In rare moments within the history of capitalism, too few workers exist. Not as an absolute, of course: in total, workers always outnumber paid possibilities for work; that’s how our economy functions. But in a specific industry, a shortage may emerge, if only for a brief time. In 1998, on my first day of work as an analyst with the accounting and consulting firm Arthur Andersen LLP, it was clear that some aberration in accumulation had placed me in the twenty-fourth-floor conference room of a Manhattan skyscraper, overlooking the Museum of Modern Art’s sculpture garden, staring at a PowerPoint presentation for new hires. On one slide was a cartoon duck, bespectacled and presented in profile, standing on the tiptoes of its webbed feet. In its hands was a sledgehammer, held overhead, ready to smash a desktop computer.
I would learn soon enough that this—my first professional and only corporate work experience—was a fake job. It was fake because although I worked with Arthur Andersen, I never worked for them. (Their shade of blue-chip firm would never have hired the likes of me: they recruited from places like Harvard; I’d recently graduated from Hampshire College. They required new hires to have impeccable GPAs; my school didn’t confer grades.) Instead, I was employed by a global advertising conglomerate that had hired Andersen on a consultancy project and then placed me alongside the Andersen team—the result of a confluence of staffing shortages.
It was, moreover, a fake job because Andersen was faking it. The firm spent the late 1990s certifying fraudulent financial statements from Enron, the Texas-based energy company that made financial derivatives a household phrase, until that company went bankrupt in a cloud of scandal and suicide and Andersen was convicted of obstruction of justice, surrendered its accounting licenses, and shuttered. But that was later.
Finally, it was a fake job because the problem that the Conglomerate had hired Andersen to solve was not real, at least not in the sense that it needed to be solved or that Andersen could solve it. The problem was known variously as Y2K, or the Year 2000, or the Y2K Bug, and it prophesied that on January 1, 2000, computers the world over would be unable to process the thousandth-digit change from 19 to 20 as 1999 rolled into 2000 and would crash, taking with them whatever technology they were operating, from email to television to air-traffic control to, really, the entire technological infrastructure of global modernity. Hospitals might have emergency power generators to stave off the worst effects (unless the generators, too, succumbed to the Y2K Bug), but not advertising firms.
With a world-ending scenario on the horizon, employment standards were being relaxed. The end of the millennium had produced a tight labor market in knowledge workers, and new kinds of companies, called dot-coms, were angling to dominate the emergent world of e-commerce. Flush with cash, these companies were hoovering up any possessors of knowledge they could find. Friends from my gradeless college whose only experience in business had been parking-lot drug deals were talking stock options.
The employment agency through which I got my fake job made no epistemological distinction between knowing something and knowing about something. JavaScript, for example, a computer programming language: I knew about it but did not know it. Fine. Was I aware that the modern world might go on a catastrophic hiatus of unknown duration at the end of 1999? I had heard of something to that effect, although if pressed I couldn’t have explained. The Conglomerate was not much more stringent. My interview consisted of about twelve minutes with a laconic, mustachioed, middle-aged Arthur Andersen manager named Dick. (One of the services Andersen had been asked to provide was to help hire the Conglomerate’s Y2K team.) “On a scale of one to ten, what’s your knowledge of computer software?” he began. I paused for a moment, unsure of whether our interview would include a demonstrative component, as had so many previous interviews for jobs I had not gotten. But his office was empty. I couldn’t see how he would test me. I said eight.
“And what’s your knowledge of computer hardware, on a scale of one to ten?” Dick continued. The moment called for both boldness and modesty. I felt committed to eight, a number I had long appreciated for its intimations of infinity when turned sideways. So I repeated myself: “Eight.” It was true that one of my campus work-study jobs had been as a computer lab monitor. I could restart a PC or refill a printer’s paper tray if the situation demanded it, although it rarely did. I’d had the weekend evening shifts.
Dick’s next question would determine the development of my nascent career. “And what’s your level of problem-solving, on a scale of one to ten?” I sensed, suddenly, an opportunity to pass through a corporate loophole, to surmount my lack of credentials, training, and touch-typing skills and lean into my historical moment. “Nine,” I replied.
“That was it?” my girlfriend chirped when I reported to her the climax of my interview. The Conglomerate had hired me on the spot.
