Assaf Gavron - Almost Dead

He made a sketch of the intersection on the drawing board, wrote the street names, and marked the point of the jam. ‘A traffic-light cycle, meaning the time between one green light and the next, is between twenty-four and a hundred and twenty seconds. The seconds are divided meticulously between pedestrians, traffic in all directions and the gaps between. But, as every driver knows, not every direction receives the same time. Traffic-light technicians divide the time at every location according to need. Short greens in city centres are ten seconds long. The longer ones, in less stressed locations, usually take around eighty seconds out of a cycle of a hundred and twenty. In Rabin Square I discovered that the south-eastern corner had traffic lights which were simply throwing time away.’ Ron’s eyes were keeping up a constant commentary. ‘Must have been a programmer’s mistake. One of the phases in the process took ten seconds when it needed only three!’

Jimmy tossed his smile around the table. ‘Seven seconds!’ He beamed delightedly.

‘Yes. I had seven seconds available in various different locations around the square, meaning that if I could clear one side, I’d be able to unblock the rest. Perhaps you remember that until a few months ago the whole square was blocked during the morning rush hour? At this zebra crossing,’ he made some marks in one of the corners, ‘scores of pedestrians would accumulate.’

‘Yes, I remember!’ I said, into a tableful of surprised faces. Dmitry looked at me silently for two point five to three seconds.

‘I retimed the whole day — pressure periods, post-pressure periods, after an accident, after a demonstration. I made an appointment with a municipal technician, we opened the control box and he logged in with his laptop and uploaded my new definitions. The traffic was pretty heavy at the time. Yet minutes after we’d run the program everything started flowing with perfect smoothness. The technician went back to his office and I celebrated on my own with a well-earned glass of wine at a bar.’

‘Which bar?’ asked Talia Tenne. Talia Tenne likes bars.

Dmitry didn’t remember.

After the lecture, Bar sent his numerological reading of Dmitry. It said: ‘Dmitry = kind bollocks scrambler’. It’s an old Hebrew habit or superstition, doing numerologies, but Bar uses a piece of software he wrote while he was supposed to be working on programming for Time’s Arrow to calculate his. Among his favourite numerologies are ‘Rafi Rafael = bald for no reason’, ‘Rafi Rafael = tough midget manager’ and ‘Time’s Arrow = a total waste of time’.

Our business in Time’s Arrow is saving time. Not seven seconds — for us seven seconds are an eternity. We work for years in order to save a second or two. Not from traffic lights on a square but from the conversation time of each and every call made to directory enquiries: 144 in Israel, 411 in America, 118118 and so on in the UK, 104 in Japan…And why do we need to save a second from conversations to a call centre? Take, for instance, these clients of ours who provide the service in Manhattan. They’ve got a couple of thousand operators in New York answering calls coming in non-stop–5.5 million phone calls a day in search of telephone numbers. If we can save one second from each call we save 5.5 million seconds a day, which is 63 days, or almost three working months of an employee. Our software can save a company like that around $10,000 a day.

These numbers were my job. I was the Croc of Numbers! The Belgian company whose representatives Jimmy and I were going to meet takes 44 million calls a year, or more than 120,000 a day, with 300 operators working at any given time. I worked in sales, selling the product to national or private phone companies, landline or mobile, or companies providing directory assistance, DA for short. Recently phone companies have been springing up, or being privatised, all over the place. And every one of these companies needs DA. The market’s worth $145 million this year: next year it’s projected to be $200 million.

Pearls from Jimmy’s tireless mind: ‘Time’s Arrow is the Fed-Ex of the twenty-first century. Fed-Ex saved days, we save seconds.’ Or: ‘We’re not only living in a world where every second is worth money, but every hundredth of a second.’ How do we save this time? Software and consulting. Our software replaces the operator for certain parts of the conversation: it replies, asks for name and location, auto-completes names, searches and finds results in optimal time, reads out the number and dials it. Theoretically, it’s also got voice recognition, but that’s not perfect (yet), and conversations are still shared between software and operators.

Besides the software we consult: we supply guidance to operators on the software, on how to decrease talk time, on posture and voice; solutions for companies relating to shift construction (work/rest ratio, number of workers per shift, optimum shift lengths), ergonomic call-centre design, HR management, marketing strategies, pricing and distribution. All this, with periodic software upgrades thrown in, is yours for a million dollars on the table and a yearly licence costing half a million, more or less, in truth somewhat less than more — especially lately when everyone seems to be in crisis.

Interested?

I read the names of the dead on Ynet. Some of the photos I recognised. The manager of the minibus company said of the ‘driver, 36’: ‘Ziona was irreplaceable; everybody at the station loved her.’ There was Gabriel Algrably, 41, a widower builder who left behind two girls, ages 11 and 13. Two Hungarians, short-contract workers. Mali, a young woman, a student in the Vital College of Design: ‘a flower plucked in full bloom’. Shlomo Yarkoni, 29. ‘The most wonderful husband in the world,’ said his widow Yael, ‘four months pregnant and biting back her tears’. The suicide bomber, Shafiq Omar, 19 years old.

I met some of the families. After everything else happened, after they heard about me, they wanted to get in touch. Shlomo Yarkoni’s widow Yael called to ask whether I remembered him, but I didn’t. I hadn’t recognised the photo on Ynet. He probably got on at the Centre. A week after Yael, a woman named Smadar called me, also about Shlomo. He had visited her a few minutes before the bomb. He had left his phone in her flat. The phone rang endlessly all morning, and she didn’t answer. She didn’t turn it off either. She just stared at it and knew. She’d heard the boom. It was a beautiful winter morning. She sat and looked at the ringing phone all day, his sperm still warm inside her.

There was one unidentifiable body. It had to be him. I took out his Palm and stared at it. Should I hand it to the police? Or his family? But Giora had made me a request, the last request of his life. I turned the Palm on and watched the black letters flicker in the grey liquid crystal. Yesterday, the last day of his life, he’d had a meeting in Tel Aviv at eight in the morning and then nothing until the evening, where he’d written: ‘Shuli?’ The name he’d told me. The one I was going to look for.

I synchronised — I transferred all the information from Giora Guetta’s PalmPilot to my computer for back-up. I saved it just for the hell of it. Much later I thought: I did it instinctively, as if I knew there was information in there that I was going to need…

The offices of Time’s Arrow are located on the twenty-third floor of the Dizengoff Centre, with views over the Mediterranean and the dense houses of Tel Aviv, ugly when seen from above. I checked the Belgian company’s website and then called Switzerland.

‘Ivan!’

‘Eitan. How are you? I heard you’ve just had a bomb in Tel Aviv.’

‘Oh yeah, yeah: nothing to worry about.’ This is company policy — to play down any whiff of terrorist activity in the Middle East in general and the Tel Aviv area specifically. If anything should happen and, with the help of the negative and sensationalising global media, reach the ears of our overseas clients and potential investors, it should be treated with at most the interest an elephant might display at a fly landing on its forehead — not even a passing annoyance.