The Weed Agency (21 page)

But in the following days, traffic at EasyFed.com was up considerably, almost as much as at the Web sites devoted to Ernest Borgnine and
Laverne & Shirley
.

FEBRUARY 2000

Ava was crestfallen. “What do you mean you’re leaving?”

Raj broke the news before Kozmo.com had delivered their Ben & Jerry’s and the night’s direct-to-video cheese-fest starring Marc Singer.

Ava was in no mood to be blindsided by more bad news. Her hours in the office had been lengthening, not shortening. Silver was acting increasingly erratic, and a mood of nervousness and paranoia had descended upon the office like a cloud of poison gas.

Raj explained he would be leaving GlobeScape in two weeks to take some job in Boston. He talked about what a great opportunity it was, but seemed evasive on what this consulting firm did and what precisely he would be doing. What had been unthinkable was that Raj hadn’t mentioned anything about any of this before announcing he would be taking the job and moving across the country.

A strange question popped into her mind. “Have your stock options even vested yet?”

He shrugged.

And with that evasion, Ava felt something turn within her.
Good riddance
, she thought, glaring.

MARCH 2000

Rumors of layoffs were louder and more frequent.

Finally, one morning the entire branch was asked, via e-mail, to assemble in the conference room again. This meant a meeting of more people than the room was ever meant to include, and the temperature rose uncomfortably. Silver came in, ten minutes late.

“As you have heard, our seed funders are … growing impatient,” he said quietly. “With our sites not yet revenue-neutral, we need to demonstrate that we can cut costs until the turnaround accelerates.”

He looked around the room, recognizing some people, not recognizing many others.

“I believe in looking people in the eye when we need to let someone go,” he said, picking up a sheet of paper he had entered with.

“Chat … Chatur …”

“Chaturvedi,” said a frustrated techie in the back.

“Yup, that’s the one.”

“Which one? There are three of us here.”

“Vivek.”

“Vivek P. or Vivek R.?”

Silver looked blankly at the sheet in front of him. “It doesn’t say here … I’m going to have to check with human resources. We’ll come back to that one.”

Silver mispronounced one name after another during the long, awkward meeting.

One by one, the names were read off. A few cried. A relative veteran employee burst out with frustration, “This is a bunch of bull, man!”

Silver worked through a dozen names. Then a second dozen.

“I just got my business cards printed!” groaned one of the newer faces.

APRIL 2000

That night, Ava called Jamie—to check in, to vent, to cry a little, and to get a much-needed laugh or two.

Jamie reported that married life had proven joyous so far, and that life at the Agency of Invasive Species continued as it had for most of the preceding years. The appointed director remained virtually invisible, Administrative Director Adam Humphrey continued to manage, Deputy Administrative Director Jack Wilkins put out fires as necessary.

And Jamie admitted she still felt like a travel agent some days, continuing to arrange for Humphrey to travel to far-flung destinations for conferences.

The next night, Lisa called Ava—to announce that she was now the assistant director of communications … and to admit that with her new title, she still felt like she distributed information no one cared to read, and ignored or diverted the requests for information that anyone might actually want to read.

JUNE 2000

The next round of layoffs did not include a personal announcement from the CEO. Those being cut were invited to the conference room. The old rule was that if you weren’t invited to a meeting, it was bad news because you were out of the loop. The new rule was that if you weren’t invited to a meeting, you probably weren’t getting laid off today.

But one Thursday, a particularly large group was asked to
attend the meeting. Willow was among them. Drew and Ava were not.

“I’m sorry,” Ava said.

“It’s just a matter of time for all of us,” said Drew, in his way of being reassuring.

Willow departed to get the bad news.

Two guys from the remains of the sales team strolled into the office and looked over Willow’s desk. Consulting a printed-out e-mail, one nodded to the other, “Yup, Willow Potts. She was on the list.”

The other looked over her desk—still cluttered with the papers and other detritus of work from less than twenty minutes ago—and started removing the staplers, pen holders, and other office supplies.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Ava asked angrily.

“It’s not like she’s going to need it,” the younger sales guy shrugged.

“Scavengers!” she gasped.

AUGUST 2000

On Capitol Hill, Congressman Nick Bader was starting to wonder if the entire U.S. government was some elaborate practical joke on him, as each effort to get the power he wanted left him feeling even more powerless to achieve his goals.

He had finally been allowed to join one of his colleagues, Tom Coburn, for a meeting with Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, a Mississippi pork enthusiast whom Bader had found to be an insufferable disappointment. The pair laid out, in great length and detail, how the latest omnibus appropriations bill, responsible for funding the government, had been a disaster.
Not only was it huge and stuffed to the gills with waste, but Coburn insisted it amounted to a complete repudiation of what Republicans claimed to stand for, and a betrayal of the concept of “good government.”

The Senate majority leader was unmoved. “Well, I’ve got an election coming up in 2000,” he said. “After that we can have good government.”
²⁶

Coburn fumed, and Bader had to stifle so much rage that he snapped the pencil he was holding.

Afterward, Bader ran into another one of his budget hawk allies, a newly elected member and budget wonk from his home state.

“How did it go?” asked Pat Toomey. “Does the Senate leadership understand what we’re trying to say, or not?”

