Terry Schmidt’s father had served in the US armed forces and been awarded a field commission at the age of just 21 and received both the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star, and the decorated veteran’s favorite civilian activity in the whole world — you could tell by his face as he did it — was polishing his shoes and the buttons on his five sportcoats, which he did every Sunday afternoon, and the placid concentration on his face as he knelt on newspaper with his tins and shoes and chamois had formed a large unanalyzable part of the young Terry Schmidt’s determination to make a difference in the affairs of men someday in the future. Which was now: time had indeed slipped by, just as in popular songs, and revealed Schmidt fils to be neither special nor exempt.
In the last two years Team Δy had come to function as what the advertising industry called a Captured Shop: the firm occupied a contractual space somewhere between a subsidiary of Reesemeyer Shannon Belt and an outside vendor. Under Alan Britton’s stewardship, Team Δy had joined the industry’s trend toward Captured consolidation and reinvented itself as more or less the research arm of Reesemeyer Shannon Belt Advertising. Team Δy’s new status was designed both to limit R.S.B.’s paper overhead and to maximize the tax advantages of Focus Group research, which now could be both billed to Client and written off as an R&D subcontracting expense. There were substantial salary and benefit advantages to Team Δy (which was structured as an employee-owned S corporation under U.S.T.C. § 1361–1379) as well. The major disadvantage, from Terry Schmidt’s perspective, was that there were no mechanisms in place by which a Captured Shop employee could make the horizontal jump to Reesemeyer Shannon Belt itself, within whose MROP division the firm’s marketing research strategies were developed, thereby enabling someone like T. E. Schmidt to conceivably have at least some sort of impact on actual research design and analysis. Within Team Δy, Schmidt’s only possible advancement was to the Senior Research Director position now occupied by the same swarthy, slick, gladhanding émigré (with college-age children and a wife who always appeared about to ululate) who had made Darlene Lilley’s professional life so difficult over the past year; and of course even if the Team did vote in such a way as to pressure Alan Britton to ease Robert Awad out and then even if (as would be unlikely to say the least) the thunderingly unexceptional Terry Schmidt were picked and successfully pitched to the rest of Team Δy’s upper echelon as Awad’s replacement, the SRD position really involved nothing more meaningful than the supervision of sixteen coglike Field Researchers just like Schmidt himself, plus conducting desultory orientations for new hires, plus of course overseeing the compression of TFGs’ data into various statistically differentiated totals, all of which was done on commercially available software and entailed nothing more significant than adding four-color graphs and a great deal of acronym-heavy jargon designed to make a survey that any competent tenth-grader could have conducted appear sophisticated and meaningful. Although there were also of course the preliminary lunches and golf and gladhanding with R.S.B.’s MROPs, and the actual three-hour presentation of Field Research results in the larger and more expensively appointed conference room upstairs where Awad, his mute and spectrally thin A/V technician, and one chosen member of the relevant Field Team presented the numbers and graphs and helped facilitate R.S.B.’s MROPs and Creative and Marketing heads’ brainstorming on the research’s implications for an actual campaign that in truth R.S.B. was already at this stage far too heavily invested in to do anything more than modify some of the more ephemeral or decorative elements of. (Neither Schmidt nor Darlene Lilley had ever been selected to assist Bob Awad in these PCAs*, for reasons that in Schmidt’s case seemed all too clear.) Meaning, in other words, without anyone once ever saying it outright, that Team Δy’s real function was to present to Reesemeyer Shannon Belt test data that R.S.B. could then turn around and present to Client as confirming the soundness of the very OCC† that R.S.B. had already billed Client in the millions for and couldn’t turn back from even if the actual test data turned out to be resoundingly grim or unpromising, which it was Team Δy’s unspoken real job to make sure never happened, a job that Team Δy accomplished simply by targeting so many different Focus Groups and foci and by varying the format and context of the tests so baroquely and by facilitating the different TFGs in so many different modalities that in the end it was child’s play to selectively weight and rearrange the data in pretty much whatever way R.S.B.’s MROP division wanted, and so in reality Team Δy’s function was not to provide information or even a statistical approximation of information but rather its entropic converse, a cascade of random noise meant to so befuddle the firm and its Client that no one would feel anything but relief at the decision to proceed with an OCC which in the present case the Mister Squishy Company itself was already so heavily invested in that it couldn’t possibly turn away from and would in fact have fired R.S.B. if its testing had indicated any substantive problems with, because Mister Squishy’s parent company had very strict normative ratios for R&D marketing costs (= RDM) to production volume (= PV), ratios based on the Cobb-Douglas Function whereby RDM 
must, after all the pro forma hemming and hawing, be
, a textbook formula which any first-term MBA student had to memorize in Management Stats, which was in fact where North American Soft Confections Inc.’s CEO had almost surely learned it, and nothing inside the man or at any of the four large US corporations he had helmed since taking his degree from Wharton in 1968 had changed; no no all that ever changed were the jargon and mechanisms and gilt rococo with which everyone in the whole huge blind grinding mechanism conspired to convince each other that they could figure out how to give the paying customer what they could prove he could be persuaded to believe he wanted, without anybody once ever saying stop a second or pointing out the absurdity of calling what they were doing collecting information or ever even saying aloud — not even Team Δy’s Field Researchers over drinks at Beyers’ Market Pub on E. Ohio together on Fridays before going home alone to stare at the phone — what was going on or what it meant or what the simple truth was. That it made no difference. None of it. One R.S.B. Senior Creative Director with his little gray ponytail had been at one upscale café someplace and had ordered one trendy dessert on the same day he was making notes for one Creative Directors’ brainstorming session on what to pitch to the Subsidiary PD boys over at North American Soft Confections, and had had one idea, and one or two dozen pistons and gears already machined and set in place in various craggy heads at R.S.B. and North American’s Mister Squishy had needed only this one single spark of C12H22O11-inspired passion from an SCD whose whole inflated rep had been based on a concept equating toilet paper with clouds and helium-voiced teddy bears and all manner of things innocent of shit in some abstract Ur-consumer’s mind in order to set in movement a machine of which no one single person now — least of all the squishy Mr. T. E. Schmidt, forgetting himself enough almost to pace a little before the conference table’s men and toying dangerously with the idea of dropping the whole involved farce and simply telling them the truth — could be master.