If there’s a Proustian madeleine of my Fortune 500 life that continues to pull me into the past, that evokes a corporate nostalgia and longing, neither of which qualifies as enjoyable but both of which are uncannily mesmerizing, it’s calling an 800 number. Not the opening instruction to take care in making one’s selection because “some menu options have changed.” Haven’t they always?
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No, it’s the just-as-dependable mention of surveillance and information collection, the oddly menacing warning that “this call may be recorded for quality assurance.” Who adjudicates the quality of those phone calls, parsing the transcript for inconsistencies in meaning and intent? Who keeps the call records, and where are they stored?
Before I walked into this advertising conglomerate’s Y2K outpost for my Careers by Penthouse-arranged job interview, I can honestly say I had more interest in contemplating the filament of a toothpaste tube than in considering such questions. But it was quality assurance that gave me my in and offered me not only a job but a career with my business desideratum—management consulting.
A potentially world-ending technological implosion. One of the biggest goddamned communications companies in the world. A looming, glassy Midtown skyscraper. I imagined the blinking color palate of NASA’s Mission Control or the rapid transiting of letters and numbers across the New York Stock Exchange’s trading floor, not the 8.5-by-11-inch single sheet sign that was taped to the seemingly indifferent door.
Conglomerate2000, the office was called, a simple enough name. This outpost would deal with the predicted and actual ramifications of the Year 2000 bug for the Conglomerate, itself a holding company of more than 1,100 communications firms ranging from advertising, to branding, to marketing, to public relations.
Before I walked into this advertising conglomerate’s Y2K outpost for my Careers by Penthouse-arranged job interview, I can honestly say I had more interest in contemplating the filament of a toothpaste tube than in considering such questions.
In fact, during my initial interview at the Conglomerate, no specific mention of doomsday occurred. Nor of advertising. Or management consulting. There was no discussion, even, of the rainy weather, and few pleasantries were exchanged.
Rather, I spent about twelve minutes with a laconic, mustachioed, middle-aged Arthur Andersen manager named Guy. On his otherwise empty desk sat a colorful carved wooden figure of a boy wearing overalls and dangling his feet over a quaint pier in a recognizable fishing posture. Yet he held a golf club. “Gone Golfing,” the plinth’s etched letters declared.
“On a scale of one to ten, what’s your knowledge of computer software?” Guy began.
I paused for a moment, unsure of whether our interview would include a demonstrative component, as had my visits to so many employment agencies. But his office was empty, save his laptop, strangely locked to the arm of his swivel chair with one of those plastic-sheathed steel cords, and his golfing tchotchke. I couldn’t see how he would test me. I said “eight” and we moved on.
Guy was my second stop during the Conglomerate interview. The first had been with the Managing Director, who, in a scene that may read as contrived for its stereotypical polarity, glanced at my resume and asked with a perplexed mien, “You worked at the ACLU?”
I had been a summer intern, the previous summer, the one before my Klonopin daze. I copyedited the Reproductive Rights newsletter and answered the phone during the receptionist’s lunch break. If asked, I would have reported that the ACLU’s main switchboard functions as a kind of national clearinghouse for those with undiagnosed psychotic tendencies. But I wasn’t.
“Well, I think they’re basically a good organization that takes a lot of shit,” the director concluded before conveying me to Guy and explaining as he did so that the Conglomerate2000 office had two corporate populations, those who worked for Arthur Andersen on the Conglomerate’s Y2K project and those who worked for the Conglomerate itself. If hired, I’d be a kind of dual passport holder. I’d work for one, but with the other. And it was that other with whom I now sat.
“And what’s your knowledge of computer hardware, on a scale of one to ten?” Guy continued. The moment called for both boldness and modesty. I felt committed to “eight,” a number I had long appreciated for its intimations of infinity when turned sideways.
So I repeated myself, “Eight.” Here I should add that one of my campus work-study jobs had been as a computer lab monitor. I could restart a PC or refill a printer’s paper tray if the situation demanded it, although it rarely did as I had the weekend evening shifts.
And then came his penultimate question, the one that would determine the development of my nascent career. Given the exacting reputation of Arthur Andersen and the potentially apocalyptic setting of our encounter, one might expect the summa of Guy’s inquiry to be grand and revelatory, biblical even: What animals would populate your diluvian arc? Maybe survivalist: With which provisions would you stock your earthen bunker? Something technical would surely have been appropriate: Which programming language is most vulnerable, which most impregnable?
