A Chinese Character

Wednesday is Friendsday. That's what we called it in Personnel and Personality Testing, because on Wednesday we had the fewest number of issues to deal with. So I was a bit put out to have two long-winded messages waiting for me at nine that morning. Two employees had written, each one complaining about the other. Funny thing was, I knew from gossip they were an office romance, a long-term one, which everyone expected to blossom into a marriage.

I brazenly sent them the same message: Can I get you both of you in my office together?

He replied immediately: That would be great!

She replied after an hour: I'd rather not, but okay.

The two of them entered separately. I could hear him laughing before he entered my room, while she slinked in silently. They sat down in the available chairs.

I won't be revealing any confidential information if I tell you that "Don" worked quietly, and shyly, in the mailroom, and was something of a failed poet, while "Trudy" was from the advertising department, with all the noise that that entails. On their Meyers-Briggs, he was strongly an I, and she was strongly an E, so neither was acting the correct 'type'.

I was still annoyed at having to do any work, so I boldly announced: "Drugs? (to Don) Stimulants? (to Trudy) Depressants?"

Trudy quietly said: "Not interested," and looked shyly at her fingernails.

Don said: "You got any good ones?"

"No, I don't have any drugs. Not that kind of councillor. Do you know you complained about one another?"

Don looked at Trudy and cried: "What? What would you have to complain about?"

Trudy fidgeted. "I don't want to talk about it."

Her behaviour was odd for an advertiser, see? I decided to go further outside the book, hoping they didn't know how far outside of the book I'd already gone. I told her: "Trudy, you have to tell me. Your complaint is part of Corporate Records now. So spill it."

She avoided my eyes and examined the ceiling. She checked her nails again. Two minutes later, she said: "It's Vegas."

Don jumped from his seat. "What do you mean? You don't want to go anymore?"

With a pained expression she said: "I don't think it's such a hot idea anymore. I just want to be left alone."

"It was your bloody idea! And now‑now that I'm totally into it, you're not interested?"

"Vegas is noisy‑and so crowded."

"You bought tickets for Elton John!"

"You can re-sell them somehow. Probably for lots, since he's retiring soon."

I felt we were stuck in a time-suck so I interrupted. "This all looks personal, not personnel. Ha. How is this any of the Corporation's business?"

They looked at me blankly for a moment. Then Don said: "It's because this place brought us together." He laughed loudly. "If it wasn't for this place, I'd be a happy man!"

Trudy muttered: "Happy."

I said: "If it's not impacting on the day-to-day operations of the company, I can't see how it is possible for me to get involved. I'd be held responsible for matters that are not my business."

Don shouted: "Something must be done!"

"If it starts affecting your work, let me know. For now, I suggest you co-ordinate your arrivals and departures such that they don't overlap."

Trudy sighed: "This was a bad idea from the get-go."

Don snorted. "Tell me about it."

They got up to leave. As they left, Trudy turned to me. "And he's started a blog," and rolled her eyes and shook her head.

They left; out in the hall I heard him shout: "And I'm gonna monetize the shit outta my content!"

Maybe I laughed to myself, thinking the course of true love never runs smooth. I returned to my inbox. There I found, oddly for a Friendsday, another crisis for me to resolve. The message was signed by three engineers in our research and development department, and it said they had a serious complaint about their manager "Donald." I found the phone number of the first signer and called him up. He said, We have to get organized a bit, feel things through, then we'll be up.

Thirty-five minutes later they sauntered in. With Donald were "Heather" and "Gerald." They stood there looking around like they had to get the mood of the place.

I said: "Could one of you shut the door?"

Gerald laughed and slowly closed the door.

"So what's the problem with 'Ann'?"

Heather said: "She's just‑just I dunno. She's making all these charts and stuff. Organizational charts. Time-and-motion studies. She's really interfering with how we like to operate."

Gerald said: "She wasn't like that, like, a month ago. Back then, in the 'glory days,' she let us do our thing. Now it's like she's going through our codes and schematics with a fine-tooth comb."

