w.
The ideal Experience is as much a magic trick as it is whimsy work. You can’t just throw Alice in Wonderland at a client and call it a day. Adults don’t naturally produce much whimsy at all, so most people’s definition comes from elsewhere. Some draw on half-remembered memories from their childhood, but most of us rely on radically different pop culture cliches of whimsy. That’s why you have to cater each Experience to the client’s particular definition of whimsy.
Getting that definition is an art unto itself. It’s not a problem you can attack head on and just ask the client. There is nothing particularly whimsical about getting exactly what you expected.
Worse still, it’s hard to genuinely feel whimsy when you’re paying for it. Even if you forget, in the moment, that you’ve got a w. subscription, you’ll remember later on when you get the bill. Maybe some whimsy will be left after that, but more often it turns into a more rational curiosity as you wonder how an Experience was pulled off. Then your satisfaction is dependent on how interesting our approach could have been. Or how good your imagination is.
What distinguishes the good operators from the merely clever ones is that even if you were told that something was part of an Experience, you’d still wonder how they could have possibly pulled it off. Where even if you were told that, you might not believe. Lingering doubts are an important part of the truly great Experiences.
Those doubts can manifest in lots of different ways, but I’m partial to the weirdness that comes with a digital jinx. When two different people in your life contact you at precisely same time about separate things that nonetheless share some quality that makes it seem serendipitous.
It’s an easy enough play that most rookie operators keep it somewhere in the toolbox, but if you were told that it was an Experience, you’d have all kinds of explanations close at hand. With enough time, clients can work backwards to determine how most Experiences are done. Maybe people were tricked, paid, or pushed to say what they said. Maybe phones were stolen. Maybe just we hacked their feeds. Or yours.
Whatever the method, you might be vaguely impressed if we pulled off a particularly novel approach, but knowing takes away from the experience of the Experience. What you’re paying w. for is the lie and so we fail every time that we remind you of what you’re paying for.
Dr. Julia Werner’s solution to the digital jinx was a subtle tweak, but it makes all the difference in the world. She would switch out one of the people involved for the client. You are no longer a passive observer as an Experience happens to you, but instead an active participant — or, better yet, the initiator.
You receive a message from someone precisely as you were sending them one. Not only are both messages on the similar topics, but they almost serve as a sideways response to each other. Rationality be damned, the feeling of genuine coincidence is hard to shake. It’s the kind of Experience that makes you wonder whether it was just an experience, because how could it possibility have been artificially generated whimsy? How could an operator know exactly what you were going to say and be ready with an appropriately close response?
That’s not my secret to tell. Not that Dr. Werner would have cared. She was the founder of the company, brilliant mind, and general weirdo, but she’d gotten bored of whimsy work long before she died. Since then, that is among the many secrets that belong to w.
I’d been trying to avoid reminders that she was gone. Not just because I didn’t want to think about it, but because I couldn’t keep the grief off my face and sadness is almost never the appropriate reaction in a staff meeting.
“It’s perfectly safe. We’re not going to mess with anything important.”
Ana said, “We’re not going to be interfering with a shuttle launch.”
Anastasia Werner. Senior Vice President of Platinum Operations for a couple years now. We’ve also been friends since before w. became too cool for whole words. I probably mean that as a dig, but it’s not an unfair depiction of the company these days.
To their credit, nobody pushed the issue. They would grumble about it later with each other, but there was no point derailing a meeting over something that had been decided. Not every good idea was a good idea to management.
Ana turned to me.
“Ismay, it’s been a couple weeks since we’ve had an update from you,” she paused and I filled the silence .
“Will no one rid me of this turbulent prince?”
That got a couple of knowing chuckles. Royal clients were usually more difficult to get access to, but this one in particular was a shut in. His mother had arranged the contract, because she hoped that a bit of whimsy would keep him from becoming an asshole king. Her words, not mine.
“If you’re struggling, we can pull some things off your plate.” Ana said and this time I had nothing to fill the silence with. “Can any of your clients be handed off?”
“Well, obviously I’ve already fallen in love with them all. That’s just the way this job works. You can’t do it neutrally. I’ve fallen in love with every single client I’ve had since I moved into operations.”
“That’s a good line. Well rehearsed.” Ana replied with a faint hint of a smirk before looking further down the table.
“Renata, can you play around with that language and get something on my desk for next week?”
“Yeah.” Even through Renata’s monosyllabic response, I could hear the distance in her voice. She was likely already replaying the audio and sending the clip to her team, so I didn’t bother sending my own copy.
“That doesn’t, however, answer the question,” Ana said and turned her attention back to me. “Which means you’re hedging. Which makes me think that you are struggling.”
She wasn’t quite scolding me in front of the class but it was close. It also wasn’t an unfair accusation.
“It’s just been hectic without Marcus,” I said not quite honestly. That wasn’t the full truth but it certainly wasn’t a lie. “I know that I lost the argument, so I’m not trying to bring it up again. But is he doing okay in there?”
Even the people who had been politely ignoring our conversation gave us their full attention. In there. Quite the euphemism considering that Marcus was in an American prison serving a two-year sentence for tax evasion. That he was in prison at all was the argument to which I was referring.
