Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,24

as looking like a ’70s yearbook photo come to life. Agency MROPs whom Terry’d worked with for years had trouble recalling his name, and always greeted him with an exaggerated bonhomie designed to obscure this fact. Ricin and botulinus were about equally easy to cultivate. Actually they were both quite easy indeed, assuming you were comfortable in a laboratory environment and exercised due care in your procedures. Schmidt himself had personally overheard some of the other young men in Technical Processing refer to Darlene Lilley as Lurch or Herman and make fun of her height and physical solidity, and had been outraged enough to have come very very close indeed to confronting them directly.

41.6% of what Schmidt mistakenly believed were the TFG’s twelve true sample consumers were presenting with the classic dilated eyes and shiny pallor of low-grade insulin shock as Schmidt announced that he’d decided to ‘privately confide’ to the men that the product’s original proposed trade name had actually been Devils!, a cognomen designed both to connote the snack cake’s chocolate-intensive composition and to simultaneously invoke and parody associations of sin, sinful indulgence, yielding to temptation, & c., and that considerable resources had been devoted to developing, refining, and target-testing the product inside various combinations of red-and-black individual wrappers with various cartoonishly demonic incarnations of the familiar Mister Squishy icon, presented here as rubicund and heavy-browed and grinning fiendishly instead of endearingly, before negative test data scrapped the whole strategy. Both Darlene Lilley and Trudi Keener had worked some of these early Focus Groups, which apparently some inträagency political enemy of the Creative Packaging Director at Reesemeyer Shannon Belt who’d pitched the trade name Devils! had used his (meaning the CPD’s enemy’s) influence with R.S.B.’s MROP coordinator to stock heavily with consumers from downstate IL—a region that as Terry Schmidt knew all too well tended to be Republican and Bible-Beltish—and without going into any of the Medicean intrigues and retaliations that had ended up costing three midlevel R.S.B. executives their jobs and resulted in at least one six-figure settlement to forestall WT* litigation (which was the only truly interesting part of the story, Schmidt himself believed, jingling a pocket’s contents and watching his cordovan rotate slowly from 10:00 to 2:00 and back again as straticulate clouds in the lake’s upper atmosphere began to lend the sunlight a pearly cast that the conference room’s windows embrowned), the nub was that the stacked Groups’ responses to taglines that included Sinfully Delicious, Demonically Indulgent, and Why Do You Think It’s Called [in red] Temptation?, as well as to video storyboards in which shadowed and voice-distorted figures in hoods supposedly confessed to being regular upstanding citizens and consumers who unbeknownst to anyone ‘worshipped the Devil’ in ‘secret orgies of indulgence,’ had been so uniformly extreme as to produce markedly different Taste and Overall Satisfaction aggregates for the snack cakes on IRPs and GRDSs completed before and after exposure to the lines and boards themselves, which after much midlevel headrolling and high-level caucuses had resulted in the present Felonies!®, with its milder penal and thus renegade associations designed to offend absolutely no one except maybe anticrime wackos and prison-reform fringes. With the facilitator’s stated point being that please let none of those assembled here today doubt that their judgments and responses and the hard evaluative work they had already put in and would shortly plunge into again qua group in the vital GRDS phase were important or were taken very seriously indeed by the folks over at Mister Squishy.

Showing as yet no signs of polypeptide surfeit, a balding blue-eyed 30ish man whose tag’s block caps read HANK was staring, from his place at the corner of the conference table nearest Schmidt and the whiteboard, either absently or intently at Schmidt’s valise, which was made of a pebbled black synthetic leather material and happened to be markedly wider and squatter than your average-type briefcase or valise, resembling almost more a doctor’s bag or computer technician’s upscale toolcase. Among the periodicals to which Schmidt subscribed were US News & World Report, Numismatic News, Advertising Age, and the quarterly Journal of Applied Statistics, the last of which was divided into four stacks of three years each and as such supported the sanded pine plank and sodium worklamp that functioned as a laboratory table with various decanters, retorts, flasks, vacuum jars, filters, and Reese-Handey-brand alcohol burners in the small utility room that was separated from Schmidt’s condominium’s kitchen by a foldable door of louvered enamel composite. Ricin