It's Just Data Analysis!
Chapter 10 in my ongoing story about workplace surveillance
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I was pretty damned excited to hear more about Keith’s job, especially now that I knew he worked on the same team—or at least the same division—with Stamper. But I knew better than to go in “questions blazing” when we went over to dinner at his house a couple weeks after my hike with Stamper. Keith was so careful with what he disclosed about anything, and I knew him well enough to know that if I announced my suspicions about employee surveillance, he’d clam up. I wasn’t making any “panopticon” cracks around him!
We sat out on their back deck and his wife Lori buzzed around, checking on the food, making sure we all had drinks, turning the music up a little, down a little. She was either a great host or had way too much energy. Okay, both. We were on our second beer when I asked, “So Keith, how goes the work?”
“All good,” he replied.
“Is the analytics stuff as interesting as you thought?” I probed. He would have left it there.
“Yeah, it’s good. There’s tons of data, so the real question is how do you find relevant connections.”
“Give me an example,” I said.
“You know, I’m not really supposed to talk about the data we’re gathering.”
“Dude, I’m your brother!”
“I know, Dan, it’s just not really relevant outside the company—I just don’t think you’d find it very interesting.”
Typical Keith. He wasn’t going to offer me a darn thing, so I played the only card I had in my hand.
“Did I tell you that I know someone else on the Human Dynamics team?” I asked him. “A lady I used to work with at Wizards, Kate Stamper.”
He looked right at me, all serious.
“You know Stamper?” he asked.
“Yeah, I worked really closely with her at Wizards—I may have mentioned her to you, she’s the one who started that project that I worked so much on for several years.”
“Doesn’t ring a bell.” No surprise there. Keith just wasn’t curious about other people’s lives, not even his brother’s. But he wanted to know out more about me and Stamper. “How well do you know her? Do you know what she’s doing now?” he asked.
“Keith, I just went on a hike with her a couple weeks ago, and she told me how she was recruited to Human Dynamics based on the work we did together. I’d say I know what she’s doing.”
“I bet what she’s doing now is different,” he said, seeing if he could close the door on the topic.
“Based on what she told me, you guys are finally doing what she wanted to do all along: tracking and modifying human behavior,” I offered.
“She told you this?”
“After I signed an NDA!” I laughed.
“I fucking hope you signed an NDA,” he barked. Keith never barked. “I guess she can get away with it. She’s treated like she’s some kind of …”
“Keith!!!,” called Lori from inside, “come help me with something a second.”
Keith excused himself and stepped inside, then turned and slid the glass door shut. I could see him and Lori at the back of the kitchen: Lori was talking, talking with her hands; Keith was nodding. It looked serious. Before long, he came back out.
“You were saying,” I prodded, “Stamper was treated like …?”
“Well, she’s an L9. She’s got a lot of sway. People are really happy to have her.”
“I bet they are—she’s a dynamo. She told me she was pretty pumped about the behavioral improvements you were seeing. What’s that look like from your perspective?”
“It’s just a job, Dan. It’s just data analysis.”
“Yeah, but I’m so curious about what you’re doing with that data …” Typical conversation with me and my brother: I push too hard, he withdraws.
“I’m just analyzing it. I’m not overthinking it,” he said. “It’s just work. You ready for another beer?” And with that, he shut the door on the conversation and I couldn’t open it back up. I’d had Keith shut me down before, or shut me out. He had a way of bottling things up that I’d never understood. Was it a lack of curiosity? Did he not want to see what was right in front of him? Or was there something there he didn’t know quite what to do with? I honestly couldn’t tell, but I had my suspicions.
There was a time, years ago, when Erin and I were visiting Keith and Lori when they lived in an apartment in Evanston, just north of Chicago. We had enjoyed dinner and Lori went into the kitchen to get dessert when she called out, “Keith, look at this ice cream!”
She stood in the doorway and held out a paper carton of ice cream, and it was plain to see that the ice cream was soup, just sloshing around in the box. It wasn’t remotely frozen.
