FLOOZMAN
«By a
scandalous abundance, he brings deliverance »
FRED LOOSEMAN’S MAINTENANCE DIARY
Dépôt S.A.C.D. 174 627
© BC, 2005
Somewhere at the heart
of the financial system flows a mysterious and inexhaustible money source. Fred
Looseman is among the few who have found it. Like them, he has carried a long
investigation, like them he has caught a glimpse of the truth and like them, as
he approached the emanation origin, he has lost his memory…
Only yesterday, he was still the smart Worldwide
Credit Corporation Chief Risk Officer and the president of the anti money
laundering commission. Since his fall, he survives on the job the bank found
him in a computer maintenance team. His family and friends have become
estranged. Isolated, his faculties obscured, he only lives to mend the cash
dispensers and the network which connects them up to the central computers.
Sometimes, after long work hours, he happens to hear voices. Closing his eyes,
he distinguishes prayers. Some are so clear and sincere that he drops his tools
and starts to cry.
This is how he becomes Floozman. He comes to light and
recovers his minds. His banker calls him on the phone. They both know what
Floozman has to do. He has the required resources and more. But this wealth is
not his: it is the magical money of deliverance.
Fred
Looseman’s portable terminal is organizing the activities. Plugged into the
dashboard or simply put on the van’s seat, the machine dialogs with the
navigation system in order to optimize in real time the round’s itinerary. From
time to time, when driving and especially during traffic stoppages, Fred
glances to the seat of this silent presence.
He also uses the terminal to follow up procedures.
Before each round: consult the planning and the mission forms, verify the
availability of parts in the van or in stock, check history of interventions.
During the intervention, start and end times, engineer name and id (this is
him), maintenance type (preventive or curative). For each problem or failure:
indicate category, severity, diagnostic, action, tests and possible comments.
After each round, connect to the network and transmit information.
He
is very happy with it. He feels gratitude when he recalls the interminable path
along which this interface took him during his reeducation.
He
remembers. At the beginning, when he had not fully recovered the ability to
read, he had to figure out the meaning of the signs by their mere place on the
screen and in the menus. He was experiencing an exacerbated sense of vigilance
when the instructor was expecting a decision. In these moments, fully stretched
by the choice, he was sensing the tiny movements of the weights hung to the
frail pendulums of his mental representations. Watching these as they were
turning, clueless like a baby in his cradle, he was waiting for his damaged
brain to trigger his will.
- You
can do it! You can do it! You’ve
already done more complicated things…He was encouraged.
But more than anything, the program’s infinite
patience was enveloping him. Little by little, the machine was restoring the
organization of things. The cash dispensers were giving him back the space
dimension and the city streets where vague reminiscences were sometimes dancing
like shadows. The detailed procedures were recreating the time, the beginning
and the end. Bank notes dispatching was bringing back sense and some form of
joy…
It is in the «comments» field that Fred Looseman could
tell the machine about his existence and in a way, about his gratitude.
To go beyond good work, Fred had understood that he
could tell through this narrow input window the things which complemented the account
of operations, all the human prolongations of his industry which he ingenuously
wanted to bring to the program and to the world.
A
few examples:
Comments ==> Today, I stayed a while on the
opposite pavement to see the dispenser in operation but nobody showed up. Since
there was a terrace and I was asleep, I have ordered a coffee.
Comments ==> People never look happy to withdraw
cash.
Comments ==> I do not like driving in town. Often I
get bored. We should be able to do everything remotely. I prefer driving in the
countryside but it makes me feel sleepy. It is good to doze off. I dreamt I was
snoozing but never stopping; I was bumping on security rails and waking up just
the time to avoid a collision or falling in the sea. It was so complicated to
park…
Comments
==> I like the waste ground between the Paling Fence Space shop and the Lawn
Me Tender hardware exposition center, close to the round about. There are high
grass and white bushes. Maybe animals. I wish I could stop there but I would
have to park on the road and everyone would see me.
Comments ==> I was given hoots because I was
dreaming and they looked at me fiercely. I must have done something wrong.
Drivers scare me when they behave like this, especially if they have right on
their side.
***
He
also remembers the coming of the new screens…
Fred
had practically no problems anymore (except his inexplicable absences) when
things got complicated. Damned complicated.
He can not remember as to make it clear but he knows
all these changes came with the reorganization of his company: TermiBank.
The persons involved however, had all understood the
change in the strategy.
