Up and Down (5 page)

I spoke for about ten minutes as I walked through my slides.
There was a beginning, a middle, and an end to the presentation, and I seldom found myself reaching for words after the first slide or so. Out of the corner of my eye, I’d seen both Diane and even Amanda nodding with approval, or perhaps with early-onset Parkinson’s. When I actually lifted my eyes to look at Amanda, she immediately stopped nodding and gave me a look that seemed to say “Wrap it up, pal, time’s a-wasting.”

“So coupled with the comprehensive earned media and social media campaign to get the word out, I think there are literally millions of average Canadians who would love to fly on the shuttle and spend a few days floating around the International Space Station, even throwing up in zero gravity, a near certainty for a considerable number of astronauts. And I don’t think we’d have any trouble generating entries. It’s big and bold, and I believe nothing short of this will meet the challenge
NASA
has given us. Here endeth the sermon,” I said as sat back down.

There was a long pause, and I waited for Diane to announce that she wanted my idea added to the deck before it was sent to
D.C.
Nope. She was waiting for Amanda.

“Interesting idea but I don’t think so,” Amanda began. “It’s soundly conceived, but we have to be realistic and not push them too far. These are very risk-averse people, according to Crawford. We can’t afford to scare them off. If we presented this, we’d blow way over on the crazy-o-meter. Think of the liability issues of sending Joe Public into space. It’s a non-starter. Nice effort, but a non-starter.”

That hurt. But I wasn’t done yet. I looked towards Diane in the hope that she’d overrule Amanda. But she was just looking serenely across the table into space. Okay, now I was done. Diane finally broke the silence.

“Okay, so that’s it then. Nice job on developing the idea, David. With a different client in the chair, I think it could have worked,” she said as she stood. “Thanks, everyone. Amanda, you can tie it up with a bow and send it off to Crawford.”

A minute or two later I was licking my wounds in my cubicle when Diane stuck her head in.

“Don’t be bummed at what just happened. That was an impressive performance for an agency tenderfoot. I liked what I saw, so don’t stop doing that,” she said. “Also, I think you should try to get to know Amanda a bit better. It’ll help both of you.”

With that, she was gone, and I could turn to Google for a definition of “tenderfoot.” I found it in less than three seconds. “A newcomer not yet hardened to rough outdoor life.” I could live with that. The
NASA
deck was still in front of me and with not much on my plate, I idly flipped through it. Something caught my eye and gave me a second reason to leave the pit and head over to Amanda’s office on the nicer side of the floor.

“Hi,” I said after I’d stood in her doorway for a few seconds without catching her eye. I startled her and she jerked just a bit, then tried to cover it up. Jumpy.

“Oh, David. You know you really shouldn’t sneak up on people like that.”

She sounded annoyed.

“Sneak up? I just walked down the middle of the corridor in broad daylight and stopped right here in your doorway. You were clearly focused on your work. Next time I’m going to start calling your name gently when I’m getting close.” I smiled as I said it.

She’d returned her attention to her laptop by this time.

“I just didn’t hear you, that’s all,” she snapped.

“Well, I guess I walk softly. Diane says I have tender feet.”

Amanda didn’t get it. Now she looked annoyed, too.

“So, David, what’s up? I’ve got a lot going on right now.”

“Has the
NASA
deck gone to Washington yet?”

“I was just about to push the button. Why?”

“Check out page six, in the capabilities section. There’s a mention of
GM
when I’m pretty sure you mean
NASA
.”

A deep furrow immediately appeared in her forehead as her eyebrows came together in the shape of a capital M. For most, it would have been a lowercase m, but she had very athletic eyebrows. Quite striking, in fact. She abused the wheel on her mouse trying to find the offending slide, and then leaned in closer to read. I heard her sharp intake of breath.

“Shit! I was just about to send this. I would have looked like an idiot in front of Blake,” Amanda said as she corrected the line.

“No harm done. How did you manage to type
GM
instead of
NASA
?” I asked, genuinely curious.

She flushed a bit.

“I started with an old credentials deck from a pitch last year to
GM
, just for the capabilities section. I thought I’d caught all the references, but one slipped through. You can’t even trust PowerPoint’s ‘search and replace’ function. This would have made me look so sloppy and unprofessional.”

“Whoa. Someone else would have caught it before the actual presentation. No harm done. No big deal,” I said.

“No big deal?” she asked, giving me her best “Are you on crack?” look. “David, we don’t get the chance to strut our stuff with the Washington office very often. Crawford Blake could well be the next
TK
president, and he’s tough. Impressing him can have a real impact on your career. So screwing up in front of him is not on my agenda. Having him discover a stray
GM
in the deck is almost worse than
NASA
finding it!”

I just barely stopped myself from backing out of her office. She was so seriously intense. I found my hands in the air as if she were holding me at gunpoint.

“Okay, I got it. I’m glad we found the mistake so that no careers were ruined by an evil Detroit-based multinational.”

Fortunately, I had stumbled across her well-hidden sense of humour. She softened and even smiled.

“Sorry, David. I’m mad at myself, not at you. I can’t abide carelessness in myself or in others. I read this deck a hundred times and never caught it.” She paused, then looked at me again as I lowered my hands, no longer under the gun. “Thanks, David. You saved my bacon.”

