I was a twenty-four-year-old intern, and I had three days to put my uncle on the clips.com homepage live. Last time, I had done it by accident in about four seconds. Doing it on purpose turned out to be much harder.
On Wednesday morning, I owned a launch. I had a project channel, a budget code, and a calendar with fourteen meetings on it. One of them was called "Sync re: Sync."
I also had a document open in a second window. It was titled INCIDENT-4471 POSTMORTEM. It was due Thursday at noon, and every section was empty except one.
Desmond had typed a single word in the Root Cause box. It said: "config."
The studio was in the basement, in what had been the mattress warehouse's loading bay. The crew built a stage there in a day. There was a riser, a velvet curtain, and nine lights on a truss, each one costing more than my car.
Gil from marketing was in charge of the look. He had a mood board. The mood board was mostly photographs of famous concert halls, and one photograph of a lighthouse, for reasons he described as "spiritual."
"Harbor Lights," Gil explained. "Lighthouse. It's the brand."
"It's a song from 1983," I said. "Nobody remembers the brand."
"They will now. That's what brands are for."
The band arrived at ten. They were four session musicians called the Overnight Shift, all in their forties, all in black. Their bandleader was a pianist named Corwin Ash, forty-seven, who wore fingerless gloves indoors and called everyone "chief."
"Chief," he said to me. "We got the chart. We'll play it as written."
"There's one thing," I said. "At the bridge, my uncle goes up a key."
Corwin looked at his chart. He turned it over, as if the key change might be on the back. "It's not in the song, chief."
"I know. He does it anyway."
"Does he tell us when?"
"He closes his eyes," I said. "That's when."
My uncle arrived at one for rehearsal. He wore the good jacket, which meant he considered rehearsal a meeting.
He walked onto the riser and looked up at the nine lights. They looked down at him. Nobody won.
"It's very bright," he said.
"It's for the stream," Gil said. "Forty million people. You want them to see you."
"At the Copper Kettle there's one light," said Uncle Teo. "It's pink. Agnes put a gel on it in 2014 because the white made the fries look sad."
"We can do pink," Gil said, and wrote something on his mood board.
The Overnight Shift counted in. They were good. They were very, very good.
The opening bars of "Harbor Lights Tonight" filled the room. It sounded the way it must have sounded in 1983, before Wharf Street got hold of it.
My uncle sang the first verse. He sang the second verse.
Then he reached the bridge. He closed his eyes. He climbed.
The band did not.
For four bars, my uncle sang in one key and the Overnight Shift played in another. It was like watching two trains leave the same station in slightly different directions.
Corwin stopped playing first. Then the drummer. Then my uncle, last, with his eyes still closed.
"Chief," Corwin said gently. "You went up."
"I always go up."
"We'll go with you. Just—give us a signal."
"I closed my eyes."
"A different signal."
They tried four more times. Each time, my uncle reached the bridge and something went wrong. Once, he went up too early.
Once, he went up twice. Once, the band went up and he didn't, and everyone just stood there in the wrong key together, very politely.
"It's not like Thursdays," he said to me during a break. He was sitting on the edge of the riser, holding a water bottle with both hands. "On Thursdays it just happens."
"What happens?"
"I don't know," he said. "That's why it's Thursday."
At four, Harriet Vosk came down to the basement. She did not announce herself. She simply appeared at the back of the loading bay, sleeves pushed up, and watched the fifth attempt fall apart.
When it was over, she walked to the piano.
"Mr. Ash," she said. "What's the retention?"
Corwin looked at me. I shook my head very slightly. I did not know what the right answer was either.
"Of the chord, chief?" he said. "About four bars. Then it falls off a cliff."
Harriet nodded as if this were a useful number. She looked at my uncle on the edge of the riser, and then at the nine lights, and then at me.
"Interesting," she said, and went back upstairs.
"Who was that?" Corwin asked.
"The CEO of clips.com."
He studied the stairs for a while. "She's got good time," he said finally. "She left right on the downbeat."
Something else happened on Wednesday. I'd been expecting it. I wished I hadn't been right.
By the afternoon, there was a second trend on clips.com. It was a mean one. Somebody had made a remix of my uncle's clip. It slowed down the key change and added a sad trombone at the end, then a sound like a deflating balloon.
It was called "Flatline." It had two million views.
Under it were comments. Some of them were the kind of thing people only say to a screen.
"He's never going to land it." "Grandpa's going to crack on live TV." "Friday's going to be the funniest night of the year."
Pilar showed it to me in Plush. She had her hood up, which I had learned meant serious.
"I assumed it was a marketing campaign," she said. "It's not."
"Can we take it down?"
"It doesn't break any rules. It's mean, and it's not against the rules to be mean."
She paused. "It's against my rules. Those don't count on clips.com."
"Has he seen it?"
"He has a flip phone."
"The bakery lady doesn't," I said.
On Thursday morning I sat in Firm and tried to write the postmortem.
A postmortem at clips.com has five sections. Summary, Timeline, Impact, Root Cause, and Lessons. The template says to write it "blamelessly," which means you describe what the system did, not what the person did.
I wrote the Summary. I wrote the Timeline, down to the minute.
Three-oh-six, deploy. Four-oh-two, first alert. Four-fifteen, Pilar decides it's marketing.
Then I got to Root Cause. The box still said "config."
I deleted it.
I typed: "An intern deployed a personal video to production by mistake. She misread the environment dropdown. She clicked yes because the documentation said to. Then she told the CEO it was a test."
I looked at it for a long time. It was not blameless. It was accurate. I had been at clips.com for four days, and I was beginning to think those were not the same thing.
Desmond read it over my shoulder. He had come in silently, which I hadn't known he could do.
"That's not how we write these," he said.
"I know."
"You put yourself in the root cause."
"I am the root cause."
He sat down next to me. He put the seed jar on the table between us, like a peace offering, or a witness.
"Here's a secret about root causes," he said. "You keep asking why, and eventually you hit a person. Every time.
"So we stop asking one why early, and we write 'config.'" He cracked a seed. "It's kinder. And it's usually also true."
"Is it true this time?"
He was quiet for a while.
"I don't know yet," he said. "That's different."
I left the postmortem open on the big screen in Firm. That was my mistake. I had made several that week, but this one I made on purpose, at least about the leaving. I went to get coffee from the machine that Desmond said had a config problem.
It took six minutes. The coffee machine had a config problem.
When I came back, the door to Firm was open.
My uncle was standing in front of the screen. He had come early for rehearsal. He was wearing the good jacket. He had his reading glasses on, the ones he only uses for bus schedules and menus, and he was reading the Root Cause box.
He read it twice. I could see his lips move.
"Uncle Teo," I said.
He took off his glasses. He folded them carefully and put them in the inside pocket of the good jacket.
Then he turned around. His face was not angry. It would have been easier if it were.
"You didn't pick me," he said. "You just had me on your phone."
Up next: Thursday
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