Donald said: "We ourselves got shot down just because we wanted to start a little study group, just an hour a week."

I asked: "What did you want to study in that time?"

"Spinoza's Ethics."

"That's an unusual choice for engineers."

"We needed a broader view."

"Holistical."

"God and nature, time and being."

I was taking notes all this time, and I told them I'd contact Ann and let her know their concerns. They thanked me for listening, and Gerald said: "Namaste," on the way out.

I looked up Ann and telephoned her. She said: "I'll be right there!"

In less than a minute she was in my office.

"Sorry I'm late," she said as she pressed a button on her phone. "I've de-bugged and stream-lined this PDA, but there's still room for improvement."

"Very good," I said. "That's not a very N thing to do, however."

"N?"

"Intuitive."

She laughed. "Bullshit, all bullshit. You should see my team. They've lost focus. It's like they're enjoying wasting time on dead ends. 'It's a dead end!' I tell 'em, and they say, 'There's still lots to learn, there's no such thing as a dead end.' Can you believe it?"

"Perhaps they're going through a creative period; maybe‑go easy on them for a bit? Group psychology always looks odd to someone outside the group."

"They've gone cult."

"Mmm?"

"Touchy-feely."

"That's not a cult."

She looked around, angry, cornered, by HR (which she was! ha). "When were they in?"

"Mmm?"

"They made complaints of a particular kind. When exactly were they in?"

"I don't know; eleven-ten?"

She pointed up. "Ah! They said they were going off for coffee! and they'd never done that before! all together!"

I made some gestures of consolation. "Ann, they're worried about you. Your personality has changed."

"Their personalities have changed."

"I'm not going to make the distinction. Look, they want you to let them do some exploration. So‑let them."

She gave up the battle. "Okay. I promise to give them the space to do ... whatever. But I tell you: this isn't going to last long! I've got schematics to look through."

She left my office.

I made notes, drawing more question marks that day than any other day.

It was lunch, and in the elevator I met our visiting researcher Dr. Chang Ling. He nodded and nodded, so we had lunch together down in the food court.

Chang Ling had come to our organization solely because‑so I'd been told‑of our size: twenty thousand employees worldwide, in a multinational corporation. He was researching personnel and spatiality, or some such intersection. (It was all somewhat beyond me at the time.)

We chose to dine on samosas, and we sat down and dug into them. He asked how my day was going.

"Two odd situations, neither of which I can resolve. Tell me, what do you know about the malleability of personality? How quickly can it change?"

He nodded and blinked. "That is an interesting question. A ninety degree rotation turns the moon into the sun and the sun into the moon, you see."

I nodded like I knew what he was talking about. I said: "I'm thinking more about how characters can change their types."

He said: "Character is not type, and type is not character. Each is formed by the other, as yin creates yang and yan creates ying."

I nodded again. I said: "A character has to be set in a type, and each type consists of many characters." Why was I thinking book-historically and print-culturally? I suppose I had nothing else to go on.

I went back up to my office after dining with our inscrutable researcher only to find, lo and behold, the company's Chief Executive Officer ("Patrick") sitting at my desk, in my chair, doing something to my computer.

"Oh," he said. "I fixed your email inbox to sort your mail efficiently."

"I thank you. What are you doing here?"

He got out of my chair, saying: "We'd both be better off with you sitting here." He moved to the chair opposite and continued: "I'm having problems with my Chief Operational Officer. She seems to have fallen in love with me, quite irrationally. I have evidence."

I sat myself down, saying: "You mean 'Becky'? I never thought of her as an emotional sort."

He pulled a sheet of paper from a folio and showed it. "She's written me a poem. It's in proper scansion, and it appears to be full of feeling, I don't know."

I looked the poem over. Yes, it was a love sonnet that even used the real name of 'Patrick.' (N.B. I am using pseudonyms because we are our nation's military's sole suppliers of advanced rocket fuels.)

"This is authentic?" I asked.

He leaned onto my desk and looked me intelligently. "She gave it to me herself."

