The Montreal Project [03]
Chicago, A While Back
He was out walking on the Lakefront Trail near Montrose Harbor where the breakwaters curve way out into the lake and you can disappear into the nature preserve and watch plovers mating and building nests in their apartment buildings made of sand, if that’s your thing, or if it’s evening the little peeper frogs get up their chorus of mating songs like a choir trying to find a common key, but it was late afternoon and just kinda hot out and he was walking off the anxiety he felt in his bloodstream from not having worked in a few months, wondering how he would tell his friends the landlords who lived upstairs that he was going to need another month, at least, but he would figure something out, he would steal from gangsters if he needed to, and they would laugh and say no please don’t do that but they would also be visibly disappointed. The lake was out there doing its thing and there were sailboaters and attractive people in bathing suits all along the dunes and the grassy hillocks and beach balls were being tossed around and he realized without wanting to think about it that he had no idea what the purpose of a beach ball was. Then his pocket rang.
He didn’t recognize the sound at first. Thought it was coming from somewhere else or a nervous hallucination. He’d turned on the ringer in case the recruiter who’d contacted him online actually called. He didn’t expect it. He also didn’t expect it to turn into an actual job. The number was long and stringy and probably not from the U.S. but he answered anyway.
Hello, this is Dougho. He didn’t catch the caller’s name, as he spoke quickly and in a thick accent Dougho couldn’t place, but he gathered that the thrust of things was someone wanted to hire him for some reason and they were impressed with his resume but didn’t mention specifics and there would be a calendar invitation for an interview on Monday. It was Friday afternoon now. Okay, Dougho said, watching a seagull preen itself on the sidewalk near an overturned french fry boat, is there anything I should know to prepare, what’s the position, what’s the pay, when will it start, and the guy on the other end just said yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah, you have an [unintelligible] degree, right, perfect, yes so interview Monday and okay, good, and he hung up.
The weekend passed slowly and Dougho made no preparations, mostly taking long walks, sleeping when he could, reading a lot, fighting the urge to drink off his anxiety, firing up the Playstation to drown out the world, watching a series about people who work in outer space he’d watched at least eleven times now. On Monday he didn’t feel better or different than he had on Friday but then he received an invitation to an online video meeting and figured what the hell and accepted.
A couple hours later he had a shirt with a collar on and sat at the desk he rarely used anymore in front of the open laptop. A call came through and a woman hiding behind a black screen introduced herself as a hiring manager or somesuch, asked him a few questions about his experience and interest in artificial intelligence, all of which he answered honestly but cautiously, emphasizing that he was interested in ways to keep the technology from making things worse, and she said she understood that, and what were his weaknesses, and he said, again honestly, that he didn’t do well in situations where communication and expectations weren’t clear. She said great and asked if he had any questions and he said, yes, what’s the name of the business? No one has told me that yet.
The call concluded he found the company online. A tech subsidiary of a larger well-known poly-industrial conglomerate probably best known for producing personal massagers, and he emailed someone in Austin to verify the company’s existence, their relationship to this supposed human recruiter, and that they were hiring for whatever position they’d told him they were hiring for.
He went out for probably his third walk that day and thought about the interview. It felt like a formality. Dogs meeting at a dog park. Are you real? Are you a threat? Great let’s get on with it. In the tunnel underneath Lake Shore Drive lined with mosaics of long passed community leaders he received another call from the stringy overseas number. Hello, yes, Dougho, we would like to hire you for the position. Great, he said, what’s the position. Please report tomorrow for orientation and we’ll get the hiring process started, the other voice said, and hung up.
That evening his inbox was flooded with documents to sign, non-disclosure agreements, confidentiality notices, and hiring forms, including instructions on how to receive the company laptop. Turned out the money was decent, the position was full-time, he could do it from home, which was important, he realized, what with the apartment being one of the only places where he didn't feel like an underperforming reject from everywhere.