Up and Down Read online

  I had a blast. It was right up my alley. I seemed to be able to get along with nearly everyone and managed to navigate the labyrinth of international relationships that fuelled space diplomacy. I’m still amazed just how far you can go relying only on curiosity, writing skills, manners, and the ability to connect with different people. It kept me moving up the ladder for three years, until my mother’s cancer returned.

  My father died of a heart attack five years ago, shortly after my mother’s first brush with breast cancer. She recovered, from the cancer at least. I’d come home on summer vacation and some weekends to try to do my part and stay connected, but my older sister, Lauren, shouldered most of the burden. Then six months ago, what we thought had been defeated returned with reinforcements, and the siege began once more. Siege was an understatement. My mother’s lungs were so riddled with the invader that surgery was not even in the play. Despite my sister’s protests that she had everything under control, I resigned from the job I loved and moved back to Toronto. I’d been feeling guilty for three years about my rather carefree existence in Ottawa while Lauren looked after our mother. Now there really wasn’t much time left.

  My job in Ottawa had been all-consuming, so I was still very much single. It was hard to sustain a meaningful relationship while working in the pressure cooker of national politics. I did have a few less-than-meaningful relationships during my time on the Hill, but they were mercifully short. On a more positive note, I’d banked a whack of dough. Within a week of moving back to Toronto, I made a down payment on a condo across the road from the St. Lawrence Market, on Front Street. It was built in the eighties, a few years before developers discovered that people were prepared to live in 575-square-foot condos. So my unit was 1,120 square feet with a spacious living room and bedroom, and a den of sorts that I turned into a library. As something of a bibliophile, I had collected many history books about science and the space program, lots of novels, and dozens of volumes related to Sherlock Holmes, including several editions of the stories and novels themselves. I loved Arthur Conan Doyle’s writing and the characters he immortalized in what were arguably the most famous tales in the world. I often tried to think like Sherlock Holmes when faced with complex problems in my own life, but found I could seldom rise above the Hardy Boys.

  When unpacked and settled, I was very happy with my first stab at home ownership. It was only a block from one of Toronto’s most beautiful bookstores, and it took me just a ten-minute subway ride north to reach the family homestead near Yonge and St. Clair.

  Did I mention that my sister is a saint? Like most saints, she was still single at twenty-eight, and worked part-time at the Deer Park branch of the Toronto Public Library. Most of the librarian stereotypes fit, but not all of them. Lauren moved back into the family home when the cancer moved back into our mother. Taking care of someone in the final stages of cancer is not a great gig. It leaves next to no time for anything else. When I first visited my mother after moving back to Toronto, I was shocked to see the deterioration since I’d last seen her, two months earlier. She was gaunt and weak, seemed resigned to her fate, and hoped it would come sooner rather than later.

  My sister kicked off the visit by chewing me out a bit for abandoning my dream job in Ottawa just to assuage my guilty conscience. I tried to argue that I was acting responsibly and that she deserved help with Mom’s care. She snorted a saintly snort. She was so good with Mom. While I flailed around cracking jokes and dodging the big malignant elephant in the room, Lauren knew just exactly what to do, what to say, when to stay, and when to leave.

  There were about eight people in the boardroom and, it sounded like, plenty more on the speaker phone when we gathered at 2:30 p.m. for the conference call “briefing and brainer.” After Googling “brainer,” I’d learned that it was PR agency slang for “brainstorm.” Got it. I sat down in one of the few remaining plush leather chairs and rolled as far away from the centre of the action as possible while still staying in the boardroom. Several of the folks I’d met earlier in the day on my little tour nodded to me. I nodded back. Diane sat at the midpoint of the boardroom table. Amanda was right next to her, staring into the speaker phone as if it were a crystal ball. She looked a little tense, which for all I knew was how she always looked.

  A voice boomed through the static on the line at ear-bleeding volume.

  “Okay, let’s get started!”

