I cram my red hair into my helmet, heft my bike out the door and down the peeling wooden stairs of a sad porch that leans to the left, then wheel it along the cracked concrete of the front walkway. My route to work takes me due south and downhill on Broadview, west on Queen Street to where it forks with King, then left on Yonge all the way to the lake. It’s a pleasant ride and I use the time to muse idly about the day ahead. Likely the same old. Check email and voicemail, usually sparse and inconsequential. The weekly status meeting is at ten o’clock. I’ll need to come up with a list of things I’ve done that sound meaningful and productive. Lunch at noon. Afternoon spent shuffling papers. I never thought working at a tech start-up could be so boring. But I can’t quibble with the paycheque.
When I arrive at One Yonge Street, I’m lucky to find an empty spot in the bike rack that’s closest to the front door. I unclip my pannier, release my Kryptonite U-lock from its holder on the frame, and secure the bike to the post. I take off my helmet but bring it with me as I walk up the steps to the front door. I don’t think helmets are stolen very often, but I like this one and it fits well, so I don’t want to take a chance. It has a kind of swirly black-on-white thing going on and I bought a kid’s size so it would fit what my helpful friends call my “pin head.” Come to think of it, any normal adult wouldn’t be able to wear it, so I’m not sure why I’m so careful with it. Maybe because carting a bike helmet around makes me look like the urban street warrior I aspire to be seen as. Not the business school graduate, debt-laden yuppie that I am.
I snag just a snippet of conversation from the guy who gets off the elevator as I enter at seven forty-five. “Missed third-round funding,” I think he said. He probably saw the same article I read this morning about the sad plight of tech companies. I press the button for the twenty-fourth floor. The corridor is empty as I leave the elevator car and so is the handicapped bathroom that I use as my change room. I strip off my bike shorts and t-shirt, sop up my glow with paper towel, and change into an outfit appropriate for a start-up: ombre-striped matching shell and cardigan in decreasing shades of pink. Op art flowered miniskirt. Birkenstocks.
Maxlink, where I work, is a nascent telecom company whose mission is to supply the “last-mile internet” to low-rent office buildings. This is going to be accomplished by satellites and thin air. No need for costly infrastructure upgrades! Class C buildings will be able to charge Class B rent! Or something like that. I started here in January, four months ago, to be in charge of documenting business processes so the company will look like it has its act together, so investors will invest. Our office does indeed look impressive from the outside. In the marble-clad reception room a well-groomed twenty-something, wearing a geometric-patterned Diane von Furstenberg knock-off wrap dress, murmurs quietly into a phone. She’s probably arranging a manicure appointment or rallying her BFFs for Friday cocktails, not intercepting an important call. Because it’s not only my phone that rarely rings.
Once I pass through the glass doors to the inner sanctum, the ambience devolves into a rat-maze of intersecting cubicles. As a holder of a fancy job title — Director of Process Improvement — I get a semblance of an office. I don’t exactly have a window but more of what a real estate agent would call a “window view,” as there is a narrow hallway separating my door from the floor-to-ceiling glass. When my door is open, I can see the Toronto Islands and the condo that’s right next door, within spitting distance. So close that the guys congregate every afternoon to watch the clean-freak lady on the twenty-fourth floor who vacuums every day at three o’clock. Completely naked. I guess they need to derive excitement from something, because it sure isn’t available within these walls.
I enter my enclave, fling my pannier on my visitor chair and boot up my computer. I am almost logged into email when Serge bustles in. He’s a short, roundish, jolly, Quebec French guy. We got hired because Normand, the CIO, knew us from the consulting firm we both used to work for. I didn’t know Serge before I got here because he worked in the Montreal office and I was in Toronto, but we’ve become fast friends because we speak the same language: consulting firm lingo. We speak of methodologies and deliverables and decks and use-cases and entities.
Maxlink uses a lot of consultants, including a big crew from our old firm, which was recently sold to IBM, most of whom get billed to us at a thousand dollars a day. Serge’s job is to oversee the projects the consultants are working on. He gets to boss ex-colleagues around and make them accountable for their billables. We both enjoy this a little more than would seem appropriate, but then again, the meaning of appropriate kind of flies out the window when you work for a tech start-up.
We’ve compared notes and Normand apparently gave us both the same smooth sales pitch, complete with copious exclamatory sentences. “It’s a start-up, so you can write your own ticket! Invent your own role! It’s telecom, a bullet-proof industry! The need for internet connections is exploding! The mainstream providers can’t keep up! You can pretty much name your price and there’ll be stock options very soon!” he said.
I’m guessing he made a bunch of big promises to broker himself a good package and needed us to make them happen. But the job I had at the time at a niche consulting business that never seemed to have more than one client was not looking promising. At least this sounded more exciting. I couldn’t resist those enthusiastic exclamation points. I bit.
Serge eyes my pannier and raises his eyebrows. I sigh and move it from the chair to the gap between my desk and the wall. He plops into the guest chair. “Did you see the email?” he asks.
“No. I just got here. I’ll log in once I check my voicemail.”
“Don’t bother logging in. It may not work anyhow. We just got notified that round three funding is toast. We are probably toast. Or as we would say in French, nous sommes brioche.”
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