I was placed on the quality assurance team, assisting with work the Conglomerate had contracted to be carried out exclusively by the Arthur Andersen contingent. They weren’t called “a contingent” around the Y2K office. The consultants were referred to as the Andersen people, a term that exaggerated the partition between them and other Conglomerate employees, from whom they commanded both bewilderment and respect and, as often follows from the first two, a certain amount of resentment. These contradictory feelings stemmed from the fact that management consultants constituted then—and still do now—the vanguard of corporate work. They flit between companies and industries, parachuting in to diagnose problems and suggest, although rarely implement, “best-practice” solutions. It’s management consulting lingo, best-practice, and it indicates that the good is not enough: this isn’t Winnicott’s consulting room. Instead, management consultants aim for superlatives. They hire the best. They practice the best. They claim Pete Buttigieg among their alumni ranks. At the Conglomerate they had their own offices, their own meetings, their own schedules. They worked from the Conglomerate’s office space while they were on its project, but when they “rolled off” (they had their own terminology, too) they would take up residence within the ambit of another Andersen client.
“You’ve been selected because you’re Andersen quality but not Andersen price,” explained Cindy, the chipper data-warehousing expert who served as the quality assurance team’s Andersen-employed leader, on my second day of work. I felt like a piece of organic fruit found in the conventional produce bin. Cindy also told me that, as with wolves, pack solidarity was intense within Andersen groupings. So was a wariness toward intruders.
In the first meeting with my lupine team, I did stand out, though not for lack of credentials. In fact I was the only person not massaging a fistful of Play-Doh. The Conglomerate’s office was beige, the carpet beige, the people beige, too. But from each of the four quality assurance team members’ hands exploded a most brilliant collection of colors: neon greens and yellows, hot pink, siren red, an almost psychedelic scene. Team members twirled and juggled their own handfuls, separated their globs and recombined them. “It’s a new management technique,” Cindy said, before I could ask. “It helps relieve stress.”
Cindy herself did not seem stressed, but the situation she laid out for our team was certainly overwhelming. The Conglomerate held more than a thousand advertising, public relations, and communication companies worldwide, with possessions in both emerging markets and well-established ones. These cumulatively raked in billions of dollars per year. But any or all of these “shops,” in industry lexicon, might collapse as one millennium ended and another began, preventing the Conglomerate from executing its global advertising operations and compromising its earnings and thus its stock price. Perhaps a radio station in Finland would go haywire and be unable to run a Conglomerate-booked spot; conceivably, a television station in Western Australia could disappear and, along with it, a Conglomerate-produced commercial; maybe a billboard would tumble off a highway in Rio de Janeiro amid social chaos, destroying a Conglomerate-created visual. If such events were to transpire, revenue loss would be a best-case scenario; one could imagine far worse. There had been a slide in the new-hire presentation, the one with the duck, that spelled out the possibilities: a stick figure with a thought bubble hovering above its perfectly circular head wondered: “On Jan. 1, 2000 will I still have: electricity, food, telephone, transportation . . . ?” Each life-sustaining noun was contained in its own thought bubble, and the final thought bubble offered only a series of anxiety-producing question marks (“?????”).
That same tremulous atmosphere permeated the office, where a thumbtacked photocopy of a Computerworld article entitled “Economist Predicts Y2K-Based Recession” greeted team members on their daily arrival at the elevator bay. In the windowless kitchenette, several copies of the book Time Bomb 2000 were available for employees to peruse while they warmed their instant coffee or selected a Pepsi product—Pepsi being a client—from the mini fridge. Most team members had their own Y2K doomsday clock on their desk, tracking the years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds, and milliseconds until techno-rapture.
The first segment of the Conglomerate’s Y2K project, “Phase I: Inventory,” involved retrieving technological inventories from the Conglomerate’s various agencies and recording them in a database. The lesser, non-Andersen network analysts entered data about the number of PCs, routers, fax machines, and printers any given Conglomerate shop had in its possession, copying the material from a spreadsheet said shop had emailed them. The superior Andersen quality assurance analysts (and I) provided the oversight, identifying the mistakes our colleagues had made. Someone had hit the 0 instead of its keyboard neighbor, the 9; another team member, her mind wandering perhaps, had neglected to check the “entry completed” box. Little errors, but the general sense was that history would not judge them kindly. My team set out to rectify them before it had the chance.
