Everything Changes

offices of the Spandler Corporation look exactly like the place where you will not write your award-winning screenplay should look. The walls are an off-white that looks old right out of the can, the carpets a defeatist shit brown to preempt the midtown dirt we track in every day. The account executives are all men in their late twenties or early thirties who wear cheap suits and brandish their PDAs, laptops, and cell phones ardently, in the fervent hope of being mistaken for investment bankers. There’s not a whiff of creativity, a hint of color, to be found in these halls, only the base grit of commerce as it exists in its lowest incorporated form.
    Rael and I had this great idea for a screenplay. But he was working as a salesman in his father’s paper company and I was here, and even though we could talk our asses off about it, about characters and scenes and plot twists, there was no way it was going to happen. So we made a pact. We were going to wait until the end of the year, at which point we would quit our jobs, set up shop in the brownstone, and write the damn thing. Jed, who liked the idea but had no patience for writing, promised us he would take it upon himself to shop it around Hollywood when the time came, or else put up the money to produce it independently if it came to that. It was a great plan, and when the three of us got together, we spoke of little else. Even if we failed, Rael said, it would be a worthwhile exercise. But then he got himself killed, and, worthwhile or not, the dream seems to have died with him.
    I sit down at my desk, banging a quick hello to Tommy Pender on the other side of my cubicle wall.
    “King!” he yells from behind the wall.
    “Pender!”
    “Bill’s in the production meeting. He wants you there.”
    “Swell.”
    My voice mail light is flashing, but I can’t bring myself to play the messages. I have 130 new e-mails. At least half of them are nothing more than solicitations to buy toner, membership to various porn sites, or generic Viagra. I picture a gargantuan warehouse, somewhere in Middle America, stocked with nothing but ink cartridges, erection pills, and porn. The rest of the e-mails are primarily from clients, checking on projects, demanding updates, presuming that I have nothing else to worry about other than answering their petty inquiries, holding their hands, and letting them know everything’s on time. How the hell have I done this for so long? It’s just after noon, and my doctor’s appointment isn’t until four. I decide to skip the production meeting and see if I can make any headway on the Nike problem before I see Bill.
    One of the drawbacks of doing your manufacturing in China is that because of the vast time difference, you can never get a quick answer. And today, for whatever reason, there is no response to the urgent e-mail I jotted off yesterday before I left. It hardly matters, though, since I know that everything’s already been produced. Craig will accept nothing less than a new production run, which he has no intention of paying for. The first run will have to be scrapped, at a raw cost of approximately $120,000, which we’ll have to eat. We will also have to pay for the second run, with a probable twenty percent surcharge for a quick lead time as well as expedited shipping to get it in by Nike’s original deadline. I’d calculated the Spandler Corporation’s commission on the order to be a whopping eighty thousand dollars, twelve thousand of which would have been mine. Now not only will there be no profit, but we stand to incur significant losses remanufacturing the order, even if I manage to get Craig to foot the bill for the expedited shipping, which isn’t likely. The Spandler Corporation will write off the loss, effectively halving it, but I will see no such benefit in my own loss.
    There is another option. I can go over Craig’s head and present the documentation to his bosses. It was Nike’s screwup, after all, and we’ve got the spec sheets to prove it. Nike would then pay for the first order and place a new order in the correct color, and I would magnanimously offer to drastically reduce our margins on both so that we only break even, as a gesture of goodwill. A hell of a lot of work for which we would not make a dime, but we help them through the crisis, proving to be partners rather than vendors, and they reward us with future business. Of course, this strategy presumes that Craig will be fired, because if he