The Reorg

Chapter 1: The Badge

Corey Jackson had written four hundred and eleven product descriptions for shower curtains. He knew this because he kept a running tally on a Post-it note stuck to the bottom edge of his monitor, the way a prisoner might scratch marks into a cell wall. Four hundred and eleven shower curtains. Sixty-seven travel mugs. Thirty-nine bath mats. Twelve laundry hampers that he suspected were the same hamper photographed from different angles.

He was twenty-eight years old. He had a degree in English literature from a state university that wasn't the good state university. He had student loans. He had a studio apartment in a neighborhood that real estate listings described as "emerging," which was code for "you will hear gunshots but only on weekends." He had a cat named Paperweight, because the cat did nothing except sit on things.

And he had a job at Vantage, a mid-size e-commerce company that sold everything from kitchen gadgets to outdoor furniture, where his official title was Junior Copywriter and his unofficial title was "the guy in the corner."

It was Monday morning, the kind of Monday that felt like it had been Monday for several days already. Corey shuffled through the lobby of Vantage's headquarters — a four-story building in a business park that also housed a dental supply company and something called "Pinnacle Synergies" that nobody had ever seen a human being enter or leave. He badged in at the security turnstile, the same way he'd done every morning for three years, and the little screen flashed a greeting.

GOOD MORNING, COREY JACKSON
CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER

He stared at it. The turnstile beeped impatiently. He stared at it some more.

"You gonna go through or are you just gonna stand there communing with the machine?" said a voice behind him.

Corey turned. It was Manny Restrepo from the sales floor, a stocky guy with a goatee who always smelled faintly of protein powder. Manny was holding a smoothie the color of lawn clippings.

"It says I'm the Chief Financial Officer," Corey said.

"Yeah?" Manny leaned around him to look. "Huh. Mine said I'm VP of Procurement. I don't know what procurement is. I sell patio umbrellas." He shrugged and took a sip of his smoothie. "System's probably glitching. They did that big migration thing over the weekend."

Corey remembered. There had been an email — several emails, actually, each more urgent than the last — about the migration to a new enterprise management platform called OrgVault Pro. The emails had come from Dev Copeland, the IT lead, a lanky man with the permanently exhausted expression of someone who had been asked to explain the same thing fourteen times to fourteen different vice presidents. The migration was supposed to happen seamlessly over the weekend. Nobody was supposed to notice a thing.

Corey pushed through the turnstile and walked toward the elevator, his messenger bag bumping against his hip. The lobby was louder than usual. People were clustered in small groups, staring at their phones, laughing nervously or not laughing at all.

"I'm listed as Director of Legal," said a woman from the marketing team, her voice pitched somewhere between amusement and panic. "I got a C in business law."

"At least you went to law school," said the man next to her.

"I didn't go to law school. I got a C in an undergraduate business law class that I took as an elective because it fit my schedule."

Corey took the elevator to the third floor, where the copywriting team sat in a cluster of desks that the facilities manager had optimistically called a "creative pod." It was four desks pushed together near the men's restroom. The creative pod smelled like industrial hand soap and, occasionally, worse.

His desk was exactly as he'd left it on Friday: a monitor, a keyboard, a half-empty water bottle, and the Post-it note. Four hundred and eleven. But when he logged into his computer, everything was different.

His dashboard had changed. Instead of the content management system where he usually typed things like "This elegant shower curtain features a modern geometric pattern that complements any bathroom décor," he was looking at a financial portal. Revenue charts. Expense summaries. A calendar full of meetings with names like "Q3 Margin Review" and "Capital Allocation Committee." His email inbox, which normally contained maybe six messages a day — half of them from his team lead asking him to "punch up" a bath mat description — now held one hundred and forty-seven unread messages.

The first one was from someone named Reese Yamada.

Subject: RE: Q3 Variance Report — URGENT

Corey opened it.

"Corey — I'm not sure why you're copied on this but the variance report needs to go to the board by Wednesday. The consolidated P&L has a $2.3M discrepancy in COGS that I've been tracking since August. DO NOT let anyone present the numbers without reconciling the wholesale supplier rebates. I've flagged the line items in the attached spreadsheet. Call me if you need context. — Reese"

Corey did not know what COGS was. He did not know what a variance report was. He was reasonably certain that P&L stood for "profit and loss" but only because he'd seen it on a whiteboard once. He opened the attached spreadsheet and was confronted with approximately nine thousand cells of numbers, many of them negative, some of them in red, and all of them meaningless to him.