The verb under whose sign the quality assurance team labored was a new one for me: to QA, past tense QAed. All mistakes our QAing located were recorded by hand; all handwritten records of our QAing were photocopied; the copies were kept in Cindy’s office while the originals were bound for a secure document warehouse in New Jersey. Necessarily, our records would be kept on paper. If the predicted Doomsday 2000 did arrive, the digital world would be inaccessible, maybe gone forever. Computer technology had gotten us into this millennial quagmire and could not be trusted to extricate us from it. Perhaps that’s why my problem-solving abilities had mattered more than my knowledge of computer software and hardware on Dick’s scale of one to ten. The fact that the scale itself remained undefined, and that neither interviewer nor interviewee agreed to its coordinates, suggested both the fake nature of the whole endeavor as well as the desperation the Conglomerate felt, its keen awareness that it was running out of time.
The Andersen position was that “Y2K is a documentation problem, not a technology problem.” One could not know the magnitude of the technical problems we would face on January 1, 2000, with complete certainty until that revelatory day arrived, and so 1/1/2000 functioned as a kind of horizon of contingency: would we all be launched, Back to the Future–like, into a new stone age, or would a few rest-area vending machines conk out and everyone get on with it? To contend with this range of possible futures, we focused on the past. Instead of fixing things with the hope that they would function later, we would document the anti-Y2K efforts the Conglomerate had already undertaken, necessarily more knowable than those events not yet in existence. We would not, for legal reasons, promise things to come; we would certify that things that had already transpired had been appropriately recorded. To the alarming claim of the Y2K town criers—modern life after 12/31/1999 cannot be guaranteed—the quality assurance team responded retrospectively: whatever happened yesterday would be consigned to a database. At a certain point all that had happened yesterday was our documenting, so then we documented that. Then, exponentially, we had to document ourselves documenting our own documentation.
These efforts—designed to avoid the liabilities of selling a project that offered a Y2K fix, because what if Y2K wasn’t “fixable”?—were part of a floating corporate-compliance rubric referred to only as the Process. Proprietary, capitalized, and always prefaced with that exclusive definite article, the Process could only be implemented by Arthur Andersen LLP. When a business engaged Andersen in a consultancy project, they purchased the Process. The Process seemed to have no printed home. To the extent that it existed, it passed between the minds and speech of Cindy and Dick. It was both accessible enough to be constantly appealed to—“the Process says,” “How would we apply the Process here?” “I’m not sure this syncs with the Process”—and inaccessible enough never to be grasped with Play-Doh–like tangibility. In keeping with the Process, the quality assurance team scoured hundreds of thousands, millions even, of Excel spreadsheet lines. My day began and ended with comparing database entry to inventory spreadsheet and writing in my own script Column 4, row 14: “18 routers” should be corrected to read “8 routers.” Column 9, row 10, empty. Indicate yes or no. This was dissociative, diminutive work, and time passed vertiginously, minutes and seconds overlapping on my teammates’ unsynchronized doomsday clocks until the day concluded with a final collective effort at preservation. All quality assurance analysts—not Cindy, for hierarchical reasons—would convene in the photocopy room to ensure that, come what may on December 31, 1999, the deliverables from our day’s labor would be archived, in print, in perpetuity. The only times we really spoke to each other in an uncurated fashion were over the blinding flashes and tray clicks of the Minolta copy machine. There we would discuss our commuting woes, roommate dramas, awkward dates, student loan repayment plans, as well as a rather unarticulated feeling of: What?
Who managed the management consultants? Cindy, shepherd of the Process, conducted random checks of all QAed spreadsheets and kept the results in her own spreadsheet. Dick and an elusive cabal of Andersen upper-tier management QAed Cindy. Once a rotund Andersen partner named Benjamin, outfitted in a yarmulke, a three-piece suit, and those unfortunate slipper-like Merrell suede shoes just making their way into the world in the late 1990s, spent an hour in the office, presumably to QA Dick.
The Conglomerate’s Y2K managing director, Justin, had constructed a makeshift smoking lounge in the utility closet across the hall from my cubicle. It was there that Justin and Dick would liaise and swap status updates, and Justin often hosted other visitors in his windowless, walk-in humidor. Invariably these were older, suited white men, a world of Dicks. I’d try to eavesdrop, to pry bits of information from the clouds of secondhand smoke that escaped under the door and hovered momentarily about my cubicle before being absorbed into the carpet. A few gems did waft out. I learned, for example, that I wasn’t the only team member to whom Cindy had described Arthur Andersen LLP as a pack of wolves: slender, agile, fangs bared, lips curled, marking their territory with urine (complimentary). When Justin heard this interspecies analogy, he balked. “More like bloodsucking leeches. They overcharge. Bullshit their billable hours. They want my employees to fuck up so I’ll fire them and they can bring in more Andersen people. . . . Of course they’re part of our team.”
