*19*

Bob's phone rang once - inside call. "Data Management," Bob answered. It was his boss. Meet him in conference room "C" at 10:00 - they needed to discuss PharmaView software implementation in the U.K. Bob made a note of the meeting in his pad.

Sometimes Bob wished he could do away with meetings altogether. Being a worker, a creator, he could just as easily solve a problem and get things done without assistance. Meetings around here tended toward "mental masturbation" groups - managers passing back and forth packets of love or power, jockeying for position, claiming credit for work done by their subordinates.

Bob checked his pad: 10:00 conference call re: European implementation. Sigh. He turned to his credenza, retrieved the PharmaView folder. He swung back around, logged onto e-mail, searched for any references to European PharmaView. Two e-mails. He popped them up and skimmed them: nothing significant, just the usual political stuff. He grabbed his pad and headed to conference room C.

Dave, the V.P., met him in the hallway. They nodded and made small talk. Nobody was in room C, Dave flipped on the light switch. They sat at the table, and Dave answered the inbound call from the European office.

"Hi Fiona, Dave here. I'm here with Bob, the developer, and we're expecting Carol shortly." As if on cue, Carol walked into the room and nodded to Dave and Bob.

"Hi Dave," Fiona answered. "I'm here with Larry and Mike."
"Carol just joined us," Dave mentioned.

"So how's it going out there," Bob spoke to the speaker phone.

"It's going just fine," Fiona answered. "Now that everybody's here," Fiona continued, "I want to briefly review our agenda of open items from our last meeting. First off, how is Autoload progressing?" They paused briefly as the topic ball floated between participants, Bob and Dave jockeying for who would pick up the thread to continue. Bob yielded to Dave's seniority.

"Correct me if I'm wrong Bob, but we have been making progress to get the software up and running. Apparently we ran into some initial difficulties with the network, but Bob has been working with your local staff to come up with a workaround."

Bob picked up the thread. "Yes Fiona, I apologize for the delay, but we have apparently been fixing one problem, just to discover another. It's a slow process, but we seem to be moving in the right direction."

Dave picked up the ball again. "Bob, we've been running this software at headquarters for, what, a year-and-a-half now? So what is different about the installation in Europe that is giving us trouble?"

"Well," Bob replied, half-relishing the opportunity to release some knowledge, half-dreading the drudging out of ego, the laying down of routine, the fill of time and space of human activities. In a world of television sitcoms and commercials, these meetings were the sitcoms. The filler. The real interesting stuff was the commercials: behind the scenes, one-on-one duking it out with the soul of the future.

"It could be a couple of things," Bob continued. "For one, they are probably running a U.K. version of Windows, where we run a U.S. version. I don't know if that would have much effect, but it's something for us to test. Also, their network might be configured differently."

Bob described some more ideas, basically laying everything on the table for the participants to mull over, knowing full well that it was merely the process that mattered.

Dave picked up the ball and narrowed down the possibilities to reach some action items. Bob drifted away from the meeting, and began to doodle along the pad edges. He started with triangles, stacked, alternating edges, empty and solid. The triangles wiggled apart, then gravitated together again. Alternating a solid left edge, bottom edge, right edge. The V.P. on the phone did a push-pull reverse flip. Bob smiled to himself - he knew better than to respond. The V.P. next to him, ever astute, smirked an inside joke. Bob paused to savor the irony, nodded and smiled. His mind drifted to Denise, her love, her body. He blushed slightly, changing his motif. I used to be a fairly accomplished doodler, he thought. Those hours upon hours bored in class.