"It borders on pornography."

"She appears to have little control over her juices."

I put the sexy verse down on my desk. "I think you should take this to the Board of Directors. You don't answer to me."

He put up a thoughtful index finger. "That could jeopardize our entire operation, putting thousands of jobs at risk."

"When did you get so thoughtful? You're the CEO. You're supposed to be the emotional core of the whole operation."

(Who was I to talk to our blessed CEO like that, you are probably wondering. Fact was, I knew his sister very well, and we'd met at her wedding.)

He said: "I've deduced a change has come over me recently. The cause I cannot figure; but the change is self-evident to those who can reason through such matters."

"Meanwhile," I said, cluing into something interesting: "Our erstwhile reasonable COO has shed her functionally useful reason and become something of a slave to her emotions."

"Precisely. Why, I know not."

I gave him back his poem. "I have to think about this for a while. Stay cool to your associate, and I'll contact you in a day or so."

"That sounds logical to me."

And thus did our CEO depart.

I checked my email, expecting some similar matters because I could see the pattern that was forming, though I didn't know why it was forming to begin with. There was an email from one of the legal team‑"Anne". I phoned her and she told me she had some other matters to attend to, and that she would come to see me as soon as it "worked" for her. Of course I'd never heard such language from a lawyer before‑neither have you‑so I guessed that she was having trouble with someone who had suddenly become a person who had to have matters settled.

An hour later, Anne came into my office. I let her decide where to start‑in accord with her new type.

She began: "I'm hosting a conference with some of the lawyers of our sub-contractors‑steel producers, oxidant generators, kerosene makers and so on‑and our in-house caterer is demanding too much information. He won't let it go with the flow!"

"What sort of information?"

"He's demanding to know the number of attendees! I tell him: I don't know. He tells me: Be as exact as humanly possible. I tell him: Just give us food and we'll eat it. He says: I have to use complicated tables with demographic breakdowns to make any step, even the first one. His demands are making me crazy!"

Chang Ling.

I asked: "Before now, he was, as a caterer, always able to improvise and do things at the last minute?"

"Yes, always very accommodating."

"Because I suppose it should be in his character to be like that?" (I nearly added: to be P?)

"I suppose, if you want to go that way, sure. It's his type."

"However, shouldn't you, as a lawyer, want things to be as accurate as possible? Shouldn't it be in your character that way?" (I nearly added: to be J?)

"I seem to have loosened up in the last week or so, I must admit."

"Do you see what I'm getting at?"

"Be as vague as possible, and perhaps I can."

"The two of you‑you and the caterer‑have traded characteristics."

"Is that possible? I suppose it is. That could be the case. Oh well. Anyway, he's still driving me crazy with his demand for accuracy."

I wanted her out of my office as soon as possible. I said: "I'll look into this. I'll have a talk to the caterers, and we'll work things out."

She appeared to weigh her options, and finally she left.

Alone at last, I decided to find more information about Chang Ling. You see, he was a recent arrival, just a couple weeks engaged, and I knew nothing about him. He had been parachuted in, more or less. So I took a look at his résumé, which was called his "C.V." as the highfalutin academics called it. I noticed a hyperlink to Hong Kong University, and I followed it. Much of it was in Chinese. A list of publications was there. Reading from the bottom up, I saw three (anglicized) publication credits, then a half-dozen in Chinese, then, at the very top, in English, a credit for a graduate-level essay called "Sixteen Lives to Live: The Consolidation of all Types Into One Character." Clicking around (I'm a pro at finding dirt on people) I found an abstract that said that the research concerned the mutability of type that could potentially allow an individual character, under the influence of the right sorts of drugs, to experience all possible types.

With more than just a hunch I looked up Chang Ling in our company directory. He had two phone numbers, and I reverse-look-upped the second one to discover that we had LABs on B-6, six floors under street level. As far as I knew, all our elevators bottomed out at B-4. How to get there?