But what, really, was there to hear? That the Process was vertically integrated apocrypha? That Dick had knowledge of his firm’s various fraudulent endeavors at Enron and was up to something similar here? In fact, Dick and Cindy could not have been more devoted, insistent as they were on evangelizing the Process to the Conglomerate’s office. “Y2K is a documentation problem, not a technology problem,” Cindy repeated at our weekly analyst meetings, and she invited us to say it with her.
Several months into my employment, in November 1998, a group of Andersen and Conglomerate elite visited our Y2K office to see what the $4 million Andersen project had produced in terms of Y2K preparedness. CEOs, COOs, CFOs, CTOs, an alphabet of executives, all men and some with aides-de-camp, filed through our office into a closed meeting. After their departure, Justin invited all team members into the conference room, where a Roman banquet of muffins and fruit pyramids, a well-appointed coffee cart, and the usual assortment of Pepsi products greeted us. None of these provisions had been touched, and team members were invited to pick through the refuse. “We just had over one hundred million dollars’ worth of executives in here,” Justin began. “They wanted updates.”
We were encouraged to review for ourselves a paper copy of the executive council presentation, many of which lay scattered about the oblong conference table. I was perplexed to see that it was essentially a rehash of the new-hire presentation. The cartoon duck holding the sledgehammer. The stick figure wondering, “On Jan. 1, 2000 will I still have . . . ?” The floating text box, conceptual art–like in display, “Y2K is a documentation” et cetera. But the mood in the conference room was ebullient and self-assured. Even the always starched and monogrammed Dick looked pleased. The man seldom spoke outside of closed-door klatches, but as a measure of the morning’s importance, he was invited by Justin to address the team. He rose and delivered a brief, litigious soliloquy:
“When January first of the year 2000 hits and a floodgate of Y2K lawsuits descends, and [we’re] being sued by everyone, and the firms who aren’t suing us, we’re suing, the indemnification issues, the claims of fiduciary responsibility and accusations of abandonment thereof. What are we going to need? Proof. They’re going to want to know what we did and how we did it. So that’s what this Council is concerned with, proof, paper, documentation. And that’s why our battle plan is simple: keep documenting, team.”
Months of reading and populating spreadsheets turned me spreadsheet-like myself: capacious but conceptless, able to record, to list, and to organize and sort, but according to an unthought, unthinkable orientation. After six weeks or so, and without much consideration, I began producing my own documentation, a kind of casual corporate ethnography. I noted the distribution of titles and nicknames at the Conglomerate. All the managers were men; all the analysts were women. Cindy was referred to as “the den mother.” Dick had an alliterative title that recognized his central place: “Dick, the documentation expert.” Justin, our commander, was hailed as “the general.” I, along with another young woman and quality assurance analyst, an engineer by training who shared my hair color, were given the clunky moniker “the blond QA twins.”
My favorite team member was a Viennese network analyst named Magdalena, who went by the German diminutive Leni. Tall and thin, accented and bespectacled, she hailed from fallen Austrian nobility. Her family had lost seven-eighths of their estate in World War I, but they nonetheless remained comfortable enough not to have to concern themselves with bourgeois trifles like work or mortgages. Had her father been a Nazi? Indeed, he had. Imagine a Captain von Trapp–like personality who had never softened under the melodious ensorcellment of a Fraulein Maria. Leni had fled her father’s eastern Reich not by yodeling her way over the Alps but through an American husband who got her a green card, then a transnational law firm that got her experience, and then, finally, an analyst position at the Conglomerate. When she interviewed with Dick, she had been asked to rate her foreign language abilities on his mysterious scale. Fluent in German, English, and French, proficient in Spanish, she had given herself a ten.
Each Wednesday we gathered for a general meeting with all team members: the database programmers, who never spoke; the disheveled but crucial IT coterie; all the Andersen people; Conglomerate managers; Dick. Sometimes the receptionist even set the phone to an automated answer function and popped by. By January 1999, after five months on the job, I’d come to find some comfort in the routine coordinates of the general meeting. At 2 PM, everyone except Justin would be seated in the conference room, Pepsi product in one hand, Cindy-authored agenda in the other, waiting for the meeting’s commencement, at which point Justin would announce through the all-office intercom that the meeting would begin five minutes late. Those minutes would pass and he would trudge in, a cloud of smoke all but trailing him.