He closed the spreadsheet.

He opened it again.

He closed it again.

His desk phone rang. He picked it up.

"Is this the CFO's office?" said a crisp female voice.

"This is Corey Jackson's desk," Corey said. "I write product descriptions for shower curtains."

"The system says you're the CFO."

"The system is wrong."

"Well, I have a purchase order for $340,000 worth of warehouse shelving that needs CFO approval by noon. Can you approve it?"

"I don't — I can't — I write product descriptions for shower curtains," Corey repeated, as though this fact, stated firmly enough, might restore the natural order of the universe.

"So is that a no on the shelving?"

"I don't know what the shelving is for."

"It's for the warehouse."

"I don't know what the warehouse is for."

There was a pause. "It's for storing things. That we sell. To customers."

"Right. Yes. I know that. I mean — can you call the real CFO? Reese Yamada?"

Another pause. "Reese Yamada is listed as Warehouse Shipping Coordinator."

Corey hung up the phone. He stood up from his desk. He needed to find Dev Copeland.

---

The IT department was on the second floor, in a room that had once been a conference space and now functioned as a combination server closet, break room, and therapist's office for anyone whose computer was doing something they didn't understand. Dev Copeland sat at the center of it all, surrounded by three monitors, a tangle of cables, and a mug that said "I'M NOT ARGUING, I'M EXPLAINING WHY I'M RIGHT."

Dev was thirty-five, bald by choice, and had the kind of calm demeanor that either meant he was deeply competent or deeply dissociated. Possibly both. He was on the phone when Corey arrived, and from the sound of it, he'd been on the phone for a while.

"Yes, I'm still holding," Dev said into the receiver. He looked at Corey. He did not look surprised. "Let me guess. Your title's wrong."

"I'm listed as CFO."

"You're the fourth person to come down here in the last twenty minutes. Before you, it was Janet from accounting, who is now apparently the VP of Product Design, and Tomas from the warehouse, who is listed as Chief Marketing Officer." Dev leaned back in his chair. "The org chart module scrambled during the migration. Every employee's title and role assignment got randomly reshuffled."

"So fix it."

"I would love to fix it. Truly. There is nothing I want more in this world than to fix it. But the system is locked. The admin credentials were overwritten during the migration. The only people who can unlock it are at OrgVault Pro's headquarters, and their emergency support line has been playing hold music for" — he checked his watch — "six hours and fourteen minutes."

Corey could hear the hold music. It was a jazz arrangement of "Girl from Ipanema" that sounded like it had been recorded inside a tin can.

"What kind of hold music plays for six hours?" Corey asked.

"The kind that makes you question every decision that led you to this moment." Dev adjusted his headset. "I've also tried their online support portal, which is down. Their Twitter account hasn't posted since March. And their 'Contact Us' page has a form that, when you submit it, gives you a 404 error and then redirects you to a page selling timeshares in Cancún."

"That can't be real."

"I will show you the timeshare page. It's actually a pretty good deal if you're flexible on dates."

Corey sank into a chair that was being used as a shelf for old keyboards. "So what do we do?"

"We wait. I've got a ticket in with their engineering team through a back channel — a guy I know from a conference. He says they're aware of the issue and they're working on it. But he also said that last Tuesday about a different issue that still isn't fixed, so."

"How long?"

Dev spread his hands in the universal gesture of a man who had absolutely no idea. "Could be hours. Could be days. Could be the heat death of the universe. Welcome to enterprise software."

Corey's phone buzzed. It was a calendar notification.

CFO WEEKLY LEADERSHIP SYNC — 10:00 AM — BOARDROOM

It was 9:47.

"Dev," Corey said. "I have a leadership meeting in thirteen minutes."

"Better get going then, Chief Financial Officer."

"This isn't funny."

Dev's mouth twitched. "It's a little funny."

