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Geek Barn
Ernie knew it was Todd Latrec entering the room even before he spoke. Todd wore Velcro-fastened running shoes with an orthotic in one that caused it to squeak in a tone different than the other shoe. He sounded like a European ambulance wherever he went.
"Uh, yeah," came the sinus-tortured voice.
Ernie worked in a small, windowless room at TriNova Positron ("The eLearning Hub!" as the marketing literature trumpeted), owned and run by Todd and his twin brother, Rod. For all of the arguments and hissy fits Ernie had overheard between the brothers, he knew that the "Uh, yeah" was reserved only for outsiders.
He turned. "Hey, Todd."
"Right," Todd said, wearing the expression of someone who desperately needed the relief of a toilet. "Uh, your jacket?"
"My jacket?"
"Yeah, your, uh, jacket—yeah, we don't do that here."
"Wear jackets?" Ernie was only two weeks into an open-ended copywriting contract. TriNova employed seven people, including the Latrec brothers: Ernie, three designers and a programmer, who gamed online during their lunch hours.
Todd chuckled, sucking air through his teeth. "No, no, we wear jackets, of course. We just don't, uh, drape them over the backs of our chairs."
"I keep my wallet in my jacket, and I like to have it close," Ernie said, turning back to his work.
"I can, uh, assure you that your jacket and wallet will be quite safe in the cloak closet," Todd said. "It— it— it just doesn't look right, you know, over the back of the chair, and all."
Ernie was a thirty-year-old freelance writer who had worked in a dozen offices in the last seven years. He knew well the types who treated the office like their home, all but having in home improvement specialists erect sunrooms and BBQ decks on their cubicles. The passive aggressive vigilantes who posted messages on lunch—room refrigerators excoriating people for leaving lunches over the weekend, placing signs filled with boldface type and underlining above kitchenette sinks, imploring and threatening others to clean up after themselves. He had once seen a notice above a workplace urinal recommending a training course in splash-free pissing.
Working at TriNova Positron wasn't so much like working in the Latrec brothers' home, as in their bedroom—Ernie imagined them sharing a room, sleeping in bunk beds amid a nightmare nest of wires, hubs, routers, PC towers, monitors, and game controllers. A few days ago, Todd spoke to Ernie about leaning back too far in his chair: "We're not, uh, against you, you know, leaning back, per se, but just about people leaning leaning back. You know? It— it— it wears out the chairs faster. There may be cherry trees, but as far as, uh, I know, you know, there aren't any chair trees," followed by more sucking of his teeth.
Taking his jacket from the back of the chair, Ernie said, "Sorry about the breach."
Todd nodded and shuffled his feet, revving the Euro-ambulance. He was all relief and victory. "No problem, no problem. You know, hey, we're easygoing, we let everybody, uh, wear jeans."
The Latrec brothers were known in the freelance community as the Triplets. They were bachelor geeks in their late twenties who were more like spouses than siblings to one another. The "triplets" reference put Ernie in mind of Truman Capote's book, In Cold Blood, and an observation made about its two central characters, murderers Perry Smith and Dick Hickock—that neither man, on his own, was capable of murder, but together they formed a third personality who was. Ernie figured the "triplets" handle was a pedantic nod to the Latrec's considerable technical prowess, that third personality, which placed TriNova at the forefront of local Web design / eLearning shops.
Ernie hung his jacket in the closet, and walked past the Latrec's office. Through the open door he saw the massive back of Rod extending out of his chair like Vesuvius. This was all the TriNova guys saw of Rod, who spoke to no one, seemed never to require use of the washroom, and to whom Todd brought whatever food and hydration he needed. Rod was the Beethoven and DaVinci of Flash animation, and dozens of other Web authoring tools. His output remained prodigious so long as he went unbothered by human contact. The one time Ernie witnessed Rod out of his chair, he estimated that he stood a few inches under six feet, and weighed a few pounds more than four hundred. At the moment, Todd leaned over Rod's shoulder, whispering. Ernie thought he heard the word "jacket" amid Todd's mumbling.
Ernie went into the kitchenette. One of the designers, a myopic guy named Berm, was at the counter tearing open packets of sugar. Ernie took the last mug from the mug tree by the sink.
"It's true," Berm said.
Ernie looked at him. "Pardon?"
"There is a third brother."
"What?"
"The Triplets—there's a third."
"Really? How do you know?"
"It's rumored the third suffered the same fate as Elvis Presley's twin."
"How's that?"
"Died at birth. But I know better." Berm stirred seven packets of sugar into his coffee.
"Why are you telling me this?"
Berm moved toward the door. "I heard you getting the 'jacket speech.'"
"So—?" Ernie began, but was interrupted as Todd rushed in.
"Out of the way!" Todd exclaimed. "Rod needs a Schweppes!"
