“If you’re more comfortable with thirty-five millimeter slides, Dr. Lancaster, we can certainly accommodate,” the tech was saying. His name was Ray, a good guy, but he had the habitually droopy eyes of a regular weed smoker.
“You can?” Dr. Lancaster replied, the surprise evident in his voice.
“Sure,” Ray said, looking up at me as I joined their little circle. “I’ve got a few slide projectors on the truck. If Alan here gives the word, I can get one set up in the back of the ballroom and then use the i-mag camera to send your slide image to all the main and delay screens.”
Dr. Lancaster turned my way. “Are you Alan Larson?”
“I am, Dr. Lancaster,” I said, shaking his extended hand. “I’m sorry for being late.”
“No trouble at all. But I hope you can understand what this young man just said.”
I could and I did, and in a few minutes more the plan was approved and understood by all. It was a simple fix, really. Something that only required a little creativity and an AV budget in excess of six figures. My mind, however, was frankly not on Dr. Lancaster and his technology phobia, but on the conversation Mary and I had just had.
I was in trouble. That much was clear. I had challenged her leadership and, at least from Mary’s point of view, disrespected her. I had been with the company long enough to know what eventually happened to people who did that.
After the keynote session began, and Dr. Lancaster was satisfactorily embarked on his 45-minute presentation, I quietly stepped out of the ballroom and called home.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Jenny. It’s me.”
“Alan? Oh my god, what’s wrong?”
“What makes you think something’s wrong?”
“It’s the middle of the day. You never call home from the Annual Conference in the middle of the day.”
“You’re right. Something’s wrong.”
“What is it?”
I told her in as few brushstrokes as possible. Caroline’s desperate call. Amy’s cackling laugh. Gerald’s drubbing down. Mary’s suspicious ignorance. My fateful decision. It took a lot longer than I expected to get it all out. About halfway through I started pacing back and forth across the teal and green carpet in the ballroom foyer, but Jenny remained patiently silent throughout. Only when I was clearly finished did she offer any words of wisdom.
“Alan, honey. You’re fucked.”
I stopped pacing.
“I am, aren’t I?”
“You crossed the dragon. She’s going to roast you alive.”
I was nodding my head. “And not quickly. She’s going to make my life miserable.”
There was a strange silence on the phone. For a moment I thought the call had been dropped.
“Jenny?”
“I’m here, Alan.”
“What are we going to do?”
This time there was no hesitation.
“We’re going to get you that new job. Have you had a chance to call Quest Partners yet?”
“No,” I said, starting to pace again. “Maybe you should call for me.”
“I can’t do that, Alan. They want to talk to you.”
“I’m juggling a lot of balls here, Jenny. Can you at least find out if they want me to fly to Boston, or if they are going to send someone to interview me.”
“They want you to fly to Boston. They even said they would pay for the ticket.”
“They did?”
“Yes, I told you that last night.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Yes, I did. I could tell you weren’t listening to me.”
I stopped. Now it was my turn to nurture a strange silence. Jenny often accused me of not listening to her when we spoke on the phone. And to be fair, I often didn’t. She had a habit of drifting off into the details of her day and I usually had the details of my own day on my mind. But this time there was something different in her tone of voice. Something hostile. And threatening.
“Alan?”
“I’m here, Jenny.”
“You need to find time to call them soon. Now more than ever. Do you or do you not have the name and number?”
“Text it to me and I’ll call and leave a message late tonight. I’ll have to look at my calendar and find a good time for a vacation day. Are there any days in the next two weeks I should avoid being gone?”
Jenny and I had long ago synchronized our calendars, but she filled hers up with so many tentative appointments and reminders that I could never tell what was adjustable and what was carved in stone. If she needed me to do something, the only surefire way of confirming that was to ask her, assuming nothing.
“I’ll adjust. Pick the day that works best for you and get it done.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Do you want to talk to your son?”
“What, are we done?”
“Alan, I’m in the middle of about twelve things right now.”
It was funny how easy and difficult phone conversations with Jenny were. We’re married, and have been for enough years that getting down to business is simple and straight-forward, but even so, there are certain things that never seem to get said.
“How are you feeling today?” It suddenly felt like the most important question on earth.
“I’m fine. Don’t you have to get back to your conference?”
“No, it can run without me for a few more minutes. I want to know how you are doing. I love you.”
“Well, I love you, too. And I really am feeling fine.”
“How’s Crazy Horse?”
“Fine. I have an appointment with Dr. Andrews this afternoon.”
“But nothing’s wrong?”
“No. Just a well baby check.”
“Okay. Let me know what Andrews says.”
