loopinfinite

The day of the pitch, my palms were slimy and disgusting. My pores were malfunctioning somehow, fighting a war with themselves, launching blobs of sweat that bounced off my skin and splattered like fucking grenades.

I would wipe my palms dry and ten seconds later they’d be wet again. Where was all this sweat coming from? I could only guess that my pores were leeching it from some eternal spring, some never-ending supply buried deep within my body, some mystical cavern of sickening slime.

The sweat made me paranoid. Important executives would introduce themselves to me and I would refuse to shake their hands. I was afraid of what these people would think.

“You’ll have to excuse me,” I told them. “I’m sick. I’ve got a bad virus. It’s very contagious.”

But I didn’t have a virus. I was just nervous. My nervousness level had smoothly, steadily gone up as the time of the meeting neared.

Now it was at its peak. I was in the 5N conference room, standing in front of the projection screen, wiping my palms, looking out at three rows of important executives in folding chairs. They seemed bored and distracted and this was not a good sign.

The 5N conference room was part of the north wing, the newest expansion to Shark Corporation’s headquarters. The north wing technically was still under construction and wasn’t due to open for another month, but management had ordered the work team to rush 5N’s construction just for pitch day.

The team had grumbled and complained, but they got the job done on time, taking no shortcuts and cutting no corners. 5N really looked spectacular.

It had high, white ceilings, speckled with beads of hardened paint. It had floors that were polished, reflective, modern. It had air that brimmed with a pungent-but-pleasant aroma that was two parts paint and one part sawdust.

And on the east wall it had a framed photograph of Frank Shark himself, looking stately as always, his sandy hair combed to anal perfection and his mouth set into a dignified half-smile. He was holding a slim purple bottle embossed with the familiar SharkCo logo, a cartoon hammerhead shark giving a thumbs-up sign.

The slim purple bottle contained SharkCo’s first – and still most popular – product, the grape-flavored drink called “Shark Fizz.”

In the photograph, Frank Shark’s eyes burned with unnerving ambition. Frank Shark’s ambition was what had, in just twenty-two years, transformed SharkCo from small-time soda maker to gargantuan corporate conglomerate.

I looked back at the rows of executives. Most of them appeared to be in their mid-to-late fifties. They wore heavy, serious suits. Black blazers, black ties. I worried that they might be too uptight.

When I’d claimed I was too sick to shake their hands, it had been with a sheepish, silly grin, a grin that none of these executives had returned. What if these people had no sense of humor?

Behind me, my boss and friend Faun was sitting behind the lectern, balancing his laptop on his knee and looking intently at its screen. I knelt down next to him.

“Faun,” I whispered. “Do you have a second? What are you doing?”

Faun looked up. “I’m adjusting our transitions,” he said. “I’m changing every instance of the fade to a wipe. The wipe looks a lot better.”

I rolled my eyes. Though he was my superior, Faun hadn’t been at SharkCo much longer than me. Until last year he had worked for Microsoft, where he’d been project lead for PowerPoint 2047.

But then SharkCo bought Microsoft, and to Faun’s horror, brutal corporate restructuring took PowerPoint away from him, giving it instead to SharkCo’s own software division.

Faun was transferred to SharkCo’s sales department, where he was now Vice President of Corporate Branding Strategies. Faun didn’t know how or why this had happened. He was not a marketing guy. He was a software guy.

He was also the kind of guy who didn’t let go easily. He was still in love with PowerPoint. He loved playing with transitions and templates. He could spend days tweaking a single animation, trying to get it just right. He could not give a presentation without making sure the slide aesthetics met his high standards.

This annoyed me to no end, but I never said anything because I knew better than to get between a man and the love of his life. And anyway, I’d have been a dick to complain. It was through Faun’s generous recommendation that I’d gotten this job in the first place.

“Faun,” I said, “I’m a little worried, you know. I don’t know if they’ll like the campaign. I don’t get a good kind of vibe from these guys. You think there’s any way you can cancel this? Tell them we have to reschedule?”

“You know I can’t do that,” Faun said. “I don’t make the schedule.”

“Faun, the slogan’s terrible.”

“Look, you can’t think about that now. You can’t second-guess yourself. We’ll give the presentation. Everything’s gonna be fine.”

“I guess,” I said.

Faun clapped me on the back. “We’ll fucking kill ‘em,” he said.

“I guess.”

Faun went back to his slides. I crawled to the side wall and sat down. I took a deep, shuddering breath. I wiped my palms and stared into the rows of seats again, seeing them, this time, in profile view. I saw that someone sitting in the back had a yellow legal pad balanced on his knee. He was scribbling something. Scribbling what?

Six minute went by and then Faun began talking. He greeted everyone, introduced himself. He didn’t introduce me, because that would come later. He dimmed the lights and flipped PowerPoint into presentation mode.