But inscrutable Guy stayed the course, a characteristic that I would learn indeed defined him. “And what’s your level of problem-solving, on a scale of one to ten?” he asked.
There would be no SAT scores—mine had been decidedly average, but the whole test had been redesigned and its scores recalibrated soon after I took it, and now few people could make sense of the older results; no college transcripts; no career office to steer certain students to certain institutions; no typing tests or PowerPoint competitions. My twenty-two-years’ worth of infelicities—some given to me, more cultivated by me—suddenly seemed surmountable.
Indeed, I suspected then, in August 1998, and can confirm now, that a working life presents few loopholes, an economic term whose genealogy has relevance here. Originally a cleave in a wall, an actual hole out of which to shoot an arrow, its meaning metamorphized into the process by which a business gets away with something designed, but not well designed, not to be gotten away with.
Since that initial semantic shift, so many businesses have gotten away with so many things that the definition has transformed again to include giving a business a chance to get away with something with the hope that only a few entities will utilize it. The point is that as my professional and educational history, my aptitude, my credentials, my person, even, as each of these were recombined and transmuted into something called “problem-solving,” only to be then reduced to an undefined scale of 1–10, I sensed an opportunity to pass through a corporate loophole.
“Nine,” I replied.
“That was it?” My girlfriend chirped when I reported to her the pinnacle of my day’s transactions. Guy had approved me, and the Conglomerate hired me on the spot. How could something not be off, and fundamentally so? Neither one of us had an answer, nor was I myself too inclined to investigate further.
The infrastructure on offer appeared respectable enough. A Fortune 500 entity with all the trappings. The company was listed on the New York Stock Exchange and issued quarterly reports. There were suited men. And daily hauls of the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, The New York Times, plus a new one, Adweek, placed around the ground-floor lobby if seemingly never disturbed.
But most crucially, the Conglomerate acted in one way exceptional. They took me. Dayenu—said girlfriend was Jewish—had they only hired me, it would have been enough. But there was more. In a career twist whose origins remain murky, I was placed on the Quality Assurance Team, work carried out exclusively by the Arthur Andersen contingent.
They weren’t called “a contingent” around the Y2K office, of course; rather, they were referred to as “the Andersen people,” a term that indicated that a certain partition existed between them and other Conglomerate employees, from whom they commanded both bewilderment and respect and, as often follows from the first two, a certain amount of cynicism and resentment.
Such contradictory feelings stemmed from the fact that management consultants constituted then, and still do now, the vanguard of corporate work. They transit between companies and industries, parachuting in to diagnose problems and suggest, although rarely implement, best practice solutions. That’s management consulting lingo, best practice, and it indicates that the good is not enough—this isn’t D. W. Winnicott’s consulting room—rather, management consultants aim for superlatives.
In a career twist whose origins remain murky, I was placed on the Quality Assurance Team, work carried out exclusively by the Arthur Andersen contingent.
They hire the best. They practice the best. They claim former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, former United States secretary of transportation, Pete Buttigieg, among their alumni ranks.
At the Conglomerate, the twenty or so Andersen people had their own offices, their own meetings, their own schedules, all of which took place within the Conglomerate’s twenty-fourth-floor office space while they were on its project, but when they “rolled off” (they had their own terminology, too), they would take up residence within the ambit of another Andersen client.
In a certain way, then, I had landed what I had hoped for, and in an elite management consulting company, both colloquially and structurally, there I stood, an Andersen team member—had I ever wanted something so discrete and eventful and actually gotten it? In another way, however (perhaps several of them), my facsimile appearance of inclusion served for numerous occasions of exclusion.
“You’ve been selected because you’re Andersen quality but not Andersen price,” the Quality Assurance Team’s leader, Cindy, a chipper data-warehousing expert, explained on my second full day of work, as though I were a piece of organic fruit found amongst the conventional produce bin. She then related in an officious but friendly manner that as with wolves, pack solidity was as intense within Andersen groupings as it was offensive of intruders.
In the first meeting with my lupine team, I did stand out, though not for lack of credentials. Rather, I was the only one not massaging a fistful of Play-Doh.
