"So it's a new job," she said. "You're going to work for Tjan?" Tjan's
Westinghouse operation was fully rocking. He had fifty teams up the
eastern seaboard, ten in the midwest and was rumored to have twice as
many in Eastern Europe.
He grinned. "Oh, Suzanne, don't try to journalist me." He reached out
and hugged her in a cloud of her father's cologne. "You're fantastic,
you know that? No, I'm not going to a job. It's a thing that's an
amazing opportunity, you know?"
She didn't, but then he was gone and boy did she miss him.
Perry and she went out for dinner in Miami the next night with a PhD
candidate from Pepperdine's B-school, eating at the same deco patio
that she'd dined at with Tjan. Perry wore a white shirt open to reveal
his tangle of wiry chest hair and the waitress couldn't keep her eyes
off of him. He had a permanent squint now, and a scar that made his
eyebrow into a series of small hills.
"I was just in Greensboro, Miss," the PhD candidate said. He was in
his mid-twenties, young and slick, his only nod to academe a small
goatee. "I used to spend summers there with my grandpa." He talked
fast, flecks of spittle in the corners of his mouth, eyes wide, fork
stabbing blindly at the bits of crab-cake on his plate. "There wasn't
*anything* left there, just a couple gas-stations and a 7-Eleven,
shit, they'd even closed the Wal-Mart. But now, but now, it's *alive*
again, it's buzzing and hopping. Every empty storefront is full of
people playing and tinkering, just a little bit of money in their
pockets from a bank or a company or a fund. They're doing the dumbest
things, mind you: tooled-leather laptop cases, switchblade knives with
thumb drives in the handles, singing and dancing lawn-Santas that
yodel like hillbillies."
"I'd buy a tooled-leather laptop case," Perry said, swilling a sweaty
bottle of beer. He waggled his funny eyebrow and rubbed his fuzzy
scalp.
"The rate of employment is something like ninety-five percent, which
it hasn't been in like a hundred years. If you're not inventing stuff,
you're keeping the books for someone who is, or making sandwiches for
them, or driving delivery vehicles around. It's like a tiny,
distributed gold rush."
"Or like the New Deal," Suzanne said. That was how she'd come to
invite him down, after she'd read his paper coining the term New Work
to describe what Perry was up to, comparing it to Roosevelt's
public-investment plan that spent America free of the Depression.
"Yeah, exactly, exactly! I've got research that shows that one in five
Americans is employed in the New Work industry. Twenty percent!"
Perry's lazy eye opened a little wider. "No way," he said.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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