Smart’s specialty was quixotic projects. That’s a whole ‘nother yarn. Maybe enough for a sweater. Later perhaps.
But his main stock to trade? Oh, Smart blogged. He penned pathetic puns. Pop culture prattlings. Annoying anecdotes. Ridiculous rambling rants. Oh, and let us not forget…motorcycle tech tips. You see although Smart’s linguistic intellect verged on heavily flawed brilliance, he had just one tiny occupational flaw. As far as wordsmithing went, Smart had the attention span of a red squirrel. Anything beyond 3000 words and his eyes glazed over and the flow of verbiage turned to driven slush and then froze. No Great American Novel was looming in his future.
Smart’s workaround? He targeted markets that used (and in some rare cases actually paid for) short pieces of literary work. Motorsport magazines. One page advertising. Short stories. And he churned out how-to’s by the bushelful. Chop your Harley. Preserve your parsley. Paint in paisley.
But like us all -- Smart had to eat. No “starving artiste” he. And, not much money in the foregoing. So henceforth he perpetrated an outrageous fraud on an entire industry. He became a “marketing communication specialist”. For a computer company.
Which one? It will be remain blissfully nameless. Let us just say it was the quintessential Peck’s Bad Boy - PBB. In a brash, no-holds-barred competitive realm where the cut throats and back stabbers were the nice guys. And PBB did little to dispel the image. Headquartered in the liberal state of Massesclueless, it housed itself in a rambling, non-descript, low ceilinged cheaply built warren of dinky doorless cubicles and smokey conference rooms and murky labs. The place spread itself over literally acres. The halls were so long, on hot humid days, interior smog could easily be discerned.
PBB was, for a few shining years, a money-mining juggernaut that rivaled the robber barons of a century before. It treated non-executive employees badly but paid them very well. There were no paucity of prospects willing to sell their soul to this digital devil. It is ironic that the very computing architect schema that sky-rocketed PBB into orbit later lasered it down from the sky. Another tale for another time. Perhaps.
Early on, PBB changed its name to something ostensibly meaningless like Dartha Gerbil. Quite unknowingly appropriate. Vaguely malevolent. With the focus and attention span of a red squirrel (love that cut and paste). For PBB was poster child of corporate ADHD run amuck. Quixotic, wild eyed, megalomanic and grandiose schemes, projects and initiatives roiled over each each other in a seething foaming sea of intrigue, skulduggery and underhanded competition. The nastiest competitors for any given world-beating-mousetrap were not the competition down the highway, but the crackpots in the next building.
The cofounders were the strangest frick and frack imaginable. Each monstrously rich of course. And diametric opposites. One was a wirehaired, weird wizard engineer who walked around with vacant wild-eyed look. Not unlike the result of near electrocution. No doubt ruminating about new obscure revolutionary Von Neumann computing concepts. At the expense of any scintilla of social graces. It was said that those who could emulate One’s vacant stare to best effect, rose all the quicker through the seamy roiled ranks of rats in PBB’s dingy stable.
Unknown to him, he carried the below-radar moniker Senyor Sonny. A curious reflection of both derision and grudging admiration. His soft spoken air belied a venal sociopathic sadistic streak. His idea of fun was to order the surreptitious towing of employee cars -- parked at the company lot in a manner not suited to his taste. Eventually he towed someone not in total obsequious genuflecting awe and got served with a Summons for Criminal Complaint. Peels of hysterical laughter were heard from an adjoining front office in exec row that afternoon.
The source of the laughter? Well that was Two. Two was the sales guru. Tall and handsome and good looking as One was strange. He sported a Mullet hairdo in the best tradition of Bernie Madoff and John Corzine. His ersatz patrician air was betrayed by a foul mouth, a randy wayward eye towards females and a heart of cold driven slush. He honed his craft of persuasion by practicing serial philandery on the many attractive woman targets under his employ. Subtlety was not a strong suit. How would just call them up at their office from his pool-side cabana at home and summon them for services. His idea of motivating the sales force was to hurl an antique spear the entire length of the front office conference room and embed it in the far wall. “That is what will happen to you if you fail to make your numbers!” Drywall contractors were called in regularly.
PBB baptized its fledgling product with a Latin and astronomical name that implied bright and new. They lucked out except in France where the name in translation meant more-or-less “it doesn’t work”. It was to be the last and only reasonably good nomenclature they conducted. The follow-on product was dubbed something ostensibly sexy from the heaven sphere. But it equated with being plunged into darkness. After that PBB degenerated its labeling into the hackneyed letter-number soup of its competitors. Years later they adopted the safety-first Corfam philosophy of Dupont. Names that that sounded vaguely good but in actuality meant nothing at all.
In the early days of PBB, a foolish west coast firm had made the mistake of offering a plug compatible knock off of PPB’s main product. And soon after, the HQ of that hapless victim entity did in fact go up in smoke and burn to the ground. (How’s that for a tautology?) Rumors persisted that PBB execs had contracted for the firebombing of this competitor. A grand jury was convened to look into arson charges.
