“You’re joking, right?”
“I wish I was. I’ve been fighting for the last two weeks. They won’t listen. They’re doing it. They’re gonna kill the project. They’ll announce it tomorrow. I felt you should know.”
“How? Why?”
“They [the mobile phone division execs] just lost [their biggest phone customer]. They’re cutting everything so that when they announce the loss to the street, they’ll have something to soften the blow.”
“But this is THE FIX!!??”
“Of course, but they don’t see it that way. Our division’s name is ‘mobile phones’ and this isn’t a mobile phone.” (ah, the fear-driven, short-sightedness rears its ugly head)
“Won’t the street see that we’re gonna make it up on iPod?”
“Apple won’t let us tell them.”
And so here we sat as the early-evening sun flooded the cafeteria with a pall that matched our emotions. I could see he was drained. I had just found out, but he had been living this nightmare for two weeks and had fought the good fight.
But it was over.
We stayed for a while as he patiently played therapist while I bitched and moaned, swang from anger to sadness, and started to come to grips with reality. My dream project, the one that intersected my geeky fan-boy past with the impending tech cultural shift of our future, was over. And I had no say in the matter.
Gladys’s New Shoes had just been run over by a bus full of fearful executives afraid of getting scolded for what they lost rather than being excited and confident about the possibilities of what could be.
“Oh, please, mommy, don’t be mad at me!”
I walked back to my desk in zombie mode and sank into my seat. As I stared at nothing, the lead silicon engineer popped in and said, “Hey, man, did you see that [the VP of the division] just invited us to an all-hands for the New Shoes team? I wonder what’s up?”
“Sorry, man. We just got invited to our funeral.”