“I will. But don’t you dare call me until after you’ve spoken to Quest Partners.”
Before I could respond one of the doors to the ballroom burst open and Bethany Bishop appeared. She looked quickly left, then right, and, spotting me, violently motioned for me to come inside.
“Got to go, honey.”
“Sure. Talk to you later.”
“Alan!” Bethany shout-whispered at me. “We need you!”
I was already moving towards her, tucking my phone back in my pocket. “What is it?”
“Dr. Lancaster is freaking out!”
That didn’t sound good. As soon as I stepped inside the ballroom, Lancaster’s amplified voice filled my world, it didn’t sound kind and pleasant like it had in the speaker ready room.
“Hello?” it said caustically. “Is there anyone there? Can someone please fix my slide?”
I looked up at one of the delay screens and quickly took in a complicated scatter diagram of some kind. Then I looked back to the AV riser and saw a flurry of movement and activity. Amidst the murmur of an audience interrupted, I practically leapt up the riser stairs.
“What’s going on?” I demanded.
“His slide’s in backwards,” Ray said. “I need to pull the carousel and reverse it.”
“Hello?” the voice continued to taunt. “Is anyone back there?”
“Go!” I said, and Ray leapt off the riser and practically sprinted over to where he had previously set up the 35mm slide projector.
I looked up and saw the perspectively diminutive form of Dr. Douglas Lancaster at the far front of the room, on our stage, standing behind our podium, his hand up to shield his eyes from our spotlight, peering with difficulty into the darkness for someone to help him.
“Give me the VOG mic,” I said to the AV tech stationed by a soundboard larger than my kitchen table.
Without question, he picked up a handheld microphone, switched it on, and handed it over to me.
“We’re attending to the problem now, Dr. Lancaster,” I said into it, my voice booming like the voice of God out over the ballroom sound system.
“Well, thank heavens,” Dr. Lancaster said. “It appears I haven’t been abandoned after all.”
A nervous chuckle rippled through the room, and suddenly all the projection screens went blinding white. Looking over, I saw that Ray had popped the slide carousel off the projector and was in the process of plucking the offending slide out of its slot so he could reverse it.
“Oh my!” Dr. Lancaster gasped. “That’s not better, that’s worse!”
“One moment, please,” I said as calmly as I could into the microphone, but Ray was already clicking the carousel back into place, and as quick as that the slide with the complicated scatter diagram was back on all the screens.
“Eureka!” Dr. Lancaster exclaimed. “That’s what we’re supposed to be looking at. Now, if I can bring everyone back to where we left off, I wanted to point out this large cluster of data points in the upper left quadrant -- and, indeed, now it is actually in the upper left quadrant!”
Dr. Lancaster continued his presentation, the audience quieted back down into its typical somnolence, but I continued to stand there on the AV platform with the live VOG mic in my hand. Ray returned and stood by my side, but made no other movements and spoke no words. We undoubtedly were both waiting for the same thing.
As quietly as I could, I clicked off the microphone, but did not yet release it. “Is that the only one that’s going to be backwards?”
“Beats me,” Ray said. “He’s the one who loaded them.”
We stood and listened to Dr. Lancaster describe at length and in great detail what he often described as the “surprisingly elegant” meaning of his small and scattered clusters of data. I can’t speak for Ray, but I know the elegance was lost on me. The population density of Rwanda, the emergence of diseased allele pairs in Hawaiian Geese, the frequency of dangling participles in 19th Century Russian literature -- he could have been talking about any or all of these things and I couldn’t have told you. I was simply waiting for him to advance to the next slide.
“And so,” Dr. Lancaster eventually said, “if we look at the same data set six months later, we see...” There was a flutter on the slide carousel behind us and the image on the screen switched in a flash of white light, a similar but different eye chart, the clusters of blue data points in an alternate configuration, but the words, the words on the x and y axes, fortunately, thankfully, and happily, in the proper orientation. “...that much has changed. What was dominant has now become sub-dominant, and what was sub-dominant has all but disappeared.”
I handed the microphone back to the guy behind the soundboard.
“Stay on it, Ray,” I said. “If he put one in wrong, there might be more.”
“Will do, Alan. Sorry, man.”
I shook my head. “It wasn’t your fault. I’ll stay close until his presentation is over.”
Ray nodded solemnly. He looked grateful, like I had just packed him a fresh bowl. I just sat myself down on one of the empty chairs on the AV riser. Something inside me told me the threat was over, that this one slide was the only one that Lancaster had loaded backwards, but that same thing told me to stick around regardless. It was only one slide, but one slide was going to be enough. There would all kinds of hell to pay.
+ + +
“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.
This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
Image Source
http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/
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