99 Club

“This is the loop,” said Buck, tracing a large, lazy circle in the air with this left hand. “And this,” he added, wiggling two dangling fingers of his right hand like human legs some eighteen inches outside the loop, “is Buck.”

Stubbornly refusing to refer to himself in the 1st person, Buck went on to invite the reader to notice that he was not actually in the loop.

That had always been the story of Buck’s life, but now the winds of change were upon him, blowing through hair that refused to yield because of the sturdy product he used to reinforce it. “Curious the lengths some people will go to carefully construct the illusion of casual disinterest in their appearance,” he mused, but then he quickly pulled himself back from the precipice of digression. “The topic is the winds of change. Buck was finally in the loop.”

Word on the street had reached him that he was not alone. There were others like him dwelling within the sordid depths Cubopolis, silently suffering the insecurities associated with being a consultant. These are human beings, real flesh and blood, body and soul, just like their clients, and yet there is an expectation that they be more than the client: smarter, more productive, more efficient. The consultant is clairvoyant and correctly reads industry trends, finding solutions to problems that the client didn’t even know he had. He “hits the ground running,” accomplishing in hours what might otherwise never be accomplished at all. He weaves order out of the strands of chaos by introducing controls into business and technical processes, despite the fact that he may himself be the former product of that same chaos with no ability to articulate what a “control” actually is in this context, let alone the actual experience necessary to create and implement these controls. All this he must execute with an aura of supreme self-confidence despite a persistent, underlying fear that he will be exposed as the ordinary mortal he really is.

It reminds Buck of his early days as a consultant. He was tossed into a situation where he was supposed to introduce controls for a team of programmers the least experienced of which had exactly 15 more years of programming experience than Buck. Along the way, Buck was supposed to help them write code and identify areas of improvements in their architecture. Buck had faked his way through a year of that nonsense and received nothing but glowing feedback, entertaining multiple interesting job offers, yet at the end of that engagement he still could not have described an actual control. If controls meant the design documents he had written, then sure, he’d introduced “controls.” Yeah, that’s the ticket. Add it to the resume.

At one point the client’s manager had asked Buck into his office to see if Buck could come up with the solution to an architectural problem inherent to the client’s system. Buck was dumbstruck (and dimly aware that he should have foreseen this particular problem: shame on him for allowing the client to find it first!). Buck was invited to take it away and think about it for awhile, and think about it he did. He wrestled with the problem for two weeks. In the end he proposed some options, all of which profoundly sucked. It would be another two years, long after the window of opportunity had closed, before it dawned on him. No, not the answer to the architectural problem, but the flaw in Buck’s approach.

The consultant really is better than the client because he is not actually one person. The consultant is the vanguard of the entire consultant company, and chances are that someone in that company has the background necessary to solve a given problem. This is how he differs from a contractor. A contractor is on his own, while a consultant has his entire firm to fall back on. He does not need to be the expert: someone else in the firm already is. The consultant’s job is to find that expertise and bring it to bear on his client’s situation, and if he succeeds, everybody wins: the client gets his problem solved, the consultant looks like a clairvoyant genius, the expert gets a name to pass along to his manager when it’s time to collect feedback for writing reviews, and the firm itself strengthens its reputation with the client. Good stuff happens.

So Buck heard through the grapevine that people like himself were finding comfort in the blog, that the late night ranting of a lunatic third-person-self-referrer were easing the feelings of isolation inherent in the field of consulting in this tense pressure-cooker Hell we all know and love as Cubopolis. He mentioned this news to the beautiful and enigmatic Mrs. 99, and she said, “You’ve started a religion.”

Or a cult, thought Buck to himself. This was a dangerous situation. People were finding out about the blog. News was spreading. At some point a critical threshold would be reached when enough people would know about the blog that one of them would be the wrong person, someone in a position of power within the firm who didn’t subscribe to the dogma Buck was peddling. Then the house of cards would collapse amidst a flurry of pink slips. Cubocalypse, the end of the road for Buck. He had to do something to rectify this, and fast.

“The first rule of 99 Club,” he began, pacing around the living room in his skivvies, “is don’t talk about 99 Club.”

He adjusted his gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses, pausing to allow time for the first rule to sink in.

“The second rule,” he continued, deliberately emphasizing every last syllable, “is don’t talk about 99 Club!”