When the Founder showed up at the Dirtlease office wearing wrap around shades and a baseball cap pulled low over his face, people spoke. He exited the elevator, walked straight to his office, shut the door and turned his back on the floor without even grunting when his assistant asked him how he was. The office Slack channel went ping ping ping.
I bet he fell off the wagon, Operations said.
I bet his kid flunked out of medical school, Strategy said.
I bet he has cancer, IT said.
I hear a lot of opinions here, Economics said. Can we make a market?
The Intern was glad that this had not happened the week before. On the Founder’s birthday, Operations and Hedging had asked the Intern to think of a way to goof on him. She had gone to a live poultry market and bought a rooster, a hen and a dozen newly-hatched chicks. Then, she had gone to Home Depot and bought a couple of bales of straw. She had spread the straw over the floor in the Founder’s office and used loose leaf binders, legal pads and Scotch Tape to build a makeshift chicken coop. When the Founder arrived in the morning, he opened the door to his office, stepped over a gaggle of chicks, sat down at his desk, turned on his computer and got to work as if nothing had happened.
In the here-and-now, the Founder’s assistant came in with a cup of coffee. When he asked her to shut the door, she sat down. He took off his shades to show her his face. He had two brand-new black eyes.
‘Omigod’, she said. ‘What happened?’
‘The Comptroller’, the Founder said. ‘She found out who I use for payroll.’
The Assistant had blond hair and skin that looked like cream poured over strawberries. The two of us should have both been born in the Mad Men era, the Founder thought. Things would have been so much easier then.
‘She seems like such a mild-mannered woman’, the Assistant said.
‘That’s not what she’s like when we go home’, the Founder said.
‘You should speak with someone’, the Assistant said. ‘Seriously.’
‘Please don’t mention this to anyone’, the Founder said. His voice was steady as he spoke, but his hands shook. ‘She’s taking her meds and she is going to therapy now.’
.
At the Media Res, the Founder took a shot glass full of a green liqueur and dropped it into a pint glass full of light beer. ‘Bukowski called that a depth charge’, Legal said.
‘Klima called it a magicke oko’, the Founder said. ‘That means ‘magic eye’’.
‘Show off.’
Legal took a swig of the beer. What’s with all the IPAs these days, he thought. You can’t get a fecking pint of summer lager. ‘What happened’, he asked.
‘I told her that we use PennyPayrollWOW.’
‘And then she hit you?’
‘She hit me when I told her a payment to Mike would be late.’
‘Is Mike still managing the park in northern New York?’
‘Yeah. He’s a good man.’
Legal took another swig. The IPA was bitter but the magic eye tasted like Clorox. A stripper named Slava walked up to the two men, ran her hands over Legal’s shoulder blades and asked him if he wanted a lap dance. ‘How’s your daughter’, Legal asked.
‘Whiny’, Slava said.
‘So’s mine’, Legal said. ‘We should get them together.’
‘Mike is a star’, the Founder said. ‘He could be managing Goldman Sachs.’
Slava disappeared to the other side of the bar.
‘What’s the story with PennyPayrollWOW’, Legal asked.
The Founder touched the corner of one eye to probe its softness.
‘I am so sorry’, Legal said. ‘I am here for you.’ Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Slava sitting on the lap of a large bald man, interweaving her arms and legs with his. He tried not to stare.
‘I hired PennyPayrollWOW when we bought our first park’, the Founder said. ‘They were cheap, they had the words ‘penny’ and ‘wow’ in their name, and we were a startup.’
‘Do they really only cost a penny?’
‘Only if you use the bare minimum service. Automated payroll tax filing is $15 a month, and direct deposit is another $15. They also have popup ads. Every time you log in, you have to look at an ad for Norton Antivirus and another for Cheapo Air.’
‘So, it’s thirty bucks a month?’
‘Yes.’
‘Any per-employee fee?’
‘No.’
‘How is their customer service?’
‘Crap.’
‘How is their user interface?’
‘Antediluvian.’
The bartender brought over two more IPAs and two more magic eyes. Across the room, the bald guy buried his face in Slava’s breasts and she looked at her phone behind his head.
‘When you say their customer service is crap, what do you mean’, Legal asked.
