Teddy Wayne: Kapitoil

3. The circumference of a circle divided by its radius also equals 2 , which may or may not be a coincidence.

4. Pyramids are elegant images of best practice hierarchies for organizations.

Barron deposits me at my entrance. He exits the car and angles his head back to see the building, although his perspective is from the ground, which is inferior to an elevated view. “Not bad.”

“My company is paying for it,” I say.

He removes my luggage from the rear, and I give him a gratuity. “Thank you,” I add. “I hope I have not interrupted your dinner plans.”

“No, I’ve got dinner waiting at home,” he says. “Have a good night.” He reenters the car and drives away.

The material in the entrance is made of dark wood and brass or possibly gold. All the surfaces mirror light, and there is a guard in a suit of greater quality than Barron’s behind a desk. My room is 3313, which makes me think of the RPM of records, and the record to the CD is an analog for the pyramid to the skyscraper, and although the modern invention is of course more efficient, there is still something intriguing about the obsolete device. E.g., I have positive memories of my mother playing the few Beatles records she was able to acquire in Doha when I was a child and of the sound of the instruments merging with the interference and especially of how she played them at higher volume when my father was not at home, but I do not have any positive memories of CDs, possibly because I have little leisure time now to listen, and also I do not know anyone who loves music as much as my mother did.

ASAP = as soon as possible

On Monday, when I exit the elevator on the 88th floor of World Trade Center 1 (the floor number there also delights me, because 88 has perfect symmetry, as the most elegant objects and ideas do), I immediately see the S and E and the black Schrub logo of the hawk attached to the wall, as if it were trying to fly away. In the Doha office the logo is not so large and it is merely painted on the wall. This is a three-dimensional plastic object, and before I enter the office I touch the hawk briefly when no one is nearby, although a sharp corner of its wing slightly pains my finger.

A hallway curves around the main circular laboring room, and there is a small nucleus in the center of six desks in a circle. The sides of the room have sections divided by walls like the lines connecting to numbers on an analog clock, and in fact there are 12 sections called pods. Each section contains four gray desks and workers arranged in the shape of a non-compressed staple. Therefore, the workers in the center, who are the superiors, can observe the other employees at all times.

My podmates are Dan Wulf, Jefferson Smithfield, and Rebecca Goldman. Jefferson stands up to shake my hand and Dan shakes my hand from his chair and Rebecca waves. The desk assignments are:

Jefferson is the pod leader. He is very short, possibly even shorter than Rebecca, although he wears shoes that have thick soles and when he took them off later that day I saw additional cushioning in the interior, so with them he equals her vertically. His pale face has acute angles and looks like it belongs on a sculpture and shares some features with Taahir’s from Doha Human Resources, and his hair is between blond and brown. His forearms are highly defined with muscles and he frequently rolls his sleeves up to type but I hypothesize also to reveal them. Multiple postcards on the wall over his desk display the posters of Japanese movies with translated titles such as Akira and Seven Samurai and Ikiru . Sometimes during work he writes in a small notebook and counts with his fingers five or seven times as he moves his lips and mutely reads it.

Dan is slightly taller than I am, potentially 75 inches, although he constantly minimizes his height by not standing 100 % vertically, and his dark hair is already slightly voiding on the top. He is plugged into earphones most of the time. Over his desk a framed image of the top of a mountain displays:

THE ARTOF BUSINESS:

ANTICIPATE, DON’T WAIT

REACT TO THE FACT

THRIVE, NOT JUST SURVIVE

Rebecca wears glasses like a turtle’s shell I once located for one of my father’s customers and her black hair is not short or tied up like the hair of the other females in the office, although you can still see her earrings, which are in the shape of dolphins. One lower tooth is misaligned with the others. Her only desk decoration is a small photograph of her with her younger brother.

Jefferson and Dan complain frequently to each other about our “minor league bitch work,” which is partially true of the Y2K project because it is repetitive and Jefferson commands me to “piggyback” on the team’s previous work and not create anything original, although I believe it is inappropriate to complain in the workplace and demoralize your coworkers. They sometimes quietly discuss other programmers and financial analysts ranked above them that they believe they have superior skills to. Rebecca does not make any negative comments about the project or other workers except on the first day when she says, “Don’t expect to receive any kudos. We’re essentially vassals here.”

However, I can tell she is not stimulated because she frequently puts her lower face in her hands shaped like a V and stares at the divider wall above her monitor.

Jefferson and Dan also recreate with a game called fantasy baseball. When they arrive at work, they analyze the previous night’s performances of the players they “own.” Typically I do not listen to them, because I do not know the players and have difficulty understanding their jargon terms. Rebecca tells me they converse about it even more now than they did during the summer because they are in a special playoff fantasy baseball league and the winner receives more money. They also make daily bets of $10 with each other on the stock market’s performance.

But I do listen to one integral conversation on Wednesday as they are leaving.

“Book it,” Dan says as he clicks his mouse. “I just traded away Bernie Williams for Scott Brosius with Tim.”

Jefferson cleans his mouth with a toothpick from a box he stores in his desk. “You was robbed.”

Dan points to a newspaper article on his monitor. “Nope. The Post said Williams has never had a consistent playoff run — he always burns out. Brosius was consistent in every series last year. The data’s out there. Tim’s lazy, he never looks it up.”

After they leave, Rebecca rotates her chair to me. “Do you ever just sometimes genuflect and thank Jesus that we’re privy to such scintillating conversation?” she asks.

Although I can detect most of the idea from her voice and face, I do not know the definitions of some words, so I say, “I am uncertain what you mean.”

Her small smile deletes. “Forget it, dumb joke,” she says, and she leaves so quickly for the restroom that her chair makes a 270-degree rotation afterward.

I take the subway to the Museum of Modern Art after work to utilize my free access as a Schrub employee. The business section of The New York Times is on the plastic subway seat next to me, and I read about a merger on Tuesday between two start-up companies that raised their stock. A merger is similar to a mutually beneficial trade, although of course there is no way an investor could know about it before it occurs without insider trading.