"Yeah. So they weren't shipping a whole lot of product, to put it mildly. Then I spent a couple of weeks in Manhattan housesitting for my friend while he was visiting his folks in Wisconsin for Thanksgiving. He had a ton of this stuff lying around his apartment, and I would come back after walking the soles off my shoes and sit in front of the tube playing with it. I took some of it down to Madison Square Park and played with it there. I liked to hang out there because it was always full of these very cute Icelandic
"Anyway, Marta was in charge of Machinery and Avarice, the spoiled monsterkinder of a couple of BBD&O senior managers who'd vaulted from art school to VPdom in one year when most of the gray eminences got power-thraxed. Machinery was three and liked to bang things against other things arythmically while hollering atonally. Avarice was five, not toilet trained, and prone to tripping. I'd get Marta novelty coffee from the Stinkbucks on Twenty-third and we'd drink it together while Machinery and Avarice engaged in terrible, life-threatening play with the other kids in the park.
"I showed Marta what I had, though I was tactful enough not to call it
"Then Machinery comes over and snatches the thing away from Marta and starts pounding on Avarice, taking unholy glee in the way the stuff alternately softened and stiffened as he squeezed it. Avarice wrestled it away from him and tore off for a knot of kids and by the time I got there they were all crowded around her, spellbound. I caught a cab back to my buddy's apartment and grabbed all the Ardorite I could lay hands on and brought it back to the park and spent the next couple hours running an impromptu focus group, watching the kids and their bombshell nannies play with it. By the time that Marta touched my hand with her long cool fingers and told me it was time for her to get the kids home for their nap, I had twenty-five toy ideas, about eight different ways to use the stuff for clothing fasteners, and a couple of miscellaneous utility uses, like a portable crib.
"So I ran it down for my pal that afternoon over the phone, and he commed his boss and I ended up eating Thanksgiving dinner at his boss's house in Westchester."
"Weren't you worried he'd rip off your ideas and not pay you anything for them?" Szandor's spellbound by the story, unconsciously unrolling and re-rolling an Ace bandage.
"Didn't even cross my mind. Of course, he tried to do just that, but it wasn't any good-they were engineers; they had no idea how normal human beings interact with their environments. The stuff wasn't self-revealing-they added a million cool features and a manual an inch thick. After prototyping for six months, they called me in and offered me a two-percent royalty on any products I designed for them."
"That musta been worth a fortune," says Szandor.
"You'd think so, wouldn't you? Actually, they folded before they shipped anything. Blew through all their capital on R&D, didn't have anything left to productize their tech with. But my buddy
"Damn, that's cool."
"You betcha. It's all about being an advocate for the user. I observe what users do and how they do it, figure out what they're trying to do, and then boss the engineers around, getting them to remove the barriers they've erected because engineers are all basically high-functioning autistics who have no idea how normal people do stuff."
The doctor chuckles. "Look," he says, producing a nicotine pacifier, one of those fake cigs that gives you the oral fix and the chemical fix and the habit fix without the noxious smoke, "it's not my area of specialty, but you seem like a basically sane individual, modulo your rooftop adventures. Certainly, you're not like most of the people we've got here. What are you doing here?"
