Chapter Nine
Nine
I’m up early Monday morning ready to take on my first official duties as a strategist. Though it’s true I’m not actually qualified to do this job, in some ways it feels like I’ve been preparing for this for a lifetime.
I begin by strategizing how to get an extra fifteen minutes in bed—skip the shower, dry shampoo, dress the top half of my body but stay in pajama shorts.
Next, I strategize the best way to get breakfast made for me.
For this, I settle on the simple yet foolproof method of letting the kitchen cupboard bang shut, which instantly summons my father.
This particular kitchen cupboard has been wonky since the dawn of time, and if you don’t close it with care, it clatters shut, then swings open again until the metal handle makes contact with the cupboard beside it.
If you ever want to torture my father for information, all you need to do is slam this cupboard once or twice. He’ll break instantly.
“Watch, watch, watch,” he chides when he sails into the kitchen, shouldering past me to shut it himself. I swear he’s attuned to hear the sound of this cupboard from any room in the house.
“Sorry,” I say, not even remotely meaning it. “I was looking for the mugs.”
“What’s for breakfast, kiddo?”
“I was just about to ask you the same thing. I’m starving.”
He slings an arm around my shoulder. “Then I guess it will have to be pancakes.”
I smile back at him. “I guess it will.”
He drops a kiss onto the top of my head and releases me to gather his ingredients while I take up position at the breakfast bar to enjoy the live cooking demonstration.
I love watching Dad pottering around the kitchen. It’s like seeing him in his natural habitat. While most of our neighbors stripped out their old kitchens and replaced them with sleek, ultra-modern upgrades, my parents have kept it vintage.
They replaced the countertops a few years ago, and upgraded the bar stools, but otherwise, everything right down to the pale-yellow wash on the walls is the same as when they bought it. It’s not aesthetically pleasing, and wouldn’t work anywhere else but in the suburbs, but I love it.
“Carl,” Mom says in exasperation when she comes into the kitchen and sees the maple syrup. “Again?”
“Why not?” he reasons. “Annie’s not home very often.”
She makes a big song and dance about how pancakes are not a nutritious breakfast option, but parks herself at the counter beside me anyway.
A few minutes later, Dad deposits the first pancake on my plate, carrying it directly from the frying pan and flipping it down straight off the spatula. It is, quite simply, perfect. I like to think I played a small part in this—after all, I’ve had him doing practice runs the last two mornings.
“And where’s mine?” Mom asks him when he flips the next pancake onto his own plate.
“You said you didn’t want any.”
“I said no such thing,” she replies haughtily. “Annie, get me a plate, would you? Your father forgot.”
—
Connor has scheduled a strategy induction call for us at 10 a.m. sharp.
I’m here first, and then he’s late, so I click around and then zone out on The Cut while I wait.
There’s no telltale ding to alert me that someone else has joined the call, so I’m startled when his voice rings out across the room, and hastily close the tab, straightening into business mode as I do.
On-screen, he’s staring back at me, pitched slightly forward, his face intent.
“Is this your childhood bedroom?” he asks, forgoing any greeting. He’s not looking at me at all, but over my shoulder, at all the details he can see in the background behind me.
“It is, yes.”
“What’s that poster of?” he asks, pointing toward the corner.
I wonder if he’d believe that my computer died if I just shut my laptop down immediately. Somehow, I sense the answer is no.
“That’s none of your business,” I say primly.
“Justin Timberlake?”
“No.”
“Coldplay.”
“No.”
He pauses, thinking.
“…Weezer?”
“No.”
“Am I close in any way? Will I ever guess this?”
“Probably not,” I admit. Am I going to say this out loud? “It’s…Ice Age. I really liked that movie as a kid.”
“You’re right,” he says, laughing as if this is the single greatest thing he’s ever heard in his life. “I never would have guessed that.”
“Did you actually want to talk about work, or have you just called me to mock my childhood bedroom?”
“Definitely the latter,” he says. “Are you still a supporter of the Ice Age franchise?”
“No,” I say, lying.
“Why’s the poster still up then?”
“Time capsule. This place is a living museum,” I say, stretching out my hands.
“Your bedroom is absolutely enormous. Hey—where does that door go?”
