was certain she too felt a spark, and he stood at the dangerous precipice in which his fantasy manifested itself in action.
Throwing caution to the wind, Alan decided that in his bloodied state, and with a little revisionist history to embellish the fight, he would ask her out. Alan willfully neglected to consider the certainty that the barista had no interest in anything other than pouring Alan’s coffee. In fact she had no interest in any interaction with him whatsoever; however, pouring coffee was a task so clearly in her job description that she could not defer. As a result, the plague of unrequited love from married men, and their middle age come-ons, would continue as long as she worked her way through college.
As he walked through the front door of the coffee house, Alan stepped around a pack of young kids waiting on their orders. He spied his heart’s desire behind the counter talking on her cell phone. Mustering as much swagger as his tiny frame allowed he sauntered to the counter. Before he could recast the tale of the playground fight, to one in which he fought an enforcer for the Hell’s Angels, a battle where he took a beating but gave more than he got, she blurted out, “Oh my God, he really did mop the playground with your sorry ass. I heard about the fight. I babysit for that child on Tuesday nights. Are you okay? You are so lucky you were able to hide in the doll house until the Moms could break it up.”
A minor setback in that she knew the actual events, but Alan remained determined. As he stood on his tip toes, and readied for the big ask, he spotted an engagement ring on her left hand. The words froze in his mouth as he stared at the brilliant gemstone. Before Alan could say anything a co-worker stepped to the counter, a hot chocolate in each hand, looked at Alan, confused him with the kids waiting their orders, and asked, “Kid’s cocoa, right? You want sprinkles little man?”
Humiliated, as he raged from his would-be lover’s betrayal, Alan began to lose his mind, “Coffee, I want a coffee you minimum wage baboon. Ed, is your name Ed? Ed, you baboon, give me a coffee!” Alan’s head turned purple as he shook with rage and sputtered like a misfiring engine.
Ed was nonplussed. He was used to irrational behavior and customer rants, plus, the arty socialite that always flirted with Ed just walked in the door. He was definitely getting after that as soon as Napoleon got out of the way. To pacify Alan, and move him along, the barista handed Alan a small coffee.
“My straw! Where is my straw?” Alan demanded with asperity. In an effort to keep his teeth white Alan only drank coffee and red wine through straws. The barista reminded Alan the straws were on the counter right behind him. Insult was added to injury when Alan turned around and realized it was his boss’s wife, Aspen, who stood in line witnessing his temper tantrum.
Alan’s undoing continued the next day at work when the additive effects of the failed IT project, playground fight, and barista’s betrayal, conspired against him and he decided to re-title himself. Alan’s HR-approved corporate title was Chief Financial Officer. A standard title for his job responsibility and one commonly used and recognized in the business community. Alan was convinced a more differentiated title would separate him from his peers, better position him to be America’s first formally recognized dictator (George W was not officially recognized), and oust Doug from the CEO role. It might also help to minimize the fallout from the failed IT project. Alan planned to add the word, Exalted, to his title.
During Doug’s staff meeting Alan began to refer to himself in the third person, and ended his sentences with the bombastic phrase, “and so sayeth the Exalted Chief Financial Officer.” Normally Doug would have lit into Alan for behaving as an idiot, but Doug simply wanted out of the little, bug like, man’s presence. Misinterpreting Doug’s looks of disgust as approval, Alan immediately laid plans to reprint his business cards with his new title: The Exalted Chief Financial Officer.
After re-titling himself Alan’s business cards couldn’t accommodate the corporate logo, font, and font size, without splitting his title across three lines. This was exactly the Goddamn detail he, The Exalted Chief Financial Officer, didn’t want to be bothered with. To fix it he outsourced the prob
lem to Sue, the young, entry level analyst within Mary’s organization whom Alan was convinced also felt a mutual attraction.
Unknown to Alan, Sue had been informed earlier in the day that at week’s end she should, “stop by HR with her laptop, and to please bring her pictures and personal items with her.” Unfortunately for Sue, Cuddy, the COO, was hell bent on firing all the attractive people in Mary’s organization. As the day of reckoning loomed Sue realized the end was at hand, and her retirement plan unlikely to come to fruition. In a last great act of defiance she penned the new corporate tag line: We Hate You As Much As You Hate Us.
Venom dripped as Sue changed the logo and graphics of the corporation’s business cards. The new logo, which took a minute to decipher, was a mosaic of offensive symbols and names. A quick study, her corporate servitude had gifted Sue with a penchant for profanity laced tirades. With Satan as the backdrop, the card featured swastikas in each corner, and a rainbow of offensive words that included cocksucker, cunt, fuck, motherfucker, piss, shit, and tits. The infamous George Carlin 7, which rounds to the Lenny Bruce 9 if you add ass and balls. Sue elected to forego “ass and balls”. She found them commonplace, and without the caustic impact she sought. The new corporate address was clearly legible as Buttfuck, Illinois.
