Tonight scrawled in blood red chalk, in front of the steps of my old south Brooklyn walk-up, read the words, “U GO DOWN 101010101”.
I have to tell this tale in case something happens to me and I don’t get another chance.
It all began with lunch.
“I once threw a cat out a window!” he blurted, mouth full of burrito. He was my new manager. His name was Tony.
“Was there a fire?” I asked.
“Naw man!” Tony responded, his voice no longer just edgy. It was now agitated too.
“Were you on the first floor?” I asked.
I tried a slow deep breath through my nostrils. I felt my trapezius muscles tense.
“Naw! It wasn’t no first floor!” Tony retorted. The edge sharper. The agitation more frenzied.
Now his full mouth soliloquy gnashed meth fast. I blinked hard.
“Why did you do that?” I asked, releasing the breath that could never have been deep enough for this meshugge.
But here I was. Tony was the one who interviewed and hired me when nobody else wanted to. And now Tony looked warpath angry.
“I DON’T KNOW!” he barked. A man and a woman with ID cards around their necks looked up from their big salads then quickly away. Their faces wore an uncomfortable look.
I was jealous. I wished I was merely uncomfortable. What I was, was raging nauseous. I could feel adrenaline enter my stomach with acid and gravitas.
My skin was crawling beneath the July sun while the yachts bobbed nonchalantly in the marina behind our office as we ate our lunch.
This was my third day on the job. And it was right then and there I heard that little voice in my head that I was first introduced to at the age of five when my parents split inform me, once again, “I was doomed.”
I thought of my bank account. I thought of rent. I thought about my advancing age. I thought about the job interview at a big bank I had just walked out of two weeks before that. Why had I walked out? Because the dude wrote down a bunch of names of fruit on a piece of paper with associated prices and then a kumquat with no price and asked me how much it would cost.
Like I say, I had a relationship with IT full stack development gigs and the inevitable egos, irrationalities and EMO like prima donna pettiness the way Sean Penn had a relationship with paparazzi in the 1980s.
And there it was again. That little familiar voice whispering in my ear; dude; you are fucking doomed like Christ on the cross. You are doomed like Joan of Arc at a French fry. You are doomed like the third season of Family Guy. You are Charlie Brown football interruptus doomed.
So, after spending the better part of the last twenty-five years as a software developer, engineer or whatever the cool kids are calling my job these days I can tell you this with no equivocation; I.T. consulting sucks.
Why does it suck?
Firstly, as a consultant or sub-contractor you are not subject to the vast majority of rules, regulations and policies that protect the full time corporate employee from being treated like a disposable object. Generally speaking you are subject to one and only one rule; the golden rule; i.e.; they who’s got the gold makes the rules. And, I thought I was okay with that. I’ve tried full time work and my soul bled.
Hell, I wouldn’t even be a consultant if my comic book mail order subscription club hadn’t gone belly up during the infamous Comic Book Distributor Wars of the mid to late 1990s. But I don’t feel sorry for myself; sometimes a dream ends in bliss and sometimes, or always in my case; fiasco. But I never believed in evil before. I never looked into a face and saw true evil. I can’t say that anymore.
Well, like I said I knew IT consulting sucks but what I did not know is the operation I’m sub-contracting for is being terrorized by a malevolent spirit more evil and insidious than anything I’ve ever dealt with. And about the only thing I am absolutely certain of is the malevolent force is not feline.
Fast forward a couple of years later and I have witnessed Tony yell at my colleagues at the top of lungs menacingly; ladies who had given over three decades of their lives to the company helpless in his verbal assaults. I have seen Tony shred everybody’s code always finding a reason why it was unacceptable thus ensuring everyone lived in a culture of sabotage and chaos.
I have seen Tony get three other consultants fired for being, “unable to do the job,” after he lied about non-existent memory leaks to Mohan that in the end turned out to be simple configuration issues Tony willfully prevented my predecessors from fixing.
But somehow, perhaps because I grew up with a crazy mad single divorced Mom, I knew how to read Tony. Slowly I put together my resources making lateral moves with Tony’s boss Mohan that continuously minimized my time with Tony. And then I was granted full time remote status.
I thought we were free of Tony. So much for keeping hope alive.
And then Mohan informed us a couple of weeks ago we were subject to a disaster recovery exercise and I had to build a new version of our application and deploy it to a new site in less than twenty-four hours. And that’s when Tony began to shred me and my team’s work.
