Company
Colson Whitehead
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Company’s another story. It begins with a new employee, Stephen Jones, starting his first day at the Seattle-based Zephyr Holdings. A fresh-faced lad of above-average intellect and drive, Jones comes into the Training Sales department loaded for bear and looking to make a mark, only to be confronted by a brick wall of bureaucracy. In fact, he doesn’t get any further than the lobby before he’s confronted by the Zephyr mission statement, a nice-sounding paragraph of nonsense that’s fairly standard corporate gobbledygook except for one thing: nowhere does it say what it is that Zephyr makes, or sells, or trades, or traffics.
After discovering that Training Sales doesn’t even have customers–they only sell training packages to other Zephyr departments–Jones comes to realize that not only do his coworkers have no idea what the company does, they have little interest in finding out. And as he tries to solve the puzzle on his own, going from one person to the next and even knocking on the door of the feared and dictatorial department head, he gets the same mix of defensive befuddlement.
A onetime sleepy burg located somewhere in the northeast–Whitehead is vague on specifics–Winthrop has been revitalized by the success of Aberdeen, a hot software company. But the influx of capital has brought changes to Winthrop, from new chain stores to, perversely, a growing sense of insecurity. It’s as though before the town became successful the citizenry didn’t know what was missing from its name. But now, with the anxiety of the nouveau riche, some residents are getting antsy, wondering “whether or not Winthrop as a name reflects new market realities.” New Prospera, they argue–now that’s a name.
