The cyclone release, p.19
The Cyclone Release, page 19
Brendon did the unthinkable and spent the rest of the weekend away from Janela. As he walked in on Monday morning, Charlie intercepted him and called him into his office.
“Word is you took a little walkabout this weekend,” Charlie said as he rounded his desk. “So did I.” He tossed his cell phone onto the desk. “That fucking thing buzzed all weekend. I didn’t even look at it.”
The VP grinned suddenly. “So, Brendon,” he said. “Mo Gramercy. Well done, man.” Brendon knew his response to this was all wrong. He knew this called for a rehearsed smugness and that his face must have been betraying the sense of alarm he felt at the mention of Mo’s name. “Well, it’s none of my goddamn business,” Charlie said, “but Mo’s a hell of a catch.” He shifted some papers on his desk and sat. “But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about,” he said. “Have a seat.”
Brendon set his backpack next to the chair in front of Charlie’s desk and sat.
“First off, I’m glad you took the weekend,” he said. “Like I say, I did, too. I’ve been through these IPOs before, and what I want to talk to you about is, it goes to the next level now.” Here he became very direct, peering through Brendon. “And my concern with someone like you, Brendon, is that you’ll take it all on yourself, like it has to be done now, and it has to be done by you. Well, this is the time, frankly, to do exactly the opposite.” Brendon felt an itch in his lower back and shifted in the chair. He had an urge to reach into his backpack for a notebook, to start writing things down, but that seemed out of place. “Within three, four weeks maybe,” Charlie said, “we’ll be ready to dump reqs for new people on you. Not sure how many, but that’ll be Job One, staffing up. Others are doing it already, as I’m sure you’ve seen. We’ve got capital now, and we’re going to use it, so the emphasis for someone like you changes. It’s all about leadership now. And that doesn’t mean it has to be you. You need to start getting résumés to look at, unofficially, just lining them up so you can get interviews going when the reqs come through. But if you don’t want to manage, if you don’t want to run the team, feel free to start looking at résumés for managers, someone to replace yourself, basically, as the lead person. Mo could do it, of course, but if I know her, and I think I do, she won’t want it. Likes to keep her sleeves rolled up. Anyway, you’ve got to start looking at what you want a team of ten, twelve, fourteen people to look like. I need you to put that into an org plan, just the basics, but I need to see the evolution of the Docs team over the next year. Can you do that for me?”
“Sure, Charlie, yeah.” Brendon was relieved to have something to interject.
“I’m telling you all this because I know Gerhard, Lear, those guys are great at what they do, but they’ve got blinders on. And they don’t give a shit about you until you fuck up, until their project is at risk because of you. And then they won’t say, ‘Oops, we should have told you to staff up.’ They’ll say, ‘What the fuck, Brendon?’ You get what I’m saying, right?”
Charlie was leaning forward now, his elbows on the desk, and Brendon was just now coming to grips with the mention of Gerhard’s name. Nonetheless, he nodded, and would have even said something if he’d had the words.
“That was harsh,” Charlie said. “That’s not really the conversation I wanted to have, but I had to say it. Anyway, the thing is, in the meantime, Brendon, in the meantime…” He paused and hit Brendon with a penetrating glare. “You’ve got Mo. Make sure she’s loaded up. She can totally take it. I guarantee you, she will come through for you.” He paused, picked up his cell phone, shifted it back and forth in his hands. Then he sat back in his chair. This was all stuff Brendon had been vaguely aware of, stuff that had been rattling around in the back of his mind, but Charlie was bringing it front and center. “And the thing is,” Charlie said, more calmly now, “the time for you to be killing yourself is coming to an end. You’ve put in four horrendous fucking months here, you’ve helped us get to this IPO, and the frame of mind you need for this next phase, well, you know, right? You’ve led teams before.”
“I have.”
“All right.”
“Okay, so that’s it?”