General meetings involved an anonymous all-team exercise called “What’s Good? What Needs Improving?” Team members were instructed to rip a piece off some desolate corner of their 8 x 11 agenda and compose two reflections on these stated questions. The compositions were then passed to the table’s head for Justin to read.
Justin read aloud one Wednesday from the shrinking pile of anonymous comments. “What’s good: getting a lot done. Needs improving: kitchen out of Sweet’n Low.” And then: “What’s good: enjoyed my office Secret Santa gift. Needs improving: I don’t understand what the media team does and I will not accept ‘ask a member of the media team’ for an answer.” As he read, Justin’s countenance shifted from curiosity to uncertain disdain. He became aware—as did all team members—that his managerial style, his habit of punting, was being subtly mocked. Not only that: his antagonist was sitting among us. With a sly smile, somewhere between intrigued and embarrassed, he asked: “Who wrote this?” This query caused a swift reaction in Cindy, who responded, “This is an anonymous exercise.” Justin interrupted with Thank you, Cindy, who, so chastened, let Justin continue: “I asked—who wrote this?”
Dead silence of the urban kind only a skyscraper can provide, where a soft machinic din emits from the building itself. Team members, careful to avoid potentially implicating eye contact with each other, fixed their downcast stares on their Pepsi beverages. “You don’t want to tell me?” said Justin. “Fine. We’ll sit here all goddamn day. We’ll sit here till Y2K. Because I’m going to find out who wrote this fucking note.”
Sitting to the right of Cindy, an Andersen analyst named Tracy reached over, took the offending paper scrap, and meekly announced to the nervous audience, “It’s a girl’s handwriting.” I couldn’t have felt more relieved. My script is scraggly and angular, the furthest thing from that of a girl. Tracy too must have felt some relief, having just exculpated herself. And Cindy—who would suspect her? As team members began scanning the conference table, privately searching for someone whose handwriting was bubbly and who menstruated, the silence broke.
“I did it—I wrote the note.” Leni! Daughter of a Nazi. “It’s just that you never answer questions and I thought—well, I thought: You’re the boss, you will know.”
Justin ended the meeting by ordering her to stay alone with him in the conference room. Later I asked what Justin had said to her in private. “That I’m ‘on his shit list,’” she told me. And what did she say? “Fine.”
In February, with ten months left until the possible techno-finale of modernity, the Conglomerate decided to expand its Y2K preparedness operations and bring more Andersen people into the office. The new consultants also seemed to be wondering what the media team did. Located in an office directly behind my cubicle, they appeared to occupy themselves in the same way we did: printing spreadsheets, photocopying them, faxing them, and placing them in binders. Where the media team distinguished itself was in its leadership: it was the one team in the Conglomerate’s Y2K shop run by a manager of color. Perhaps the only bit of knowledge I had of this manager was that he had somehow managed to board a plane to Brazil without having secured the necessary entrance visa. When he arrived in São Paulo he was detained, denied passage, and put on a flight back to NYC. He’d blamed the corporate travel agent, the gay and moody Carlos, and demanded his firing.
Instead, the Andersen axe fell on him. In a presentation to the Conglomerate higher-ups, Dick and a group of Andersen top brass declared that the media team was floundering. Their recommendation: the Conglomerate should fire its one Black Y2K manager, clear out any of his remaining loyalists on what came to be known as the old media team, bring yet more Andersen consultants into the office, and let them staff a new media team. Heather, the Andersen person who had conceived this coup de grâce, naturally took the reins. Her first move was into the old media team’s office; her second charge was to populate her team. She needed someone familiar with the Process, someone of Andersen quality but not Andersen price. “You’d actually be helping with critical management considerations,” Cindy said, after she’d invited me, for the first time since my hiring, into her office. “Think of it as a promotion.”
I didn’t know what the media team did, and Leni had been placed on a private shit list for even asking. And the quality assurance team was almost finished with our QA of the inventory database—we had located around 6,700 typos, many of which had been remediated and all of which had been documented as the result of our efforts. After such a collective accomplishment, it felt like an odd time to jump ship. In talking to Cindy, however, I realized that just as the offer to join the media team was to be thought of as a promotion, it was also to be thought of as a choice.
