Rift Read Free

it.”
    I first learned about the “volunteer” program during my midyear performance review. In Batista’s office, sitting side by side, leaning over a poorly thought out form designed to pigeonhole my job performance into one of three categories: Below Targets, Above Targets, and Achieved Targets. You’d think a relatively new company—a startup, really—would find a more radical (read: logical) way to measure an employee’s work ethic and value. And of course he asked me the question that probably every manager in the world poses to his subjects:
Cameron, if you were me, how would you rate your performance so far this year?
In this situation you are supposed to aim high (to prove your confidence) without aiming
too
high (which reveals arrogance or an inflated self-worth). I rated myself a solid Achieved Targets, the same as last year and every year. After all, I didn’t do anything differently. I didn’t launch any new initiatives or identify new synergies in the routine expense accounting that comprises the bulk of my daily work. No, I pretty much maintained the status quo, which is what Batista asks of me since I never do anything else.
    You could say that Batista and I enjoy a pretty good relationship considering neither of us respects the other professionally. His distaste for my corporate apathy doesn’t prohibit him from inviting me to his house every month or two for slow-cooked baby-back ribs and buttered corn on the cob. I ask about his ailing father (prostate cancer) and his athletic sister (she was an alternate for the 2002 Winter Olympics) in spite of the insidious way his artificially upbeat management style infects our office. Batista and I coexist in spite of our differences, and for this I owe him a certain amount of gratitude. He owns the power to terminate my employment at any time, to replace me with a younger accountant who would surely bring a fresh attitude to the work I take for granted, and yet he doesn’t. I don’t mind admitting that his reasons for this baffle me.
    This time, though, something was different. When I predictably uttered “Achieved Targets,” Batista replied,
I don’t think so
. He pointed out that I had absolutely no interest in NeuroStor other than the paycheck the company issued every two weeks. In fact, as Batista launched into his motivational speaker voice about how NeuroStor was looking for Go-Getters and Forward-Thinkers and teammates who would Walk the Talk and genuinely enjoyed being part of the Corporate Family and blah blah blah—you get the picture—as he droned on about all this I honestly thought he was about to fire me. Perhaps he wanted me to think that. Because when he finally got around to his offer, I was ready to entertain anything. Of course, he didn’t just come right out and ask. First he revealed that NeuroStor wasn’t just an information-age startup that had learned to mimic the neurological structure of the human brain to develop faster, higher-capacity digital storage devices. No, the company had really been formed to develop another product that required this sort of massively improved storage. He also made clear that this as-yet-unrevealed-to-me product was a secret only a select few NeuroStor team members guarded with their lives. And when I asked what it was, Batista gleamed and explained how they had developed a way to transmit matter from one place to another using a wrinkle in quantum physics.
    This was quite a bomb to drop on someone who thought he was overseeing the financial ledgers of a company that made ridiculously expensive flash memory cards. Not that it mattered, I suppose—accounting no matter how you slice it isn’t much more than number crunching—but something about possessing this knowledge immediately made working there seem a lot more intriguing. And when he saw he had me (I probably cracked a smile for the first time since he had called me