The office in which we met was beige, the carpet beige, the people beige, too. But from each Quality Assurance Team member’s hands exploded a most brilliant collection of colors: neon greens and yellows, hot pink, siren red, an almost psychedelic scene. Team members twirled and juggled their own handfuls, separated their mass and recombined it; the only thing more impressive than their dexterity was their nonchalance.
“It’s a new management technique,” Cindy noted to me, as an aside, answering a question I didn’t have the courage to ask but one she had the perspicacity to know I was worriedly pondering—why am I the only QA Team member without a canister of Play-Doh? As she shifted her own oblong shape between her hands, she explained, “It helps relieve stress and streamline your thoughts.”
The irony that the one truly in need went without seemed lost on everyone. Nor did Cindy herself seem stressed—maybe because of the Play-Doh—but the situation she laid out for our team was certainly overwhelming.
The Conglomerate’s 1,100-plus advertising, public relations, and communications companies worldwide spanned emerging markets and well-established ones. Each kicked up a certain percentage of their take to corporate headquarters, cumulatively raking in billions of dollars a year.
But any or all of these “shops,” in industry lexicon, might collapse on January 1, 2000, thus preventing the Conglomerate from executing its contractually agreed-to global advertising operations, compromising its earnings, exposing it to lawsuits, and jeopardizing its stock price.
Maybe a radio station in Finland goes haywire and can’t run a Conglomerate-booked spot; maybe a billboard tumbles off a highway in Rio de Janeiro amidst social chaos, and with it falls a Conglomerate-created visual; conceivably, a television station in Western Australia could disappear and, along with it, a Conglomerate-produced commercial. If such events were to transpire, the scene would be one in which revenue loss would be an almost best-case scenario; one could imagine far worse.
There had been a slide in the New Hire Presentation, the one with the duck, that narrated the possibilities through a sexless stick figure, whose face was composed of a series of hurried dashes, who had a thought bubble hovering above its perfectly circular head, and who wondered, “On January 1, 2000, will I still have electricity, food, telephone, transportation,….?”
Each life-sustaining noun was contained in its own thought bubble a tad above and to the right of the previous one, and the final thought bubble offered only a series of anxiety-producing question marks.
Reminders of that same tremulous atmosphere appeared around the office, whose windowless kitchenette offered several copies of the book Time Bomb 2000 for employees to peruse while they warmed their instant coffee or selected a Pepsi product—Pepsi being a client—from the mini fridge; the office bulletin board hosted a thumbtacked photocopy of a Computerworld article entitled “Noted Economist Predicts Y2K Recession” to greet team members on their daily arrival and departure from the elevator bay.
A certain part of me felt foolish, I admit. To think I had been conducting myself as though a long-term future could be assumed. I’d even signed up for a discounted gym membership that required a two-year commitment.
At least I wasn’t the only one with a questionable sense of historical duration. When completing my onboarding process at the Conglomerate’s HR office a couple of blocks east of its Y2K office, I was told that after six months I could elect to purchase company stock at a special employee rate—now I realized such a short window didn’t allow much time for it to accrue value.
That said, the urgency of our historical predicament contrasted with the pace of the working day I soon found myself structured by, like the difference between an elapse of a second compared to a change of seasons. But it felt slower.
The Andersen people had offices, but I was not an Andersen person, and my ramshackle Formica cubicle sat directly left of the receptionist, whose radio’s ongoing broadcast of 1010 WINS’s “minute by the minute” reporting marked the passage of time in place of natural light or human contact. “Traffic on the nines,” “Weather on the ones.”
In the morning, the repetition of these phrases enervated me, doomed as I was to hear them every ten minutes; by afternoon, they seemed more encouraging, sometimes able to jolt me from the fluorescent fugue I had invariably slipped into.
Just as any previous notion I had of the elite character of the management consulting labor in which I was supposedly engaged stood in some contrast to the proofreading of inventory spreadsheets that now structured my life. The first segment of the Conglomerate’s Y2K project, “Phase I: Inventory,” took its name from the fact that most team members’ activities were devoted to either retrieving inventories from the Conglomerate’s various 1,100- plus agencies and inputting the data from those inventories into a database or checking for errors team members had made while doing so.