Charlie actually laughed, and seeing the creases at the corners of his eyes and the whiteness of his teeth, Brendon realized for the first time that Charlie was actually quite a handsome guy. “Yeah, Brendon, that’s it.” He stood up, his handsome smile lingering on.
Brendon dropped his backpack on his computer table, went to the break room for coffee, then marched directly to Mo’s cube. She was her usual self, exquisite in jeans and oxford shoes, a green blouse open for two buttons at the top, contrasting splendidly with her skin. As she noticed his presence and turned, her expression was expectant, almost joyful. She was clearly happy to see him, and for a moment, it tore him up inside.
Make sure she’s loaded up.
He remained standing in the cubicle entrance. “So, how are things going?” he said.
She smiled and gave a tiny shake of the head. “It’s been a little weird, but I’ll get past it. Hey, where were you all weekend?”
“I needed some time.” He glanced at the floor and dismissed the topic. “I was actually wondering about your projects. Everything on track?”
For just a beat, she appeared confused, almost hurt.
She can totally take it.
“Well, the adapter guide and configuration docs have been done for a while, just the occasional minor fix or doc bug. And PSO is happy with where we are on the API guide, so that’s good, and now I’m just integrating some comments from Kartik—really good comments, by the way.”
Again, Brendon was dismissive. “Okay, I need to add something else to your plate. I just got a slew of review comments on the online help I need to deal with, and I need you to get with the Release team on the builds, and get the files tagged and sent over for me. I just won’t have time for that.”
“No problem.”
“Okay, the files are in Perforce, should be easy enough to find, in the folder marked Final.”
“Yep.” She was calm and sanguine now, divorced from the lingering tension, and Brendon’s attention shifted to the subtle movements of her shoulders, the tiny laugh lines at the corners of her eyes, the sheen of the fluorescent light on her hair.
“I’ll also need you to take on the installation guide. You can check in with Suresh on that.”
“Yep, got it.”
“And we need some kind of format for the release notes and bug list, so if you could put something together for that.”
“Yep, no problem.” She sat nodding at this for several seconds until her expression gradually changed. Soon she was grinning at him, then smiling with something like delight, the secret smile of a secret lover. He followed her delight for just an instant.
“Listen, I’ve got some stuff for Charlie I need to get to.”
“Okay, talk to you later then?” she said, and he just waved as he left the cube.
On Tuesday, he sat next to Mo at Technical Team, but avoided eye contact, and then spent the rest of the day trying to concentrate on his online help work. He knew, of course, that he’d have to address Mo again. He’d have to part from the professional and address her as the woman he’d made love to just four nights ago.
But not today, he decided as he switched off his system at dinnertime, ducking the communal meal set up in the break room and heading out into the traffic, and home. As he entered the house, the photos of Sadie assaulted him more forcefully than they had before, and he made the impulsive decision that it was time to box them up.
He started where he was standing and worked his way around the room. But when he got to that last one, a photo on the mantel of the two of them together, in the shade of an oak tree at Vasona Lake Park, he just couldn’t take it down. And so he left it there, and stood at the mantel taking in the image.
The strong, peppery aromas of butter chicken and lamb saag drew Mo up out of her chair and into the aisles. She didn’t normally take the meals offered in the break room, choosing instead to work through the dinner hour and grab a packaged salad or bagel on the way home. But the Indian food smelled amazing, and she needed a reason to break through to Brendon, who had now been absent for the weekend and aloof for two full days, too busy or distracted, never in a place where she could grab a quiet moment and really speak to him. Perhaps a dinner of butter chicken, basmati rice, and nan would give her that chance.
She had envisioned something very different, the two of them subtle and conspiratorial in the cubes, remaining professional but blending their new personal tie into their workdays. She was now wondering whether that would work.