‘I mean you can’t get anyone on the phone. When you do, they are twelve years old and don’t know any answers, or they are eighty years old and don’t know any answers. The only person who knows anything is the boss, who is a guy named Ted. He answers emails, but he doesn’t take phone calls.’
‘How bad is their GUI?’
‘Nineteen eighties bad.’
‘So, what happened?’
‘Nothing, for a long time. A payroll service provider is like a fan belt. It is fine, so long as you don’t have to think about it.’
‘And?’
‘And then they started delaying payments.’
‘The fuck?’
‘They warned us about it at first. In mid-May, they sent out an email saying that, until the week ending June 6, direct deposit payments would be delayed by two working days.’
‘What did you do when you heard that?’
‘We told Mike and Dee Dee that their direct deposit payments due at end of May might be delayed. We offered to lend them money to tide them over if that was a hardship. They declined the offers. I thought that was that.’
‘What did the Comptroller say?’
‘I told her when we were eating dinner. She said, ‘They are having cash flow problems. They will take your money, go bankrupt and disappear. Change providers.’’
‘Did you?’
‘Then we posted a payment through them to Mike for some excavation work that he had done. The payment was posted on Monday June 9. It was supposed to be paid on Thursday the twelfth. It was not paid.’
‘Did the money come out of our account?’
‘Yes.’
‘So – the money came out of our account but did not go into Mike’s account?’
‘Correct.’
‘Oh, man.’
Legal saw Slava and another stripper named Brandi dancing cheek to cheek while a bunch of finance-bro type guys watched. One of the guys, a short dark-complected man with forme fruste hair stubble, was waving a wad of hundred-dollar bills while a large man with dark eyes and male pattern baldness laughed and spoke excitedly. Schwartzenegger and Devito, Legal thought. Devito stuffed a bill into Slava’s garter.
‘What pissed me off the most’, the Founder said, ‘Was that Mike didn’t get paid. He earned that money. He has bills of his own to pay. When payment is made late, that makes us look bad. When we look bad, our ability to do business is affected.’
‘What did PennyPayrollWOW say?’
‘They said that we had been warned that payments would be delayed. I pointed out to them that they had said that payments posted the previous week would be delayed. They did not say that payments made this week would be delayed.’
‘Did you get into a pissing contest?’
‘I would have liked to, but they wouldn’t answer the phone.’
‘Did Mike get paid?’
‘Two days late, yes. It gets worse.’
‘Oh?’
‘When we set up direct deposit, we set up an escrow account with PennyPayrollWOW to secure direct deposit payments. Fuck if I know that money is safe.’
‘What did the Comptroller say?’
‘She told me that I was an idiot. That when businesses hold on to payments like that it means they are having cash flow problems. That at best they are taking the float and at worst they are using our money to pay their own bills. That she had told me once that there was a problem but that I kept right on as before, fat dumb and happy. That I might as well have given our money to Bernie Madoff.’
‘What did you say?’
‘Nothing. She was right.’
‘Did she say anything more?’
The Founder motioned toward his eyes. Then, he pulled up his shirt to reveal a large, dark bruise on his ribs. When he turned to his drink, two large drops splashed in it. Legal had never seen someone cry into his beer before.
‘You can stay at our house tonight’, Legal said. ‘We will call around for a shelter bed tomorrow.’
‘She says she does it because she loves me’, the Founder said.
‘That is bullshit’, Legal said. ‘But she does have a point. You entrust your money and your tax compliance to your payroll provider. If they delay payments, that could be a sign of insolvency. If your payroll provider becomes insolvent, you are fucked.’
.
On the way out, the two men passed Slava sitting at the end of the bar, tapping on her phone. ‘Are you texting your daughter’, Legal asked her.
‘I am doing my books’, Slava said.
‘Who do you use for payroll’, Legal asked.
‘You’re a dumbass’, Slava said.
‘Seriously, you should make yourself an S-corp’, Legal said.
‘If you are looking for a payroll provider’, Slava said, ‘I have heard good things about Patriot Software.’
‘Employees from PennyPayrollWOW come here, I have heard’, Legal said. He looked quickly toward the Founder, who was stumbling toward the door. ‘You ever give them lap dances?’
‘Ick’, Slava said, ‘I am a sex worker, but there are some things I will not do.’