The Consultant (2 page)

“Don’t you tell me to be quiet.”  

“Hey, I shut up when you were watching
Top Chef
.”  

“Fine,” she said. “Watch your stupid show.”  

And the subject was dropped.  

****  

Phil was waiting for him in the parking lot when he arrived at work the next morning, and the two of them walked up together. “Did a little research last night,” Phil said.  

“On what?”  

“BFG Associates.”  

“And?”  

“They’re heavy hitters. Fortune 500 companies, the whole bit.” He paused. “Very impressive résumé.”  

“But you’re not convinced.”  

“Well… No, I’m not.” He glanced around furtively, as though afraid of being spied upon. “The thing is, they leave a lot of destruction in their wake. Sure, they usually get stock prices up, but they also cut a lot of jobs and do what they refer to as ‘reshuffling,’ which, as far as I can tell, means placing employees in jobs for which they aren’t really qualified. It’s supposed to give them a broader background and greater perspective, which is supposed to make them better employees, but what ends up happening is that they’re thrown into positions where they’re over their heads. So they can be legitimately fired and replaced with new hires who come in at a much lower salary.”  

“That doesn’t sound good,” Craig admitted.  

“And it’s probably just the tip of the iceberg. I’m sure there’s a lot more that I wasn’t able to find out.”  

They were approaching the building, and Phil stopped before they got to the entrance. He waited while a group of women walked by. “What’s your take on this?” he asked Craig when the women had gone inside.  

“You mean the consultants? I have no idea. Angie says consultants just provide justification for decisions that have already been made. But you’re the one who always has his ear to the ground. What have you heard?”  

“Nothing.”  

“Yet,” Craig said.  

“Yet,” Phil agreed.  

As always, Lupe was at her desk when Craig arrived on the sixth floor. “Those consultants aren’t wasting any time,” she told him. “They’re already here. I got an email. Sent at six-thirty. Meetand-greets have been set up all day long. Department heads first, then division heads, managers, supervisors, all the way down to peons like me. Your meeting is scheduled for eleven. We secretaries go in at three-thirty.”  

He walked around the desk to read the email over her shoulder. “What’s the mood?” he asked. “Around the building. Have you had a chance to talk to anyone?”  

“Nobody knows anything, and everybody’s worried.”  

“My take on it exactly.”  

Lupe’s voice was uncharacteristically serious. “
Should
we be worried?”  

“I don’t know any more than I told you yesterday.”  

“But you’ll give me a heads-up if you hear anything.”  

“I will,” he promised.  

Craig walked into his office, intending to read through today’s emails before getting started on anything else, but he was distracted and swiveled his chair around to look out the window. He had always liked this office, had always liked this building. Angular and modern, with skylights and large windows and thick walls of unpainted concrete, many of them hung with equally angular, equally modern artwork, it had seemed to him perfectly suited for the work they did here. Now, however, it seemed unnecessarily ostentatious. Even staring out at the grounds below— the “campus,” as it was called—he noted the perfectly manicured lawn, the exotic plants and flowers, the high-priced sculptures. They could have just as easily done their jobs in a simpler environment, an ordinary building with generic offices and cubicles. He hoped this was one of the things the consultants were going to look at, as it would not be fair for loyal, hardworking employees to lose their jobs because money had been wasted on extravagant furnishings and landscaping.  

Swiveling back to face his desk—an expensive Plexiglas slab when a cheaper wooden desk would have been much more prac-tical—Craig turned on his computer and began scrolling through his emails. There was a lot of spam; a couple of updates from the lead programmers working on
WarHammer III
and
Zombie Navy
, the company’s next two game releases; a desperate note from Tyler Lang concerning proposed updates to the ill-fated OfficeManager, and a message with the bizarre subject line “Photos of CompWare Women Sucking Cocks at Christmas Party!!!”  

He’d been at that party—one of the most staid gatherings he’d ever attended—and he knew that no such thing had happened. Frowning, he opened the email.  