The lesser-educated network analysts completed the data entry; the Ivy League–graduated Andersen Quality Assurance Analysts (and I) provided the oversight as we identified and recorded the mistakes our colleagues had committed. Someone had hit the 0 instead of its keyboard neighbor, the 9; a team member who had never questioned her ability to mirror-write had typed 91 when she had meant to type 19; another team member, her mind wandering perhaps, had neglected to check the “entry completed” box.
History would not judge such oversights kindly. My team set out to rectify them before it had the chance. Not rectify as in fix; rather, our charge was to alert the necessary interlocutors to the problem so that they could make amendments.
It was the mission of the Quality Assurance Team to ensure the quality of the Inventory Database. The verb under whose sign we labored was a new one for me: “to q.a.”; its past tense “q.a.’ed.”
All mistakes our q.a.-ing located were recorded; all records of our q.a-ing were photocopied; the copies were kept in Cindy’s office, while the originals were bound for a secure document warehouse in New Jersey, one whose safeguards included humidity control and fireproofing and whose precise location was not shared with the lowest professional strata of our team, me, for example, out of proprietary concern for their well-being.
Necessarily, our records would be kept in paper. If the predicted Doomsday 2000 did arrive, the digital world would be inaccessible, if not disappeared. Computer technology had gotten us into this millennial quagmire, and, therefore, it would not be trusted to extricate us from it.
That’s why my answer of “nine” to Guy’s invitation to rate my problem-solving abilities on a scale of one to ten during my interview had likely been more appreciated than my answer of “eight” in response to his invitation to rate my knowledge of computer software and hardware on a scale, possibly the same one, possibly a different one, of one to ten.
The fact that the scale itself remained undefined and that neither interviewer nor interviewee agreed to its coordinates suggested both the fake nature of the whole endeavor as well as the desperation the Conglomerate felt to staff its Y2K office with sixteen months to prepare for the possible expiration of the modern technology.
Also odd appeared the fact that in the face of an impending total or partial technological suspension, the Andersen-developed office mantra stated that “Y2K is a documentation problem, not a technology problem.” That had been in the New Hire Presentation, too, drafted, I later learned, by Cindy and approved by Guy, senior onsite manager of the Andersen people and firm partner-in-waiting. The message was declared in capitalized bold and italicized letters and encapsulated in a text box, and it appeared twice, as an announcement at the beginning, as a reminder at the end.
While the technical problems that loomed on our collective corporate horizon may have been able to be fixed, one couldn’t know of their status on January 1, 2000, with complete certainty until that revelatory day arrived. In some philosophical traditions that distance between what one thinks will happen and what does happen is the very definition of the future, but in the Conglomerate’s Y2K office, it was understood as a problem in need of a workaround.
With the precocity for which they were known in business quarters, the Andersen people had located one. Instead of fixing things with the hope that they would function tomorrow—one foot always in the uncertain future—we would document anti-Y2K efforts that the Conglomerate had already undertaken, one foot in the past, by no means transparent but perhaps more knowable than those events not yet in existence.
Instead of promising things to come, we would certify that things that had already transpired had been appropriately recorded. To the somewhat alarming claim of the Y2K town criers—there is no assurance of modern life after 12/31/1999—the Quality Assurance Team operated in retrospect: whatever happened yesterday, we would represent and consign to a database.
And at a certain point, all that had happened yesterday was our documenting, so then we documented that. Then, exponentially, we had to document ourselves documenting our own documentation.
To the somewhat alarming claim of the Y2K town criers—there is no assurance of modern life after 12/31/1999—the Quality Assurance Team operated in retrospect: whatever happened yesterday, we would represent and consign to a database.
Skeptics, and I include myself, will immediately conjecture: What does any of this have to do with the potential malfunction of a computer’s calendars on a systemwide level? How does knowing what a given advertising agency has in its inventory forestall time bomb 2000?
How does checking that said agency’s inventory matches the information we had in our inventory database get any of us to the other side of 1/1/2000? How does our documenting of our own documentation further our mission of ensuring the continuation of advertising after the dawn of the third millennium?
A singular answer to these questions exists, but to comprehend it with the dedication it deserves requires a philosopher’s commitment to exegesis.
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Fake Work: How I Began to Suspect Capitalism Is a Joke by Leigh Claire La Berge is available via Haymarket.