“Do you remember in
Indiana Jones
, where they’re on a plane, and they think everything’s fine, and then the plane starts shaking, and they sense things aren’t fine, so they go up to the cockpit?” Bader rambled, a little shell-shocked with disappointment. “And then they open the door and gasp, seeing two empty seats and no pilots and a mountain right in front of them?”

Bader sighed, shook his head, and refocused with a wide-eyed, befuddled stare.

“Pat, nobody’s flying our plane!”

MARCH 2001

U.S. National Debt: $5.7 trillion

Budget, USDA Agency of Invasive Species: $175.93 million

Humphrey and Wilkins departed the Department of Agriculture building, walking along the National Mall to look at a site that the administrative director declared would be the next location of the Agency of Invasive Species Headquarters Building. Wilkins thought his boss was wildly over-optimistic.

Wilkins shook his head with a skeptical laugh. “There’s no way the Mall bosses are going to sign off on this.”

They stood before an unused triangle of land, where the grass grew thin, bordered by Independence Avenue from the north, Maine Avenue to the west, 15th Street to the east. Maine and 15th intersect at the southernmost point. Directly to the northeast was the Washington Monument.

“I’ve been suggesting sites to the National Capital Planning Commission for the past eight years now,” Humphrey said. “They’re more receptive to this than to any of my previous proposals.”

“Yeah, because your other ones were even more ridiculous,” Wilkins chuckled. “How long did it take them to laugh
you out of their office when you proposed a site that would have views of both the Washington Monument
and
the White House? They’d never put something there.”

“Actually, word is that they’re going to put the National Museum of African American History there.”

“Really? There?” Wilkins winced. “I mean, it’s good to have one—although I guess I’m wondering why you would want it separate from the National Museum of American History.”

“Probably because they’ll soon finish the National Native American History Museum, and eventually they’ll have to address the proposal for the national Latino Museum,” Humphrey shrugged. “It’s a land rush, Jack. The Dwight Eisenhower Memorial—”

“Wait, you mean separate from the World War II Memorial?”

“The victims of Ukrainian famine, the United States Air Force Memorial, the Victims of Communism Memorial, the Thomas Masaryk Memorial—”

“I have no idea who that is.”

“First president of Czechoslovakia.”

“Ooh, I have a good spot for that one! How about Prague, does that work for them?” Wilkins rolled his eyes.

“The American Veterans Disabled for Life Memorial. They’re jamming the Japanese-American Internment Camps memorial on a narrow little traffic triangle by Union Station.
²⁷
In the future, everyone will have a memorial or monument for fifteen minutes.”

“To be carved in stone at the Andy Warhol Memorial,” Wilkins griped. “Good luck getting the funding for all these, particularly with a Republican in the White House.”

“That’s the thing, Jack,” Humphrey said with a smile. “You
notice we haven’t needed our traditional battle-stations meetings, no dire sense of a budgetary threat from a new Republican coming to Washington, no sudden embrace of the latest Bader plan to cut us to the bone.” He nodded in the direction of the White House. “This one doesn’t have any of that budgetary ferocity. His enthusiasm for faith-based government services, his repeated emphasis that he’s a …” Humphrey momentarily squinted his eyes and held his hands to his heart, “
compassionate
conservative, the belief that government should help people … George W. Bush did not come to Washington to cut spending.”

“You realize you’re saying this with Republicans controlling the House, and the Senate, depending on what side of the bed Jim Jeffords woke up on this morning.” Wilkins laughed a bit at the irony. “So after all these years, these ninnies have finally made peace with government spending?”

Ava expected the layoff notice from EasyFed to trigger another round of heartbreak, but she found it liberating.

The EasyFed site had more and more portions that said, “This page is currently undergoing maintenance.” Updates grew more infrequent, and traffic dwindled. Some pages failed to load entirely and dead links multiplied. Like a dying relative, Ava wanted to see someone pull the plug and end the suffering. She joked that some sites should come with prearranged

DNRs—“Do Not Reload.”

She expected the decline of the site to generate humiliating criticism and mockery, but she realized that everyone who would write about it in the dot-com world was undergoing the same ritual sacrifice of mass layoffs. It was brutal out there.

It was brutal inside, too. Ava outlasted Drew—he said
farewell by setting fire to a pile of long-awaited business cards on the sidewalk outside GlobeScape headquarters—and she found that she knew only a small fraction of her remaining coworkers. Those that remained seemed to keep their heads down and rarely said hello in the hallways. The GlobeScape offices grew emptier, and the EasyFed team kept getting moved to smaller and more cramped spaces—the cubicle farms went from free range to a setup that the ASPCA would find intolerably cruel for livestock. She introduced herself to new office-mates, “Hi, I’m Ava Summers, and I’m the Angel of Dot-Com Death. Within a few months we’ll be moving offices again, and half of our coworkers won’t be here.”

When GlobeScape announced that the EasyFed project was going “on hiatus,” she knew it was dead.

The good news was that with her failure to use any vacation days or sick days, and the fact that GlobeScape as a whole continued to operate, Ava departed the building with about three months’ worth of severance and unused paid vacation.