  I had an inkling Amanda was startled by the voice by the way she jerked her whole body up and off the chair, before placing her hand on her sternum and breathing heavily. Diane calmly leaned over the speaker phone and dialled back the decibels to prevent any further hearing loss among the Toronto team.

  “Hi, Crawford. It’s Diane. Go ahead. We’re all assembled here in Toronto,” said Diane.

  “New York is all set, too,” piped in another disembodied voice.

  “Okay. Thanks for coming together on this, everyone. For those of you I haven’t yet met, I’m Crawford Blake, GM here in Washington. I’ve got with me several of my very smart colleagues. We’ve got New York on the line and Toronto, too. Rather than taking the next twenty minutes for round-table introductions, let’s just introduce ourselves when and if we have something to say. This project, when we win it, will be led out of D.C., with Toronto handling the Canadian component. New York will be hovering around the edges to help out, but it’s really a D.C.–Toronto play.”

  I’d never heard of Crawford Blake, so I pulled out my iPad and Googled him as his pronounced southern drawl draped itself over the meeting. According to the bio that appeared on the TK site, Crawford Blake, forty-one, was a Washington insider who had worked for three Republican congressmen and served a stint at the Republican National Committee. He was born in, yes, rural Mississippi and had earned a law degree from Alabama State next door. I tuned back in.

  “Let me walk you through pretty well all the information we have on this opportunity and you can all hang on to your questions till I’m done, if you don’t mind. Okay. Because of a contact of mine on the inside, we’re one of three multinational agencies invited to pitch for a nice little project … with NASA. Yep, the NASA. So rule number one is that none of us ever, ever, cracks a joke that includes the line ‘Well, it’s not rocket science.’ At NASA, everything is rocket science and they take it very seriously. Here’s the deal in a nutshell. To try to tackle our mountain of debt, this Republican Congress, bless their hearts, is threatening to turn off the funding tap to NASA, and to many other outdated and unnecessary agencies. And do you know why they feel comfortable telling NASA where they can put their precious space station?”

  Nobody said a word, which was just fine with Blake because he seemed to like owning the floor.

  “I’ll tell you why. The public no longer cares about space exploration. NASA has been polling for more than fifty years. Back in the early sixties, when we were racing the Russians to orbit and then to the moon, the average American was obsessed with space travel. Nobody went to work when there was a launch. We were glued to our radios and TVS. I’m just barely old enough to have hazy memories of the late Apollo lunar missions and I can tell you, this country was moon crazy. Our family would gather around the TV in the rec room and watch for hours on end. With that kind of public support, Congress kept sending bigger and bigger cheques to NASA and felt good doing it.”

  Blake paused to catch his breath, but only for a moment.

  “Well, my friends, times have changed. Citizens no longer care. A Simpsons rerun now draws a larger TV audience than a shuttle launch. In fact, one of the key tracking questions NASA has been asking Americans since the start of the shuttle program in the early eighties is whether you’d rather watch the launch of the shuttle on TV or go out for lunch. The lunch option wasn’t even on the landscape until the mid-nineties. But it’s definitely on the scene now. In the latest tracking study, for the first time in over thirty years, the majority of survey respondents would rather go out for lunch than watch a shuttle launch. I kid you
not. That single finding has pushed NASA off the deep end. Hence their call to us.”

  “Crawford, Diane here again. Can I just ask whether the public opinion trends are the same here in Canada?”

  “Good question, Diane. NASA didn’t care much about Canada until you all built that funky mechanical arm for the shuttle. So the polling sample has only covered Canada for the last decade or so and your numbers have also been steadily decreasing, but they’re not on as steep a decline as here in U.S. of A. That’s one of the reasons NASA wants this to be a continental program. So here’s the challenge, put as simply as I can. We need a big-ass PR program to rekindle the public’s passion for space flight. We’ve got to arrest the free fall in our citizens’ interest in, and support for, NASA and the important work it does on behalf of all Americans … and you all freezing up there in Canada, too. And we’ll make a pile of dough while we’re doing it.”