[Business sequence begins]
After a phase of costs modelization and optimization, the board of
TermiBank had analyzed the value chain, looked at the predictive scorecard and
acknowledged that the business model was not viable anymore in the medium term.
Facing the urgent need to adapt to the hyper
competitive financial services access market, through the impetus given by his
young CEO, the company had elaborated a new ambitious vision: TermiBank would
become n°1 of financial network quality and extensions.
An authentic paradigm shift and to the employees, a
new way of being, influent, recognized, energetic, source of commitment and
performance.
Among the strategic axes chosen to achieve the goal, once
the vision had been shared by the stakeholders, was a dynamic adjustment of the
production costs.
Among the actions taken and measured to meet the
objectives associated to production, costs control was a throughout work
reorganization.
Appropriation
of these objectives by the teams was a key success factor.
Nothing gave better account of this strategy than the
coloured slides presented to the stakeholders then to the employees as part of
kick off meetings where mugs and printed T-shirts were generously distributed.
There, the collaborators could learn that it was up to them to make it happen
through a new collective conscience of success. Open air games and team
building sessions were teaching them how to express and materialize a new
collective synergy aimed a freeing performance.
Maintenance teams had thus become profit centres
capable to generate their own business while relying on transversal services
provided by the group shared services units.
This is how Fred Looseman had traded is contract for
another far more flexible. This is how he had been granted a transverse sales
territory under control of the account manager, three days in depth training to
TermiBank solutions sales and an exalting autonomy which did not deprived him
of the satisfactions attached to the maintenance tasks he was due to sell with
the support of his team. [Business sequence
ends]
In
all these activities, new screens (still poorly assimilated) were guiding him.
For each call: customer score and services appetence
indicator, sales opportunities to qualify. For each qualified opportunity:
sales type, amount and forecast close date, sales cycle stage, involved
contacts, competition, potential problems. For each contact: name, function,
role in the sales cycle.
The link between those screens and his payroll was
still difficult to grasp. He was told many times that without the screens he
would not receive any money, that he would have to stay home and that he would
not be authorized to take the van. Yet today, the reason why his salary was cut
by half was still beyond his understanding.
***
Fred
has had a bad sleep. Yet he needs to wake up early to start his round. Since he
has no heating, he thinks of his van to find some courage. It will be warm in
the cabin. He won’t have a wash today to save time.
More than ever the screens are guiding him. Since he
is dealing with a new bank agency he does not know the way. It does not matter.
Make a right at
He is listening to a teenage radio talking sex and the
listener’s questions make him blush.
Then the itinerary requires his attention. Make a
right at 20ft, then
He
sleeps. He always has a reserve of sleep so short and agitated are his nights.
Indeed, since the revision of his compensation plan, Fred Looseman lives in a small
studio at the Lilly of the Valley dormitory city, in a suburban area near
Plouvigny, by the bypass road. When he tries to take refuge in himself, his
eyelids shut; the noise wall does not disappear. It extends to the infinite,
even in the inner directions. It slackens, tightens, ruffles with rumbles and
shrieks, accommodates for a short silence full of objects to clear, then
painfully delivers another truck, then another even bigger.
We
know what his body knows and his poor memory ignores. The sounds which were
weaving his childhood nights. The wide plane tree foliage moved by the autumn
wind, then gradually appeased. The mysterious lone car heading straight into
the summer time heart when the mirror waters are trembling in the open
verandas. The cosmos. The
crickets. The earth rolling towards the light. The market rumble swelling with
the sunrise and the fleeting words making suddenly sense under the shutter riddled
with light.
We know what is animal soul retains of these happy
times when rich parents were watching over his sleep.
We
can also get closer to observe Fred Looseman now that he is asleep on the
parking, without having even locked the van’s doors. He looks like the child
and he looks like Floozman. Differences lay in the small oddities of his face,
maybe the forehead too low or the jaws too long. He opens the eyes to check the
time. These are slow dull calculating eyes even when his gaze meets the
other’s. With the same glance, Fred is capable to conduct technical
conversations like a true professional, especially when his spirit disconnects
itself.
Videos
showed him that nothing distinguishes him from his interlocutors, except humour,
may be. Fred Looseman has no humour. He is learning.
At 9 am, he enters the agency together with the employees.
He has an appointment with the deputy director in charge of Information
Technologies. Despite his progress, Fred Looseman fears the face to face
situations with such self confident and competent persons. When the deputy
director invites him in, he wants to run away.
