The thermostat war at Kell & Moberly lasted nineteen days. It ended in forty-one seconds, on a break-room table propped up with a tax code.
I know the exact time because I kept it. I'm the referee. I'm also the IT administrator, which is how I got the job. In an accounting firm of thirty-one people, IT is the only neutral country, because everyone hates us equally.
My name is Russ Nakamura. I was thirty-four that spring and had been at Kell & Moberly for six years. Mostly I reset passwords that people had changed to their dog's name plus a number. I knew everyone's dog.
The thermostat war went like this. The audit team sat on the north side of the third floor and wanted seventy-two. The tax team sat on the south side, by the server closet, and wanted sixty-eight. Every morning someone moved the dial, and every afternoon someone moved it back.
Pauline Okerlund, a thirty-eight-year-old audit senior, had started wearing a fleece blanket to meetings. She wore it like a cape. She referred to it as "evidence."
Clement Ostrander led the tax side. Clement was forty-one, a senior tax manager, and the kind of man who irons his tie while wearing it. He had taped a note over the thermostat: DO NOT TOUCH — C.O. The next morning a second note appeared underneath: WHY NOT — P.O.
On day nineteen, Mina Kostas walked into the break room with a cup of tea and a stapler.
Mina was twenty-nine and a senior staff accountant. She was small, polite and very hard to rush. She owned a gray cardigan for every weekday, and they were all the same cardigan. She reconciled accounts like jigsaw puzzles, certain that every missing piece existed somewhere.
She set the stapler in the exact center of the break-room table. Then she looked at Pauline, in her cape, and at Clement, by the thermostat.
"Would either of you like to settle this?" she asked.
Pauline said yes immediately. Pauline had been cold for nineteen days.
Clement made a face I had seen before. It was the face of a man who has lost to Mina Kostas fourteen times and kept count. "I'm not fighting Pauline," he said.
"You're not," said Mina. "I'll take the audit position. You take tax. Winner sets the dial, and loser leaves it alone until October."
"Why are you on audit's side?"
"I'm not. I'm on the side of it being over."
There was a pause. Then Clement took off his jacket and folded it over a chair. He folded it in thirds. Clement folds everything in thirds.
"Fine," he said. "Russ. Get the book."
The book was a green composition notebook with BOOK OF ELBOWS written on the cover in Mina's neat capitals. It lived in my desk drawer, under a box of spare mouse batteries. At that point it held two hundred and eleven entries.
Each entry had a date, the dispute, the parties, the time and the result. Entry one was from four years earlier.
Who left fish in the microwave. M.K. vs. D.F. 0:22. Fish owner confessed.
Since then the table had decided parking spots, printer queues and the holiday party theme. (No theme. 0:53.) It had ruled that "per my last email" counted as hostile. (1:07.)
Twice it had settled client disputes, with each client's enthusiastic agreement. One of those clients still sent Mina a fruit basket every April.
There were rules, written on the inside cover.
1. Both parties ask for it. Nobody gets volunteered. 2. Either party can say "concede" at any time. No discussion. 3. Elbows stay down. Eyes on the stapler. 4. No rematches on the same dispute. 5. The winner washes the mugs.
Rule five was my favorite. Mina said it kept people from gloating. It is very hard to strut while scrubbing a mug that says WORLD'S OKAYEST UNCLE.
There was also a waiver.
Imelda Lomax was our in-house counsel. She was fifty-two, worked Tuesday through Thursday, and spent all three days writing waivers. There was one for the office birthday cake (Form BC-2) and one for the stepladder.
The arm wrestling waiver was Form AW-1. It had started at one page and was now four.
Imelda appeared in the doorway as if summoned. She probably was. She carried a clipboard and two pens, because one pen, she said, is a single point of failure.
"Form AW-1," she said. "Both of you. Initial page three. Page three is the sore-wrist acknowledgment."
Clement initialed page three. Pauline initialed it with a flourish, from under the cape.
I should explain the table, because the table matters.
It was a round laminate table older than me. One leg was shorter than the others. Years ago someone had wedged a thick paperback under it: the 2014 federal tax code, volume two. Nobody remembered who put it there, and nobody would move it.