He cornered me in a meeting and told me, “You can lose your job. I don’t think you can do it. It’s not the 80s anymore! It’s not the 80s! Get it? You shot down my idea to trash the data dictionary and rewrite that old piece of shit! You made me look bad! Yea dude, you can lose your job!”
“Tony, if that’s the case I will just thank you all for a wonderful two years or so. I’ve met so many wonderful people. But I have a call so if you’ll excuse me I have a hard stop now.”
“Yea! No problem! No problem!” Tony barked untruthfully.
I called a meeting with Elena and Dina. They had been there running the main system for over thirty years. They had worked with all my predecessors. They had watched them disappear into the aether as one by one they had incurred Tony’s wrath and then, had poisoned Mohan against them. And then they were gone. I told Elena and Dina I had gone to Mohan and I was going to tell tales.
Later that day two years of evil bubbled to the surface. The cat. Tony’s spastic-macho stories of how he always wielded a baseball bat in hand whenever answering the front door of his Bronx home.
Tony had once explained to me; “I’m from the Bronx! I hate liars. I know jiu-jitsu and I can dead-lift 400 lbs. Anybody rollup on my front door looking for trouble; batter up!”
The following Monday after the cat incident Tony, mouth full of donut turned to me and said, “I was at Chuck E. Cheese with my son and he bit this kid and the mother came up to my son and I said, ‘OHNONOBODYCOMEUPTOMYSON!!!!!IWASGONNA
And there I was finally, two years later in a meeting with Mohan and the company’s chief compliance officer, Dave. I felt the dam burst.
I told Mohan how Tony had once screamed at Elena on my fourth day on the job in front of the office so loud that my ear drums hurt for hours. I told Mohan the story of how once Daisy, the office admin and my friend who welcomed me since day one, watched sunsets with me and sat next to me offered him a homemade cookie only to be barked at.
Tony woofed and growled, his three chins trembling with rage, “I don’t eat candy!”
Fucking moron couldn’t even tell the difference between confection and baked goods.
Daisy, unperturbed, offered me a cookie. I gratefully accepted and as Daisy walked away Tony suddenly swiveled at me, eyes preternaturally the color of wildfire, spittle dripping from the corner of his mouth then blurted out, “I hate HER!”
Six months later Daisy was dead. There had never been an announcement formally. It was just casually mentioned in a meeting. I was bereft.
And there I was, for the first time in my entire life, ratting someone out to their boss.
I finished telling my twisted Tony tales to Mohan.
Mohan asked Dina and Elena if what I said was true.
Elena explained that Tony was a bully and had humiliated people in meetings for things that they simply never did or he had misunderstood. Dina explained people had made remarks or complained informally countless times and that things were, “not very pleasant with Tony.”
Finally, when all was said done Mohan said, “Well, I can’t have silos. Tony is our top architect. I need you to still meet with him regularly and I need this disaster recovery done fast.”
“He threw a cat out a window, Mohan!” I heard myself exclaim. “I don’t think we can trust him with a disaster recovery. I think he’s a disaster waiting to happen.”
Mohan looked at me and said, “I have worked with some evil horrible people. Sometimes we all have to. If I am nothing you know that I am pragmatic.”
“I won’t give him any oxygen,” I heard my voice say. “I have to go. We’ll have to find a way around but right now I’m too upset for this meeting.”
A few days later a recruiter called me with a job that seemed my perfect escape.
It turned out it was at my company doing the exact same thing I do.
The recruiter said, “Man, I think something is up.”
I thanked him. He didn’t have to do that.
The next day I was told by Mohan I have until Friday to simulate a disaster and recovery in 24 hours.
It feels like a setup.
Then tonight I saw it in the chalk.
U GO DOWN 101010101
I looked around and I thought I saw an ominous fat fucking figure that looked like Tony under the tears of the weeping willow that stands guard over the community garden across the street from my apartment.
I turned and broke into a jog to cross the street. Then with the Doppler-esque certainty of the siren’s increasing red glare I was prevented by an FDNY ambulance from crossing.
When it finally passed there was no sign of Tony.
But, even more disturbingly, when I went back to take a picture of the red chalked threat at the foot of my building; it too was gone.
Just. Gone.
I am not superstitious. I am a rational person and I know what I saw. I know what I saw.
The dread I feel now in the pit of my stomach is like none other and somewhere in the distance I hear the sound of a tortured cat’s mewling. I feel like I am the victim in a crime not yet committed.
Please advise?