---

The boardroom was on the fourth floor, and it was the nicest room in the building by a significant margin. It had floor-to-ceiling windows, a table made of actual wood instead of the particle-board-and-laminate that everything else in the building was constructed from, and a coffee machine that made real espresso rather than the brown liquid the break room dispensers produced, which Corey had always suspected was just hot water that had been shown a photograph of a coffee bean.

When Corey walked in, the room was already half full, and it was immediately clear that something had gone very wrong with the seating chart of corporate America.

At the head of the table sat Liz Stahler, the CEO. Liz was fifty-three, silver-haired, and had the kind of presence that made you sit up straighter without being told to. She was the only person in the company whose role the system hadn't touched, which either meant the glitch had a sense of hierarchy or she'd been protected by some administrative flag that even the scramble couldn't override. She was sipping espresso and looking at the assembled group with an expression that Corey couldn't quite read. It might have been concern. It might have been amusement. It might have been the look of a woman who had just decided to burn everything down and was waiting to see what grew from the ashes.

"Good morning," Liz said. "Please sit down. I know this is unusual."

Corey sat. To his left was Becca Hollings, a twenty-one-year-old intern who had been with the company for exactly six weeks. Becca was small, freckled, and had the wide-eyed expression of someone who had just been told she was now in charge of things she had never heard of. Her badge said HEAD OF HUMAN RESOURCES.

"I was an English major," Becca whispered to Corey. "I don't even know what HR does."

"I was also an English major," Corey whispered back. "I'm apparently the CFO."

They shared a look of mutual, exquisite horror.

Around the table were other familiar faces in unfamiliar roles. Greg Pettibone, a fifty-seven-year-old warehouse supervisor who had been with the company since its founding, was now listed as Chief Technology Officer. He was wearing steel-toed boots and had grease under his fingernails. Anita Desai, who ran the customer service team with the fierce efficiency of a general, was now VP of Business Development. She did not look pleased.

"I've spoken with Dev Copeland," Liz said, once everyone had settled. "The system migration scrambled the org chart. Every role, every title, every reporting line — randomized. Dev is working with the vendor to resolve it, but there's no timeline for a fix."

"So we just... wait?" said Greg, who had the rumbling voice of a man who had spent decades shouting over forklift noise.

"No," said Liz. "We don't wait. Waiting is what this company does best, and it's killing us." She set down her espresso. "Here's what we're going to do. Until IT resolves the glitch, everyone operates under their new title."

The room went silent. Not the comfortable silence of agreement, but the airless silence of a group of people collectively wondering if they'd misheard something.

"I'm sorry," said Anita. "You want us to do jobs we're not qualified for?"

"I want us to stop pretending that titles are the same thing as competence," Liz said. "I've been CEO of this company for seven years. In that time, I've watched talented people get stuck in boxes because someone decided ten years ago that they were 'a warehouse guy' or 'a copywriter' or 'just an intern.' This is a radical agility exercise."

"This is insane," said Anita.

"Those two things aren't mutually exclusive."

"Liz," said Greg, carefully. "I've been loading trucks for thirty years. I don't know what a CTO does."

"Neither did the last three CTOs we hired, and we paid them a quarter million each." Liz smiled. It was not a reassuring smile. It was the smile of someone who had made a decision and was daring the universe to stop her. "I'm not asking anyone to perform surgery. I'm asking you to try. Use your judgment. Ask questions. If something is truly urgent and truly dangerous, escalate it to me. But I suspect you'll find that most of what we do here is not as complicated as we've made it."

"What about payroll?" Corey asked, because it seemed like the kind of thing a CFO should ask about.

"Payroll is automated. It runs on a separate system. Everyone gets paid their actual salary, regardless of what the org chart says."

Small mercy, Corey thought.

"How long?" Anita pressed.

"Until IT fixes it. Could be today. Could be this week." Liz stood. "I suggest everyone spend the morning getting oriented. Find your new teams. Read your emails. Ask dumb questions — they're usually the best ones." She gathered her things. "And for God's sake, don't panic. We sell shower curtains and travel mugs. Nobody's going to die."

She left. The room sat in stunned silence.

"I'm going to die," Becca Hollings said quietly.

Corey looked at his phone. He had eleven new emails, all of them about money he didn't understand, from people he'd never met, regarding things he couldn't pronounce.

Chief Financial Officer.

Four hundred and eleven shower curtains had not prepared him for this.