And read the single-line message: “This is not what you should be looking at during work hours.”  

Craig quickly exited the screen, his heart pounding. It was a trap, probably planted by the consultants, who were no doubt keeping track of each employee accessing the message. Now he was going to be questioned about it and would have to come up with a justification explaining
why
he had wanted to see “Photos of CompWare Women Sucking Cocks at Christmas Party!!!”  

These guys were playing hardball.  

Craig responded to the emails that required a response, then told Lupe he was going downstairs to see the programmers.  

“You have that meeting with the consultants.”  

“That’s not until eleven.”  

“Leave your phone on,” she told him.  

“I’ll be back in plenty of time.”  

“Leave your phone on.”  

She knew him well. He was still watching a demo of
Zombie Navy
, gathered around a PC with a group of programmers, all shouting out instructions and suggestions to the technical writer, testing the recently debugged second level of the game, when his phone beeped, and he picked it up to see a message from Lupe: “Meeting in ten minutes. Third floor conference room.”  

“Gotta go,” he told them. “Let me know if you find anything. And I need you to have that next level ready by Friday.”  

“It’s done,” Huell said. “I just need to clean up a few things and then we’ll let John-Boy go at it.”  

The technical writer did not look away from his screen. “My name’s Rusty, dillweed.”  

“Just keep me up to date,” Craig said.  

The third floor conference room was much smaller than the one on the first floor and was not set up like a theater but consisted of three large tables facing a freestanding white board set up in front of the bare concrete wall. Nearly all of the seats around the tables were taken, and Craig was forced to sit in a row of overflow chairs that had been lined up in the back of the room. Phil was nowhere in sight, but seconds later, he hurried into the room and sat down in the chair next to Craig. “I was on the phone with this jerk from IBM. Couldn’t get off. I finally had to just hang up and bail. I’ll call him when we’re done here and tell him there was a glitch in the phone system or something.”  

There was no one standing at the front of the room, and Craig didn’t see anyone unfamiliar who might be a consultant, but just as he was about to ask Phil if he’d heard any scuttlebutt regarding the morning’s earlier meetings, Matthews entered through the back door, another man with him. Silently, they strode between two of the tables directly to the head of the conference room.  

All conversation ceased as the gathered division heads faced forward. The man standing next to Matthews was tall, thin and wearing a red bow tie. His hair, an odd shade of brown so light it was almost orange, was cut into a flattop, rendering his already large forehead even larger. The expression on his face was blank, like that of an automaton waiting to be powered up, and he placidly surveyed the seated audience, his eyes taking in everyone without resting on anyone in particular.  

“All right,” Matthews said. “Let’s get started. This is Mr. Patoff. As you may have already guessed, he will be coordinating the study for BFG Associates to help us determine how to proceed forward after our recent, ah,
misfortunes
.”  

The man smiled.
Warmly
, some might have said, but they would be wrong. Outwardly, his smile did appear warm, and Craig had no doubt that it could seem that way to a lot of people. But there was something underneath, the opposite, a
coldness
he detected and that left him feeling uneasy. There was nothing genuine there, only a calculated attempt to convince those in the room that he was a kind man who had their best interests at heart instead of a soulless shark who was here to decide whose jobs should be cut.  

This man was dangerous, Craig decided. He needed to be careful from here on in. And on his best behavior.  

“Mr. Patoff and the consultants working with him will be…” Matthews paused, smiling. “Well, why don’t I let him tell you about it? Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Patoff.”  

There was light applause.  

“No need to be so formal,” the consultant said, stepping forward and writing his name on the white board with a black marker. “You can call me Regus. Like the talk show host, only spelled with a U.”  

Polite chuckles.  

“As Mr. Matthews said, we’ve been hired to take a look at your operations. I understand that your organization has had some recent financial setbacks, and it’s our job to look for a way to ameliorate whatever losses you may have suffered and find a new way forward. Whether that involves merely streamlining procedures or revamping product lines remains to be seen.  

