Terms & Conditions by Robert Glancy Page B

having my face punched in by a tiny man named Chang, I quit.
    When I told her I quit, my wife said, ‘But Valencia says it’s so good for your core.’
    Sometimes Valencia will call on a Saturday to demand my wife comes into the office, and my wife always agrees. ‘It’s an emergency. I have to deal with this, Frank.’*
    * What sort of emergency could it be? A doctor I understand.
Someone’s dying, I have to go
. But my wife is in HR. She writes psyche tests. What’s the emergency?
Come at once, this guy you evaluated as a calm type has just said something a bit mean about my new shoes, we need you to re-test him immediately!
    My wife thinks I’m having an affair.
    She reads all my texts and looks through my wallet. I’m not having an affair.*
    * Yes, I know I have a crush on the beautiful barista but that’s just born out of desperation. That’s fantasy. I wouldn’t have the nerve. I’m not an unreliable narrator. Unhinged, yes; unreliable, no.
    I admit that I do mourn the death of the person that my wife used to be, but I’d never use that grief to justify being unfaithful to the person my wife has become.
    My wife’s job involves a lot of role-playing. When my wife first suggested that we role-play together I got very excited, my mind wandering like a naughty teenager into saucy scenarios.
    I was to be disappointed.
    She meant role-playing really boring and obvious scenes like how to tell an employee they’re not performing well at work. My wife and I role-play all the time now. My wife and I have role-played ourselves into the adults we are today. We’re role-playing what it would be like if two people who married young and had grown apart still lived together pretending that their marriage was real.*
    * I’m sorry, that’s actually a terrible thing to say about my marriage.* 1
    * 1 I meant every word of it.

From: [email protected]
    To: [email protected]
    Subject: Cop or Criminal
    Frank – hi!
    Spotted a sticker on a backpacker yesterday:
    Life’s a fucking riot, pal! So you best figure out if you’re a protester or a policeman!
    Ha!
    Love and revolution,
    Malc
    PS I have not the slightest inkling what the hell that means.

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF EXECUTIVE X
    X marks the plonker!
    OK, so in the spirit of full disclosure, I should confess that I do know how I score on my wife’s tests. I know exactly how I score. The reason I know is because my wife published my results for the world to read. My wife wrote a book called
Executive X
. The cover was black with a giant white X in the middle wearing a collar and tie. It was in that period of the late nineties, before the crash, when everything was working, when there was money everywhere. A time when no one was sure why it was working or who was responsible – until, that is, management consultants were credited with the world’s runaway success.*
    * Proviso: management consultants didn’t earn the credit – they took it. They did this by writing books informing the world that management consultants were the reason for the rude health of the world, that they had cracked the code of commerce and in so doing were without question the one and only reason for the unfettered success of the universe.
    The Self-Help shelf bulged with corporate tomes such as
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
. My wife, a young executive at the time, managed to get in on the act. She published the definitive psychometric book about how to hire the right – or wrong – man for the job. And it made her famous; well, industry famous at least.
    It was her friend Sandra, who had become a commissioning editor, who actually published it. Which was all great.
    Until I actually read it.
    My wife hadn’t given me a copy until it was published and when I read it I knew why.
Executive X
, the subject of the book, the man who did all the tests and was analysed like a lab