- It
is for a sale. Says Fred
plainly, without taking place in the seat indicated by the dry red faced man. I
am sent by Jeremy Bleat, World Wilde Credit Global Account Manager.
-I
know Jeremy Bleat very well: he invited us in a fine restaurant at the end of
last year. But we have a procurement robot. It has access to the TermiBank
referential and to the negotiated prices. Jeremy confirmed everything is up to
date. Just connect it somewhere, I’ll call you back if it detects and opportunity.
I have a lot to do, you know, I only have a team of three persons to keep the
agency up and running.
-Thank
you sir. I’ll be maintaining the cash dispenser.
At
this very moment, his wireless micro headphone delivers the message which was
already displayed on his telephone this morning and which he has forgotten.
- Err; I have to tell you….The dispenser has not been
scoring customers since Thursday. In this mode, he has rejected – Fred
concentrates in order not to loose the thread – t…two eligible customers and he
has been using a generic 4.5% rate which already results in a probable loss of
0.32 points. A contract extension would offer a 4h intervention delay to be
compared to….
- Make sure the robots see to that…Administration of
things …yes…that is the future as said….I can’t remember who. And
administration of things by things, that’s the top, I say. Good bye…
The deputy director rises to take Fred back to the
door. Because it is a very small office, Fred has to flatten against the partition.
-
Saint Simon’ Eh Sir! Fred computer’s trumpets.
Fred
is not displeased. During the intervention and while he is waiting for his
robot to talk to the agency’s, he will have time to experience the double
skeleton: exoskeleton and endoskeleton. This image which came to him while he
was watching a documentary on the evolution of species makes him smile.
His external skeleton protects him, guides him and links him to the world. It
is a shell made up of several layers: van, navigation system, SFA (Sales Force
Automation) interface, organizer, computer, augmented reality glasses,
telephone, headphones…
His internal skeleton sustains him and supports
vegetative functions.
If he manages to reduce thought to a silent trickle like a little fountain in a
Zen garden, he will witness the two skeletons integration which is to him a
recurrent phantasm. Retired, evanescent, his tired conscience will then
experience a great peace.
***
Fred
leaves the agency shortly before noon. He has sold nothing. He plugs in and
starts typing his report. He is using the free format fields.
Comment ==> Today, at the agency, I believe I have
stopped thinking for a long moment. All the systems were operating, including
the brain zones prompted by work. When this has ceased I have felt a sort of
restlessness.
The
telephone rings. It is Jeremy Bleat.
- Hi Fred. Hope I am not disturbing you. I’m
calling to debrief your round. I would have come with you but I had this call
with the central agency Risk Manager about on line fraud detection. It is a new
family of solutions; I’ll have to tell you about it! How did it go?
- Well…The man asked me to connect the robots. They
found nothing interesting.
- You did not talk to him? You did not qualify?
- Well, no…
- …
- ….
- Well. All right. I’ll have a look at your
agenda. Next time, I’ll be coming with you.
Jeremy Bleat sighs while leaning in the deep seat of
his midlevel SUV. I’ll not get stressed before my call, he says to himself. He
looks at his face in the central mirror. I say, this guy, it’s a mystery they
don’t fire him. I can’t believe he enjoys protections at the executive
management level. I’ll take advantage of our next encounter to dig on that, so
that I’ll not completely loose my time.
Jeremy Bleat also has his skeletons. Later, he will
have to update his sales forecast: group, account, nature of the opportunity,
customer pains, solution type, amount, expected close date, type of commitment
(firm, stretched, joker), contacts, competition. Then at some point, he will
have to explain the changes occurred since last week to Tim Cockroach, his
manager. This perspective does not please him because he is lagging behind his
objective and they both know he will not reach it. He must also update his
reports; his calls follow up template and the list of customers to invite to
the event “Throw your competitors into misery with individual monetary
aspiration solutions”. All this work will cut into his evening. .Will he have
time for his squash game?
Let the navigation system guide him while he his
mentally reviewing the complex structure of the price offer he has to present
in less than one hour at the other end of town..
***
Fred Looseman sighs while injecting his van into the
national road’s traffic. He thinks of a video game which would be called
“City”. The game would be sectorized and the polygons generation would take
into account parameters such as density, wealth, type of franchises, geography,
light…
He
smiles. Time will end up passing, he muses.
But
the distress which gripped him upon return of the thought suddenly resurfaces.
He feels defenseless. He would almost cry and find the way to prayer if the
phone did not start ringing.
He
hangs up.
-
Fred. This is Mrs. Marinella. You can’t do this!
***