Some of the other products and agencies whose branding campaigns Terry Schmidt and Darlene Lilley’s Field Team had also worked on for Team Δy were: Downyflake Waffles for D’Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles, Diet Caffeine Free Coke for Ads Infinitum US, Eucalyptamint for Pringle Dixon, Citizens Business Insurance for Krauthammer-Jaynes/SMS, the G. Heileman Brewing Co.’s Special Export and Special Export Lite for Bayer Bess Vanderwarker, Winner International’s HelpMe Personal Sound Alarm for Reesemeyer Shannon Belt, Isotoner Comfort-Fit Gloves for PR Cogent Partners, Northern Bathroom Tissue for Reesemeyer Shannon Belt, and Rhône- Poulenc Rorer’s new Nasacort and Nasacort AQ Prescription Nasal Spray, also for R.S.B.
The only way for an observer to detect anything unusual or out of the ordinary about the two UAFs’ status would be to note that the facilitator never once looked fully or directly at them, whereas on the other hand Schmidt did look at each of the other twelve men at various intervals, making brief and candid eye-contact with first one man and then another at a different place around the conference table and so on, a subtle skill (there is no term for it) that often marks those who are practiced at speaking before small groups, Schmidt neither holding any man’s eye for so long as to discomfit nor simply panning automatonically back and forth and brushing only lightly against each man’s gaze in such a way that the men in the Focus Group might feel as though this representative of Mister Squishy and Felonies! were talking merely at them rather than to or with them; and it would have taken a practiced small-group observer indeed to notice that there were two men in the conference room — one being the terse eccentric member surrounded by personal-care products, the other a silent earnest-eyed bespectacled man who sat in blazer and turtleneck at the table’s far corner, which latter Schmidt had decided was the second UAF: something a tiny bit too composed about the man’s mien and blink-rate gave him up — on whose eyes the facilitator’s never quite did alight all the way. Schmidt’s lapse here was very subtle, and an observer would have to be both highly experienced and unusually attentive to extract any kind of meaning from it.
The exterior figure wore also a mountaineer’s tool apron and a large nylon or microfiber backpack. Visually, he was both conspicuous and complex. On each slim ledge he again appeared to use the suction cups on his right hand and wrist to pull himself lithely up from a supine position to a standing position, cruciform, facing inward, hugging the glass with his arms’ cups engaged in order to keep from falling backward as he raised his left leg and turned the shoe outward to align the instep’s cups with the pane’s reflective surface. The suction cups appeared to be the kind whose vacuum action could be activated and deactivated by slight rotary adjustments that probably took a great deal of practice to learn to perform as deftly as the figure made them look. The backpack and boots were the same color. Most of the passersby who looked up and stopped and accreted into a small watching crowd found their attention most fully involved and compelled by the free climb’s mechanics. The figure traversed each window by lifting his left leg and right arm and pulling himself smoothly up, then attaching his dangling right leg and left arm and activating their cups’ suction and leaving them to hold his weight while he deactivated the left leg’s and right arm’s suction and moved them up and reactivated their cups. There were high degrees of both precision and economy in the way the figure orchestrated his different extremities’ tasks. The day was very crisp and winds aloft were high; whatever clouds there were moved rapidly across the slim square of sky visible above the tall buildings that flanked the street. The autumn sky itself the sort of blue that seems to burn. People with hats tipped them back on their heads and people without hats shaded their eyes with their gloves as they craned to watch the figure’s progress. The clabbering skies over the lake were not visible from the buildings’ rifts or canyon’s base. Also there was one large additional suction cup affixed to the back of the hood with a white Velcro strap. When the figure cleared another ledge and for a moment lay on his side facing out into the chasm below, those onlookers far enough back on the sidewalk to have some visual perspective could see another large orange suction cup, the hood’s cup’s twin, attached to his forehead by what was presumably also Velcro although this Velcro band must have run beneath the hood. And — there was general assent among the watching group — either reflective goggles or very odd and frightening eyes indeed.
Schmidt was simply giving the Focus Group a little extra background, he said, on the product’s genesis and on some of the marketing challenges it had presented, but he said that in no way shape or form was he giving them anything like the whole story, that he wouldn’t want to pretend he was giving them anything more than little pieces here and there. Time was tight in the pre-GRDS orientation phase. One of the men sneezed loudly. Schmidt explained that this was because Reesemeyer Shannon Belt Adv. wanted to make sure to give the Focus Group a generous interval to convene together in camera and discuss their experiences and assessments of Felonies! as a group, to compare notes if you will, on their own, qua group, without any marketing researchers yammering at them or standing there observing as if they were psychological guinea pigs or something, which meant that Terry would soon be getting out of their hair and leaving them to perpend and converse in private amongst themselves, and that he wouldn’t be coming back until whatever foreman they elected pushed the large red button next to the room’s lights’ rheostat that in turn activated — the red button did — an amber light in the office down the hall, where Terry Schmidt said he would be twiddling his metaphorical thumbs waiting to come collect the hopefully univocal Group Response Data Summary packet, which the elected foreman here would be receiving ex post hasto. Eleven of the room’s men had now consumed at least one of the products on the table’s central tray; five of them had had more than one. Schmidt, who was no longer playing idly with the Dry Erase marker because some of the men’s eyes had begun to follow it in his hand and he sensed it was becoming a distraction, said he now also proposed to give them just a little of the standard spiel on why after all the solo time and effort they’d all already put in on their Individual Response Profiles he was going to ask them to start all over again and consider the GRDS packet’s various questions and scales as a collective. He had a trick for disposing of the Dry Erase marker where he very casually placed it in the slotted tray at the bottom of the whiteboard and gave the pen’s butt a hard flick with his finger, sending it the length of the tray to stop just short of shooting out off the other end altogether, with its cap’s tip almost precisely aligned with the tray’s end, which he performed with TFGs about 70 % of the time, and did perform now. The trick was even more impressively casual-looking if he performed it while he was speaking; it lent both what he was saying and the trick itself an air of nonchalance that heightened the impact. Robert Awad himself — this being the Team Δy Senior Research Director who would later harass and be so artfully defused by Darlene Lilley — had casually performed this little trick in one of his orientation presentations for new Field Team researchers 27 fiscal quarters past. This, Schmidt said, was because one of Reesemeyer Shannon Belt Advertising’s central tenets, one of the things that set them apart from other agencies in their bailiwick and so was of course something in which they took great pride and made much of in their pitches to clients like Mister Squishy and North American Soft Confections Inc., was that IRPs like the 20-page questionnaires the men had so kindly filled out in their separate airless cubicles were of definite but only partial research utility, since corporations whose products had national or even regional distribution depended on appealing not just to individual consumers but also of course it almost went without saying to very large groups of them, groups that were yes comprised of individuals but were nevertheless groups, larger entities or collectives. These groups as conceived and understood by market researchers were strange and protean entities, Schmidt told the Focus Group, whose tastes — referring to groups, or small-m markets as they were known around the industry — whose tastes and whims and predilections were not only as the men in the room were doubtless aware subtle and fickle and susceptible to influence from myriad tiny factors in each individual consumer’s appetitive makeup but were also, somewhat paradoxically, functions of the members of the group’s various influences upon one another, all in a set of interactions and recursively exponential responses-to-responses so complex and multifaceted that it drove statistical demographers half nuts and required a whole Sysplex series of enormously powerful low-temperature Cray-brand supercomputers even to try to model.