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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
She got some comments from a few of the protestors, some details. Worked for Kodak or Duracell all their lives. Gave everything to the company. Took voluntary pay cuts under the old management five times in ten years to keep the business afloat, now facing layoffs as a big fat thank-you-suckers. So many kids. Such and such a mortgage.
She knew these stories from Detroit: she'd filed enough copy with varying renditions of it to last a lifetime. Silicon Valley was supposed to be different. Growth and entrepreneurship -- a failed company was just a stepping-stone to a successful one, can't win them all, dust yourself off and get back to the garage and start inventing. There's a whole world waiting out there!
Mother of three. Dad whose bright daughter's university fund was raided to make ends meet during the "temporary" austerity measures. This one has a Down's Syndrome kid and that one worked through three back surgeries to help meet production deadlines.
Half an hour before she'd been full of that old Silicon Valley optimism, the sense that there was a better world a-borning around her. Now she was back in that old rustbelt funk, the feeling that she was witness not to a beginning, but to a perpetual ending, a cycle of destruction that would tear down everything solid and reliable in the world.
She packed up her laptop and stepped out into the parking lot. Across the freeway, she could make out the bones of the Great America fun-park roller-coasters whipping around and around in the warm California sun.
These little tech-hamlets down the 101 were deceptively utopian. All the homeless people were miles north on the streets of San Francisco, where pedestrian marks for panhandling could be had, where the crack was sold on corners instead of out of the trunks of fresh-faced, friendly coke-dealers' cars. Down here it was giant malls, purpose-built dot-com buildings, and the occasional fun-park. Palo Alto was a university-town theme-park, provided you steered clear of the wrong side of the tracks, the East Palo Alto of slums that were practically shanties.
Christ, she was getting melancholy. She didn't want to go into the office -- not today. Not when she was in this kind of mood. She would go home and put her blazer back in the closet and change into yoga togs and write her column and have some good coffee.
She nailed up the copy in an hour and e-mailed it to her editor -- no e-mail-savvy newsrooms in Detroit! -- and poured herself a glass of Napa red (likewise, the local vintages in Michigan left something to be desired) and settled onto her porch, overlooking the big reservoir off 280 near Mountain View.
The house had been worth a small fortune at the start of the dot-boom, but now it was worth a large fortune and then some. She could conceivably sell this badly built little shack with its leaky hot-tub for enough money to retire on, if she wanted to live out the rest of her days in Sri Lanka or Nebraska.
"You've got no business feeling poorly, young lady," she said to herself. "You are as well set-up as you could have dreamt, and you are right in the thick of the weirdest and best time the world has yet seen. And Landon Kettlewell knows your name."
She finished the wine and opened her PowerBook. It was dark enough now with the sun set behind the hills that she could read the screen. The Web was full of interesting things, her e-mail full of challenging notes from her readers, and her editor had already signed off on her column.
She was getting ready to shut the lid and head for bed, so she pulled her mail once more.
From: kettlewell-l@skunkworks.kodacell.com
To: afleeks@sjmercury.com
Subject: Embedded journalist?
Thanks for keeping me honest today, Andrea. It's the hardest question we're facing today: what happens when all the things you're good at are no good to anyone anymore? I hope we're going to answer that with the new model.
You do good work, madam. I'd be honored if you'd consider joining one of our little teams for a couple months and chronicling what they do. I feel like we're making history here and we need someone to chronicle it.
I don't know if you can square this with the Merc, and I suppose that we should be doing this through my PR people and your editor, but there comes a time about this time every night when I'm just too goddamned hyper to bother with all that stuff and I want to just DO SOMETHING instead of ask someone else to start a process to investigate the possibility of someday possibly maybe doing something.
Will you do something with us, if we can make it work? 100 percent access, no oversight? Say you will. Please.
Your pal,
Kettlebelly
She stared at her screen. It was like a work of art; just look at that return address, "kettlewell-l@skunkworks.kodacell.com" -- for kodacell.com to be live and accepting mail, it had to have been registered the day before. She had a vision of Kettlewell checking his e-mail at midnight before his big press conference, catching Rat-Toothed Freddy's column, and registering kodacell.com on the spot, then waking up some sysadmin to get a mail server answering at skunkworks.kodacell.com. Last she'd heard, Lockheed-Martin was threatening to sue anyone who used their trademarked term "skunkworks" to describe a generic R&D department. That meant that Kettlewell had moved so fast that he hadn't even run this project by legal. She was willing to bet that he'd already ordered new business cards with the address on it.
There was a guy she knew, an editor at a mag who'd assigned himself a plum article that he'd run on his own cover. He'd gotten a book-deal out of it. A half-million dollar book-deal. If Kettlewell was right, then the exclusive book on the inside of the first year at Kodacell could easily make that advance. And the props would be mad, as the kids said.
Kettlebelly! It was such a stupid frat-boy nickname, but it made her smile. He wasn't taking himself seriously, or maybe he was, but he wasn't being a pompous ass about it. He was serious about changing the world and frivolous about everything else. She'd have a hard time being an objective reporter if she said yes to this.
She couldn't possibly decide at this hour. She needed a night's sleep and she had to talk this over with the Merc. If she had a boyfriend, she'd have to talk it over with him, but that wasn't a problem in her life these days.
She spread on some expensive duty-free French wrinkle-cream and brushed her teeth and put on her nightie and double-checked the door locks and did all the normal things she did of an evening. Then she folded back her sheets, plumped her pillows and stared at them.
She turned on her heel and stalked back to her PowerBook and thumped the spacebar until the thing woke from sleep.
From: afleeks@sjmercury.com
To: kettlewell-l@skunkworks.kodacell.com
Subject: Re: Embedded journalist?
Kettlebelly: that is one dumb nickname. I couldn't possibly associate myself with a grown man who calls himself Kettlebelly.
So stop calling yourself Kettlebelly, immediately. If you can do that, we've got a deal.
Andrea
There had come a day when her readers acquired e-mail and the paper ran her address with her byline, and her readers had begun to write her and write her and write her. Some were amazing, informative, thoughtful notes. Some were the vilest, most bilious trolling. In order to deal with these notes, she had taught herself to pause, breathe and re-read any e-mail message before clicking send.
The reflex kicked in now and she re-read her note to Kettlebelly -- Kettlewell! -- and felt a crimp in her guts. Then she hit send.
She needed to pee, and apparently had done for some time, without realizing it. She was on the toilet when she heard the ping of new mail incoming.
From: kettlewell-l@skunkworks.kodacell.com
To: afleeks@sjmercury.com
Subject: Re: Embedded journalist?
I will never call myself Kettlebelly again.
Your pal,
Kettledrum.
Oh-shit-oh-shit-oh-shit. She did a little two-step at her bed's edge. Tomorrow she'd go see her editor about this, but it just felt right, and exciting, like she was on the brink of an event that would change her life forever.
It took her three hours of mindless Web-surfing, including a truly dreary Hot-Or-Not clicktrance, before she was able to lull herself to sleep. As she nodded off, she thought that Kettlewell's insomnia was as contagious as his excitement.