Leopold Kell, our founding partner, called it the only time that volume had ever been useful.
Mina sat. Clement sat. They set their elbows down on either side of the stapler, and their right hands met in the middle.
"Grips even?" I asked.
"Even," said Mina.
"Even," said Clement, in the voice of a man who did not believe it.
I put my hand over theirs. "Both parties consent?"
"Yes."
"Yes. Again."
"Elbows down," said Mina. "Ledger's open."
I lifted my hand.
People think arm wrestling is about strength. Clement believed this for fourteen matches. He came in fast, rolling his wrist over the top to bend her hand back. It's a real technique, and it works on most people.
Mina didn't fight it. She just held.
That was the whole Kostas method. She kept her wrist straight and her eyes on the stapler and let the other person spend everything early. She once explained it to me in accounting terms. Everyone has a number, she said, and most people's number is about thirty-five seconds.
After that, they start thinking about something else.
At twenty seconds Clement's ears turned pink.
At thirty he said, through his teeth, "This is a very reasonable temperature."
At thirty-five, exactly on schedule, he glanced at the thermostat.
Mina went. Not fast. She brought his hand down the way you close a filing drawer, steady and all the way. His knuckles touched the laminate at forty-one seconds.
"Ledger's closed," she said.
They shook hands. Clement flexed his fingers and winced in a dignified way. Imelda wrote 0:41 on the waiver.
Pauline set the thermostat to seventy-two. Then she stood back, considered it, and turned it down to seventy.
"Middle," she said. "For the tax people. As a gesture."
Clement nodded once. The war was over. Mina washed eleven mugs, including WORLD'S OKAYEST UNCLE.
"Rematch?" Clement asked her, at the sink.
"Rule four," said Mina.
"In October?"
"It'll be a different dispute in October."
He brightened slightly. He always did. He had now lost to her fifteen times, and every time he liked her a little more. I wrote Entry 212 in the book.
I've thought a lot about why it worked. Here's my theory.
In most offices an argument never really ends. It goes underground and turns into a tone in an email, or a meeting nobody invites you to. At Kell & Moberly, arguments had a beginning, a middle and a handshake.
You asked for it. You signed page three.
You looked at a stapler with someone for forty seconds, and then it was over, and somebody washed the mugs. It was the most honest thing in the building. It was also, Imelda reminded us monthly, "legally load-bearing."
Leopold Kell called the all-hands on a Monday at four.
Leopold was sixty-seven. He had founded the firm in 1984 with a partner named Moberly, who had retired to a sailboat in 2011.
Moberly now communicated only by postcard. The postcards hung on the break-room corkboard and all said roughly the same thing: Wind good. Hope the books balance.
Leopold stood by the corkboard and cleared his throat. He had the look of a man about to say something he had practiced in the car.
"As some of you know," he said, "we've been approached."
Nobody knew. Everyone looked at me, because IT always knows. I had only suspected. Leopold had asked me to set up a private calendar called DENTIST, and it had nineteen appointments in it.
"Noordhaven Advisory," Leopold said, "would like to merge with us."
Thirty people inhaled at once.
Noordhaven Advisory had two thousand four hundred employees, forty offices and a logo shaped like a sail. It had once acquired a firm our size before lunch and renamed it before dinner. Merge, in Noordhaven's vocabulary, meant roughly what swallow means to a whale.
"Negotiations start in three weeks," Leopold went on. "Their side will be led by their Chief Integration Officer. Rosamund Nyberg."
Pauline pulled her cape tighter. Clement actually sat down.
Everyone in our industry had heard of Rosamund Nyberg. According to a trade magazine, she once sat across from a bank's board and said nothing at all for forty-one minutes. At minute forty-one, the bank gave her the building.
"I'll lead for us," Leopold said. "I'll need one person on numbers." He looked across the room. "Mina."
Mina had been drying the last mug. She set it on the rack. Every head turned toward her, and then slowly toward the break-room table.
It sat there with its stapler and its tax code and its two hundred and twelve settled arguments. Mina looked at it too. Then she looked at Leopold.
"Does Ms. Nyberg," she asked politely, "know about the table?"
Up next: Due Diligence
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