Connie Willis - Bellwether

“I’ll have a caffè latte,” I said.

“Single or double?”

“Double.”

“Tall or short?”

“Tall.”

“Chocolate or cinnamon on top?”

“Chocolate.”

“Semisweet or dark?”

I’d been wrong when I told Dr. O’Reilly all fads had to have a low ability threshold.

After several more exchanges, concerning whether I wanted cubed sugar versus brown and nonfat versus two percent, he left, and I went back to the personals.

Honesty was out, as usual. The men were all “tall, handsome, and financially secure,” and the women were all “gorgeous, slender, and sensitive.” The G/Bs were all “attractive, sophisticated, and caring.” Everyone had a “terrific sense of humor,” which I also found unlikely. All of them were seeking sensitive, intelligent, ecological, romantic, articulate NSs.

NS. What was NS? Nordic skiing? Native American Shamanism? Natural sex? No sex? And here was NSO. No sexual orgasms? I flipped back to the translation guide. Of course. Nonsmoker only.

The buxom, handsome, caring people who place these things seem frequently to have confused the personals with the L. L. Bean catalog: I’d like Item D2481 in passion red. Size, small. And they frequently specify color, shape, and no pets. But the number of nonsmokings seemed to have radically increased since the last time I’d done a count. I got a red pen out of my purse and started to circle them.

By the time my sandwich and complex latte had arrived, the page was covered in red. I ate my sandwich and sipped my latte and circled. The nonsmoking trend started way back in the late seventies, and so far it had followed the typical pattern for aversion trends, but I wondered if it was starting to reach another, more volatile level. “Any race, religion, political party, sexual preference okay,” one of the ads read. “NO SMOKERS.” In caps.

And “Must be adventurous, daring, nonsmoking risk-taker” and “Me: Successful but tired of being alone. You: Compassionate, caring, nonsmoking, childless.” And my favorite: “Desperately seeking someone who marches to the beat of a different drummer, flouts convention, doesn’t care what’s in or out. Smokers need not apply.”

Someone was standing over me. The waiter, probably, wanting to give me a nicotine patch. I looked up.

“I didn’t know you came here,” Flip said, rolling her eyes.

“I didn’t know you came here either,” I said. And now that I do I never will again, I thought. Especially since they don’t serve iced tea anymore.

“The personals, huh?” she said, craning around to look at what I’d marked. “They’re okay, I guess, if you’re desperate.”

I am, I thought, wondering wildly if she’d stopped on the way in to empty the trash and had I locked the car?

“I don’t need artificial aids. I have Brine,” she said, pointing at a guy with a shaved head, bower boots, and studs in his nose, eyebrows, and lower lip, but I wasn’t looking at him. I was looking at her extended arm, which had three wide gray armlets around it at wrist, mid-forearm, and just below the elbow. Duct tape.

Which explained her remark about it being a personal errand this afternoon. If this is the latest fad, I thought, I quit. “I have to go,” I said, scooping up my newspapers and purse, and looking frantically around for my waiter, who I couldn’t find since he was dressed like everybody else. I put down a twenty and practically ran for the exit.

“She doesn’t appreciate me at all,” I heard Flip telling Brine as I fled. “She could at least have thanked me for cleaning up her office.”

I had locked my car, and, driving home, I began to feel almost cheerful about the duct tape armbands. Flip would, after all, have to take them off. I also thought about Brine and about Billy Ray, who wears a Stetson and boot-cut jeans and a pager, and about what an accomplishment Dr. O’Reilly’s unstylishness really was.

Almost everything is in style for men these days: bomber jackets, bicycle pants, dashikis, GQ suits, jeans that are too big, tank shirts that are too small, deck shoes, hiking boots, Birkenstocks. And now with the addition of grunge’s faded flannel shirts and thermal underwear, it’s hard to find anything that looks bad enough to not be in style. But Dr. O’Reilly had managed it.

His hair was too long and his pants were too short, but it was more than that. One of the garage bands has a drummer who wears pedal pushers and braids onstage, and he looks like the ultimate in trendiness. And it wasn’t his glasses. Look at Elton John. Look at Buddy Holly.

It was something else, something that had been nagging at me all evening. Maybe I should go back down to Bio and ask him if I could study him. Maybe if I followed him around while he taught his monkeys to Hula Hoop or whatever it was he was going to do, I could figure out how he managed to be trend-free. And by studying a nontrend, get some clue to its opposite. Or maybe I should go home, iron my clippings, and try to figure out what caused two million women to suddenly pick up their scissors in unison and whack off their Little Lord Fauntleroy curls.

I didn’t do either one. Instead, I went home and read Browning. I read “The Pied Piper,” a poem which, oddly enough, was about fads, and started Pippa Passes, a long poem about an Italian factory girl in Asolo who only got one day a year off (clearly she worked for the Italian branch of HiTek) and who spent it wandering past windows singing, among other things, “The lark’s on the wing;/The snail’s on the thorn,” and inspiring everybody who heard her.

I wished she’d show up outside my window and inspire me, but it didn’t seem likely. Inspiration was going to have to come the way it usually did in science, uncrumpling all those clippings and feeding the data into the computer. By experimenting and failing and trying again.

I was wrong. Inspiration had already happened. I just didn’t know it yet.

Quality circles [1980–85]

Business fad inspired by successful Japanese corporate practices. A committee of employees from all areas of the company would meet once a month, usually after work, to share experiences, communicate ideas, and make suggestions as to ways the corporation could be better run. Died out when it became apparent that none of those suggestions were being taken. Replaced by QIS, MBO, JIT, and hot groups.

Wednesday we had the all-staff meeting. I was nearly late to it. I’d been down in Supply, trying to wrestle a box of paper clips out of Desiderata, who didn’t know where (or what) they were, and, as a result, every table in the cafeteria was filled when I got there.

Gina waved to me from across the room and pointed at an empty chair next to her, and I slid into it just as Management said, “We at HiTek never stop striving for excellence.”

“What’s going on?” I whispered to Gina.

“Management is proving beyond a shadow of a doubt they don’t have enough to do,” she murmured back. “So they’ve invented a new acronym. They’re working up to it right now.”

“…principle of our exciting new management program is Initiative.” He printed a large capital I on a flipchart with a Magic Marker. “Initiative is the cornerstone of a good company.”

I looked around the room, trying to spot Dr. O’Reilly. Flip was slouched against the back wall, her arms swathed in duct tape, looking sullen.

“The cornerstone of Initiative is Resources,” Management said. He printed an R in front of the I. “And what is HiTek’s most valuable resource? You!”

I finally spotted Dr. O’Reilly standing near the trays and the silverware with his hands in his pockets. He looked a little more presentable today, but not much. He’d put a brown polyester blazer on that wasn’t the same brown as his corduroy pants and a brown-and-white-checked shirt that didn’t match either one.