Up in the Air

I counseled three senior people in sales and marketing. One woman, two men. All were furious. They wailed. This time, though, I didn’t sympathize. Vigorade’s troubles were purely of its own making, and these were the folks who’d hatched the basic plot. With court battles already raging and tempers raw, my job was to neutralize the threat from three insiders who might well retaliate, and possibly scuttle the whole enterprise. There was no sentimental fuzziness around the true identity of my client. I was working for management. Private Bingham.

And they armed me well. Along with my usual inspirational literature, Craig Gregory fed me a package of psychological tests formulated somewhere in the depths of ISM Research. The tests were unfamiliar to me. Strange. And some of the questions seemed out of line, and haunted me. “You’re an astronaut on a three-man mission to Mars and you discover, privately, in flight, that only enough air remains for two of you. Would you: (A) inform your crewmates and participate in a negotiated solution? (B) conspire with a second crewmate to murder the third? (C) say nothing and leave your survival up to fate? (D) spare your team by committing suicide?”

As instructed, I administered the tests, scored them using the relevant keys, and consulted several manuals to ascertain the meaning of the results. The findings shocked me. All three subjects, it seemed, suffered from deep personality disorders predictive of poor—the poorest—career performance. These people were freaks. Deficients. Messed-up specimens. Had I made some mistake? Were the manuals at fault? I sent the documents to ISM, who double-checked them and vouched for my conclusions, which they ordered me to keep a secret so as not to arouse or embitter the ex-executives. Frankly, I was relieved. I went on counseling them, focusing on the bright side of unemployment, then packed up my kit and flew off to my next job. Just one thing nagged me. If the subjects truly were as disturbed as the tests suggested, wasn’t someone obliged to offer them expert help?

Like I’ve said, I’d stopped checking on former cases by then, but these three intrigued me. They were special. Unique. I inquired about them at three months, six months, one year. By three months, one was dead. The woman. Suicide by blocked tailpipe in sealed garage. Her note singled out her abusive husband for blame and it emerged in a search of old police files that he’d been battering her steadily for years, had been arrested over and over, but was always released when she declined to press charges and took him back.

At six months, one of the men was facing trial for possession of a Class Three substance—heroin and stolen Percodan—with intent to distribute. I followed his trial and it came out in court that the man had been using heavily since college and selling the stuff to his son and his son’s friends. They convicted him.

At a year, the third subject, who’d struck me as the dull one, was America’s latest paper billionaire, having taken public a tech firm whose leading product none of the business journals could clearly describe, noting only that it involved microscopic lasers and the man-made element seaborgium.

What to make of all this? I’m not smart enough to know. And that’s what still floors me: how little I knew these folks and how far they must have already progressed toward their ultimate, outrageous fates by the time I started seeing them. Would the expert help I sensed we owed them have done any good? For the suicide perhaps. Not the billionaire. And junkies are junkies. And how revealing, really, were those test results? Could any of what happened been foretold? Not by me and not by ISM. And anyway, the counseling is the same whether the subjects are upstanding citizens or masochists, drug fiends, and scientific geniuses.

Career Transition Counseling is not just bad because it peddles false hope—most products and services do that, more or less, including a lot of the ones my fired subjects made big money providing, temporarily—it’s bad because it’s uniform. Steady state. People are going to prison and making fortunes and bailing out violent lovers and duping teenagers and CTC just sits there and sucks its thumb. In every kind of weather. All day, all year. It’s divided against itself and numb and circular and feels, to someone who does it for a living, like some ingenious suspended-animation scheme designed to inject you with embalming fluid while still allowing you to breathe and speak.

Vigorade, the beverage, still exists. They added herbs, reconceptualized the packaging, and repositioned it as an endurance aid for aging jocks and outdoor enthusiasts. But I won’t drink it. It’s ever so slightly salty, just faintly sweet, and it tastes the way I imagine tears would taste if you could collect enough to fill a jug.