  This guy and his ignorant cracks about my fair country were starting to get on my nerves.

  “I’m just about done, but we don’t know which other two agencies we’re up against, nor do we have any sense of budget for the program, but NASA has their ass stuck between a rock and a very hard place. So I say we go big but not too off the wall. This is still a stodgy group. We’ve got about two weeks to pull this off. We’re pitching NASA here in Washington on the twenty-third and they want a joint American–Canadian team. Okay, I’ll shut up now and throw it open for initial ideas.”

  I’d been watching Amanda for much of Blake’s briefing. She was not hard to look at, quite the opposite in fact, and I was intrigued by Diane’s description of her as a very dedicated employee who was consumed, perhaps even defined, by her job. She looked like she was dying to say something, anything, just to get into the mix. There was a brief lull after the boss had stopped talking. Cue Amanda.

  “Um, it’s Amanda Burke here in Toronto. Knowing only that NASA was the potential client, my team has gathered and analyzed the last three years of NASA media coverage here in Canada, including mentions of the shuttle program and the International Space Station. The amount, tone, and placement of the coverage are heading very much in the wrong direction. Even in the social media space, ahhh … no pun intended, NASA is not a big topic of conversation. I think we need a more creative, more robust, and more sustained media relations effort to reanimate the public’s interest.”

  She actually had quite a lovely voice.

  Her comment triggered a full discussion about what might be done to generate more media coverage. Ideas came thick and fast, including astronaut media tours, more IMAX space movies, weekly news releases, allowing reporters to follow rookie astronauts through their training, even building a mock-up of the space station and touring it across the continent. True to Diane’s suggestion, I just listened, but I was not particularly impressed with what I was hearing. It all sounded to me like a bunch of tactics in search of a strategy. I turned my mind to what I thought was really being asked of us. But the unexpected sound of my own name brought me back to the discussion.

  “It’s Diane again here in TO. Sitting very quietly here in our boardroom this afternoon is the newest member of the TK Toronto team, David Stewart. This is David’s first day – he has just joined us fresh from the political staff of the Minister of State for Science and Technology, where he handled media liaison and the government’s relationship with the Canadian Space Agency. Even though I suggested he just listen today, I’m going to put him on the spot.”

  Great, just great. There was a sudden drought in my mouth. Here I am, minding my own business, trying to get the lay of the land in this strange new world, and all of a sudden, Diane decides to toss me my first anchor. With nowhere to hide, I shuffled my chair up to the board table as a condemned man might climb the scaffold stairs.

  “David, you’ve been listening to the ideas fly back and forth, but you’ve kept your own counsel so far,” Diane commented. “Given your experience and expertise, are we on track?”

  All eyes in the room and all ears on the speaker phone turned to me. What to do, what to do. My heart rate soared. I’ve often heard that in moments of high stress, everything slows down, the fog clears, and the perfect response comes into sharp focus. Yes, I’ve often heard this – I’ve just never actually experienced it. I knew what I had to do. It was obvious. The path of least resistance was simply to leap on board, ingratiate myself with my new colleagues, build a bridge to Amanda, and support the heavy media relations play being proposed. Yep, all aboard the bandwagon.

  “Are we on track? Well, we’re on a track, I just don’t really think it’s the right track” were the words I heard coming out of my mouth.

  Bandwagons were usually easier to board. I had somehow missed the big fat open door and managed instead to throw myself under the back wheels. By the looks I was getting in the room, no one would be helping me back to my feet.

  “What do you mean we’re not on the right track?” snapped Amanda. “We’ve just kicked around dozens of great story ideas here. The media will be lapping it up.”

  Now that I was out on the limb, it was time to reinforce my branch and hook up a safety line.

  “I have no doubt that we could generate a giant stack-o-coverage, but NASA is asking us to re-engage the public, not manufacture news clippings,” I explained, not yet knowing exactly where I was headed, other than being ostracized, isolated, and perhaps even unemployed. “More articles and news items will not re-animate the average citizen’s fascination with space exploration.”