I took the elevator down to B-4 and wandered the halls. Huge machines were rumbling behind thick iron doors. "I am closer to Hell than I have ever been before," I thought. I passed rotten cardboard boxes filled with who knew what sort of Cold War relics and finally I came to a door marked S for stairs. I went into the stairwell and sure enough there were stairs‑clean, well-maintained‑going down. So I went down two floors.

I heard distant music: Led Zeppelin. I followed the music down a hall and then another hall, to a door marked PSYCHOLOGY LAB. I opened, and went inside.

The music was very very loud. The atmosphere was suffused with a mellow blue-tinged light in which vast mainframes hummed and chemistry sets burbled. I found the stereo‑on a shelf at the far end of the room‑and turned down the LP of "II". There was a door beside the stereo and it opened and in walked Chang Ling wearing an orange kimono. He shouted with glee seeing me and slapped me on my shoulder, saying: "Miss Anderson! How good it is to see you! Care for a drink?"

"Mr. Chang‑"

"Call me by my first name!"

"Oh. Mr. Ling, what is the nature of your research way down here on B-6?"

"Please, have a drink! I've got a per diem!"

"No thank you; it's mid-afternoon."

"Well, shoot your shelf! A little martooni never hurt anyone."

He hopped over to his chemistry set and poured himself, from beaker to martini glass, a drink. "So what brings you down to my lab?"

"I want to know about your personnel research. I've had several unusual meetings with people today, and I have a hunch it's got something to do with your research."

"Come over here, sit yourself down on my couch."

There was a couch in the lab. I hadn't noticed it. I sat down, saying: "I looked up some of your research abstracts. Is it the case that you are 'messing around' with personality types?"

"Ah! So you've noticed!"

"Yes, I've noticed."

"Would you like a demonstration? It's a real breakthrough for humanity, if I do humbly say so myself."

"I'm curious," I said. "So go ahead, show me what you've got."

He darted to a drawer near the chemistry set, opened it, pulled out some sheets of paper, grabbed a pen, and darted back to throw the papers and pen in my lap. "Non-disclosure agreement! Everything I'm doing is hush-hush!"

I looked over the legalese. "I can't sign this. My office has to know fully what's been going on with our employees."

His eyes bugged out and he turned away to chew his thumb and think. He was also hopping a little. He turned back to me and said, "I can risk it. I'm so close to the end! Would you like to see the chemical or electronic version?"

"I'll leave that up to you."

"The electronic version is fast-fast-fast."

He darted into the room beside the stereo and re-emerged with a contraption of circuit boards, wires, and what looked like a megaphone, which he proceeded to plug in (via a wholly pedestrian USB) into a CPU tower that in turn attached to the mainframes.

"Hah!" he cried. "Now watch and learn!"

His device in hand started to burble and spark. On the screen attached to the CPU he clicked a GUI toggle and the device's pitch got higher. He turned the funnel to his face and his eyes glowed green as he smiled crazily. Thirty seconds later the unit went silent. Chang Ling heaved a sigh and calmly set the device down beside the screen.

"There," he said. "My personality is now different."

I looked at him closely. He did in fact look different. His eyes were droopy with tiredness. "So what's changed?" I asked.

"I have retreated from fire and I have entered the xing of metal." He sat down calmly. "Would you like to give it a go?"

I laughed nervously. "I wouldn't know what would happen. I mean: What have you done to yourself with that machine?"

"I've changed my personality by changing my types."

I got up to stretch my legs. He smiled indulgently. I said: "How long has this been going on? Is this what you're here to do? Is this what all your research is about?"

He laughed lightly. "For my entire life, I have wondered about the causes of personality. Why is one as one is? I read all the psychological theories, about 'armouring' and so on, and Jung of course, but it all seemed so second-hand and just-so. Behind it all, I had a pressing desire for just one thing. Tell me. You must have had some regrets in your life. Name me one."

I thought for a moment and said: "I never learned how to play a musical instrument."

"There we are," he said, gesturing for me to sit down once again; which I did. He continued: "That is a trait of your personality. Now imagine if you could have changed your personality, even for a short while, don't you think you may have been able to be more of a person who wanted to play a musical instrument?"