Entering his cube, she found him gone and the system shut down. Noting the paper cup next to the terminal and the coffee dregs in it—very unusual for the tidy Brendon—she was suddenly enraged. He’d been dismissive for two days, making lame excuses, sitting with his eyes trained on his screen, spiriting away after Technical Team. She briefly considered driving to his house and confronting him but decided against it. Walking out of the cube and back toward the spicy aromas in the break room, she decided she would give him until the end of the week, no longer, and then she would confront him.
Strangely, in the strained silences, a lot of work was getting done, both Brendon and Mo churning through their deliverables as the release date came closer and closer.
And so, at 5:00 Friday morning, Brendon was finally getting to work on Charlie’s org planning task, building a set of PowerPoint slides with his usual exacting precision, envisioning the Docs team as something bigger, as a department within a department, an arm of Development like QA had always been. He created a series of org charts: the team in three months, six months, a year. He’d need more writers, an editor, then two, and a technologist. He’d need a robust set of tools. In each chart, his name stood at the top: first-level manager, then second-level, possibly a director in some future, more-extensive chart. As for Mo’s position, as Charlie had said, she probably had little interest in leadership, so he included her as the senior person in a new partner-facing team. If he was misreading her ambitions, she would certainly let him know.
He was enjoying painstakingly writing every line, crafting every illustration, aligning and organizing it all, when he sensed movement behind him. He turned to see Tanner there, his eyes set on the PowerPoints on the screen.
“You need something?” Brendon said.
Tanner motioned to the monitor. “What is that?”
“Something for Charlie, org planning.”
“Okay.” Tanner paused and raised an eyebrow. “You know where Mo is?”
Brendon shook his head. “No, I don’t.”
Tanner glanced again at the screen, then left.
Brendon tried to dismiss the awkwardness of the moment, but it lingered as he turned back to his slides, work that suddenly felt meaningless against the riotous rhythms of real work—building, integrating, and testing the system—that was going on all around him. And as quickly as that, he was imagining Mo, sitting behind him right now, guiding him, advising him, laughing with him, and the meaning was restored. And as he was thinking this, he tensed: the text on Slide 4 was two point-sizes larger than the text on the rest of the slides. He made a quick correction and immediately felt better.
“Doing an org plan?” Brendon turned to find Chuck standing behind him, just inside the cubicle. His first instinct at hearing the voice had been to close the PowerPoints quickly, but it was too late for that. “Yeah, Charlie wants me to do those, too,” Chuck said. “Definitely gotta get on that.”
Brendon saw that Chuck had a printout in his hand. “Listen, if you got a minute, I’ve got our first doc fix here.”
“Doc fix?”
“Yeah, we’re finally getting down to the bugs we won’t have time to fix, so you know what that means.”
Brendon did know what it meant: small, low-priority problems the team would just leave in the system, which meant the writers would have to change a little something in the online help or manuals to account for the broken thing, or add the bug to the release notes. “Weird, but I actually didn’t think we’d do those here,” Brendon said.
“Oh, we do them here. I’ve never been in a place that didn’t have to do doc fixes eventually.” Chuck sat down and handed the printout to Brendon. He briefly explained the bug, then surprised Brendon by staying seated, his eyes taking in the cube for a moment, then landing on Brendon’s screen. “So, you got whole org charts there and everything. Pretty impressive.”
“Well, it’s a major trip to swagsville. Executing it will be a different story altogether.”
“Yeah, well, you know what Eisenhower said. ‘The plan is nothing. Planning is everything.’”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that one. I like that one.”
“One of my favorites. Of course, if I didn’t have Nicky, who knows if we’d ever have a goddamn plan. But I get credit for hiring her, right?”
“Indeed you do, Chuck. Indeed you do.” A certain uneasiness had settled into the cube, Brendon not quite sure how to handle a moment of small talk in this place where the currents of the Cyclone release had been swirling around him for so many months. He had somehow drifted into a strange eddy here with Chuck. “So, how’s this cycle compare to others?” he said. “Better? Worse? The same?”
