Everything Changes

angular, and uptight as all get-out. I took him out to dinner once, and he drank too much and told me how lonely he was. Nike has him doing the job of three men, and he always sounds inches away from shouting.
    “Hang on a second,” I say, leafing through my file. I find Craig’s spec sheet, on which he’s listed the PMS color, and then look up that number in my Pantone color chart. It’s purple. I check again and am flooded with a sense of relief as it becomes apparent that the fuckup wasn’t mine. “Craig,” I say. “You specified PMS number 2597. According to my chart, that’s purple.”
    “What are you talking about?” Craig says, his voice flying up a few notches on the hysteria meter. I hear the frantic shuffling of papers on his desk. “Holy crap,” he finally says, having located his copy. “That’s not the right number.”
    “It’s the number you gave me.”
    “This won’t work,” he says. “The fixture is done in blue. The entire rollout is done in the blue. The swoosh has to be blue.”
    I remain silent as I check the ship date of the order. It’s this coming Friday, which means a quarter of a million purple swooshes have already been produced in Qingdao, China, packed into custom cartons, and loaded into four containers, which may still be sitting on the factory grounds or may have already left by truck to the port. The fact that the order is on time would normally be great news, would be cause for goddamn celebration, but today it is nothing less than a catastrophe. Somewhere there will be a quarter of a million sneaker racks unable to ship because the crowning swooshes are the wrong color. Late racks mean no product in the stores, which means lost sales for Nike, which means Craig is fucked. There is ironclad documentation, in both hard copy and e-mail, that this is clearly not my fault, but now it’s definitely my problem.
    “Where are you in production?” Craig asks. It’s a stupid question. We both know the order is scheduled to ship this week.
    “I’ll have to check with the vendor,” I say. “But based on the ship date, I would have to say that they’re either shipped or waiting to be processed at the port.”
    “Fuck.” A silence grows between us and I can almost hear Craig’s mind racing, not for a solution but simply to come up with a way to make the whole thing my fault. “You know,” he says after a bit, and I can feel his sweat dripping through the phone, “the whole point of getting a sample is to be able to approve it before the production run. I never would have allowed production to go forward if I’d seen this earlier.”
    “You asked for an accelerated lead time,” I say. “You got your production sample less than two weeks after placing the order. That’s standard. The only reason you can’t make changes is that you moved your ship date up by three weeks.”
    Thrust and parry, but all very pointless. The middleman can never win these duels. If I stick to my guns, I’ll never do business with Nike again.
    “Zack,” Craig says, adopting a false tone of rationality. “Get in touch with your vendor and see what you can do for me, okay? There’s a lot more business behind this order, but the first one has to be a home run for me to keep you in the system here.” Translation: Craig will blame this on me when he speaks to his bosses, I’ll lose my largest account, and the Spandler Corporation will be blackballed.
    I sigh. “I’ll see what I can do.”
    “Thanks, man.”
    “Don’t thank me yet.”
    “Thanks, man,” Craig says firmly, and hangs up.

    It’s deep-fried fuckups like this that keep the burnout rate so high here. Just last week, Clay Matthews, who sat three cubicles down from me, became the latest casualty. First we all heard the screams.
Motherfucker! You fucking bastards! Will you just fucking die!
By the time we’d all gotten off our conference calls or e-mails, the demolition had begun. Clay’s phone came flying out of his cubicle at a fearsome velocity, leaving a cone-shaped dent in the plasterboard wall before it hit the floor. Then he came charging into the hall, crazed and red-faced, his comb-over flapping maniacally behind him, stomped on the phone until it lay in barely connected pieces, and then kicked those pieces down the hall. If he noticed the lot of us rubbernecking, he didn’t let on, but stormed back inside, yelling “Fuck!” at the top of his lungs. Who knew Clay had such range? He ran the office