Sue then ordered new cards for the entire company, not just Alan, and not just any cards but the most expensive business cards she could find. Engraved on a wafer thin slice of T6 aluminum, and printed in full color, the cards were nearly $10 each. She found a vendor in London and ordered them express, next morning delivery for the entire company. All in the cost was a few hundred grand. To give the The Board something to talk about, she wanted them to arrive in time for the 2006 Board Meeting.
The cards arrived the morning of the 2006 Board Meeting and Sue prominently set the invoice and a box of cards on the middle of Alan’s desk. Already on Alan’s desk was a large package wrapped in gold foil and adorned with a large red bow. As providence would have it, on this fateful morning, Alan was gifted an executive parachute. This gift from The Board was a symbolic gesture intended to show the financial protection the company offered upper management. It was never intended for use.
Golden Shower touted their executive parachute safety devices as, “no training required.” However, by the time Golden’s corporate lawyers coupled the likelihood of facing a real lawsuit from a wealthy estate with their lax production standards they felt it prudent to publish a user’s guide. The guide was clear that if the canopy felt like cotton, not silk, the owner should immediately call a 1-800 number and report the quality control issue. Early models of the parachute incorrectly featured 1000 count cotton sheets for the canopy. The co-efficient of drag for the cotton sheet, the determinant in how slowly you fall, was rated slightly better than lawn furniture but nearly five-fold worse than silk. Golden Showers realized production standards in China might be improved if the blueprints were provided in the native language, but in the interim this solution would have to suffice.
Hours before the 2006 Board Meeting at which Alan was formally expected to concede the IT project was an epic failure, and surrender the baton as CEO frontrunner, the fire alarm rang and burnt popcorn could be smelled on the executive’s floor. Alan was overcome with joy at this unexpected turn of events, and the possibility of a clean slate. If the building burnt to the ground his atonement for the systems and business card debacles would be the least of The Board’s worries. Pushing his happiness to new heights he realized his boss and peers might perish in the fire and create a career opportunity that hadn’t existed a few minutes before. Thinking that all might not be lost, and he could still emerge as the new CEO with a decisive show of leadership, he quickly made plans to parachute from the building. He saw himself landing Special Forces style in the parking lot while the lowly staff, and The Board, stumbled out the side exit and stood with their mouths agape at his decisiveness and bravery.
As the alarm cried into its tenth minute, hands shaking with excitement and a faint sheen of perspiration on his upper lip, Alan stood and formally embraced the evolutionary strategy of the dodo. Onto his desk he tossed the sandwich, Wilma, the Executive Assistant, had just dropped off. From within the deep recesses of his closet he found and donned the biohazard suit he kept hidden, a previous symbolic gift from The Board. Immediately overtop the suit he placed the executive parachute. Lastly, he removed the pistol he kept hidden in the bottom drawer of his desk and strapped on a western style gun belt. He was now wholly consumed with the joy he would experience watching the building reduce to ash through the bulbous, aquarium-like hood of his biohazard suit as he stood in the parking lot, where he planned to rise like a phoenix from the ashes and become the new CEO.
Alan never considered the implications of discarding the parachute’s user’s guide before reading it. It’s tough to know how much time to invest in the user’s guide but a good rule of thumb is to spend time in a manner proportional to the likelihood the product might save your life. The guide was clear that you needed to be at least fifty floors above the deck if you had a prayer in hell of surviving the jump. Looking out this sixth floor office, Alan’s fate was sealed before he broke the double pained window in his office, with his stapler, and leaped. Alan was a short man, and would fall farther than most, but even with the extra distance his parachute would not deploy.
Alan expressed his exuberance when he exited the building by somersaulting out the broken window. As he fell he made his final executive declaration, “Leadership!” Graceful in the pike position, his enthusiasm caused him to over rotate and he raced to the earth with his body parallel to the ground. Precisely 2.3 seconds after exiting the window, Alan opened his eyes to find the ground six inches before him. The fall went well, with gravity performing as expected, but the impact caused his gun to misfire and it flattened some poor bastard’s front left tire. In medical parlance the coroner would note Alan’s cause of death as rapid deceleration trauma.
As the fire alarm rang, and Alan fell, Officer Nonutz received word over the radio that untoward events were transpiring in the center of his beat. Nonutz was certain the office building, for which the fire alarm cried, functioned as the headquarters of a terror cell. It would be huge kudos for him, and extra pay, when he brought the organization down. Racing to the scene Nonutz hurriedly pulled from the road and into the parking lot. Doing so he lost control and the squad car fishtailed. Nonutz surprised himself by steering out of the skid; historically these situations required a tow truck.
Nonutz aimed his car toward the mob gathered outside the building, lights flashing and siren blaring, as he gunned the engine and raced towards Alan’s landing zone. As he sped, Nonutz fumbled to un-holster his pistol. “Son of a bitch,” he mumbled in frustration as he tugged at the stuck gun. He’d yet to figure out how to remove the gun from its holster without his full attention, and quickly became wholly consumed with the task. After repeated tries he was successful. Pistol in hand, he returned his focus to driving his vehicle. “Ahhh!” he screamed as he stomped the brake, arms locked in full extension on the steering wheel, about to plow into the crowd. As Nonutz braced for impact, time appeared to slow and the car slid forward with its tires locked. At the last second, realizing the squad car about to crash into them, the crowd parted like the Red Sea before Moses. Nonutz skidded to a stop in the middle of the crowd, and ran over Alan.
