The Weed Agency

by Jim Geraghty

They embraced, until a couple of the groom’s buddies started hooting and hollering.

  “So, what’s new at the agency?”

  Lisa thought for a moment. “Um …” She paused, then sighed. “Nothing, really.” The girls laughed.

  Lisa attributed her assessment to the amount of alcohol she had enjoyed so far—but she had a nagging sense that if sober, she would have still been groping for anything that qualified as new, or different, or interesting enough to share.

  AUGUST 1999

  EasyFed’s launch date loomed, less than a week away.

  The Saturday evening before it, GlobeScape rented a 53-room mansion in Burlingame, California, for the launch party.

  The two hundred GlobeScape employees working on the EasyFed project, another hundred spouses and dates, and easily three hundred guests crammed into the mansion and its grounds. The group ran out of the complimentary fleece jackets with the EasyFed logo. “Swag bags” of key chains, mouse pads, and other tchotchkes with the EasyFed logo were distributed as well. Tuxedo-clad waiters brought around silver platters of hors d’oeuvres and canapés, and the line at the open bar was long.

  “This is … so ostentatious,” Ava gasped. “Even Gatsby would tell us to tone it down a little.”

  “It’s all about generating buzz,” Willow said with a giggle. “Everybody’s going to be writing about us—Red Herring, Business 2.0, Salon, Slate.”

  Even Drew had loosened up. “This is totally going to show those hotshots at Pseudo.com.”

  The mansion’s tennis courts were functioning as a helipad for the evening. Silver’s helicopter, sleek and the color of his surname, landed, giving the executive an entrance most Hollywood action heroes would envy. He strode to the assembled partygoers like a conquering hero, reveling in their already-inebriated cheers for a few moments before beginning some remarks.

  “My friends, this evening we celebrate a dawn!” Silver roared, as the partygoers applauded a thoroughly dysfunctional metaphor. “We stand on the precipice of a new age. We are not merely some dot-com dreamers; we are revolutionaries!” More cheers.

  Silver spoke from the edge of a large, padded platform.

  A row of about a dozen men in red ninja-like costumes marched in a line behind him, each holding a rolled-up piece of scarlet cloth.

  “What’s with the Mortal Kombat guys?” Ava asked.

  “Silver brought in some Chinese dance troupe to perform—‘Tie My Wee’ or something,” Drew cracked.

  Willow had found a program for the evening. “The Qing Yi Yin Xiang Shen Ke Dai Zi,” she read aloud. “They’re supposed to be some big performers over in Shanghai, doing a West Coast tour. They perform the ‘Dance of the Crimson Banner.’ ”

  Then the crowd laughed, because Silver had said something he thought was funny, and most of the partygoers were drunk.

  Silver concluded, “You’ve all done a lot of work to get to this point, and our revolution has already begun!” He turned to the short, limber men behind him and nodded.

  As one, the dancers unfurled small red flags in each hand and began to spin. The dancers probably cost a fortune, but they did know how to put on a show. Their act accelerated as it went on, as each performer began demonstrating spectacular leaps, flips, cartwheels, and other acrobatics. Their crimson banners snapped and fluttered dramatically with each move, and they departed by backflipping and cartwheeling through the crowded audience on their way to their vans, to roaring, drunken cheers.

  Ava, Willow, Drew, and Raj drank until the booze ran out, and then waited for the small fleet of taxicabs that GlobeScape had called in advance.

  It was only on the way out, stuck in a traffic jam upon the driveway, that Ava realized that EasyFed had celebrated its debut with a parade of waving red flags.

  * * *

  24 Science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke.

  25 This is the summary of the investing mind-set of the time offered by Michael Lewis in The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001).

  8

  AUGUST 1999

  U.S. National Debt: $5.6 trillion

  Budget, USDA Bureau of Invasive Species: $162.33 million

  EasyFed.com was scheduled to launch at 6:00 a.m. Eastern time—3:00 a.m. local—on Wednesday, September 1. When the hour arrived, the UNDER CONSTRUCTION sign was gone … and a blank screen greeted visitors. For about one hour, absolute pandemonium reigned in the Palo Alto headquarters, as some unforeseen technical glitch delayed the much-touted debut. Thanks in no small part to Ava, the bug was identified and corrected and the site went live, a mere two hours late.

  OCTOBER 1999

  From time to time, Silver liked to bring people into the conference room for what he called ‘vision talks’—what he undoubtedly believed were inspirational speeches. Ava, Willow, and Drew found them increasingly hard to follow or bear.

  The early traffic numbers had been good but not great—other than the 0 visitors successfully logged in during the initial two hours. But month by month, details of the GlobeScape IPO became scarcer and scarcer. Finally, around Columbus Day, the company announced that it had been pushed back into 2000, “when the market won’t be so crowded with IPOs.”

  Word in the GlobeScape hallways was that Lennon Silver was particularly cranky lately. When news came that another vision talk was hastily scheduled, the office’s temperature seemed to drop ten degrees.

  The EasyFed team stood around the conference room with a new pensiveness.

  “Money does not motivate me …” Silver began. “Revolution does.… But our investors need results, they need reassurance about their return on investment. They’re proving less patient than I expected—quite reasonably, I would add. So, if I cannot show them ROI, I can show them signs of the revolution advancing.”

  He looked out on the collected employees, everyone vaguely concerned but not sure what, exactly, constituted a sign of the revolution advancing.

