Turn of the Century Read Online Free Page B

but here she is, come to talk to George about working for
NARCS
as an associate producer. As soon as George sees her stepping up quickly, bobbling a little on her high heels, to shake his hand—even before he makes a point of pronouncing Magdalen College correctly and asks her about her job at Channel 4 in London—he knows this interview is just a courtesy, a formality. He will not hire Caroline Osborne to work in this office. It’s not just that she’s English (“Scottish, actually”), although that is part of his problem. It’s the way she looks and acts. His state of mind may now be in violation of city, state, and federal antidiscrimination laws. It’s unfair, he knows, even piggish in some convoluted way. But she is unacceptable. She’s too pretty, too bosomy, too beautifully dressed, too ripe, too smart, too funny, too flirty, and too tempting to have around all day, every day.

2
    “Sorry, what?”
    “I said, how are your direct reports incented?” The tan ectomorph in his late twenties—Chad? Chas?—is sitting in Lizzie’s office questioning her. He is, he has said twice in the last twenty minutes, “the senior relationship manager, business interface, and technology liaison” at a software company outside Boston.
    Huh? “Incented?” What in tarnation do you mean by that, young fella?
Lizzie is tempted to reply, but instead talks his talk, figuring that if the interview proceeds with maximum efficiency, Chad, or Chas, who has an MBA, will go away sooner. She says, “Bonuses, based on meeting revenue goals, maxing out at a hundred and fifty percent of base salary, plus equity, with two-year vesting that’s IPO-accelerated.”
    She dislikes the part of her work that requires conversations like this. During the second of her two brief periods of employment by big companies (ages ago, Procter & Gamble for nine strange months in 1987 and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation in 1994) she always complained that dealing with the human resources department was the worst part of the job. Now she realizes that having a human resources department, so she never had to discuss vesting andbonus targets and inpatient mental health benefits with employees and potential employees, was actually the best thing about the Murdoch job.
    Lizzie wants to hire someone to open and run a Fine Technologies office on the West Coast, because it’s halfway to Asia, where business is picking up again, and because the rest of her industry is there. She has been interviewing people for two weeks. According to Chas/Chad’s résumé, before he moved east (“
back
east,” as they say in Seattle) he worked at Microsoft and Starwave. And Chas/Chad is not the worst. Out in Seattle or San Jose, Lizzie knows, she could have seen half a dozen qualified people the first day. In New York, the candidates are ad agency account jerks looking for any way out, the hustler marketing partners from bankrupt web-site design shops, bullshitters (
uninteresting
bullshitters) and losers. George doesn’t like it when she uses the word
loser
, and neither does she, really—it’s so categorically harsh. But in her world, the losers seem to be multiplying. Partly this is a classic Ponzi-scheme latecomer phenomenon, where the logic of a mania finally requires a big crowd of failed contenders—the thirty-eight-year-olds who decided in 1998 that this online web thing looked like it was going to be
big
.
    The very worst, no contest, was the self-satisfied, hard-sell fat boy who came in just last Friday to show her the “A Is for Alzheimer’s” multimedia video wall that he “conceived, conceptualized, designed, and created” for the marketing department of a drug company. “Have you ever seen PET scans, MRI scans, 3D models, and CGI combined like this?” the fat boy said to her. “You have not, I guarantee you. Have you ever seen memory loss, disorientation, mood swings, and dementia depicted so intensely or so interactively? You have not.”
    By