28. The First Command

In which my partner first learns how to control me

Texcel—the hospital billing company where I now had a comfortable job in which I was treated like a real person—was working out well for me. I was good at my job and really enjoyed the people I was working with, and as a nice bonus no one at work was threatening my life this time around.

I also knew how to cheat the system.

In order to incentivize us, the computer system tracked how many accounts we worked on each day. At the end of the month, those employees who had touched the highest number of paying accounts got a bonus. Understanding software, I figured out that if I went into an account that was set to auto-send a dunning letter the next day and I manually told the system to send the letter, I got credit for touching the account even though my action had no actual impact. And I could easily do this hundreds of times in a day, so I was always getting that bonus.

I'm not proud of this now, and I'd fire myself in a second for doing it today, but it's what I did then.

The company decided to have employees perform at the company Christmas party (we weren't having "holiday parties" yet back then), and I stepped up to do a magic show. I put a lot of effort and rehearsal into the show. Heavily influenced by Penn & Teller, I started with what they called "The National Magic Trick"—a very basic trick where you stuff a hanky into your fist and make it disappear. My personal twist was to then pull it from my mouth. I was very good at this trick, but in clumsily trying to emulate my magic heroes I made fun of it in the show. Afterward it became clear that for most people that was actually the best and most mystifying trick I'd done, and my attempt to make fun of it just weakened the effect.

I got great compliments on the show, and I lapped them up. A couple of my bits were mentalism tricks, which I was at pains to point out were just tricks, yet I did get someone approaching me afterward sure that I could really read minds. Which was annoying but also secretly thrilling. (And hey what would you think if you'd just seen me have a person remember someone who'd died in their life without telling anyone who they were thinking of, then watched me write the name of that dead person on a piece of paper?)

Doing a magic show for adults and having it go very well was a big breakthrough for me, a move forward in combatting my natural shyness and difficulty dealing with social situations. Excited, I called my partner from the party to share this victory with him.

He didn't want to hear about it. He said he'd come across the porn magazines from the brief period where we'd tried to use my interest in porn to enhance our sex life, and he was depressed about that whole thing. I crashed back to Earth for the night, my little personal victory punctured. My colleagues were going out for drinks after the party, but I had to leave early and go home so we could engage in this drama instead.

But for the next couple of days at work I still lapped up compliments and starting going on and on about myself as a magician. I felt like I'd latched onto a new calling. One afternoon as I went on yet again, my supervisor looked at me and finally said perhaps the kindest thing anyone has ever said to me.

She said, "Don't quit your day job."

I crashed back to Earth again, instantly realizing that many of the compliments I'd been receiving were just co-workers being kind and that in reality I'd done a pretty amateurish show, even after all the effort I'd put in.

The truth hurts sometimes.

Given that Texcel did billing for hospitals, we were always gaining and losing contracts with various hospitals. It was part of the background noise of the business. Word did get around that we really needed to land the next contract. I didn't pay too much attention.

Then the CEO called a meeting for everyone at the company, and it was obvious he was going to announce that we'd landed the contract. We sat down and he began talking, and I paid minimal attention. But then he said something that caught my brain's attention, and for the first and only time in my life I had this bizarre experience where I froze time and ran back the tape in my head to listen to the phrase again.

The phrase was, "So we're going to start winding down the operations of the business."

I didn't hear much of the rest of what he said either, as I sat there with this phrase echoing in my head while I parsed and re-parsed the meaning.

After the meeting we were separated into two rooms. One room was the people being fired immediately. The other room were the stars, who were being kept around for a while to help wrap things up. I was one of the stars. In our meeting, the manager let us know we'd be employed for a while longer, then said there were no stupid questions and asked what was on our minds.

Some people had been given some kind of pseudo stock profit sharing thingies, and one of those people asked if their shares would still have value.

"Okay, that was a stupid question," said the manager.

I gave the news to my partner and we discussed what I should do for my next job. "If you don't double your salary, we'll go bankrupt," he said. This was news to me.

"That's ridiculous," I said. "A couple dollars more an hour maybe, but doubling? It's insane. I can't possibly do it."

"You have to do it," he said. "I know you can do it. You will do it."

This was the first command.