I thought I might as well strike while the bacon pan was hot.

“So, umm, speaking of bacon, does anyone eat lunch around here?”

She thought about it for a moment, weighing the question.

“Lunch, lunch. That’s the midday meal, right?” she asked.

“So you don’t eat lunch very often?”

“I hardly ever have time. But I didn’t think we’d have this deck done by now. So as soon as I’ve yanked
GM
out of it, I think it’s ready to go. Give me ten minutes to draft the email to Crawford and I’ll meet you in the lobby. I think I’ve got half an hour before my next meeting.”

I stopped in to see my mother on the way home from the office, but she was asleep. I offered to stay the night and let Lauren have a night off and sleep at my place. In her mind, it wasn’t even an idea worthy of consideration. Lauren seemed locked into her role. I truly wanted to do more, but almost felt like I was trespassing on her turf. We talked for an hour or so, and she let me make spaghetti for us. Then she sent me home so she could get some sleep herself. Mom usually needed her help a few times in the night and Lauren was paranoid about sleeping right through.

I loved my condo. I still got a little thrill from stepping through the door. I’d become a little fanatical about keeping it neat. I lay down on the couch and didn’t even turn on the
TV
. I realized I wanted to show off my new place to somebody, perhaps to
anybody. I wondered about knocking on my neighbours’ doors and introducing myself but thought that might seem a little odd. While I’ve always been quite happy in my own company, it occurred to me that perhaps I might be a bit lonely. With all that was swirling in my life, I didn’t think I’d freed up enough time in my schedule to be lonely.

My twenty-minute lunch with Amanda had gone well, for the most part. When she’d finally hit Send on the
NASA
deck, she seemed to lighten up and loosen up. At lunch, I’d learned that she was a couple of years older than I. While I’d been working on Parliament Hill, she’d already been in the trenches at
TK
for a few years, working insane hours and never saying no to work that came her way. As she explained between forkfuls of a limp salad in the little restaurant in our building, an agency is like a marketplace. Work flows down to those who do it well, do it on time, and do it without complaint. If you look around almost any large
PR
agency, the junior staffers who are swamped tend to be the good ones, the “keepers.” But those who can always be found with time on their hands usually have that extra time for a reason. They’ve already been tried by the senior consultants or account directors above them, and somehow fallen short. Missed a deadline, missed a meeting, or missed the point. So, repeat business dries up. It’s not good news if most others at your level in the organization are crazy busy, and you are not.

Amanda had climbed up the ladder she’d mentioned earlier faster than most. And why not? Why wouldn’t Diane promote
Amanda quickly for good performance if it meant
TK
could get a higher billing rate for her? But from my agency rookie perspective, it seemed to put a lot of pressure on Amanda to keep up the pace of her progress. I made some dumb throwaway comment about shooting stars burning out. Not a good idea, but we got past it. Despite several attempts, I was unable to discover whether Amanda had anything else that occupied her life beyond Turner King. With half a salad still left to eat, Amanda had dashed back upstairs for her 1:30.

I dragged myself off the couch and into the library and pulled down from the shelf the Sherlock Holmes story collection entitled
His Last Bow
. It included one of my favourite stories, “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans.” I’m not sure why I was drawn so often to this story. Perhaps because it’s one of only four Holmes stories that featured Sherlock’s older brother, Mycroft. Or it might also have been because the missing plans in the mystery are for a submarine. This probably appealed to my interest in the history of science. Whatever the reason, I often reread Sherlock Holmes stories before heading to bed, and this tale more than some of the others. The writing was so good and it was just very cool to be reading the very same words that were first published back in 1912, as the Holmes canon was winding down.

I finished the story and flipped through a few other Conan Doyle books on my shelf, including the second Holmes novel,
The Sign of Four
. I always seemed to gravitate to a line Holmes
utters in this story: “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains,
however improbable
, must be the truth?”

I fell asleep in the library shortly thereafter.

D.C.
in early March was mercifully less humid than in the dead of summer. I’d been to Washington a few times while working for the minister. On our last trip, a year earlier, we’d toured the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum. What an amazing place. I remember just staring up at the
Wright Flyer
hanging in the lobby. The sight of it above so transfixed me that I walked straight into the wheelchair of a senior citizen from Baltimore and nearly tipped her into a rack of museum maps. It wasn’t quite an international incident, but my minister did speed away from the scene, leaving me there alone to make my apologies. There were no broken bones, and after we eventually staunched the bleeding, the poor woman was actually quite nice about it all. I’m sure the museum staff would have been relieved to know that I’d have no time for a return visit this trip.

There were three of us from
TK
Toronto heading south for the
NASA
presentation. I figured my Ottawa stint on the Canadian Space Agency file would punch my ticket to
D.C.
and I was right. Diane called me a couple of days earlier to let me know I’d be on the pitch team. Diane, Amanda, and I would be the Canadian contingent joining six
D.C.
TK
folks and one
from New York. Ten people seemed like a big team, but this was a big opportunity. I sat between Amanda on the aisle and Diane in the window seat, which left me feeling mildly trapped. I think Amanda could probably have kept the Air Canada 767 aloft with tension alone. I wondered if she was a nervous flier, yet she was still rigid and morose back on land at the Dulles baggage carousel.