Chuck shook his head. “Oh man, you can’t even compare. When we hit QA for Blizzard, we were literally one-third the number of people we are now. It was sort of like everyone doing everything. You want to talk about all-nighters.”
“I imagine.”
“We didn’t work long hours then. We just worked—period.” He paused and pondered, his mind clearly wandering back to that time.
“Are you married, Chuck?” Brendon said for no particular reason.
“Yeah. She told me no more startups after this one. She worries, you know. I gotta lose some weight, eat better.” He patted his stomach, which, Brendon had to admit, was protruding dough-like over his beltline. “Plus, we’ve been trying to get pregnant.” He scoffed. “And I’d better get that together soon because her parents are old-world Chinese, not third-generation like mine, and if she doesn’t kick out some grandkids pretty soon, I’m in for a couple of decades of fucking hell with them.”
“Do you want kids?”
“Actually, I do. I really do.” For several long seconds, the two of them sat, Chuck’s statement hanging in the air like a hologram. “What about you? You married?”
Brendon considered the question, then said, “No. Not me.”
“Oh yeah, that’s right. I totally forgot, you got your thing with Mo.” Brendon did not respond, staring instead at the space in front of him. “Now that’s a girl there,” Chuck said. “That’s some kind of girl.”
It was just after 7:30 when Mo arrived, the building bustling as one would expect with the endgame in full flight. It had gotten so she felt dread every time she walked into the aisles, the dreaded potential of another empty encounter with Brendon.
“Hey, girly-girl,” Nicky said as Mo came in with her coffee and sat. “What’s up?”
Mo made small talk about the QA round, Nicky being in the center of it. “Still these bothersome little things,” Nicky said. “You can almost feel this place turning into a behemoth.”
“Yeah, not good.” A fleeting thought of life in a behemoth called Janela passed through Mo’s mind. “Listen,” she said, lowering her voice to a whisper, “have you talked to Brendon this week?”
“Not a word.” Nicky was matter-of-fact. Next question!
“Well, I told you about Friday night, right?”
“That sounded totally awesome.” Nicky’s eyes lit up, bouncing atop the deep, puffy circles underneath.
“Well, then he just disappears for the entire weekend, which was weird enough. But then Monday he’s like a wet fish, and just proceeds to give me the cold shoulder all week.”
“Totally weird. I heard Charlie had a sit-down with him Monday morning. I wonder if that had anything to do with it.”
“I wonder. Do you know what it was about?”
“Chuck told me Charlie’s been telling all the managers to get org plans together. Start gearing up for expansion.”
“Well, shit, why the hell wouldn’t he talk to me about that?”
“Maybe he hasn’t gotten to it yet. Chuck hasn’t. He just keeps telling me he’ll need me when the time comes, which it hasn’t.”
Mo only half-listened. “Why wouldn’t he ask me for help with that? This is starting to piss me off.”
Nicky betrayed a tiny smirk. “Up in his grill, girly-girl. Can’t let him think he can bed you and shed you—unless that’s what you wanted. Is that what you wanted?”
“I sure didn’t think so, but man, he’s kind of being a prick right now.”
“Yep, can’t let that fester, Mo. You’ve got to talk to him.”
“Which also pisses me off, by the way. Why is it all of a sudden he can’t talk to me?” She paused at this, Nicky leaning forward, patting her on the knees, squeezing her there briefly, then sliding her hands away. “I decided I’d give him until today, so unless something happens…”
Here she trailed off, shaking her head. She looked up and found Nicky’s black Irish brow raised in sympathy. She reached out and squeezed her friend’s hand. “Thanks,” she said, then she stood. “Talk to you later.”
The remainder of Friday was more of the same, a long day of immersing herself in the work.
As 6:00 rolled around, she once again caught the aroma of food from the break room, something Italian, from the smell of it. She did a fly-by to Brendon’s cube, and as expected he was gone. She returned to her own cube and shut her system down.