I look behind me to try and parse what he’s pointing at. “The closet?”
“No, that door.”
“The bathroom.”
“Oh my god, you had a bathroom in your bedroom, as a kid? That’s bananas.”
“It’s adjoining. I shared it with my sister, her room’s on the other side.”
“Seriously?” His amazement is writ large.
I rip the plug out from the laptop and tour him around, showing him the bathroom and then my sister’s old room, before turning back to my own.
He asks questions about every single thing the camera pans across, wanting to see closeups of every picture, poster, and trophy that adorns the space.
“It’s like you live in a palace,” he says, when I sit back down at the desk.
“Not really. Honestly, it’s just like, a very normal-sized house.”
“Not to me. I grew up on the Upper West Side.”
“That’s infinitely cooler than the Canadian suburbs, trust me.”
“I always wanted to live in the suburbs when I was a kid.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean, why? Riding your bike everywhere, hanging out in the forest with your friends. It sounds awesome.”
“It’s really boring when you’re not in a Spielberg movie,” I say.
“What’s trick or treating like?”
I boggle. “You never went trick or treating?”
“I did,” he says. “But it was nothing like we used to see on TV where the whole neighborhood goes out. Is it true that everybody decorates their houses?”
I scan my memory. “Not everyone, but a lot of people on our street did, yeah. When we were all little, anyway.”
“Like haunted houses and stuff?”
“Yeah,” I say, warming to the topic. “One year my uncle Bill turned his lawn into a graveyard and got a bunch of teenagers to dress up and jump out from behind the graves. It made the paper.”
“That’s sick as hell.”
I assess him through the screen. “I wouldn’t have pegged you as a Halloween person.”
He reels back, his hand against his chest. “How can anyone not be a Halloween person? It’s objectively amazing when you’re seven.”
An image of a tiny Connor covered in face paint and a cape pops into my head, Halloween enthusiasm radiating off him. Something about his boyishness now instinctively tells me he was a very cute kid. Or maybe he was a little dweeb. Who knows?
I can tell from the background that he’s in the office, the gray fabric paneling of the call booth giving him away. He’s wearing a cheerful green hoodie today, which contrasts perfectly with the charcoal that surrounds him.
The call booths have the worst lighting known to mankind, yet Connor looks fine. It speaks to the strength of his bone structure that he’s able to look good on camera. I fight a smile thinking about how shocked I’d have been if I came across him for the first time on a video call like this.
“So, shiny new data analyst,” he says. “Are you ready to be inducted?”
“Is inducted a word?”
“It is, and it worries me that you don’t know that,” he says. A second later, his image collapses into a small square and the mirror image of his screen fills my own. He’s got a slide deck locked and loaded. Let the induction begin.
—
Connor’s presentation is as thorough an onboarding as I’ve ever seen in my life.
He runs me through the projects the team is working on, the tools they use and the teams they collaborate with most, followed by a—I have to admit, very charming—slide filled with fun facts about my three other new teammates, Ben, Martin, and John.
I halt him when he flicks forward onto the next slide. “Um, excuse me—”
“Yes, Annabelle?”
I try to correct him. “No one ever calls me by my full name.”
“Oh, really?” he says, like I’ve just relayed a piece of information that has nothing to do with him whatsoever. Something gives me a strong impression there’s going to be a lot of Annabelles coming my way. Even more so now that I’ve alerted him to the fact that I hate it.
Anyway. “I didn’t see your fun fact up there, Connor.”
“That’s because I’m not fun.”
“I see how it is. One rule for the boss, one rule for the rest of us.”
“I’ll tell you what,” he says gamely. “Pay attention to the last six slides instead of staring off into space and I’ll give you my fun fact at the end.”
“Fine. The fact better be worth it, though.”
“Oh, it will be,” he says, flicking onto the next slide.
The final slides pertain to the reporting dashboard, which is finally revealed to me in all its glory.
For the last two years, most of the Jotter crew have been dismantling our platform and finding ways to integrate it seamlessly into Taskio.
The final piece of the puzzle is a new reporting dashboard, the building of which was a mammoth task that involved trying to wrangle two similar but separate softwares onto a single system so that everyone in the entire company can measure performance in the same way.
