All day, though, I’d been seeing the tech people in green—a gangly system administrator typing frantically on a marketing executive’s locked-up computer, a near teenaged girl changing toner in a brightly glowing copier, three Chinese programmers in a heated debate as they reported to Whitley about security threats from Indonesia. Some were in olive-green pants, some were in forest-green shirts or light-green shoes, one was in a dark-green hat.
There were no secret handshakes as they passed each other, no furtive hand signals, not even a shared smile. They simply all wore green.
“Leonard,” I said, “you’re wearing all green.”
He glanced up, nodded, said, “NT, XP, 2000, UNIX.” It was as if he’d launched into some high-tech haiku. In fact he was listing a range of computer systems in use at a number of our newly acquired companies. “Multiple flavors on the UNIX side,” he said. “Irix, Linux, lots of Solaris. And of course that’s in addition to every mainframe platform known to this planet.” He sighed heavily. “So many platforms, so many skills.”
Cliff nodded carefully. I nodded knowingly. Leonard turned a page.
Located on the ninth through twelfth floors, the tech group formed four floors of highly rambunctious but remarkably good-natured individuals. They hacked into each other’s computers, they organized floorwide competitions in various Web-based role-playing games, they logged into the computers that operated the building’s air-conditioning system in order to raise the temperature in rival programming groups by ten, then twenty degrees.
As I watched Leonard’s thick fingers trace absently along the sharp edges of the papers in his lap, I wondered for a moment if any of the industry spies or bored college students trying to hack into our systems were themselves sitting at their computers dressed entirely in green.
“Green,” I said, to no one in particular it seemed. “All green.”
“Collabra, Marimba, Domino, Exchange,” Leonard said, turning a page, then continuing. “Java, C, VB, Korn. So many skills . . .” he said, and let the sentence trail off.
Cliff looked up. “The real cost is personnel, yes?”
Leonard nodded quickly. “The real cost is personnel, but there’s a notch up in training.”
Cliff tapped on his calculator. I nodded knowingly. Leonard turned a page.
And really, I did know. I knew exactly what Leonard meant. I understood everything he and Cliff were saying. In Technical Development, in Strategic Planning, in Sales and R&D, everywhere I knew the workflows, I knew the org charts, I knew the software tools, I knew the strategies for the best communication and support. I knew what markets we were in, what markets we wanted. I knew the product lines and the version changes and the roll-out schedules and the launches.
In the night, when I did sleep, these were the things that drifted through my dreams.
I leaned back in my chair, absently touching the thin, straight edge of Leonard’s desk. Everything in Leonard’s office was set at right angles to the walls. As always, this had a calming effect on me. His four computers, his five monitors, his multiple stacks of status reports, software documentation, heavy reference books, even the requisite collection of sci-fi trading cards—not only was each item squared to the desk or table on which it rested, but Leonard had clearly gone so far as to bar the public display of any rounded items in his office. Leonard’s office—Leonard himself—gave me a sense of order and uniformity, not just among the physical objects within my reach but within the very structure of the universe around us.
“Corel, Claris, even Quattro, even Symphony,” Leonard said, sighing again. “In this there will be no diversity. We go to the one place. We go to the big boy.”
Cliff nodded quickly. I nodded again. I said once more, “Leonard, you’re wearing all green.”
He looked up from his notes. In a moment, he nodded, flat tongue wetting his wide lower lip, his whole presence seeming to prepare itself for an extended response. “Yes,” Leonard said, “I am.”
He nodded again, Cliff asked for costs, Leonard gave him answers, I glanced toward New Jersey and smiled. Leonard’s sincerity, the pure earnestness he brought to his work, to this life, it could make him impenetrable.
“Forty-four K, thirty-two K, an even hundred,” Leonard said.
“Was there a memo?” I asked. “Or an e-mail?”
“What’s that?” Leonard asked.
“How did everyone know to wear green?”
He paused, letting his head fall to the side, confused. Then he nodded. “Right. Yes. I see. Green. No. It’s the first of the month. On the first of the month, we’ve all decided to wear green.”
Cliff asked for supporting detail. Leonard handed us articles, budgets and comparative charts. It was thirty seconds before I had to smile again, looking out the window once more, realizing that Leonard still hadn’t really told me why they were wearing green.
“Spread the main software over three months,” Leonard was saying now. “Schedule the attached hardware over five.”
Cliff nodded. I nodded. Leonard picked up another report.
I could see that even his watch band was green.
A joke that just couldn’t be shared with the CEO. Or, more likely, a decision that Leonard—a young man completely lacking in even the most basic awareness of irony—simply could not find a way to explain.
“Impact, Freehand, Composer, Paint,” Leonard said.
“We go to the big boy?” Cliff asked.
Leonard and I both shook our heads. “We change,” I said, answering the question. “But it’s not to the big boy.”
Leonard nodded quickly, flipped me a thumbs-up. He placed the completed reports at right angles to his desktop.
In his first year as head of technology for Core, Leonard told me he’d taken business cards to his high school reunion and passed them out to all the people he had never known.
And now he was starting onto another list, Leonard with his deep, almost mystical ability to bend, shape, start and even stop the world of Core Communications. And so I sat taking in everything he said. Just as I’d absorbed every report, every plan, every budget and forecast I’d seen in the past three years. Every cost for every department. Every idea from each meeting. Sometimes even every responsibility and goal for each person in a room.
I took everything in. I remembered it all.
Because really this company was my whole life.
Nearing the end of the day. Holding an impromptu meeting with Julie in the mailroom. Staffed by eager, always well-meaning recent immigrants to the city, the mailroom was centered around a series of six huge copiers—six remarkably complex machines with smoothly harmonic noises, rapidly blinking indicator lights, brightly mirrored interior surfaces.
The paper so crisp, the sound an unwavering heartbeat of order and routine.
For years I’d used the mail room for meetings with Julie. Like me, she felt a deep and inexplicable comfort in being in the presence of the highly synchronized noise, light and human movement. This time, as always, the two of us left our meeting rejuvenated and ready, our ears still echoing with the densely orchestrated motions and sound.
Moving across ten with my assistant now, who took a moment to point at one of the oversized workspaces the company built for supervisors and managers. “Another owner-financed double-wide,” he said.
I squinted. Not understanding.
“You know,” he said with something like surprise. “The joke goes,