I countered: "But what if, all things being equal, I would rather be a person who regrets not playing the piano than a person who doesn't regret not playing the piano and plays the piano?"

He thought about this for a moment. "You're arguing for slavery."

"Oh now come on."

He continued: "If you want to be a slave to your contingencies, be my guest. I, on the other hand, wish to free people. Pick an LP."

The music had stopped. I got up to simply turn it over to side one. "Whole Lotta Love" started up.

Chang Ling sighed. "Imagine being unshackled from your character to experience botany one day, sky-diving the next, sculpture the following, and finally an orgy. And all that can be ours if we only break away from the cursed shackles of type."

I said: "Give me a straight answer here. Are you experimenting on our employees?"

"Oh, yes."

"Isn't that ... unethical?"

"The Board of Directors gave me the go-ahead. Read your employment contract. You agreed to being experimented upon on the penultimate page."

"This sounds worse than Facebook."

"That's not for me to J."

"I'm going to take this up with the board of directors."

"With what? A conference call between London, Singapore, Adelaide, Dubai, Los Angeles, and Buenos Aires?"

"That's where the directors are based?"

"I'm mostly guessing. I think Berlin and Tokyo are in there too."

We would have continued our argument if Hell on Earth had not broken loose at that point. The fire alarm went off, and we waited for the preliminary ten blasts to stop. They stopped, and I opened my mouth to speak, but instead the real fire alarm went off. It was a real alarm, and we had to get out of the building along with everyone else.

Chang Ling said, "I think we would be safe if we stayed. The fire, if there is a fire, must be above us."

"Then we'll suffocate."

"A valid point." He went to the stereo and shut it off. "Then let's be off."

We opened the door to the hallway. The alarm was deafening against the concrete walls and ceiling. A sudden explosion rocked the ground, fortunately coming from the direction we didn't have to go. I yelled: "Don't tell me. There's a rocket fuel lab down that way."

"Five, actually. A to E."

Chang Ling hurried down one hall, then down another hall, with me in tow (for he knew the best way out). I couldn't take my eyes off his orange kimono. He turned suddenly and opened a door; something exploded seemingly quite near to us, lighting up the walls around and the pressure on our ears made me wonder if we would be able to hear anything outside of outrageously gigantic explosions ever again. We got through into a stairwell and pushed the heavy pneumatic door closed.

The alarms and explosions seemed relatively far off. We started up the stairs‑six or so floors‑following signs reading THIS WAY OUT.

Finally we got outside. Sirens blasted everywhere. We got to a safe distance and watched smoke billowing out of the building from the left and right.

I asked: "So‑this is all your fault, right?"

He said: "The fault in nature was already ready."

"What did you do to the rocket scientists?"

"Maybe too much. In my terms, I changed metal to earth, and water to fire. In your terms, I changed them from being INTJs to ESFPs."

"From microbiologists to ... bartenders."

"More or less."

"That was extreme."

"I research."

Another explosion rocked the earth. The firehoses blasted the building, useless against the rocket propellants we had in use in the lab. I saw our CEO Patrick trying uselessly to take command of the emergency vehicles. Trudy was there, sitting in a euphoria, watching the burns and blasts. Donald was standing with Patrick, egging him on. I seemed to myself to be knowing everyone. Maybe I had had my personality changed? I asked Chang Ling: "Did you use your thing on me?"

He said: "I never got close enough."

 

***

 

Six scientists (or bartenders) died in the tragedy. The whole operation got shut down. We may never recover. Everyone went elsewhere, and Chang Ling, due to a pretty bizarre relationship between the Chinese government and ours, wound up disappearing. I myself am now working for a publicity organization.

The effects of Chang Ling's experiments eventually wore off, and everyone got back to ... normal.

Why hadn't he gotten close to me? Could he not have done it on the day after Friendsday? Why did the explosion have to happen on Friendsday? He should have changed me. He didn't change me. I'm tired of this.

Maybe I can find him on LinkedIn.