Multi-Platform Just-in-Time Point-and-Click e-Commerce Productivity Solution

Last night in Toledo, a salesman for my company was reviewing a powerpoint I'd made him the day before for a client presentation. He'd sent it off to our top-level executive for review. She wrote him back saying she'd liked it, "but I'd include a page about our group of companies, and talk to that."

"Great," he wrote back. "I look forward to receiving it."

"No no," she clarified. "Unfortunately, I won't be able to provide this information."

In other words: "When I say `I would include this,' I mean `you should include this.' Get on it."

The salesman got in touch with the Marketing department early this morning, asking for a PowerPoint page detailing our list of companies. From there, the email was passed along like an online hot potato; until it landed, inevitably, in my inbox.

You'd think finding a list of the group of companies Staff Co. owns would be easy. It's not. 'Cause what happens is, the owner of the company is buying companies all the time—and by this I mean he's buying bankrupt shells of companies for next to nothing. Then you have a cadre of potato-headed executives below him creating "strategic" partnerships with other companies. Then they run off to make "strategic" partnerships with other other companies, and the companies who they initially partnered with never hear from us again, and either cancel our partnerships, sell off the business to someone else, or just lay low and collect paychecks for a decade while doing nothing.

I admit it sounds weird that a company of my size would actually have no concrete list of sister companies—but for serious, in businesses as large and poorly managed as mine, with as many branches as we have, and with such a high turnover of staff, it's a wonder someone shows up with the keys to the front door every Monday.

A co-worker of mine was telling me today about a place in which he used to work, where they discovered a few years back that they'd been cutting paychecks steadily to an employee who'd died of old age in 1978. There's a threshold, in other words, between a company that's big and a company that's simply too big for its own good; with so many appendages working autonomously of each other that it usually works out best to just hope everything works out and hang on for the ride.

On a month-to-month basis, a group of companies list is hypothetically supposed to be updated: who's no longer affiliated with us? Which technologies are so out of date by now that it's not worth including them? Which companies are bankrupt or discredited by now? Which seventeen new companies should be included that do the exact same thing as the old companies? Since no one DOES actually update this stuff on a month-to-month basis, no one knows from one day to the next what it is our company actually does. Someone did in fact roll up their sleeves a few months ago and made a comprehensive binder of our companies and technologies that was immensely useful. Then, during a huge sweeping round of layoffs, she was suddenly let
go. All of her duties were circulated down by email to, eventually, inevitably, me. The binder was thrown into a box and put into storage before I could grab it, and I never saw it again.

But back to this morning. While conducting research on our group of companies, I came across one that I'd never even heard of before. I searched our webpage and couldn't find it. I searched my filed materials and couldn't find it. Perhaps, I thought, it was a newly acquired company. This happens sometimes. A company gets bought, then sits on a shelf until a group of executives go on a sufficient number of expensed lunches to discuss it. Five years later they've
figured out concretely what the product should be doing, how it should be marketed, and who it should be sold to. At this point they run back to office, conduct a lot of meetings, go on some more expensed lunches, and finally nail down some dates and who they can palm off the responsibility to. A patsy is picked, a "task force" is formed to launch the technology, and it's precisely at this time that someone points out that five years have passed since the technology'd been acquired and it's now useless. Several more lunches are expensed to discuss the matter. Eventually, it's decided it would be a waste of money to promote a technology that nobody will ever buy. Instead it's passed off to me, and I'm told to come up with a half-page of utter bullshit that "speaks to benefits" to put in my proposals, so the executives don't look like they've dropped the ball. No one, of course, ever actually buys the technology. But as long as it's included in our sales materials, no one seems to complain.

I'm thinking that this is exactly what's happened with the technology company I now can't find any information on. Desperate for copy on the tech, I conduct some random online searches—and there, buried in a link from a link from a link, is a URL to the fabled company.

First off, I try to glean what it is the technology is supposed to do. After five minutes of reading, I'm still not sure. Words like "just-in-time", "e-commerce", "multi-platform," "point-and-click", "end-to-end productivity solutions" and a lot of other hopelessly useless buzzwords seem to constitute the entire description of the product. At the bottom of the page is a phone number, which I dial.

"Hello?" asks a cracked voice.

"Hi, there. This is Jay Pinkerton from the Proposal Centre at Staff Co. This might seem odd, but... do we own your company?"

A long silence. Then: "Staff Co.? Oh. Yeah."

"Ah, good," I say. "The thing is, I just got through reading your webpage, and I'm not actually sure what it is your technology does."

"Well," he says, "it's a multi-platform just-in-time point-and-click e-commerce productivity solution that..."

"No no, I caught all that," I say, interrupting. "But what does it DO?"

"Do?" he asks.

"Yeah. If I installed it on my computer right now, what would my computer do?"

"Well," he said. A long pause. "Can I be totally honest with you here?"

"Hey, sure, why not?"

"It's a really old program. It barely works outside of DOS. It used to make ads for classifieds and stuff like that. Like quicky little text blurbs."

"But..."

"But it, well, it doesn't really work with any programs now. It's about eight years old. The graphics are kind of pixelly, and it doesn't really..."

"...do anything."

"Basically."

"I see." I chew on this. "How many people are working down there?"

"Uh," he says. "Including me?"

"Yeah."

"Me."

"Ah."

"Yeah," he says.

"Well, thanks," I say.

"Wait!" he says. "You'll keep all that under your hat, right? I mean, I got a pretty good thing going here."

"Yeah, totally," I say. "Multi-platform just-in-time point-and-click e-commerce productivity solutions never go out of style."

"Exactly." He hangs up.

I finished up the presentation slides and sent it over. Predictably, nobody noticed anything out of the ordinary, since every single one of our technologies is described in these vague terms. As I broke for lunch, it struck me that I'd inadvertantly stumbled onto my dream job: a place where I'd stumble in hungover to some forgotten place in the middle of nowhere, maybe bring along some books or a video game, and every two weeks, like clockwork, I'd get paid. No staff birthday parties, no office memos or emails. Just a desk, a net connection and a paycheck.

Something tells me that's not the kind of job you get to apply for.