Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,13

as to apply pressure and make his forearms bulge even more. It had occurred to Terry Schmidt that even though so many home products, from Centrum Multivitamins to Visine AC Soothing Antiallergenic Eye Drops to Nasacort AQ Prescription Nasal Spray, now came in conspicuous tamperproof packaging in the wake of the Tylenol poisonings of a decade past and Johnson & Johnson’s legendarily swift and conscientious response to the crisis—pulling every bottle of every variety of Tylenol off every retail shelf in America and spending millions on setting up overnight a smooth and hassle-free system for every Tylenol consumer to return his or her bottle for an immediate NQA refund plus an added sum for the gas and mileage or US postage involved in the return, writing off tens of millions in returns and operational costs and recouping untold exponents more in positive PR and consumer goodwill and thereby actually enhancing the brand Tylenol’s association with compassion and concern for consumer wellbeing, a strategy that had made J. & J.’s CEO and their PR vendors legends in a marketing field that Terry Schmidt had only just that year begun considering getting into as a practical and potentially creative and rewarding way to use his double major in Descriptive Statistics + Bv. Psych, the young Schmidt imagining himself in plush conference rooms not unlike this one, using the sheer force of his personality and command of the facts to persuade tablesful of hard-eyed corporate officers that legitimate concern for consumer wellbeing was both emotionally and economically Good Business, that if, e.g., R. J. Reynolds elected to be forthcoming about its products’ addictive qualities, and GM to be upfront in its national ads about the fact that vastly greater fuel efficiency was totally feasible if consumers would be willing to spend a couple hundred dollars more and settle for slightly fewer aesthetic amenities, and shampoo manufacturers to concede that the ‘Repeat’ in their product instructions was hygienically unnecessary, and Tums’ parent General Brands to spend a couple million to announce candidly that Tums-brand antacid tablets should not be used regularly for more than a couple weeks at a time because after that the stomach lining automatically started secreting more HCl to compensate for all the neutralization and made the original stomach trouble worse, that the consequent gains in corporate PR and associations of the brand with integrity and trust would more than outweigh the short-term costs and stock-price repercussions, that yes it was a risk but not a wild or dicelike risk, that it had on its side both precedent cases and demographic data as well as the solid reputation for both caginess and integrity of T. E. Schmidt & Associates, to concede that yes gentlemen he supposed he was in a way asking them to gamble some of their narrow short-term margins and equity on the humble sayso of Terence Eric Schmidt Jr., whose own character’s clear marriage of virtue, pragmatism, and oracular marketing savvy were his best and final argument; he was saying to these upper-management men in their vests and Cole Haans just what he proposed to have them say to a sorry and cynical US market: Trust Me You Will Not Be Sorry—which when he thinks of the starry-eyed puerility and narcissism of these fantasies now, a rough decade later, Schmidt experiences a kind of full-frame internal wince, that type of embarrassment-before-self that makes our most mortifying memories objects of fascination and repulsion at once, though in Terry Schmidt’s case a certain amount of introspection and psychotherapy (the latter the origin of the self-caricature doodling during downtime in his beige cubicle) had enabled him to understand that his professional fantasies were not in the main all that unique, that a large percentage of bright young men and women locate the impetus behind their career choice in the belief that they are fundamentally different from the common run of man, unique and in certain crucial ways superior, more as it were central, meaningful—what else could explain the fact that they themselves have been at the exact center of all they’ve experienced for the whole 20 years of their conscious lives?—and that they can and will make a difference in their chosen field simply by the fact of their unique and central presence in it . . . ; and but so (Schmidt also still declaiming professionally to the TFG all this while) that even though so many upmarket consumer products now were tamperproof, Mister Squishy-brand snack cakes—as well as Hostess,