The title slide, in bold, thirty-point Shark New Roman, said: “SharkCo’s new direction.”

Faun clicked a button on his wireless mouse. PowerPoint’s omnipotent and unseen hand wiped the title slide away as the sound of shattering glass ripped through the ceiling-mounted speakers. Faun loved cheesy sound effects.

The new slide said: “First, a brief history of our marketing . . . ”

Faun spoke with grating grandiloquence about how SharkCo’s advertising had evolved with the company’s changing needs and directions.

He traced SharkCo’s evolution from humble beginnings (“A fairly nice drink;” “The decent taste sensation”) to the confident swagger of SharkCo’s growth years (“You name it, we make it;” “You name it, we own it”) and then to the current sneering near-threat of a slogan (“You will love us”).

“Gentlemen,” Faun said, “SharkCo has a problem, and the problem, truly, can be described in the following manner: we have, if truth be told, become rather staid. SharkCo, to the common man or woman, is no longer a source of excitement.”

“When the common man or woman thinks of SharkCo, he or she thinks of a horrendous conglomorate, a horror of a monster with a swollen, distended belly, stuffed with the unfortunate and half-digested remains of smaller companies.”

“SharkCo, it can truly be said, tears those companies apart. It trashes the lives of their hapless employees.”

This, I’d assume, was Faun’s semi-veiled venting about the Microsoft buyout.

“The public dislikes SharkCo,” Faun said. “We have to change this, we have to take proactive steps. We must systematize. We require a novel strategy, an entirely new methodology of approaching the way we present ourselves. And I have just the man to help with that.”

“Without further ado, allow me to introduce our new Head of Marketing Operations.”

This was my cue. I strode to the lectern and tried to force a grin.

“Janus here has been with us for several months now – selected and hired – by me – based on his record of game-changing work as a copywriter. He’s come up with a new advertising spin for us to utilize, and he’d like to say a few words about it now.”

The rows of executives stared at me.

“Hi there,” I said. “I’m Janus. I think I’ve met most of you. You know, I think a few of you, you wanted to shake hands with me, and funny thing about that is, I have a cold, you know.”

Silence.

Just keep going, I thought. Get this over with.

“So yeah, well, we’ve been doing a little thinking, and, well, we got this new campaign. And it’s called, it’s called ‘tomorrow’s forecast.’”

Faun clicked the button on the wireless mouse. The sound of shattering glass. The current slide dissolved.

The new slide said: “Tomorrow’s forecast.”

“Tomorrow’s forecast,” I said, “is – ”

Faun clicked the button again. Glass shattered again.

“Sunny,” I said, “with a chance of innovation spreading from the east.”

This is also what the slide said.

SharkCo, of course, was based in the east. SharkCo’s headquarters were in Tractorton, Pennsylvania, which was the largest city in America.

“Gentlemen,” Faun said, “you are in fact looking at what is quite possibly the greatest slogan in the history of advertising.”

Silence. Then one of the important executives stood up and walked out the door.

Yellow pad guy in the back started scribbling again. The scratching of his pen was the only sound in the conference room.

Three hours later, I was sitting in Faun’s office. The two of us were having an impromptu meeting. He was firing me.

My emotions were numb. I’d been so nervous and sweaty before, but now that anxiousness had shriveled away, and there was nothing to replace it. No anger, no sadness. I was tired. That was all.

Faun, on the other hand, was slouching heavily over his desk, his right hand curved into a pincer that kept squeezing at his temples.

“There’s just nothing I can do, Janus,” he said. “They want you gone. Arguing with them’s no use. They’re gonna scrap the campaign. They’re looking for someone else. You’re gone, and hell, if I’m not careful, I will be too.”

Faun’s office was small but the decorators had still found space for a large portrait of Frank Shark. It hung from the wall behind Faun’s head. It was actually company policy that every room in SharkCo headquarters contain a portrait of Frank Shark.

And when I say every room, I mean every room.

“Yeah,” I said. “I kind of saw this coming. You know, the slogan really was shit.”

Even the closets.

“I guess it was.”

Even the elevators.

“I saw it coming all along.”

Even the bathrooms.

“I guess you did.”

“Yeah, you know, I’ll just go clean my desk out.” My voice was barely present, not a part of my body. My voice was an extradimensional loudspeaker’s whispered announcement in an alien language.

“I’m sorry,” Faun said. “There’s nothing I can do.”

“Faun, look – don’t worry about it. I’m gonna go home. I’m gonna sleep. I’m not gonna think about this shit right now, and you shouldn’t either.”

I turned to leave, glancing at the faded poster that Faun had taped to the inside of his door.

“Microsoft PowerPoint 2047: More transitions. More animations. More productivity.”