The bosses in the IS department had made it known that the staff should all be cross-trained in at least one other skill, a sure sign that a downsizing was in the works. Frank Simpson was a system engineer, and the system engineers worked under the same vice president as the people on the help desk, so it was inevitable, if not necessarily logical, that the system engineers would be cross-trained with the help desk.
If any of the bosses thought it odd that the help desk spent much of its time holding the hands of those in the company who were least computer-literate, while the system engineers were highly skilled and charged with making sure the company computers didn't crash, they apparently didn't feel it was worth pursuing in the high-level meetings where these matters were decided.
For a month, Frank would spend four hours a day in a help desk cube, teamed with Bob Feller. The help desk staff had headsets instead of ordinary receivers, and the headsets plugged into boxes with extra ports, so that more than one person with a headset could listen in on the same call. That was what Frank was supposed to do: when the help desk call system assigned a call to Bob, Frank would listen in and learn how the work was done. Nobody had quite figured out how the help desk would learn the work of the system engineers, but they'd cross that bridge when they came to it. Quite possibly, Frank reflected, the big layoff would hit before the bosses had to deal with that.
But here's how the first call on the first day went:
"Hi. It's me. Penny."
"Hi, Penny," said Bob. Frank just listened.
"I'm never going to get this right."
"OK," said Bob. "Let's go over it one more time." He looked at Frank and made a vague gesture with his fingers, not quite fluttering them, next to his temple. It certainly wasn't the standard gesture with the index finger twirling in circles -- it was vaguer than that, and meant to be vaguer. The problem wasn't completely clear. Perhaps it wasn't even a problem, or maybe not a problem that could be treated as a problem.
Bob took her through how to fill in the cells in the spreadsheet, one more time. When Penny hung up, he explained, "She calls every morning right about now. She gets her coffee and checks her e-mail, and then she calls us. We take her through the same stuff every morning." He wasn't judgmental about it. Was something missing where Penny was concerned? Who could say?
The unwritten rules were that nobody could say anything about it to anyone who mattered, since that would cause a war between Penny's department (which was accounting) and IS. The help desk people weren't paid much, but they were paid more than junior clerks in accounting, and if the help desk even hinted at any sort of problem with a junior clerk's retentive powers, all the resentment that the unwritten rules required accounting normally to suppress could be released, under those rules, all at once, and at a high level. Nobody wanted that.
And maybe what was missing with Penny, if anything was in fact missing, was simply the piece that was missing from just about anyone who went to work for a big company. Penny basically needed to be told what to do, and if anything, that was the sort of person human resources liked. But of course, human resources also liked people who understood the unwritten rules.
The second call of the day went like this:
"Dude!"
Feller gave Frank a look, pulled the connector for Frank's headset out of the port, and mouthed the word "personal". Apparently this was another unwritten rule: if you were training on the help desk, and your host got a personal call, your host was entitled to disconnect your headset, and you were expected to find some other way to occupy your time for the duration of the call.
Frank stayed in his seat for a while, but it was plain that this call was going to go on for some time. Feller had his head turned away and was speaking with his friend in a near-whisper. The best Frank could make out was that they were discussing, in detail, everything that had transpired in their lives since their last call, which apparently had been late the previous afternoon.
He got up, wandered over to the coffee room, and poured himself a cup. He idly browsed the notices and memos on the bulletin board, but they were exactly the same as the ones in the coffee room in his own area. Now and then he glanced out the door to Bob Feller's cube to see if Feller was still on the call. He was.
Finally, he peered out the door again, and Feller motioned for him to come back. The rest of the morning was spent, between Feller's own trips to the coffee room and subsequent visits to the men's room, with people who'd forgotten their passwords or who'd found bugs in the company programs.
As his mornings with Bob Feller progressed,, though, there were always two predictable events: the call from Penny and, often, several calls from Bob's friend. The caller display showed that the friend was calling from within the company, but beyond that, Frank couldn't tell much about him. He wondered for a while if the two were gay, but he began to discount that: Feller was married, which in itself didn't prove anything, but the gay guys he knew were both less repressed and more discreet. This was more like a teenage crush, though Feller was at least 30. If there was a sexual side to it, it was inchoate.
Every time his friend would call, Feller would pull the plug for Frank's headset from its port, and soon enough Frank learned simply to head for the coffee room and wait for 20 minutes or half an hour until he got the signal from Feller to come back. This in turn began to raise questions in his mind: what happened to the rest of the help desk when Feller was whispering at length on the phone with his friend?
"How does the system work?" he asked Al Shultz, one of the system engineers, when he was back in his own area one afternoon. "It seems to me that if he's talking on a personal call for half an hour at a time, the rest of the help desk has to take up the slack."