Changing teams meant learning the ways of a new Cindy, namely a Heather, whose ward I became and whose office I now shared. In contrast to Cindy’s genuine enthusiasm for everything about management consulting, from the Play-Doh to the Process, Heather had a hardened corporate cynicism about her. She daily took calls from her interior decorator, Yves, who always seemed to be fifteen blocks away selecting upholstery and end-table pairings at Upper East Side boutiques. In those days before smartphone image-sharing, Yves would engage in elaborate ekphrastic descriptions of this piece or that. Heather put these conversations on speakerphone so she could continue typing with both hands, her manicured nails dancing above the keyboard with such intensity that often she had to ask Yves to repeat himself.
She overheard me, too, of course. Leni had learned that our Y2K office had a toll-free number that, in the case of an advertising-oriented Y2K emergency, Conglomerate employees could call to solicit expert advice: 1-800-Y2K-SAVE. But it was March—hardly time for the world’s advertisers to panic about a Time Bomb 2000 detonation—and the line was usually quiet. In the meantime, team members in the know had begun giving out the office 800 number. Friends anywhere in the world could chat with any team member toll free. For me, free long-distance telephony was an enjoyable extracurricular perk, a way to talk to my girlfriend in Massachusetts, ideally when Heather wasn’t around to listen.
The objective of the media team was to inquire into the state of Y2K preparedness for the radio stations, television stations, and newspapers that were the Conglomerate’s most important global media vending partners. We would do this by mailing them a Y2K questionnaire. Within a few weeks of our dour partnership, Heather had condensed our team’s trajectory into a single PowerPoint slide featuring so many capitalized common nouns that, looking back over my notes from the time today, I get the anachronistic sense of reading late-18th-century English.
New Media Team:
- Media is Y2K mission critical
- Is designing Y2K Questionnaire
- Will be contacting Media Vendors
- Will suggest Y2K Contingency Guidelines
The first bullet point was a bit of a non sequitur, more atmospheric than definitional, and I’m surprised it won Dick’s approval. The second? An outright fabrication—Heather downloaded our team’s generic questionnaire from a fly-by-night website called Y2K.com. The third bullet point, at least, was not entirely fake. The new media team had inherited from the old media team a bulging, imposing binder full of vendors’ mailing addresses. A data dump would transfer those addresses from the binder to a database, and those addresses would be used to send the questionnaire—but first, a QA of the media vendor database was required. Someone needed to identify the bugs and infelicities, the doubles and deletions, that even the cleanest data always seems to include. That someone would be me.
It fell to Leni to reveal what I should have already known: that mine had been a fake promotion. Perhaps I had been moved laterally, or perhaps even that was too optimistic of an assessment. Some clues were obvious: I hadn’t received a raise, for example. Others, more subtle. Quality assurance analyst has a certain corporate gravitas to it, but what would media vendor analyst mean on my resume if I wanted to leverage my Conglomerate time into a future Fortune 500 life or defect to Deloitte? She observed my simmering angst and provided a German term: Weltschmerz, or world-weariness. Leni said I was suffering from it. She advised me to open an E*TRADE account and to orient my portfolio toward biotech. She had staked out a position in Amgen and had, within some months, doubled her money.
It’s a tricky risk proposition to mail unsolicited and legally implicating requests to corporate partners all over the world, but the Process demanded it. What, the questionnaire asked, were they doing to prepare for Y2K? For example, were they contacting third-party suppliers to inquire about their Y2K readiness? We knew very well that those five thousand media vendors wouldn’t respond to our questionnaire, because the Conglomerate itself didn’t respond to the thousands of questionnaires it received from its own business partners asking basically the same question. Heather explained that the Process wouldn’t allow a response, due to the legal vulnerability created by the disclosure of such information to another company.
By summer, perhaps our final one, the Andersen people decided that in addition to documentation, personal contact with the Conglomerate agencies was needed to stress the importance of Y2K. Many team members began trotting the globe to conduct Y2K site visits, and the office took on a transient, desolate quality. The speckled dropped ceiling seemed to sag under the weight of the HVAC infrastructure. The Diet Pepsi began to leave a sour aftertaste. Leni decamped to Asia for two weeks to support a series of Y2K regional meetings. Cindy headed for Vancouver to instruct the Conglomerate’s Pacific Rim shops in the ways of the Process. Even Justin left his smoking lounge to take a pre-millennial working tour of Paris, Brussels, and London.
