Хелен Девитт - Some Trick - Thirteen Stories

Somehow, though, instead of picking up the ball and running with it, people began pre-firing themselves. To the point where Mr. Bergsma just had to do everything himself.

Benny went on, for illustrative purposes, for another 15 deals, winding up 10 hours and 30 beers later, at eight a.m. Eastern time (seven a.m. Central), not because more, much more could not be said, but because his audience was semi-comatose. What it all explained was why Benny was forced to sublet space in his loft.

“Not that I’m not glad to have you, dude,” said Benny. “It’s just the principle of the thing.”

“Dude,” said Gil, “I’m wrecked.”

He sprawled on the bed beside the stranded backpack. Darkness claimed him.

With the wisdom of hindsight, it’s interesting that Benny had this wealth of privileged information at his disposal for 27 years , while Gil, when he went into action, had had a mere smattering for little more than a week.

In the morning, or rather late afternoon, of Gil’s second day in New York, he woke to find Benny incensed. A wall of the bathroom had this longstanding moldy seepage from the apartment upstairs. The seepage had now developed into a perceptible flow. It was the kind of thing Gil would have assumed was just normal in New York, but apparently a barrier had been crossed.

He would have liked to go back into Manhattan for pancakes, but an Iowan does not like to leave his fellow man in distress.

“Dude,” he said, “hey, look, I’ll go upstairs and see if I can fix whatever.”

Gil’s father had thought every boy should build his own treehouse; while not typical of Iowa, this is more easily achieved on a five-acre property with several 150-year-old trees than in a Manhattan apartment. Gil and his four brothers had each had a tree, and had, needless to say, engaged in cycles of competitive upgrading over the years, learning skills, as his father pointed out, that would stand them in good stead all their lives. [3] If you have never thought of a treehouse as requiring plumbing and electricity, it’s probably because you have never seen treehouse-construction as a competitive sport. You don’t come from a family of boys, is the inference. As now.

Gil had, obviously, brought his tool kit from home. He took it from the backpack and went upstairs and knocked on the door and a dude within told him to fuck off, which is so New York.

Gil talked on with the candid friendliness of the native Iowan. Presently (and he was too new in town to know how unthinkable this was) the dude opened the door a crack, leaving the chain on.

Gil talked nonjudgmentally on about the seepage escalation and his skills, such as they were, in plumbing and construction. The dude, eventually, did something even more unthinkable and let him in to see the source of the damage.

“Uh huh, uh huh,” said Gil, looking at the standing pool around the base of the toilet. “Well, I’m pretty sure I can deal with this.”

“We’re going out of our minds is all,” said the dude. “We’re trying to do an IPO. We spend all our time interacting with people. We don’t have interaction skills to spare, is the thing, on something like dealing with building management. And as for plumbers , forget it.”

The dude was wearing a t-shirt that looked like an archaeological dig showing strata of pizza over the eons.

“See, if you decide that a user-friendly program needs an interactive paper clip to befriend a certain type of user,” he said, “it’s ultimately not a problem, because even if it does take more memory it’s just a question of getting more RAM, we’re talking a hundred bucks, max. But if you’re doing software development you can’t just upgrade the memory or processing speed of the human brain. Yet . To introduce spare capacity for dealing with morons. So there’s trade-offs. So, obviously, we thought the IPO would be a done deal a year ago, but see, if we had diverted interaction capability to dealing with plumbers we would probably have alienated investors even more .”

Gil was nodding and opening up his tool kit and turning off the water supply. The dude remembered the importance of names for human interaction and provided his, which was Dave. He outlined the initial business plan and the unexpected obstacles it had encountered.

The initial business plan had been, if we get lots of money we can free up our own time to do inconceivably brilliant things and we can also hire some other really smart people and just free them up to do inconceivably brilliant things, and we can also hire lots of people who are not that smart and pay them to do all the boring things we don’t want to do, freeing up even more of our own time for really interesting stuff. If we have enough people, we can deliver whatever we decide to do really fast [4] Dave and his partners had unhappily failed to read Frederick P. Brooks’ The Mythical Man-Month . If this business plan sounds remotely plausible to you, you may want to read F. P. Brooks’ classic work before proceeding. and it will make humongous amounts of money for people who are interested in money. [5] Dave was, obviously, not explaining the details of the actual project to Gil, because explaining the project to clueless morons who know nothing whatsoever about programming was what he did, these days, for a living. No way was he going to squander what few vestiges of patience remained on a mere randomly presented plumber. We’re talking nonrenewable resource here.

This was a business plan that had worked for Dave’s older brother in 1996, but in the climate of 2007 it had needed fleshing out. Dave had drawn the short straw and been forced to make presentations, and in the midst of a presentation he had commented that actually they were now thinking it might make more sense to just rebuild from scratch using Lisp.

Bad move.

It had then been necessary to make a lot more presentations to new investors, investors who had not heard about the Lisp idea and could still be shielded from the full brilliance of the dudes. Dave had been forced to buy a suit and wear the fucker. But by this time, though Dave had made the ultimate sacrifice, it was 2008, and in the climate of 2008 the amount of aggro involved was making them wonder whether anything could be worth that amount of aggro.

“Uh huh uh huh uh huh,” said Gil, “do you have some kind of bucket or something I could use for the sources of blockage?”

“Um. A bucket?” said Dave. “Well, we maybe have some Colonel Sanders Chicken Buckets around, any good?”

“Good to go,” said Gil. A small horde of roaches poured from the pipe like the wolf on the fold, their cohorts gleaming in basic roach black. All very New York, but Dave seemed unhappy with the development.

“Hey,” said Gil. “I really need to replace this gasket anyway. I can pick up some roach stuff at the same time, no problem.”

Not because Gil was exceptionally nice or helpful or friendly, by Iowan standards, but because this was the way everyone talked where he came from. It would not have won him any Brownie points back home, but Dave was charmed, disarmed.

Gil went back into Manhattan for a late late breakfast of pancakes. Harvey Keitel wasn’t there today, but the point is, Gil was having pancakes knowing that at any moment Harvey Keitel might walk in . In some ways this was actually better than having Mr. Keitel physically on the premises. The pancakes were not, truth be told, better than his Mom’s, but his Mom, obviously, could not offer the possibility of Harvey Keitel just walking in off the street.