"Of course it does," said Shultz. "Actually, the help desk supervisor gets reports up the wazoo. How many calls each analyst takes each day, where the calls come from, whether the problem has been solved. All the supervisor needs to do is read the reports."
"And you think maybe he hasn't been reading the reports."
"I know it."
"How?"
"Let's just say I have my sources."
"But if Henry isn't doing his job, why. . ." Henry was the name of the help desk supervisor.
"Remember that flap about the help desk last year? The system users tried to get an insurrection going. They were complaining that their people spent too long on hold when they called, and once they finally got through, they didn't get much help. So the powers that be suspended Henry as supervisor, but they didn't replace him, and he even stayed in his cube, getting paid without a job."
"Oh, that's right," said Frank. "So then the help desk staff got together a petition asking for Henry to be reinstated because they thought he was a great guy."
"Right, and they put him back."
No doubt, Frank began to reflect, the bosses liked Henry because he never violated the unwritten rules. You could screw up in ways that a naïve observer might think would get you fired, but as long as you followed the unwritten rules, you were OK. The complaints, after all, came from outside the IS department. That was something for the CIO to handle, and he was too much of a big-picture guy to bother with that kind of thing.. But inside the department, there were no complaints about Henry at all.
A week or so later, the cross-training authorities scheduled both Frank and Bob to attend an all-day conference on help desks at a local college. As Frank drove over that morning, he heard a traffic report on the radio that said one of the highways was jammed due to construction work, but it didn't affect his route, and he forgot about it. The conference was even more boring than he'd expected, but he stuck it out. At least he got free Danish pastries. He kept looking out for Bob, but he never saw him.
The next morning, when he got to work, he had a phone mail message from his boss, telling him to come to his office as soon as he got in. "I hear you weren't at the conference yesterday," his boss said.
"What?" Frank answered. "Hold on. I have my parking receipt right in my wallet." It had a check-in time in the early morning and a check-out time in late afternoon.
His boss seemed reluctant to review the evidence, and the unwritten rules would have had him on firm ground if he'd refused to look at the receipt. But the time stamps were hard to ignore. "Well, OK," he finally said. "I guess we can't prove you weren't there. But what about the blocked highway?"
"What blocked highway?" Then he remembered the traffic report.
"Bob Feller called me from his home yesterday morning. He said the highway to the college was blocked, and nobody could get there. So he turned around and went home."
"One of the highways was blocked," said Frank. "That wasn't the direction I was coming from. I got there just fine."
"Well, Bob Feller told me the highway was blocked, and you wouldn't have been able to get to the conference. He said you were probably taking the day off and not telling me."
Frank spent the rest of the morning pondering the significance of this episode, as he waited in the help desk coffee room for Feller to get off his personal calls. "Let me see if I can get this straight," he told Al Shultz later that day. "Feller decides he doesn't want to wait in a traffic jam, so he turns around, goes home, and takes the day off. And what does he do? He calls our boss and tells him I've probably turned around, gone home, and taken the day off."
"Look at it the way Feller would," said Shultz. "He was worried that you'd show up at the conference, not see him there, and snitch him off. That's what he'd do, after all. So he decided to beat you to it."
"How does that fix him not going to work?"
"Remember that Henry doesn't care anyhow. That's why they had a petition to put him back in as their boss."
"So what was he trying to accomplish by calling our boss? I still don't see that."
"What, you're not following current events? There's a big layoff coming up. He's doing anything he can to ding anyone who might be competition for his own job."
"Oh, I see. I'm sitting in his cube every morning, and he figures I'm his replacement."
"He may figure that, but he's wrong," said Al. "Remember that you make twice what he makes. He flatters himself if he thinks they'd replace him with a system engineer."
"I'm sure he flatters himself," said Frank. "I'd quit if they put me in that job."
"You may not have that option," said Al. "I hope you're aware of that."
And in fact, the unwritten rules being what they were, Frank's boss recognized that he couldn't bring formal discipline against him for supposedly not attending the conference, but that didn't stop him from shopping the story around with the other bosses. The only thing Frank had to prove his case, after all, was a lousy receipt, while his co-worker actually saw that he hadn't been to the conference. "Why go to the trouble of writing him up?" his boss asked when the others wondered why he didn't take action. "We'll just put him on the layoff list."
And as Frank had surmised, the layoff arrived before anyone needed to think about how they'd actually cross-train anyone for the system engineer jobs. But the bosses had a good answer: the system engineers had been cross-trained on the help desk, so the big-picture people were reassured. When the layoff came, Frank got six months severance and everyone at the help desk got to keep their jobs. It seemed to him that he had the better deal.