In Constant Contact

problems, we're here. Is it clear?"

  "Thank you, Fred," Kandhi said, wanting to elbow him right off of his seat and onto the floor, but his snippy fit did the trick. The professional friends did finally shut up and let Kandhi conclude the initial training portion of the meeting. After that it got worse. They still had the guidelines to talk about. The guidelines consisted in "how to be a friend," and there was a lot of discussion around that tricky topic. Kandhi had thought she had it nailed down pretty tight. You were to "be there" for the client. You were to "assist" as best you can. You were to "be considerate" and "thoughtful." You were to "be positive". After all, it's a business. You were NOT to be an ordinary, average everyday friend with your own problems and issues. You were NOT to be a mere acquaintance, disinterested or uncaring. Neither were you to interfere, get over-involved, be clingy or needy. She thought she had all this summarized in a few bullet points, but it didn't go over very well.

  "What does any of that even mean?" Stanley bristled. "I know what a friend is. Why so complicated?"

  "I think we all need to know our own limitations," Velicia said, and Bilj added, thoughtfully, that it seemed to him, as the project was in beta, that they should be discovering the way it should work as they went along, rather than trying to pre-define it.

  "We have to have ground rules," Kandhi insisted.

  "No we don't," Stanley countered.

  "Some things are obvious," Bilj put in, "like don't be an asshole, for one thing."

  "Sometimes a true friend has to cross some boundaries," Velicia disagreed.

  "I call it the way I see it," Stanley insisted. "I ain't gonna try and be what I'm not. You put me into the program and I'll do it my way."

  "We each have our own identities," Velicia piped up. "You can't expect us to be standardized like robots."

  Just what I was thinking, Fred muttered to himself. We ought to have done this in software from beginning to end. Automated friends, not real ones. It would have been a whole lot easier to monitor, track, measure, and stick with the program. This whole thing's got disaster written all over it.

  "Can we find common ground?" Kandhi asked. "I do think you all have a point, or points, so to speak. We most certainly will have some trial and error to go through. We most certainly do want your own individual takes and approaches. We don't mean to pre-define all your actions. We just want to come to some common agreement on the most basic principles, like, "do good, not bad."

  "I'll go with that," Stanley said. "That's mostly my rule anyway. It's a business, like you said. In my barbershop, the customer is always right in the end. If it's some little thing, well, I can tell just how far I can go. Like, say if the guy is moaning about the Pirates, the fact that they always suck. I'll say, hey, at least we still got a major league franchise, but I won't tell him to eat shit and die, for example."

  "Nice," Fred grumbled.

  "A friend is there to be there," Bilj agreed, "but he's got to be a person too in some way. Otherwise it's going to seem fake."

  "I always put my own stamp on things," said Velicia, smiling and nodding.

  "Okay," Kandhi said, "Good enough. Now, as for the other guidelines."

  "What? There's more?" Stanley spat.

  "Almost done," Kandhi said, "I just wanted to let you all know that you do not have to be available twenty-four seven. You can state your own hours and let your friend know what they are, when it's convenient for you. If you can't work it out between you, let us know."

  "I imagine you'll know anyway," offered Bilj, "since you have constant live coverage of everything."

  "If you can't work it out, we'll do something," Kandhi went on. "Let's hope that you can. Now, we - I mean the three of us here - still have to do our initial session with your clients. After we've done that, we'll brief you on them and do formal introductions in another session. In the meantime, we've sent you a spreadsheet of some functional tests. We'd like you all to go through the list to make sure that we're all perfectly on the same page. Please try and do that within the next twenty-four hours. Okay?"

  "Fine," Stanley said, always the first to butt in.

  "Got it," said Bilj.

  "Yes," said Velicia, then they all said their goodbyes. After the connection was broken, Kandhi leaned back and said,

  "Well, that went pretty well, don't you think?"

  "It went," Fred mumbled.

  "Not so bad," Wen agreed.

  "Then we'll get to the clients next," Kandhi went on. "In two hours from now. See you then," and she stood up, gathered her laptop and exited the room. Fred and Wen lingered for a minute.

  "Bad things," Fred said.

  "Maybe so," said Wen. "Maybe nothing. My worst fear is it's going to be boring."