“This is your chance, LC,” Cindy informed me at the commencement of my own Y2K grand tour. My ambitious itinerary included cities I had long fantasized about visiting: Tokyo, Hong Kong, urban constellations along the eastern coast of Australia. There would be time for surreptitious tourism, too: the café in Buenos Aires where Marcel Duchamp played chess, the Zócalo and its murals in Mexico City. None of this is what Cindy meant, however. She told me of one team member who “earned so many frequent flier miles, he took his whole family to Sydney business class. They got a club-level suite at the harbor Hyatt.” Other team members had redeemed miles for Hawaii junkets, or converted them into points for cruise bookings, vouchers for rental-car upgrades, discounts on duty-free alcohol and tobacco purchases. Around me, I realized, had whirred an opaque economy whose currency was only now becoming apparent. Suddenly, the number of mission-critical Y2K situations throughout the Asia-Pacific region made sense: first-class tickets generate triple frequent flier miles. So did team members’ preoccupation with South Africa, a fourteen-hour flight from NYC, and not just Johannesburg: Durban and Cape Town, too, had become improbable locations of Y2K concern. Meanwhile, Canada, our proximal neighbor and English-speaking sibling, home to multiple Conglomerate shops but no long-haul flights, was judged to be fairly Y2K-prepared.
I became as greedy a reward accumulator as the next team member. But during many of my international media site visits, I felt the reliable tug of impostor syndrome. On a trip to Tokyo, in place of the usual audience of one or two media-vendor colleagues in a dingy conference room, two analysts and I were led into the agency’s unexpected auditorium to find that a sea of suited businessmen awaited us. Perhaps they had taken our intra-Conglomerate communications seriously: we had after all sent word that the world—or at least the advertising industry—might be ending in short order.
I had always taken some comfort in knowing I was speaking to people whose fluency in English could not be guaranteed. That distance in communication, real or perceived, had been crucial for me as I asked my series of absurd questions. If global technology ceased 1/1/2000, how would your agency continue its operations? The Tokyo shop, however, had arranged for a translator. In an English accent, she asked me to enunciate slowly so she could select her words with the kind of care a world-ending situation demanded.
“On January 1, 2000, will you still have . . .” I began. Concerns were shared about the Tokyo media market: “No Japanese media vendors responded to our Y2K preparedness questionnaire.” It was one of those out-of-body, disassociated experiences, so often provoked by trauma but here provoked by management consulting. As Leigh Claire the media-vendor analyst held forth, paused for translation, and then continued, a second, depersonalized Leigh Claire wandered off the stage, collected herself, and took notes. I was disturbed at my own ability to make millenarian pronouncements. Exponentially, like a QAer documenting her own documentation, I began to doubt my own self-doubt.
Many of my Japanese colleagues’ responses to my presentation concerned my appearance. My Conglomerate confrères noted how unusual it was to have a young woman with blond hair in their presence, the translator, a brunette woman herself, seemed somewhat embarrassed to convey. “It’s exciting for them,” she editorialized, “you know, the difference.” My blond hair color, the highlights—were these a naturally occurring phenomenon, they wondered. One male media hand after another went up: How old was I and what was my marital status? How long would I be in Tokyo and what were my plans? What were my recreational interests?
This attention to my person was not without benefit: it did distract from Y2K. If someone had asked about servers, routers, why the response rates to our questionnaire mailing in Japan were so low, what advice I had for Y2K compliance, I would have likely taken recourse to my own contingency plan, one developed just then—I would have spoken about the contingency of knowledge itself. Perhaps I had become a convert to the Process: the future could not be known until its moment arrived, and at that point it was no longer the future.
Late in that anxious August of 1999, a freak midnight flood struck New York City. Small puddles dotted the paving stones of Brooklyn’s sidewalks and the asphalt had that technicolor, water-mixed-with-gasoline slickness about it. The trains were delayed enough that I didn’t leave for Midtown until 10:30. I emerged from the damp morning into a transformed corporate world.
Cindy was perched with hawklike intensity inside a kind of bivouac she’d created between the office door and the elevator. She had a clipboard in one hand and a pen in the other. I had barely crossed the threshold when she broadcast clear across the stand of cubicles: “LC made it!” A different voice rang back: “Check.” Cindy had meant to affect a tone of relief at my arrival, but her excitement won out. The woman had spent more than a year preparing the office for a crisis, and now we had one: a flash flood. She herself had walked to work, she said. From the Upper West Side! She said this as though reporting on an alpine trek. A swift and unexpected nocturnal rain had swept through the city, Cindy related. “Some team members won’t make it,” she said, and, without any sense of her own drama, let a pause take hold before finishing her sentence: “into the office today.”