Three weeks previous, TriNova Positron was asked to bid on an eLearning project for the national service station franchise, PumpCo. Deployed as a Web course across more than three hundred locations, it would span a full five days, training new PumpCo managers on every aspect of running their own stations. The PumpCo "Request For Quote" document was more than thirty pages long, scoping out requirements for six hours of training for each of those five days. It was, by far, the largest project on which the Latrec brothers had ever bid.
"You know, uh, normally, I handle the, you know, uh, writing," Todd explained on Ernie's first day. "But that's just for Web pages and some of the, uh, basic eLearning modules."
They had sat in the windowless conference room; a centerpiece of dusty plastic flowers in the middle of the large table. Ernie had never worked for the Latrec's, but knew their reputation for technical genius and intense eccentricity. He was interested in observing both during his contract period.
"Rod's creating the digital, uh, portfolio. The programmers are sussing out the technical challenges/solutions of the, you know, project," Todd went on. "And it'll be up to you to, uh, pull all of it together." He narrowed his muddy gaze. "Can you do that?"
"Sure."
So, the contract began. It remained open-ended because TriNova would need Ernie all the more if they landed the project. In between jobs, and sick of endlessly tweaking his own Web site, Ernie was glad for the work. And so he was given a desk and PC in salmon-walled windowless room in the cave-like office.
By the morning of the "jacket speech," the RFQ deadline was two days away.
The Euro-ambulance of Todd's footwear trod past Ernie's door.
Ernie sipped his coffee, wading through Web research on eLearning methodology. His eyes scanned the computer screen, but he took in none of the text, distracted by what Berm had said.
Obviously, he was joking, Ernie thought. Berm and the other guys were gamers, who had their own sense of humor, razzing one another with names like "rocket fag" and "server slut," referring to their lunchtime gaming. Sure, and tell the new guy some bogus urban legend about the twins having a brother.
But the place is called TriNova Positron, he thought. Why the hell call it that? He considered this. DuoNova Positron does sound pretty stupid.
The Euro-ambulance shoes stopped at Ernie's door.
"Meeting," Todd said. "Conference room."
As project manager, Todd decided the most crucial aspect of the PumpCo RFQ was addressing cultural challenges among the trainees. PumpCo specified that the majority of its managers-in-training were men for whom English was a second language. Todd distilled this down to mean: "They're, uh, foreign guys who, you know, don't know about North American hygiene habits."
"Are you saying we are going to create training modules about washing themselves?" said a pale, reptilian designer named Nick.
"Uh, yes," Todd said. "I think that's, you know, exactly what we're being asked to do. Perhaps as a test, uh, to see how we, you know, deal with sensitive— sensitive— sensitive topics."
"Bathing," Berm said, incredulous.
"Yes," Todd said. "Bathing."
"I'm just a programmer," said Gaz the programmer. "I'm not gonna tell anybody how to wash."
"Well, we're all, uh, going to help Ernie tackle this."
"Thanks," Ernie said, "but I can handle it."
"That's— that's— that's where you're wrong," Todd said, his head tremoring in an involuntary nod. "This is a delicate, uh, cultural issue, and I think it requires team input." He looked around the conference table. "So, uh, email your ideas to Ernie, and 'Cc' me. We'll meet in two hours to discuss progress."
Email soon rolled in.
Berm wrote: "Scrub your balls. That's the essence of clean. Scrub your crotch until its raw. Then rinse and scrub some more."
Thanks, Berm, for that enlightening piece of shit, Ernie thought, hitting the DELETE button.
Gaz wrote: "Soap and water. What's so hard about that?"
Verbose as ever, Ernie thought, clicking DELETE.
Nick wrote: "First, take your turban off..."
Christ almighty, Ernie thought, and scrapped the message without reading further.
Todd emailed a five hundred word treatise on showering, detailing down to which toenail to begin digging under with a small paring knife.
"Thanks for the help, guys," Ernie said to his computer monitor.
He was about to check his personal email account, when another message appeared in his TriNova Inbox. From "sender unknown." There was no attachment, so Ernie opened it and found a page from an old Usenet bulletin board. The date read "Tue, 19 Jul 1993 20:46:29 —0500 (CDT)," and contained a lengthy news article. As he read, Ernie saw that it was actually several articles pasted together, about a tech genius named Dodd La Treck.
This is from Berm, he thought.
The article chronicled the life and budding tech career of Dodd La Treck. Said he had had an email account since 1984, and was scouted by university computer science departments across the continent since his first year of high school. Further down, however, Ernie read about Dodd's increasingly eccentric behavior, culminating with his indefinite committal to a mental institution. Another article, which made no pretense about being primarily hearsay, said that when Dodd was seventeen years old, he one day refused to come out of his bedroom. When his mother tried opening the door, Dodd shrieked, "Don't come in! I'm hideous!" When his father finally forced the door open, Dodd was found naked and poised on one foot upon his desk, arms raised above his shoulders, extended before him. "I'm a preying mantis," he proclaimed.
The triplet, he thought.
Ernie's nerves seemed to atomize when a sinus-tortured voice came from behind him: "We're meeting in the, uh, conference room, like right now."