  "Stanley-style," nodded Fred.

  "Holy smokes," Wen laughed. "Is that guy old-fashioned or what?"

  "And the New Age Velicia," Fred snorted. "I was wondering where she was hiding her crystals."

  "But Bilj seems all right," Wen added thoughtfully.

  "Has a clue," Fred reluctantly assented.

  "Well, back to the grinder," he added, and the two of them also picked up their things and took off.

  - - - - - - - - -

  Fred's disgust for the project went beyond his usual negative attitude. Sure, he was a whiner and complainer on the best of days but lately, since he'd been assigned to 'Fiend International', as he called it, he was closer to quitting than ever. Wen Li paid no attention to his "moods." She didn't understand him, never did and never would, and didn't care to at all. For her, it was all about doing the job. Ethics, morality, justice, none of those abstract concepts ever invaded her world of if, else, and then. She was a thorough professional, having been a developer in her homeland for several years in such industries as banking and insurance. She'd welcomed the opportunity to come to America and didn't even care what line of work she went into. She would always do whatever it took, and she would always excel and exceed expectations. This was her way and it was working for her. Emotional attachment to projects and companies and machines seemed unnatural to Wen. She still lived by the rules her grandmother laid down while raising her: be real, be present, and maximize every moment. She believed she was doing so now, every day. She took every occasion as an opportunity to experience a facet of existence. If she came off seeming somewhat antiseptic, well, this was only her way. Some day she knew she would meet a compatible match. Until then she was content to continue the life her grandmother had left her. In a sense, she felt she was merely the next incarnation of that estimable woman.

  Fred did not invite Wen to lunch. He knew she would only want soup, and he was tired to death of those Vietnamese steakums in dishwater. He went his own way instead, hurrying off to what he hoped would be a long, quiet lunch, perhaps sitting in the park all alone with some lamb biryani and the dreary Inspector Mole novel he was seemingly unable to finish. The novel was short, a blessing in itself, but confusing, with too many characters and a plot like a pinball machine. His envisioned lunch plan, though, was not to be had. Puku Taray, from Marketing, caught him on the way out the door and there was no getting rid of that leech.

  Puku was in on all the top secret memos, which was the only reason Fred even tolerated him. Now, as they made their way through the line at the Indian buffet, he hinted that he wanted to know more about the intention of this project. Puku was only happy to oblige.

  "It's a service," bubbled the small, thin, happy young man behind his own thick, black-rimmed glasses. "Incremental charges. Brilliant, really. It was all the idea of Chris, you know. He gleaned it from the personal experience of his life, so he said."

  Everyone knew about Chris, the other founder. This man, whose last name nobody seemed to know, was the long-time best friend and public side of the other, also-last-name-less founder. Together they had started World Weary Avengers based on a surreptitious and thoroughly maniacal personal stalking device and had grown the company through other equally invasive and outrageous inventions. Ch
ris was tall and handsome, with a full head of curly blond locks and a look about him that somehow managed to invoke instant and boundless obedience and obsequiousness from everyone in the world. People who didn't even know him would rush to give him things, to ask what he wanted, to grant him the most personal favors. It was notorious. The man lived in a mansion that had been randomly donated to him by the world's seventeenth richest man, and drove a car that a world-famous athlete "thought he might like." People didn't talk in their normal voices to Chris, but stuttered and stammered in his presence. Chris himself was modest and mild, never asked for anything, never presented himself as anything but a normal guy in his mid-thirties, but he might as well have worn a crown on his head, the way people fussed all around him. Even Fred was known to crack a smile in the presence of Chris, so powerful was this innate charisma.

  "What does that guy know about actual friends?" Fred snorted. "He's surrounded by sycophants constantly."

  "People need to be needed," Puku assured him. "This is one of the points. We can guarantee such a thing, if they pay."

  "Well, yeah," Fred replied. "That's the basis of the world's oldest profession."

  "Profession?" Puke was not aware of the idiom.

  "Whores," Fred said in a low tone. "Guaranteed to give you, you know, for money."

  "Yes of course," Puku nodded eagerly. "Chris even referenced such a fact. We have much we can learn, he told Marketing