Dave Eggers: The Circle

Mae breathed deeply, until she was calm again. “I think I have it under control now. Oh, my dad says he loves you, too. Everyone’s so happy.”

“Okay. That’s a little strange, given I’ve never met him. But tell him I love him too. Passionately. Is he hot? A silver fox? A swinger? Maybe we can work something out. Now can we get to work around here?”

“Yup, yup,” Mae said, sitting down again. “Sorry.”

Annie arched her eyebrows mischievously. “I feel like school’s about to start and we just found out we got put in the same homeroom. They give you a new tablet?”

“Just now.”

“Let me see.” Annie inspected it. “Ooh, the engraving is a nice touch. We’re going to get in such trouble together, aren’t we?”

“I hope so.”

“Okay, here comes your team leader. Hi Dan.”

Mae rushed to wipe any moisture from her face. She looked past Annie to see a handsome man, compact and tidy, approaching. He wore a brown hoodie and a smile of great contentment.

“Hi Annie, how are you?” he said, shaking her hand.

“Good, Dan.”

“I’m so glad, Annie.”

“You got a good one here, I hope you know,” Annie said, grabbing Mae’s wrist and squeezing.

“Oh I do know,” he said.

“You watch out for her.”

“I will,” he said, and turned from Annie to Mae. His smile of contentment grew into something like absolute certainty.

“I’ll be watching you watch her ,” Annie said.

“Glad to know it,” he said.

“See you at lunch,” Annie said to Mae, and was gone.

Everyone but Mae and Dan had left, but his smile hadn’t changed—it was the smile of a man who did not smile for show. It was the smile of a man who was exactly where he wanted to be. He pulled up a chair.

“So good to see you here,” he said. “I’m very glad you accepted our offer.”

Mae looked into his eyes for signs of disingenuousness, given there was no rational person who would have declined an invitation to work here. But there was nothing like that. Dan had interviewed her three times for the job, and had seemed unshakably sincere each time.

“So I assume all the paperwork and fingerprints are done?”

“I think so.”

“Like to take a walk?”

They left her desk and, after a hundred yards of glass hallway, walked through high double doors and into the open air. They climbed a wide stairway.

“We just finished the roofdeck,” he said. “I think you’ll like it.”

When they reached the top of the stairs, the view was spectacular. The roof overlooked most of the campus, the surrounding city of San Vincenzo and the bay beyond. Mae and Dan took it all in, and then he turned to her.

“Mae, now that you’re aboard, I wanted to get across some of the core beliefs here at the company. And chief among them is that just as important as the work we do here—and that work is very important—we want to make sure that you can be a human being here, too. We want this to be a workplace, sure, but it should also be a human place. And that means the fostering of community. In fact, it must be a community. That’s one of our slogans, as you probably know: Community First . And you’ve seen the signs that say Humans Work Here —I insist on those. That’s my pet issue. We’re not automatons. This isn’t a sweatshop. We’re a group of the best minds of our generation. Genera tions . And making sure this is a place where our humanity is respected, where our opinions are dignified, where our voices are heard—this is as important as any revenue, any stock price, any endeavor undertaken here. Does that sound corny?”

“No, no,” Mae rushed to say. “Definitely not. That’s why I’m here. I love the ‘community first’ idea. Annie’s been telling me about it since she started. At my last job, no one really communicated very well. It was basically the opposite of here in every way.”

Dan turned to look into the hills to the east, covered in mohair and patches of green. “I hate hearing that kind of thing. With the technology available, communication should never be in doubt. Understanding should never be out of reach or anything but clear. It’s what we do here. You might say it’s the mission of the company—it’s an obsession of mine, anyway. Communication. Understanding. Clarity.”

Dan nodded emphatically, as if his mouth had just uttered, independently, something that his ears found quite profound.

“In the Renaissance, as you know, we’re in charge of the customer experience, CE, and some people might think that’s the least sexy part of this whole enterprise. But as I see it, and the Wise Men see it, it’s the foundation of everything that happens here. If we don’t give the customers a satisfying, human and humane experience, then we have no customers. It’s pretty elemental. We’re the proof that this company is human.”

Mae didn’t know what to say. She agreed completely. Her last boss, Kevin, couldn’t talk like this. Kevin had no philosophy. Kevin had no ideas. Kevin had only his odors and his mustache. Mae was grinning like an idiot.

“I know you’ll be great here,” he said, and his arm extended toward her, as if he wanted to put his palm on her shoulder but thought against it. His hand fell to his side. “Let’s go downstairs and you can get started.”

They left the roofdeck and descended the wide stairs. They returned to her desk, where they saw a fuzzy-haired man.

“There he is,” Dan said. “Early as always. Hi Jared.”

Jared’s face was serene, unlined, his hands resting patiently and unmoving in his ample lap. He was wearing khaki pants and a button-down shirt a size too small.

“Jared will be doing your training, and he’ll be your main contact here at CE. I oversee the team, and Jared oversees the unit. So we’re the two main names you’ll need to know. Jared, you ready to get Mae started?”

“I am,” he said. “Hi Mae.” He stood, extended his hand, and Mae shook it. It was rounded and soft, like a cherub’s.

Dan said goodbye to both of them and left.

Jared grinned and ran a hand through his fuzzy hair. “So, training time. You feel ready?”

“Absolutely.”

“You need coffee or tea or anything?”

Mae shook her head. “I’m all set.”

“Good. Let’s sit down.”

Mae sat down, and Jared pulled his chair next to hers.

“Okay. As you know, for now you’re just doing straight-up customer maintenance for the smaller advertisers. They send a message to Customer Experience, and it gets routed to one of us. Random at first, but once you start working with a customer, that customer will continue to be routed to you, for the sake of continuity. When you get the query, you figure out the answer, you write them back. That’s the core of it. Simple enough in theory. So far so good?”

Mae nodded, and he went through the twenty most common requests and questions, and showed her a menu of boilerplate responses.

“Now, that doesn’t mean you just paste the answer in and send it back. You should make each response personal, specific. You’re a person, and they’re a person, so you shouldn’t be imitating a robot, and you shouldn’t treat them like they’re robots. Know what I mean? No robots work here. We never want the customer to think they’re dealing with a faceless entity, so you should always be sure to inject humanity into the process. That sound good?”

Mae nodded. She liked that: No robots work here .

They went through a dozen or so practice scenarios, and Mae polished her answers a bit more each time. Jared was a patient trainer, and walked her through every customer eventuality. In the event that she was stumped, she could bounce the query to his own queue, and he’d take it. That’s what he did most of the day, Jared said—take and answer the stumpers from the junior Customer Experience reps.