In California I could have passed for a hacker, heading for some high-tech company, but in Massachusetts even the hackers wore shirts with buttons. I pedalled through hacker territory, through the strip of little high-tech shops that feed off MIT, and into the square where my outfit has its regional office.

GEE, the Group of Environmental Extremists. Excuse me: GEE International. They employ me as a professional asshole, an innate talent I've enjoyed ever since second grade, when I learned how to give my teacher migraine headaches with a penlight. I could cite other examples, give you a tour down the gallery of the broken and infuriated authority figures who have tried to teach, steer, counsel, reform, or suppress me over the years, but that would sound like boasting. I'm not that proud of being a congenital pain in the ass. But I will take money for it.

I carried my bike up four flights of stairs, doing my bit for physical fitness. GEE stickers were plastered on the risers of the stairs, so there was always a catch phrase six feet in front of your eyes: SAVE THE WHALES and something about the BABY SEALS. By the time you made it up to the fourth floor, you were out of breath, and fully indoctrinated. Locked my bike to a radiator, because you never knew, and went in.

Tricia was running the front desk. Flaky but nice, has a few strange ideas about phone etiquette, thinks I'm all right. "Oh, shit," she said.

"What?"

"You won't believe it."

"What?"

"The other car."

"The van?"

"Yeah. Wyman."

"How bad?"

"We don't know yet. It's still sitting out on the shoulder."

I just assumed it was totalled, and that Wyman would have to be fired, or at least busted down to a position where he couldn't so much as sit in a GEE car. A mere three days ago he had taken our Subaru out to buy duet tape, and in a parking lot no larger than a tennis court, had managed to ram a concrete light-pole pedestal hard enough to total the vehicle. His fifteen-minute explanation was earnest but impossible to follow; when I asked him to just start from the beginning, he accused me of being too linear.