Having destroyed the crime scene, Nonutz freaked out, threw the car in reverse, and stomped on the gas. He gunned the engine until the rear tires smoked and Alan was unceremoniously dislodged from under the car’s front bumper. The car raced backwards and out of control, front end fishtailing, until Nonutz again slammed on the brakes, and barely missed hitting the cars parked in the lot.
Nonutz stepped from the car to survey the scene. He wiped his brow and declared in his cop voice, “Damn it! That was close.” His car now sat a good fifty yards from Alan. He walked through the
tire’s smoke, and towards the strange blue sack. The tarmac upon which he walked was scored with the squad car’s tire marks, inbound and outbound, and fresh pills of rubber lay on the outside of the tracks.
Nonutz jostled his way through the crowd, and up to the man he’d just run over. Alan lay facing the sky with a look of terror frozen on his face, and tire tracks marring his otherwise pristine parachute. Given the last few minutes, he was unquestionably dead. Nonutz prodded him with his boot, and realized this wasn’t the terror mastermind he’d expected. With Alan’s parachute, biohazard suit, and sidearm, Nonutz quickly knew the terror cell was more sophisticated than he’d initially thought. “Damn it,” he proclaimed, “I may need backup.”
In Nonutz’s interviews with the few employees he was able to corral, conducted in the freezing rain with his pistol shoved under the pit of his arm as it also took his full attention to re-holster the weapon, it became apparent few were certain what had fallen from the sky. Some claimed a midget Disney princess had fallen from an airplane. Others were certain an oversized garden gnome had been sucked up by a far away tornado, and thrown hundreds of miles to land, as unglamorously as possible, in the middle of the parking lot. A couple people would later testify under oath that they were pretty sure it was Alan; they heard him scream, “Leadership,” as he fell. In any event, a blue sack appeared where one hadn’t been before.
Crowding into Alan’s office to sort out what had happened, Mary, the VP of Sales, and Cuddy, the COO, looked down at the sorry, crumpled sack in the parking lot. When they realized Alan wasn’t likely to have survived they began to pillage his office. Both struggled to suppress their glee at this unexpected turn. With Alan gone one of them was likely to emerge as the next CEO. Both have formidable credentials. Mary is a profane and vain blonde known for her crushing handshake. Her nemesis, Cuddy, is a porcine school yard bully well versed in the persuasive powers of discomfort.
Mary, under whose tutelage the integrity and compliance programs reported, gathered the pictures Alan had neatly displayed on his bookcase. She hastily removed the pictures and pocketed the frames. Of late, Mary was more and more concerned with a need to surround herself with photos of beautiful people. And, Alan’s frames were likely silver given the monogrammed letters at the bottom, which until a couple minutes ago contained pictures of his wedding and family vacations.
Cuddy, who had been through like scenarios several times before, instinctively knew to run to his office and get the cardboard box he hid in his closet for just such an opportunity. Experience told him that the first items taken were under the pretext of need and no one really took anything of value until the pace built and then, “Katie bar the door,” the pirating began in earnest.
Alan’s secretary, Wilma, was familiar with the provenance of the sandwich that lay on Alan’s desk. She’d ordered it less than an hour ago, and even when she considered the risk of mayo it was still a $9 roast beef sandwich that’d only been sitting out a couple hours. While she looked out the broken window and waved to the employees gathered around the strange sack sixty feet below, she chewed noisily.
Nels, seeing Cuddy and Mary poke their heads out the broken window in Alan’s office, appealed to the crowd’s humanity, “We gotta talk them down!” He then spontaneously led the employees in chant, “Jump! Jump! Jump!” The employees followed his lead, and soon the mob shouted in unison as their fists pumped the air.
As the crowd’s shouts grew, Alan’s boss, Doug, the CEO, poked his head in the office. Instinctively, he knew what happened and quietly asked Wilma to collect Cuddy and Mary’s executive parachutes. Doug was certain the shareholders would understand this happening once in a while, and might even expect it, but with the company’s history of mishaps he didn’t want to risk a second jumper.
The employees in the lot caught a glimpse of Doug, escalated their discordant screams, and grew even louder, “Jump! Jump! Jump!”
A few were waving back to Wilma when the “all clear” sign blew, and the wave of humanity reversed course and re-entered the building. Alone and dead at the corner of the parking lot among the leafless box elders, geraniums, and tulips, sat Alan, wrapped in his biohazard suit with an un-deployed executive parachute on his back. As Wilma was looking out the hole where the window had been, a breeze rattled the papers on Alan’s desk and scattered the photos that had been stripped from their frames. The photos flew willy-nilly about the office.