That was the idea, anyway. Connor’s team has spent the better part of the last year bringing all the data together, creating a single easy-to-use dashboard that every department in the business could access to build their own internal reports. It’s complete. But as yet, no one will use it.
“Since you have so handsomely volunteered to take charge of the dashboard rollout, you need to learn your way around it,” he tells me. “The more you can do with it the better.”
Connor gives me a list of reports he wants me to try and generate.
I can’t tell if he really needs them or if this is some sort of extended training exercise, but I’m in no position to argue.
I’m suddenly feeling very relieved that I’m working from home the next few days where I can do this in private.
“Phone me back if you get stuck,” he says, closing out the shared screen of his desktop. His full-size image springs back up to replace it. “I don’t have any other meetings or anything this afternoon. When is the next time you’ll be in the office again?”
“Thursday,” I tell him. “I’ll get all this done before then.”
“Cool,” he says, preparing to wrap us up.
“Hey, can I ask you something? Besides your fun fact.”
“I forgot about that,” he says. “I better come up with something fast. But yeah, go for it.”
“Why did you hire me? Actually?”
“Did I hire you?” he muses. “And here I was thinking I was bamboozled into accepting you because you’d tricked your way into being reassigned.”
I give him a look like, very funny. “We both know you were going to send me packing. Why did you change your mind?”
“I guess…” He trails off. “Well, if you want the real reason—”
“I do.”
He leans forward, like he’s getting ready to reveal a secret.
“I wanted to know…all the data I can’t find on a spreadsheet.”
I laugh, then cringe. “It’s all making sense now.”
“Where will I find it, by the way?” he wonders. “You never did reveal.”
“That’s classified, I’m afraid. Any data of this nature will be supplied to you on a need-to-know basis.”
“Sounds extremely legit,” he nods. “Nothing fishy about that at all.”
We both chuckle, then fall into silence. I watch him fidget in his seat, frowning down at the pen in front of him.
“If you want the truth, things have been—difficult. Recently. On the team.”
I’m caught off guard by this moment of candor, unsure of how to respond.
“And you were right about the dashboard thing. No one is using it. It’s driving me crazy,” he says, rubbing at his eyes. “You seemed like you had it in you to bully the right people.”
I had an inkling before, but I know it for certain now: Connor is nice.
It’s abundantly clear too, after seeing the rundown of the projects Data Strategy works on, that I will not be an integral part of the team, at least not on a technical level.
I am the only person among them without a computer science degree, the working definition of a personality hire.
I’m just as likely to be a burden as a help to him, and yet he let me stay anyway, and hasn’t been a jerk about it either, never asking for any special praise for his good deed.
I register a silent vow that I’ll make every last person at Taskio use his dashboard, even if I have to stand over their desks and watch them do it.
“OK,” I say, switching gears. “Now I want your fun fact.”
“You first.”
“What? No.”
“Boss’s orders,” he says, pulling rank.
“That’s—not how this works.”
“I’d just like to remind you that you’re in your probationary period and can be let go without notice for the next three months.”
“This is an abuse of power,” I say, fighting a smile.
“I know,” he grins. “Now go.”
“Um, OK. Fun fact, fun fact,” I stall. What’s fun about me? I rack my brains and come up with nothing. “I once bought a purse from a thrift shop and found forty bucks in it?”
“Weak,” he says. “I need something stronger for the slide deck.”
“All right then,” I say. “What’s yours? I’m ready to be dazzled.”
He pauses like he’s about to blow my mind. “When I was a kid I won a chess tournament—at Disney World.”
I burst out laughing. “I can’t believe it. And yet I absolutely can.”
“Wait until you hear about the prize. I got to play chess against Buzz Lightyear!” His tone makes it clear that he still considers this to be a huge honor.
“How old were you?”
“Nine,” he says.
“Lifetime dork award,” I tell him. “Did you win or lose?”
“Well,” he starts, but I don’t get an answer. Connor’s attention is diverted by something out of my eyeline. “Oh shit. I gotta go.”
“Oh, OK,” I say, feeling deflated. “No worries.”
He says a hasty goodbye and then he’s gone. Twenty minutes later, my messenger pings.
CONNOR: I won, obviously. But I’ll never truly be sure I beat him fair and square.