“I told you, this freezer isn’t keeping anything frozen!” Lori had a way of saying things with a rising tone that sounded like alarm, even about something as simple as melting ice cream.
“Well maybe you’re opening the freezer door too much,” he replied, calm as can be. “Have you been getting stuff in and out a lot while making dinner?”
“Keith, I haven’t opened it since yesterday, when I showed you the same thing, cause I wanted to prove it to you.” She was positioned beside the freezer, one hand on the freezer door, the other imploring Keith to come look.
But Keith wouldn’t be drawn in. “Well I’m not sure that proves anything Lori,” he said, “maybe it’s just one of those ice creams that take a while to freeze, or that you’re supposed to eat soft.”
“Keith,” Lori wailed, “there’s no ice cream like that!! I could pour this.”
“I just don’t know why you’re getting upset about it, Lori,” Keith reasoned, “just put it back in and don’t open the door for a while.”
“But Keith, it’s been doing this for a week …”
We had apparently come into a conversation that they’d had multiple times over the last week, and Keith just absolutely, obstinately DID NOT want to see that their freezer was broken. He just wasn’t going to acknowledge it, and if he didn’t acknowledge it, then to him it didn’t exist.
As Erin and I drove back to our hotel room that night, I said to her: “You know, Keith’s always been like that: if he doesn’t want to accept something, he just denies it or pretends it doesn’t exist. It’s really weird.”
He’d been like this as a kid, and I guess I thought it was a defense mechanism he developed growing up amidst the low-grade warfare between our parents. I knew by the time I was 10 years old that my parents were doomed for divorce, because they just treated each other like shit: Dad offered little warmth and affection to my mom, but plenty of criticism, and Mom returned the favor with a steady stream of disdain and nasty digs. I made the mistake of engaging in it, trying to solve it, and ended up playing the middle man between my warring parents.
Not Keith. Keith just shut it out. When the sniping started, he’d just leave—he’d go up to his room or watch TV or go out to the barn. I’d complain to him about it, or ask him if he thought our folks should get divorced, and he’d look at me like he didn’t even know what I was talking about. “I don’t know Dan. Why worry about it?”
That night after the unfrozen ice cream, I realized that this was just Keith: if he didn’t want to deal with something, he just put it in a box and didn’t think about it. He once drove this piece-of-shit Saab and the floorboards were rusting out, and I’d say to him, “You better be careful, your foot’s going to go right through that,” and he’d day, “Nah, there’s plenty of metal there,” right up until the moment his heel went right through the floor on some hard braking. Lori once said he wouldn’t admit their furnace was broken until they couldn’t get the house over 55 degrees and she threatened to go to a hotel without him. Mostly he just wanted to ignore whatever he could until it went away.
But it wasn’t absolute; he could reach a breaking point. I’d seen it happen once, when we were pretty young. One day, Mom and Dad were in the kitchen, fighting. I couldn’t take it anymore, so I started to go up the stairs and there was Keith, sitting at the top of the steps, tears streaming down his face. I sat down next to him and put my arm around him.
“Do you think Mom and Dad will get divorced?” he sobbed.
“I don’t know,” I replied honestly, and I didn’t.
“Do you think it’s my fault?” Keith choked out. My god, he was in agony.
“It’s not your fault, Keith. I don’t think it’s my fault. I just don’t know what we can do.”
“I don’t want them to get divorced,” he moaned.
And we just sat on the stairs, listening, until Mom huffed out of the kitchen. Soon we heard the crackle of tires on the gravel driveway as she drove away. Then we both went to our rooms.
You know what I took from this? Keith had a breaking point. Things could get through to Keith, if they got bad enough. I wondered how long it would take for him to reach this breaking point at work. And I wondered if I’d ever know about it.
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Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. I’ve made up the story and the characters in it. While certain businesses, places, and events are used to orient the reader in the real world, the characters and actions described are wholly imaginary and any resemblance to reality is purely coincidental.
Keith and Stamper. That's oil and water right there. I really like the way you're developing the characters, Tom. They have very distinctive personalities. It does make me wonder what Stamper's weak spot is that would show her breaking emotionally. I look forward to your next installation!