As reward, one alleged lower-level henchman was assured a perpetual role on the PPB dole. So the story went. In a position that required no means of visible intellectual support. He was Smart’s boss. Manager of Marketing Communications. The term Emcee seemed to apply. He did little to dispel the rumors of his smokey past
Emcee’s rendition of the Vacant Stare was a smirk unchanging as any result from too much botox. – as though he was thinking about some inside joke to himself. Emcee’s idea of fun was to run for congress more-or-lesson PBB’s nickel. He lost. Or try to patent voice stress analyzing software. Sort of an illegal wiretap and lie detector combined. Patent denied. Or, assemble a staff of the weirdest wildest most out of control kooks he could find in an already screw loose corporate culture. In that endeavor, he succeeded beyond his fondest dream.
One of his stratagems to that end? Show around a cool color personality analyzer program. You rated ten colors in order and out popped a personality profile. Anonymous of course. Everyone took it. Good innocent fun. No one realized, anonymous, not. Emcee was secretly monitoring and parsing and sorting the result for the most crackpot intellects.
Now -- thanks to a healthy streak of a paranoia -- Smart Aleck got it. He knew what was going on. So he gamed the system. He methodically rated colors according to their grey scale value. Then he took the test again and inverted the grey scale values. The results were diametrically opposed and totally off the scale at each end. Emcee saw that one clever, devious and suspicious person had (a) figured out what was going on and (b) then gamed his program to defeat it. I want that man for my team, he must have thought. Smart Aleck had a job.
So under Emcee, a drove of devilish, dangerous, demented denizens assembled to his specifications toiled in relative obscurity. For this was technology company, not Proctor and Gamble. Marketing was not exactly its stock in trade. Marketing was a mere overhead. An expensive superfluous afterthought annoyance of sort, thought many. And Marketing Communication compounded even that. It was overhead on top of overhead. Accordingly, “Marcom” was partitioned off in a dark dank interior space fit for mushrooms. Such interior space was normally occupied by computers in labs. No windows. Even lowly Marketing types cold at least see outside light. Not so Marcom. One had to pass through several doors to achieve that.
Foremost among these troglodytes under the helm of Emcee was the sole female. Georgina Javelin, or GeeGeeJay for short.
With GeeJay, what you saw was most definitely not what you got. Her work attire was demure text book prep. She sported the penny loafers, mannish button down blouse and nondescript featureless (tautology rears its ugly head yet again) navy blue skirt considered de riguer uniform on many an pre-ivy league campus. She was pretty the way the Blue Bonnet Lady or a Kewpie doll is pretty. She had a crisp soft spoken voice. With s’s that hissed seductively . There was a strong streak of goody two shoes in her superficial demeanor. She was a very good little actress when it counted.
But, the real GGJ? Think, verdant and teeming tropical rain forest of complexity and subtlety and mystery and perversity and contradiction. GGJ teleported the concept of work hard, play hard, into the eleventh dimension. Her mind could be a strange and bizaare bazaar to those very very few who really knew her.. Pathos, aggression, comedy, vulnerability, strength, coyness, pathological mendacity – they were all in the mix. Modeling this coy and clever and confused creature’s cerebral process was a task beyond any known computational system. Then, now or far into the future.
In short, she was out there. Somewhere far beyond the pale.
GGJ’s home apartment was rendered in a hippie-crash-pad design theme. Her coffee table was a painted empty telephone cable spool. Her idea of a bed frame? The floor. She drove a Chevy Chevette with a cranky clutch and a ripped headliner. Her LP records were badly scratched.
You guessed it. Smart Aleck and GGJ were to become a match made in..purgatory. Replete with major league vice, folly, innuendo, imagery and psychopharmacology.
To be continued..perhaps..you know the AD thing…
The cofounders were the strangest frick and frack imaginable. Each monstrously rich of course. And diametric opposites. One was a wirehaired, weird wizard engineer who walked around with vacant wild-eyed look. Not unlike the result of near electrocution. No doubt ruminating about new obscure revolutionary Von Neumann computing concepts. At the expense of any scintilla of social graces. It was said that those who could emulate One’s vacant stare to best effect, rose all the quicker through the seamy roiled ranks of rats in PBB’s dingy stable.
Unknown to him, he carried the below-radar moniker Senyor Sonny. A curious reflection of both derision and grudging admiration. His soft spoken air belied a venal sociopathic sadistic streak. His idea of fun was to order the surreptitious towing of employee cars -- parked at the company lot in a manner not suited to his taste. Eventually he towed someone not in total obsequious genuflecting awe and got served with a Summons for Criminal Complaint. Peels of hysterical laughter were heard from an adjoining front office in exec row that afternoon.
