4
Back in the Day
In 2003, Lucas Davenport was being driven crazy by three kinds of people: computer programmers, actors, and accountants. He didn’t yet yearn for the time when he’d been a cop, instead of a start-up business executive, but he was getting there.
On this particular day, in the Nick O’ Time Coffee and Pastries Shoppe, it was actors who were up his ass.
He’d spent weeks writing scenarios for 9-1-1 training calls. Under his game plan, each 9-1-1 trainee would be seated in front of a computer, just as she would be in real life, and would take a prerecorded call: frightened people screaming for help. Each call would require the operators to make an appropriate response, guided by suggestions that would flash up on the computer screen.
Each operator response branched to another screaming reply by the caller, which branched to another response, depending on whatthe answer was. At more advanced levels, the operator would be dealing with three or four calls at once and would have no prompts, as would happen with a disaster of greater or lesser extent, like a school shooting, or a small-plane crash.
The whole sequence would be overseen by an instructor, based on training manuals also being written by Lucas.
Lucas wanted the calls to be vocal and realistic—that is, the trainee would have a set of headphones and a microphone. When a call came in, he or she would select an appropriate response and read it in the appropriate tone of voice.
He knew what he wanted, but the programmers explained in incomprehensible detail how difficult it was and why they should be paid more. Which drove him crazy. All he wanted to know was whether they could do it. They could, but they whined.
—
The actors wouldprovide the 9-1-1 calls with the appropriate amount of panic:
“My house is on fire!”
“There’s a man in my house. He’s got a gun!”
“My husband is hurting me! Here he comes…”
“My son has shot up and he’s not breathing!”
Lucas had experience writing board games—based on historical battles and fantasy conflicts—and had put his entire savings into the new computer company, tentatively called Davenport Simulations.
He was paying the programmers and actors, all graduate students at the University of Minnesota, a pittance, along with stock options, which everyone, without exception, laughed off as improbable.
Hence the other major pain in his ass: the accountants.
—
So there hewas in a booth in the Nick O’ Time with two actors, both grad students, both female, both attractive, one white and blond, one Black and dark-haired, trying to explain to them why asking for a “somewhat Black” accent was not racist, but designed to elicit a certain kind of response from a trainee, who might or might not be racist.
“I don’t want Mammy fromGone with the Wind, I want somebody who sounds like they live in North Minneapolis,” he said. North Minneapolis was local code for “Black.”
“Lots of white people in North Minneapolis,” the white actor said, deliberately yanking his chain.
Lucas: “You know what I mean.”
“It’d be less racist if you paid us more,” the Black woman said.
“Tell me that when you cash in the stock options,” Lucas said.
The two women laughed and the white woman said, “Yeah, right, remind me to do that.”
The three of them were impatiently working through the whole cultural/racial conundrum when two large men, mid-thirties, muscular, wearing Polo golf shirts under sport coats, and khaki slacks, with World War Two haircuts, one of them snapping his chewing gum, came through the door. The one snapping gum had brilliant white teeth, which were actually implants, paid for by the state when his natural teeth had been knocked out by a woman wielding a flowerpot.
The men looked around, and Jenkins spotted Lucas, ambled over to the table, trailed by Shrake, checked the actors and asked Lucas, “Settin’ up a salt ’n’ pepper three-way?”
“Shut up, you fuckin’ clown. We got serious business here,” Lucas said. To the startled actors, “Don’t pay any attention to him. He’s a moron. Are we good? You understand where I’m coming from? It is aracialthing, but not racist. Not on our part.”
“That sounds a little racist, whatever it is,” Shrake said, without being asked.