“We look at each company in toto. Problems can trickle down from the top or percolate up from the bottom, so we study every facet of the organization before determining which approach to restructuring will be most appropriate.”  

Phil’s hand shot up, though he didn’t wait to be called upon to speak. “There’s going to be restructuring?”  

Matthews stepped in. “That’s premature. We don’t know what there’s going to be. That’s why we’ve hired Mr. Patoff’s firm. They will study the situation and then we’ll determine the best course of action.”  

“He said ‘restructuring’,” Phil pressed.  

The consultant smiled.
Coldly
, Craig thought again. “An inappropriate turn of phrase on my part. Mr. Matthews is correct: nothing has been decided ahead of time, and we won’t make any recommendations until we conduct our study. What I meant to say was that each company is different, with different problems arising from different sources. So we talk to everyone, conduct surveys, perform research and investigate the particulars of each organization hiring us.  

“In the case of CompWare, we will start out by conducting individual interviews with each and every employee. We will film these interviews, and then go over them with the appropriate supervisors, managers, division heads and department heads in order to make sure that senior staff is involved in the process every step of the way. It is not our intent to spring surprises on anyone. Our methodology is purposely transparent, and any recommendations we make will not only be backed up by relevant data but will be discussed at the appropriate level in the chain of command so that if there are changes to be made, those changes will not come out of the blue.”  

The consultant continued to describe in vague terms the process by which his firm examined the companies they were hired to evaluate, though his account did not really address the particulars of CompWare. He asked afterward whether there were any questions, and while there were quite a few and he answered them all, neither the questions nor the answers were particularly illuminating. Craig himself asked nothing, only watched and listened, and he came away from the meeting with the distinct impression that Angie was right, that Matthews and upper management had already made their decisions and were looking to the consultants to provide validation.  

Leaving the meeting, he expressed his thoughts to Phil, and wondered aloud whether the consultants were truly independent and what would happen if they came to a different conclusion than Matthews wanted.  

“I don’t think that’s going to happen,” Phil said drily.  

“I don’t either.”  

Craig had some errands to run at lunch. Angie wanted him to pick up some stamps at the post office—“Cute ones,” she told him. “Not those boring flag stamps you always get.”—and he stood in a long line to buy some Disney cartoon stamps before walking next door and getting himself a burger and chocolate shake at Wendy’s. On his way back, he filled up his tank with gas because he’d heard prices were supposed to go up this week, and stopped off at Target for some Drano and paper towels. He could have also picked up a SpongeBob Monopoly game, which was the present they’d decided to buy for Dylan’s friend Jamie who was having a birthday party on Saturday. But Dylan liked to be there himself when they bought presents, and he needed to pick out a card as well, so Craig held off on that.  

After lunch, he had a meeting scheduled with the programmers working on updates to OfficeManager. Tyler Lang was in charge of that project, and while he had lobbied Craig hard for the position, he was now behind the eight ball due to the software program’s weak sales. The programmer was not only a good worker but a good friend, and now Craig felt guilty for giving him this assignment. It was more than possible that the consultants were going to blame Tyler and his team for OfficeManager’s poor showing, and all of the programmers involved were worried about their futures. Craig tried to reassure them, promising that he would argue on their behalf if it came down to that, but the meeting was serious and by-the-book, and the programmers left early for their introduction to the consultant.  

The rest of the afternoon was taken up with other meetings. Updates on each of the division’s projects. He saw Lupe after the secretaries’ encounter with the consultant and asked her how it went. She frowned. “Honestly? I didn’t like him and I don’t trust him.”  

“Me, neither!” Craig said.  

“There’s something about him that just rubs me the wrong way. Apart from the fact that he’s here to figure out a way to downsize the company and get rid of my job.”  

“I feel the same way.”  

Lupe fixed him with an open look. “There are a lot of rumors flying around. What do you think’s going to happen?”