  “Are we revolutionaries?” Silver bellowed.

  The response was insufficiently enthusiastic.

  “I said, ‘Are we revolutionaries?’ You, are you a revolutionary?” he pointed to Chin-Ho Kyun. He was one of the new hires, a rather intimidated South Korean immigrant. He looked mortified to be called upon in front of everyone, and his eyes bulged in fearful confusion.

  “I am … a programmer,” Kyun stammered.

  “That’s NOT GOOD ENOUGH!” Silver pounded the conference table. “Clean out your desk!”

  “But he’s—”

  Silver shot the objector a furious look. Kyun lowered his head and quickly exited the room.

  He pointed to another terrified employee. “Are you a revolutionary?

  This one had learned from Kyun’s painful lesson: “YES!”

  Ava marveled at what she saw. She exchanged an uncomfortable glance with Willow. Could an employer do this? What was the point of this insane ritual?

  Kyun had barely been here a month, and seemed to be doing good work. She realized Silver had no idea who Kyun was, and didn’t realize he had just fired one of his better employees. He appeared to be firing people for the sake of firing people, or to motivate the rest of them.

  Silver went to the deputy head of marketing. “Are you a revolutionary?”

  “Yes,” said the unshaven twentysomething, barely able to repress a roll of his eyes.

  “I want to hear it in your voice! I want to see it in your eyes! We are about overturning old, established authorities! Show me your revolutionary spirit!”

  The deputy head of marketing reached his limit. “Oh, screw this,” he said, brushing past Silver and heading to the door. “I’ve been in talks with Yahoo!, I don’t need to take this crap.”

  Silver’s face registered betrayal for a split second, but then he resumed his messianic pose. “Good! Go ahead! I don’t need counterrevolutionaries who hedge their bets! I need true believers!”

  From a standing position, the surprisingly spry Silver leaped onto
the conference table.

  “ARE YOU A REVOLUTIONARY?”

  “Yes!” the assembled employees shouted, in a mix of enthusiasm and fear that they were witnessing a nervous breakdown.

  “I SAID, ARE YOU A REVOLUTIONARY?!”

  “YES!”

  As she chanted her approval alongside Willow and Drew, Ava realized the predictable boredom of the Agency of Invasive Species had never looked so good.

  NOVEMBER 1999

  The traffic numbers slid a bit, to the merely mediocre, but not all of the news was bad for EasyFed that autumn; on Thanksgiving, the “Squiggy the Squicken” balloon made its debut in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, right between Lou Bega and Charlotte Church. While that traffic spike proved short-lived, the marketing department assured everyone that the site’s biggest publicity effort would shock and amaze.

  JANUARY 2000

  A gigantic chunk of the advertising and marketing budget for EasyFed.com—$1.1 million—was spent on the airtime for a thirty-second nationwide ad during the broadcast of Super Bowl XXXIV on January 30.

  The ad began by showing a harried Ernest Borgnine at his desk with a computer, his tables strewn with paper, and lamenting, “File my taxes online? Apply for a small business grant through the Internet? I can’t understand any of this stuff!” At no point did the ad-makers feel any particular need to explain why the star of McHale’s Navy and Airwolf was applying for a grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce.

  A computer-generated Squiggy, about the size of a traffic cone, popped out of Borgnine’s coffee cup, and immediately began waving his tentacles toward Borgnine’s computer keyboard.

  “I can help, Ernie!”

  Instead of immediately beating the strange, pinkish-purple, one-eyed beaked cephalopod to death with his shoe, as most people’s instincts would dictate, Borgnine exclaimed, “Squiggy the Squicken!” in joyous recognition. Apparently it had taken the actor several takes to get the portmanteau correct, and the director had to keep explaining it wasn’t a “Squidge-ken.”

  “Have government Web sites got you seeing red? Try EasyFed!” chirped the unnervingly happy squid, with an eye that the Taiwanese computer animators had depicted with perhaps a bit too much realism. “EasyFed.com helps you get the information you need, and fast! Simple, easy and quick!” as the tentacles typed with blurring speed.

  GRANT APPLICATION APPROVED! appeared in giant letters on Borgnine’s computer screen in a font no government Web site had ever used. Underneath the actor’s beaming face, fine white print clarified, “Results not typical. EasyFed.com is not responsible for the results of any interaction with any agency on its customers’ behalf, and government response times vary greatly.”

  “Thanks, Squiggy!”

  “Remember, there’s no need to dread! Try EasyFed instead!”

  The squid did a cartwheel on its tentacles off the desk and past a window, where an aging Michael McKean and David Lander appeared as their characters from Laverne & Shirley. “I remember when I was everyone’s favorite Squiggy,” lamented Lander.

  Across America, roughly eighty-eight million Super Bowl watchers, previously enjoying the St. Louis Rams build a 16–6 lead over the Tennessee Titans, all simultaneously turned to each other and asked, “What the hell was that thing?”

  The USA Today ad-meter reviewing the commercials the following morning suggested that test audiences and online respondents graded the ad medium-to-bad, suggesting that the audiences liked its protagonists and remembered it, but found it bizarre and were vague on the actual product being sold. But the ad scored off the charts with the advertising professionals, who praised its humor, creativity, and unpredictability.

  The ad garnered a lot of mockery from the likes of Dennis Miller, Dave Barry, and James Lileks. George Will declared, “It is long past time for mandatory drug testing of Madison Avenue’s creative staff.”

  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 particu
larly 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.