From n+1, issue 48, Fall 2024:
The Contingency Contingent
My fake job in Y2K preparedness
In rare moments within the history of capitalism, too few workers exist. Not as an absolute, of course: in total, workers always outnumber paid possibilities for work; that’s how our economy functions. But in a specific industry, a shortage may emerge, if only for a brief time. In 1998, on my first day of work as an analyst with the accounting and consulting firm Arthur Andersen LLP, it was clear that some aberration in accumulation had placed me in the twenty-fourth-floor conference room of a Manhattan skyscraper, overlooking the Museum of Modern Art’s sculpture garden, staring at a PowerPoint presentation for new hires. On one slide was a cartoon duck, bespectacled and presented in profile, standing on the tiptoes of its webbed feet. In its hands was a sledgehammer, held overhead, ready to smash a desktop computer.
I would learn soon enough that this—my first professional and only corporate work experience—was a fake job. It was fake because although I worked with Arthur Andersen, I never worked for them. (Their shade of blue-chip firm would never have hired the likes of me: they recruited from places like Harvard; I’d recently graduated from Hampshire College. They required new hires to have impeccable GPAs; my school didn’t confer grades.) Instead, I was employed by a global advertising conglomerate that had hired Andersen on a consultancy project and then placed me alongside the Andersen team—the result of a confluence of staffing shortages.
It was, moreover, a fake job because Andersen was faking it. The firm spent the late 1990s certifying fraudulent financial statements from Enron, the Texas-based energy company that made financial derivatives a household phrase, until that company went bankrupt in a cloud of scandal and suicide and Andersen was convicted of obstruction of justice, surrendered its accounting licenses, and shuttered. But that was later.
Finally, it was a fake job because the problem that the Conglomerate had hired Andersen to solve was not real, at least not in the sense that it needed to be solved or that Andersen could solve it. The problem was known variously as Y2K, or the Year 2000, or the Y2K Bug, and it prophesied that on January 1, 2000, computers the world over would be unable to process the thousandth-digit change from 19 to 20 as 1999 rolled into 2000 and would crash, taking with them whatever technology they were operating, from email to television to air-traffic control to, really, the entire technological infrastructure of global modernity. Hospitals might have emergency power generators to stave off the worst effects (unless the generators, too, succumbed to the Y2K Bug), but not advertising firms.
With a world-ending scenario on the horizon, employment standards were being relaxed. The end of the millennium had produced a tight labor market in knowledge workers, and new kinds of companies, called dot-coms, were angling to dominate the emergent world of e-commerce. Flush with cash, these companies were hoovering up any possessors of knowledge they could find. Friends from my gradeless college whose only experience in business had been parking-lot drug deals were talking stock options.
The employment agency through which I got my fake job made no epistemological distinction between knowing something and knowing about something. JavaScript, for example, a computer programming language: I knew about it but did not know it. Fine. Was I aware that the modern world might go on a catastrophic hiatus of unknown duration at the end of 1999? I had heard of something to that effect, although if pressed I couldn’t have explained. The Conglomerate was not much more stringent. My interview consisted of about twelve minutes with a laconic, mustachioed, middle-aged Arthur Andersen manager named Dick. (One of the services Andersen had been asked to provide was to help hire the Conglomerate’s Y2K team.) “On a scale of one to ten, what’s your knowledge of computer software?” he began. I paused for a moment, unsure of whether our interview would include a demonstrative component, as had so many previous interviews for jobs I had not gotten. But his office was empty. I couldn’t see how he would test me. I said eight.
“And what’s your knowledge of computer hardware, on a scale of one to ten?” Dick continued. The moment called for both boldness and modesty. I felt committed to eight, a number I had long appreciated for its intimations of infinity when turned sideways. So I repeated myself: “Eight.” It was true that one of my campus work-study jobs had been as a computer lab monitor. I could restart a PC or refill a printer’s paper tray if the situation demanded it, although it rarely did. I’d had the weekend evening shifts.
Dick’s next question would determine the development of my nascent career. “And what’s your level of problem-solving, on a scale of one to ten?” I sensed, suddenly, an opportunity to pass through a corporate loophole, to surmount my lack of credentials, training, and touch-typing skills and lean into my historical moment. “Nine,” I replied.
“That was it?” my girlfriend chirped when I reported to her the climax of my interview. The Conglomerate had hired me on the spot.
I was placed on the quality assurance team, assisting with work the Conglomerate had contracted to be carried out exclusively by the Arthur Andersen contingent. They weren’t called “a contingent” around the Y2K office. The consultants were referred to as the Andersen people, a term that exaggerated the partition between them and other Conglomerate employees, from whom they commanded both bewilderment and respect and, as often follows from the first two, a certain amount of resentment. These contradictory feelings stemmed from the fact that management consultants constituted then—and still do now—the vanguard of corporate work. They flit between companies and industries, parachuting in to diagnose problems and suggest, although rarely implement, “best-practice” solutions. It’s management consulting lingo, best-practice, and it indicates that the good is not enough: this isn’t Winnicott’s consulting room. Instead, management consultants aim for superlatives. They hire the best. They practice the best. They claim Pete Buttigieg among their alumni ranks. At the Conglomerate they had their own offices, their own meetings, their own schedules. They worked from the Conglomerate’s office space while they were on its project, but when they “rolled off” (they had their own terminology, too) they would take up residence within the ambit of another Andersen client.
“You’ve been selected because you’re Andersen quality but not Andersen price,” explained Cindy, the chipper data-warehousing expert who served as the quality assurance team’s Andersen-employed leader, on my second day of work. I felt like a piece of organic fruit found in the conventional produce bin....
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