  “Okay, new guy, what will?” Amanda threw down the gauntlet.

  At that point, I had nothing to lose.

  “Well, if we want the public to care about space, we’ve got to put the public in space, literally. So we run a contest to send a citizen up to the space station where they won’t just be PR ballast but will actually have a role in the mission,” I said, my words only a hair behind my thoughts.

  “We promote it heavily through the social media platforms and use some of the good ideas already discussed to drive some media coverage. But the storyline is about the possibility that you or your next-door neighbour might be heading into orbit. Another shuttle mission to the International Space Station is no longer news. But put a plumber from Edmonton or a nurse from Montreal on board and then you’ve got a big story, real news.”

  I decided to quit while I was behind and shut up.

  “NASA will never go for that,” Amanda interjected. “There’s no way we can …”

  “Whoa, whoa, Amanda,” Crawford Blake leapt in. “This is a brainer, honey, so our standard rules apply. There is no ‘bad idea’ in a brainstorm. We want the team to get creative, so go easy on –” I heard someone on the line prompt him with my name. “– David. It’s his first day, after all.”

  Amanda’s face flushed.

  “Of course, Crawford. I was just mindful of our time and the need to move us forward,” she explained. She looked at me as she said it and nodded. I gave her my best “No worries” look while she responded with a very convincing “Thanks, jerk” expression.

  The brainer continued with other ideas advanced and discussed, most of them back in the realm of traditional media relations. I eased myself away from the table and returned to quiet mode. After another thirty minutes or so, the flow of ideas had dwindled to a trickle, so Diane took the reins.

  “Crawford, I think we’ve got some good stuff to work with here. I assume we’ll handle blowing out a Canadian approach here and your team will do the same for the U.S. market there. Then we’ll bring them together.”

  “My thoughts exactly, Diane,” he agreed. “But let’s stick to what we do best, driving earned media coverage. In my experience, the NASA guys are very conservative and easily spooked.”

  Amanda caught my eye again, this time with what looked like “nannannabooboo” plastered all over her face.

  “Just one more thought from north of the border,” Diane added. “I’d like David Stewart to flesh out his
contest idea a little more and throw together a few slides. Then next week at our status meeting he can walk us through it before we decide on what to include in the final deck.”

  “Up to you, Diane.”

  Ten minutes later I was back at my desk in my very own cubicle when Amanda Burke arrived like an Exocet missile, only more explosive. In the classic power play, she placed her hands on my desk and leaned down from above before unleashing her tirade. She was no longer using her “lovely voice.” Rather, she spoke in a crazed whisper that carried only four cubicles away in every direction.

  “Thank you for shitting on my plan from a very great altitude!” she hissed. “Don’t you ever do that again in a boardroom packed with people, let alone with Blake and Diane right there, too. You made me look stupid and I’m running this program, not you. You come here with your vaunted political experience and think you’re something special. Well, I couldn’t care less if you were actually the minister and not just his lowly media lackey. NASA is my ticket so you’ll have to earn your way onto the team. And after today, you’re beginning the race well behind the starting line.”

  “Her” was all I said.

  “What?” she snapped.

  “You said ‘his lowly media lackey’ but I was ‘her lowly media lackey.’ Our Minister of State for Science and Tech is a woman.”

  “Oh.”

  “And I’m sorry about what I said. Diane threw me under the bus. I wasn’t expecting to be called upon and when I was, all I had was my gut reaction. I had no time to shape it or frame it in a way that didn’t appear to, as you so elegantly put it, ‘shit on your plan from a very great altitude,’ ” I explained. “But even though I regret what came out of my mouth in the heat of the moment, it is what I believe. I know your approach will net us the coverage, but unless there’s a new and bigger story angle in the play, I don’t think we’re going to move the needle. I’m very sorry my view emerged in the way it did. But it is what it is.”