"Art! It's Fede!" Federico was another provocateur in GMT. He wasn't exactly
Art's superior -- the tribes didn't work like that -- but he had seniority.
"Fede -- can I call you back?"
"Look, I heard about your accident, and I wouldn't have called, but it's
urgent."
Art groaned and rolled his eyes in Linda's direction to let her know that he,
too, was exasperated by the call, then retreated to the other side of his bed
and hunched over.
"What is it?"
"We've been sniffed. I'm four-fifths positive."
Art groaned again. Fede lived in perennial terror of being found out and exposed
as an ESTribesman, fired, deported, humiliated. He was always at least
three-fifths positive, and the extra fifth was hardly an anomaly. "What's up
now?"
"It's the VP of HR at Virgin/Deutsche Telekom. He's called me in for a meeting
this afternoon. Wants to go over the core hours recommendation." Fede was a
McKinsey consultant offline, producing inflammatory recommendation packages for
Fortune 100 companies. He was working the lazy-Euro angle, pushing for extra
daycare, time off for sick relatives and spouses. The last policy binder he'd
dumped on V/DT had contained enough obscure leave-granting clauses that an
employee who was sufficiently lawyer-minded could conceivably claim 450 days of
paid leave a year. Now he was pushing for the abolishment of "core hours,"
Corporate Eurospeak for the time after lunch but before afternoon naps when
everyone showed up at the office, so that they could get some face-time. Enough
of this, and GMT would be the laughingstock of the world, and so caught up in
internecine struggles that the clear superiority of the stress-feeding EST ethos
would sweep them away. That was the theory, anyway. Of course, there were rival
Tribalists in every single management consulting firm in the world working
against us. Management consultants have always worked on old-boys' networks,
after all -- it was a very short step from interning your frat buddy to
interning your Tribesman.
"That's it? A meeting? Jesus, it's just a meeting. He probably wants you to
reassure him before he presents to the CEO, is all."
"No, I'm sure that's not it. He's got us sniffed -- both of us. He's been going
through the product-design stuff, too, which is totally outside of his
bailiwick. I tried to call him yesterday and his voicemail rolled over to a
boardroom in O'Malley House." O'Malley House was the usability lab, a nice old
row of connected Victorian townhouses just off Picadilly. It was where Art
consulted out of. Also, two-hundred-odd usability specialists, product
designers, experience engineers, cog-psych cranks and other tinkerers with the
mind. They were the hairface hackers of Art's generation, unmanageable creative
darlings -- no surprise that the VP of HR would have cause to spend a little
face-time with someone there. Try telling Fede that, though.
"All right, Fede, what do you want me to do?"
"Just -- Just be careful. Sanitize your storage. I'm pushing a new personal key
to you now, too. Here, I'll read you the fingerprint." The key would be an
unimaginably long string of crypto-gibberish, and just to make sure that it
wasn't intercepted and changed en route, Fede wanted to read him a slightly less
long mathematical fingerprint hashed out of it. Once it arrived, Art was
supposed to generate a fingerprint from Fede's new key and compare it to the one
that Fede wanted him to jot down.
Art closed his eyes and reclined. "All right, I've got a pen," he said, though
he had no such thing.
Fede read him the long, long string of digits and characters and he repeated
them back, pretending to be noting them down. Paranoid bastard.
"OK, I got it. I'll get you a new key later today, all right?"
"Do it quick, man."
"Whatever, Fede. Back off, OK?"
"Sorry, sorry. Oh, and feel better, all right?"
"Bye, Fede."
"What was *that*?" Linda had her neck craned around to watch him.
He slipped into his cover story with a conscious effort. "I'm a user-experience
consultant. My coworkers are all paranoid about a deadline."
She rolled her eyes. "Not another one. God. Look, we go out for dinner, don't
say a word about the kerb design or the waiter or the menu or the presentation,
OK? OK? I'm serious."