Team Player

During a tense meeting, Greg angrily opposes Rick's disclosure about their product's slower clock speed, prioritizing promotion over engineering integrity. Published in And Then, Volume 21, 2021.

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It went down in the conference room. Maybe because of the clutter in Greg’s office—print-outs, disk packs, requisition forms, terminals hooked up to different mainframes, a Compaq Portable for his spreadsheets, pens, pencils, McDonald’s wrappers, McDonald’s ketchups. Or maybe because the conference room held an aura of consequence, the smell of bottom-line business. Along with the other vice-presidents, Greg worried a lot about the bottom line, a big guy with the easy gait and overhanging midriff of a bygone athlete, starting the day, as always, in blue pinstripes, discarding the jacket, loosening the tie, un-doing the top button. He’d taken the middle chair on the long side of the conference table,away from the door, against the back wall.

Me, in those days, a hair taller than Greg, but skinny as a salamander, and never athletic except for ping pong. I worried more about engineering excellence, integrity of product, elegance of design, et cetera, ad nauseam, the bottom line an afterthought. I took the opposite middle seat at the conference table, back to the door, facing Greg.

Darlene, our copywriter slash technical writer, sat two chairs to my left, a head shorter, a decade older, mussy black hair sliding toward gray. Her most recent effort lay on the conference table, a two-sided glossy announcing in blues and reds and yellows our all-new 40MHz KVX gaming board. The leaflet lay there for apparent adornment or allusion, not the subject of the meeting or of any controversy. Engineering loved it, sales loved it, marketing loved it, everyone thought it was topnotch, forty megahertz, faster than lightning, yada yada. Our meeting centered on the fourteen pages of single-sided double-spaced monotype next to the glossy, the draft copy of a technical article about the KVX destined for CPU Intensive.

Greg pressed his belly against the table, extended his right hand, and flipped away the top page of the draft. He tapped once, twice, three times on the fourth paragraph of page two, a single sentence of sixteen words, his face and neck flushing redder with each tap. Darlene and I knew the paragraph by heart, I because I’d written it, Darlene because I’d forced her to insert it into the copy.

At this point, let’s pause and look at the words of offense being drummed and stabbed by Greg’s forefinger. I reproduce them here in full: “The integration of the processor into the motherboard, however, reduces its effective clock speed to 33MHz.”

Sixteen words out of three thousand, the minimum I could devise for complete and correct specification of the product. You would have thought everyone would be pleased, or at least appeased, but before the meeting Darlene had said, “Rick, I don’t think this is going to fly with Greg.” I explained to her about the bandwidth and cycle speeds etched on the motherboard, how the processor couldn’t go faster than the pipeline that fed it. She said again, “I don’t think this is going to fly with Greg.”

“Why do you keep repeating yourself?”

“Because you say thirty-three and all our promo says forty?”

I went sotto voce. “Our promo is a tad misleading. We need this one itsy sentence for purposes of full disclosure.”

Greg stood, his thighs pressed against the table. He leaned forward, eyes red as his face, necktie hanging, right hand closed in a raised fist, right armpit exuding sweat and odor. He dropped his voice to a low rasp. “Do you know what I call this?”

I pushed away from the table and crossed my right ankle over my left knee. “No, Greg,” I said in digital monotone. “What do you call it?”

The bottom of Greg’s fist slammed the table. “Shitty,” he yelled. “That’s what I call it.” He pounded the table again. His lips formed an outstretched circle like the emission end of a bassoon. “Shitty.”

Darlene, poor dear, jumped at each stroke of Greg’s fist, at each ejection of the unpleasant expletive. I realized then she’d yet to sit in on a design session, had never before observed the sometimes acrimonious back and forth among the engineers. Just a few months earlier Greg had been pounding that same table because I’d suggested doubling the cache size. He’d brought his twisted face to within six inches of mine, deploying his favorite put-down. “Does your pointy head have any idea how much space that will takeon the board?”

I crooked my mouth and jotted numbers on my yellow legal pad. “Do you,” I said, placing the tip of my pencil on one number then another, “have any idea how the current cache size is choking throughput?” I brought my face to within four inches of his. “Do you?”

Greg looked at my legal pad. I watched the numbers churn in his head. “Fuck,” he

said. We had doubled the cache size.

But this current situation was different. We all knew the numbers.

“We cannot,” I said, “in good conscience send a technical article to a scientific journal, and imply that—”

Again Greg’s fist slammed the table, again Darlene winced. Again Greg elevated his voice. “CPU Intensive is not a scientific journal. It’s a fucking trade rag.”

I removed my right foot from my knee, placed it on the floor, and leaned forward. I kept my voice low and level. “Greg,” I said.

Greg interrupted me. “Rick,” he said, “you will henceforth keep your face in the lab and out of where it doesn’t belong.” Greg put his hands in front of his chest, fingers spread, like he was holding a basketball or a melon. “Otherwise I will twist your pointy fucking head until I hear snapping noises.”

As Greg promenaded his royal buttocks from the conference room, and Darlene scooped up her glossy and the draft pages for CPU Intensive, I said, “Greg gets a little overheated at times, nothing personal.”

Darlene smiled as she rose from her chair.

“But of this I’m certain,” I said. “We’re going to submit the article as it stands, with my insertion.”

“I think not,” said Darlene.

I think what? I couldn’t believe Darlene had just talked back to engineering. I stood and tilted my head so I was looking down on her. “Darlene,” I said, “I know you don’t fully understand the technology, but we’re misrepresenting the speed of our product unless—”

“It sounds to me,” said Darlene, “like our boss just gave us our marching orders. And they say forty not thirty-three.”

“Darlene,” I said, “have you no integrity?”

“Integrity? Rick, Jesus Christ, we’re making games.”

Games? “These are sophisticated, state-of-the-art.” I still couldn’t believe she was talking back. “They drive research, they drive—”

“Look, if you feel that strongly about it, hand in your resignation.”

“I could do that,” I heard myself say.

“Turn in your stock options, kiss your two-month sabbatical goodbye. Look elsewhere for a fat salary.”

“I could do that,” I said.

#

Thirty-five years later, Leo, my partner, my soulmate, says, “Rick, what time is it?”

I look at the glow of my Android. “Three-forty.”

“Okay. Would you, number one, stop bouncing your leg? And two, either go back to sleep or get out of bed?”

“Sorry,” I say. I lie still on my back for two minutes without bouncing my leg. Another minute goes by.

“Leo,” I say. “I sold out.”

“I know, Rick.”

I roll onto my side and get up on my elbow. “You know?”

“Rick, honey, we all sold out.”

“You say that with such finality.”

“Rick.”

“Yes.”

“I need my sleep. It’s really important.”

“Sorry.”

I lie on my back. I close my eyes.