The source of the laughter? Well that was Two. Two was the sales guru. Tall and handsome and good looking as One was strange. He sported a Mullet hairdo in the best tradition of Bernie Madoff and John Corzine. His ersatz patrician air was betrayed by a foul mouth, a randy wayward eye towards females and a heart of cold driven slush. He honed his craft of persuasion by practicing serial philandery on the many attractive woman targets under his employ. Subtlety was not a strong suit. How would just call them up at their office from his pool-side cabana at home and summon them for services. His idea of motivating the sales force was to hurl an antique spear the entire length of the front office conference room and embed it in the far wall. “That is what will happen to you if you fail to make your numbers!” Drywall contractors were called in regularly.
PBB baptized its fledgling product with a Latin and astronomical name that implied bright and new. They lucked out except in France where the name in translation meant more-or-less “it doesn’t work”. It was to be the last and only reasonably good nomenclature they conducted. The follow-on product was dubbed something ostensibly sexy from the heaven sphere. But it equated with being plunged into darkness. After that PBB degenerated its labeling into the hackneyed letter-number soup of its competitors. Years later they adopted the safety-first Corfam philosophy of Dupont. Names that that sounded vaguely good but in actuality meant nothing at all.
In the early days of PBB, a foolish west coast firm had made the mistake of offering a plug compatible knock off of PPB’s main product. And soon after, the HQ of that hapless victim entity did in fact go up in smoke and burn to the ground. (How’s that for a tautology?) Rumors persisted that PBB execs had contracted for the firebombing of this competitor. A grand jury was convened to look into arson charges.
As reward, one alleged lower-level henchman was assured a perpetual role on the PPB dole. So the story went. In a position that required no means of visible intellectual support. He was Smart’s boss. Manager of Marketing Communications. The term Emcee seemed to apply. He did little to dispel the rumors of his smokey past
Emcee’s rendition of the Vacant Stare was a smirk unchanging as any result from too much botox. – as though he was thinking about some inside joke to himself. Emcee’s idea of fun was to run for congress more-or-lesson PBB’s nickel. He lost. Or try to patent voice stress analyzing software. Sort of an illegal wiretap and lie detector combined. Patent denied. Or, assemble a staff of the weirdest wildest most out of control kooks he could find in an already screw loose corporate culture. In that endeavor, he succeeded beyond his fondest dream.
One of his stratagems to that end? Show around a cool color personality analyzer program. You rated ten colors in order and out popped a personality profile. Anonymous of course. Everyone took it. Good innocent fun. No one realized, anonymous, not. Emcee was secretly monitoring and parsing and sorting the result for the most crackpot intellects.
Now -- thanks to a healthy streak of a paranoia -- Smart Aleck got it. He knew what was going on. So he gamed the system. He methodically rated colors according to their grey scale value. Then he took the test again and inverted the grey scale values. The results were diametrically opposed and totally off the scale at each end. Emcee saw that one clever, devious and suspicious person had (a) figured out what was going on and (b) then gamed his program to defeat it. I want that man for my team, he must have thought. Smart Aleck had a job.
So under Emcee, a drove of devilish, dangerous, demented denizens assembled to his specifications toiled in relative obscurity. For this was technology company, not Proctor and Gamble. Marketing was not exactly its stock in trade. Marketing was a mere overhead. An expensive superfluous afterthought annoyance of sort, thought many. And Marketing Communication compounded even that. It was overhead on top of overhead. Accordingly, “Marcom” was partitioned off in a dark dank interior space fit for mushrooms. Such interior space was normally occupied by computers in labs. No windows. Even lowly Marketing types cold at least see outside light. Not so Marcom. One had to pass through several doors to achieve that.
Foremost among these troglodytes under the helm of Emcee was the sole female. Georgina Javelin, or GeeGeeJay for short.
With GeeJay, what you saw was most definitely not what you got. Her work attire was demure text book prep. She sported the penny loafers, mannish button down blouse and nondescript featureless (tautology rears its ugly head yet again) navy blue skirt considered de riguer uniform on many an pre-ivy league campus. She was pretty the way the Blue Bonnet Lady or a Kewpie doll is pretty. She had a crisp soft spoken voice. With s’s that hissed seductively . There was a strong streak of goody two shoes in her superficial demeanor. She was a very good little actress when it counted.
But, the real GGJ? Think, verdant and teeming tropical rain forest of complexity and subtlety and mystery and perversity and contradiction. GGJ teleported the concept of work hard, play hard, into the eleventh dimension. Her mind could be a strange and bizaare bazaar to those very very few who really knew her.. Pathos, aggression, comedy, vulnerability, strength, coyness, pathological mendacity – they were all in the mix. Modeling this coy and clever and confused creature’s cerebral process was a task beyond any known computational system. Then, now or far into the future.
In short, she was out there. Somewhere far beyond the pale.
GGJ’s home apartment was rendered in a hippie-crash-pad design theme. Her coffee table was a painted empty telephone cable spool. Her idea of a bed frame? The floor. She drove a Chevy Chevette with a cranky clutch and a ripped headliner. Her LP records were badly scratched.
You guessed it. Smart Aleck and GGJ were to become a match made in..purgatory. Replete with major league vice, folly, innuendo, imagery and psychopharmacology.
To be continued..perhaps..you know the AD thing…
I await the continuation of this saga.
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