At Wednesday’s general meeting, Justin gave Cindy all kinds of commendations for her swift crisis management. The phone tree she had set up practically out of the ether. A collection of alternate transportation routes she’d compiled that team members could consult to solicit guidance on getting into the office in the event of a natural or—dare one say it—technological disaster. A buddy system she organized in which team members could locate a partner, alphabetically or by neighborhood. Already she had initiated the process of assembling the materials into a binder. Dick, her mentor and her boss, gave off a silent but approving glow. Cindy had saved the office, but the flood had exposed a striking irony: the Y2K office, so busy advising others on contingency plans, hadn’t developed its own.
“We all knew to expect the unexpected,” said Justin. It seemed like he might verge into contemplation and consider the idea of contingency in and of itself: can one really plan for something truly unknown? Instead, he took a more imperative course. “It’s balls to the wall from here on out. We’ve got four months.” His charge occasioned a flurry of activity, as team members sought to seize the day while it still existed to be seized. We had lived through a flash flood, and things had gone berserk in a dozen different ways. What would an actual millennial meltdown occasion?
By December 1999, the feeling at the Conglomerate’s Y2K office was that nothing more could really be done. This is a common enough cliché on the approach of any moment of finality, but was particularly apt in our case, since nothing really had been done. The travel diminished, and colleagues I’d last seen lounging under a shaded terrace in Milan were again denizens whom I passed in the office kitchenette, Pepsi product in hand. To mark the progress of the calendar and to demarcate our work, team members did what we did best: preside over the expenditure of large sums of corporate cash. With most air travel suspended, we trained our focus on accruing hotel reward points. A series of suites were booked at hotels around Midtown so team members could monitor the developing Y2K situation across the collection of global time zones with which so many of us had become familiar. These graveyard shifts did not require remaining awake, only sleeping within a several-block radius of the office—and with whomever one pleased. Christmas and New Year’s vacations were revoked, of course, but that meant that team members could enjoy a series of multicourse dinners on the Conglomerate’s tab, including those inflated prix fixe menus that always seem to pop up around the holidays.
Limited time remained, certainly in the office and possibly in the world. But the mood around Midtown seemed the furthest thing from that of end times, unless end times are distinguished by towering Christmas stockings and holiday wreaths the size of tractor tires. At a holiday party, we drank drinks named after 1980s financial instruments: a Poison Pill, an LBO, a Killer Bees, a Bear Hug. Not that those dated terms of corporate chicanery concerned team members: the Conglomerate’s stock price was as buoyant as the atmosphere, and team members who had taken some of their salary in options were feeling festive indeed.
Then, as in a modernist novel whose conclusion one knows will not provide an ending, our mission-critical moment, our finale—composed of the scaffolded segments of temporality that team members took such pleasure in delineating: second, minute, hour, day, week, month, year, decade, century, and, yes, millennium—came and went, as any other had and many others would. It seems both necessary and anticlimactic to state what everyone now knows: we survived, with minimal difficulties. Cindy dutifully reported that some automatic toilets in Singapore hadn’t flushed properly, stuck as they were in an expired world order. Other team members scoured news sources for tales of Y2K glitches and compiled a modest list. There was an electric garage door opener whose open and close buttons had become reversed; a selection of already-odd Sharper Image gadgets that had no discernible clock control but that had nonetheless broken down somewhere on the momentary midnight bridge between 12/31/1999 and 1/1/2000; and an industrial blender at a cattle-culling facility in Alberta whose whirl wouldn’t cease even when unplugged from a power source.
By the time team members reconvened in the conference room on the bright, crisp morning of Monday, January 3, 2000, even these millennial malfunctions seemed little more than a set of curious examples, representatives of a larger case of something whose dimensions had already begun to recede from the Conglomerate’s collective consciousness. The sensation of collapse would return, of course, with the two scandalous bankruptcies that would signal the end of the ’90s economy, the first great financial bubble of our era. Both Enron and WorldCom had had Andersen as their auditor, and on both projects, it turned out, Andersen had been operating far short of best practices. It had been systematically shredding records for Enron and faking others entirely at WorldCom—documentation problems for the ages. But in the first days of the millennium, I was surprised by how quickly Y2K disappeared from office discourse as though censored, and by how team members adopted an almost amnesiac approach to a period so many of us had let so eventfully structure our lives. There was no self-consciousness: Why did we do that? More one felt a sense of process: This happened.
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