By industry-wide convention, Focus Group members received a per diem equal to exactly 300 % of what they would receive for jury duty in the state where they resided. The reasoning behind this equation was so old and tradition-bound that no one of Terry Schmidt’s generation knew its origin. It was, for senior test marketers, both an in-joke and a plausible extension of verified attitudes about civic duty and elective consumption, respectively. The Hispanic man to the off-blond UAF’s left, who did not wear a wristwatch, had evidence of large tattoos on his upper arms through the fabric of his dress shirt, which fabric the natural lighting’s tinted hue rendered partly translucent. He was also one of the men with mustaches, and his nametag identified him as NORBERTO, making this the first Norberto to appear in any of the over 845 Focus Groups that Schmidt had led so far in his career as a Statistical Field Researcher for Team Δy. Schmidt kept his own private records of correlations between product, Client agency, and certain variables in Focus Groups’ constituents and procedures. These were run through various discriminant-analysis programs on his Apple-brand computer at home and the results collected in three-ring binders which he labeled and stored on a set of home-assembled gray steel shelves in the utility room of his condominium. The whole problem and project of descriptive statistics was discriminating between what made a difference and what did not. The fact that Scott R. Laleman now both vetted Focus Groups and helped design them was just one more sign that his star was ascending at Team Δy. The other real comer was A. Ronald Mounce, whose background was also in Technical Processing. ‘Question:’ ‘Question:’ ‘Comment:’ One man with a kind of long chinless face wished to know what Felonies!’ retail price was going to be, and he either didn’t understand or disliked Terry Schmidt’s explanation that retail pricing lay outside the purview of the Group’s focus today and was in fact the responsibility of a whole different R.S.B. research vendor. The reasoning behind the separation of price from consumer-satisfaction grids was technical and parametric and was not included in the putative Full-Access information Schmidt was authorized to share with the Focus Group under the terms of the study. There was one obvious hairweave in the room, as well as two victims of untreated Male Pattern Baldness, both of whom — either interestingly or by mere random chance — were among the Group’s four blue-eyed members.
When Schmidt thought of Scott Laleman, with his all-season tan and sunglasses pushed musslessly up on his pale hair’s crown, it was as something with the mindless malevolence of a carnivorous eel or skate, something that hunted on autopilot at extreme depths. The African-American male whose head was unshaved sat with the rigidity of someone who had back problems and understood the dignity with which he bore them to be an essential part of his character. The other wore sunglasses indoors in such a way as to make some unknown type of statement about himself; there was also no way of knowing whether it was a general statement or one specific to this context. Scott Laleman was only 27 and had come on board at Team Δy three years after Darlene Lilley and two and one-half years after Schmidt himself, who had helped Darlene train Laleman to run chi-square and t distributions on raw phone-survey data and had taken surprising satisfaction in watching the boy’s eyes glaze and tan go sallow under the fluorescent banklights of Dy’s data room, until then one day Schmidt had needed to see Alan Britton personally about something and had knocked and come in and Laleman was sitting in the office’s recliner across the room and he and Britton were both smoking very large cigars and laughing.
The figure that began its free climb up the building’s steadily increscent north facet just before 11:00 AM was outfitted in tight windproof Lycra leggings and a snug hooded GoreTex sweatshirt w/fiber-lined hood up and tied tight and what appeared to be mountaineering or rock-climbing boots except that instead of crampons or spikes there were suction cups lining the instep of each boot. Attached to both palms and wrists’ insides were single suction cups the size of a plumber’s helper; the cups’ color was the same shrill orange as hunting jackets and road crews’ hardhats. The Lycra pants’ color scheme was one navy-blue leg and one white leg; the sweatshirt and hood were blue with white piping. The mountaineering boots were an emphatic black. The figure moved swiftly and with numerous moist popping suction-noises up the display window of the Gap, a large retail clothier. He then pulled himself up and over onto the narrow ledge at the base of the second-floor window, rose complexly to his feet, affixed his cups, and swarmed up the pane’s thick glass, which gave onto the Gap’s second floor but had no promotional items displayed within. The figure presented as lithe and expert. His manner of climbing appeared almost more reptilian than mammalian, you’d have to say. He was halfway up the window of a management consulting firm on the fifth floor when a small crowd of passersby began to gather on the sidewalk below. Winds at ground level were light to moderate.
In the conference room, the north window’s tint made the northeastern half-cloudy sky seem raw and the froth of the waves on the distant windblown lake look dark; it brindled the sides of the other tall buildings in view, as well, which were all partly in one another’s shadow. Fully seven of the Focus Group’s men had small remains of Felonies! either on their shirtfront or hanging from the hairs on one side of their mustache or lodged at the inner corner of their mouth or in the small crease between the fingernail of their dominant hand and that nail’s surrounding skin. Two of the men wore no socks; both these men’s shoes were laceless leather; only one pair had tassels. One of the youngest men’s denim bellbottoms were so terrifically oversized that even with his legs out splayed and both knees bent his sock-status was unknown. One of the older men wore black silk or rayon socks with tiny lozenges of dark rich red upon them. Another of the older men had a mean little slit of a mouth, another a face far too saggy and seamed for his demographic slot. As was often the case, the youngest men’s faces appeared not quite yet fully or humanly formed, with the clean generic quality of products just off the factory floor. Terry Schmidt sometimes sketched his own face’s outlines in caricature form as he spoke on the phone or waited for software programs to run. One of the group’s men had a pear-shaped head, another a diamond- or kite-shaped face; the room’s second-oldest consumer had cropped gray hair and an overdeveloped upper lip that lent him a simian aspect. The men’s demoprofiles and initial Systat scores were in Schmidt’s valise on the carpet next to the whiteboard; he also had an over-shoulder bag he kept in his cubicle. I was one of the men in this room, the only one wearing a wristwatch who never once glanced at it. What looked just like glasses were not. I was wired from stem to stern. A small LCD at the bottom of my right scope ran both Real Time and Mission Time. My brief script for the GRDS caucus had been memorized intoto but there was a backup copy on a laminated card just inside my sweater’s sleeve, held in place with small tabs I could release by depressing one of the buttons on my wristwatch, which was really not a watch at all. There was also the emetic prosthesis. The cakes, of which I had already made a show of eating three, were so sweet they hurt your teeth.