“It’s natural to have worries,” Ana said, “but he knew what he was getting into when he planned this Experience. I would have thought you were more sympathetic to his new criminal life, given your history.”
The mild tension in the room was immediately cut. Nobody outright laughed, but most people recognized the joke. Ana used that as an opportunity to wrap the meeting up. We’d properly get into it afterwards, in private. She hadn’t chastised me for my age yet. There were a lot of talented egos on the platinum team and I was slipping. She couldn’t afford to play favorites. Besides, she was right. I’d never been to prison for an Experience, but it wasn’t that far from my style.
I once dated a guy for fourteen months on an Experience. It was early in my career and I didn’t have the budget access I have now. I was never going to afford a permanent companion for him. Whimsical romances are one those pricy budget line items that sounds helpful. They rarely are and you can almost always find a better use for the money. Plus long term hires can also take over an Experience if they’re your primary delivery method. It’s not uncommon for them to push for a bigger payday, no matter what their contract says.
But those issues are negated by doing it yourself and, in fact, it was markedly easier to run an Experience from inside of it.
I was able to get him signed on to a decade-long re-up after his initial contract ended. It would have been a much more impressive feat if he hadn’t been forced to break his contract after he was found guilty of some complicated brand of financial crime. I didn’t bother getting too hung up on the details, because he kept paying w. which meant the Experience was still running. The only problem was that it wasn’t really his money anymore and a government accountant cancelled the service. In a moment of desperation, to save the contract, I very nearly blew my cover clumsily hinting that he needed to find a way to keep that particular expense to keep me around.
Still, the bonus I got that year paid off my student loans with room to spare, which mattered significantly less than joining the Platinum Club. That’s where the real work of w. happened.
WhimsyBox was a good enough name at first. Nobody quite knew how to describe what they expected to be in the box, but people were curious enough to find out what we meant. The market took a little while to catch up, but eventually a dam broke and everyone thought they had a novel twist on the concept.
FunBox started off strong trying to cross a few audiences with a family-friendly nice option and an aggressively ‘naughty’ option before a sorting error resulted in exactly what everyone expected to eventually happen. WeirdBox couldn’t manage people’s expectations. What’s so frustrating is that there’s not even an interesting story there. Apparently some boring companies have enough money to take a long time to outright fail. At first, ElegenceBox was way too expensive and then way too cheap.
There were even a couple of engineers trying to get funding for their proposed boxes that would be bigger on the inside than the outside. They were acquired by some weapons research firm and presumably designed some really cool ways for people to kill each other. There are enough boxes to fill whole history books, but I recommend Boxing With Giants. It’s a great docuseries about the boom which followed a bunch of the most interesting players in the indie box scene.
The entire industry held its breath every time an interesting new player entered the market, wondering if this was the one that burst the bubble. WonderBox, by the way, was tied up in lawsuits before their first shipment. Three different companies claimed the rights to the name and we never even got to see if WonderBox could live up to its name.
Every time Dr. Werner mentioned WonderBox, I would deadpan ask her if she wondered what they would have put in it. She hated the joke. Not just because it was bad but because she did wonder what could have been with WonderBox — and all the other companies that failed along the way to replicating WhimsyBox’s success. It would have been normal for her to begrudge her competitors, but she mostly just wanted to know what they could have been.
Dr. Werner understood something that a lot of the market didn’t. It wasn’t about selling a box of trinkets. It was about selling an experience. “They were all busy trying to be WhimsyBox. Meanwhile I was getting out of that game having no idea what that meant.” Her stories from that time all had this manic sort of urgency to them, as if she was racing to make the world match her thoughts.
She always made it sound obvious in the retelling, as if she had simply stumbled into doing it first. Sure, others had played around with delivery mechanisms for their ‘boxes’, but the metaphor remained intact. People paid for stuff that was delivered to their homes, offices, or wherever was most appropriate. Dr. Werner got rid of the stuff altogether and boxes became Experiences.
There are very few problems that cannot be solved by throwing a sufficient number of theatre kids at. The problem, like with any good live production, was selling tickets.
It is surprisingly easy to get people hooked on having a slightly unusual life. Learn a few details about their proclivities, what makes them tick and what makes them cringe. Most of which can be found on their public feeds. Or with an innocent looking friend request. If that doesn’t work, we can always turn to more illicit research methods. That would sound vaguely nefarious as ad copy, so we emphasize the strangeness itself rather than how we make it so.
Maybe we’ll push déjà vu at you and you end up seeing the same strange cat through different windows on opposite ends of town. Or you might start receiving consistently wrong numbers who leave ‘interesting’ voicemails. Or maybe you start to see a pattern to the billboards on your route to work.
We really do tailor the Experience to the person. Some of our competitors have low cost tiers where they made a random selection from a generic list and ‘send’ it to you. I’ve never understood why you’d pay money for junk mail but it ain’t our market, so I don’t have reason to complain. For a couple of years, poking fun at our competitors was good for a clever-enough advertising campaign. Back when we were the plucky underdogs. These days our marketing team spends more energy on subtle font changes than anything else. They have very strong opinions, so surely they must know what they’re talking about.
That sarcasm is probably unfair. After all, right now they’re in the middle of a truly bonkers campaign involving advertising with the inside of citrus fruit. They found a botanist who was able genetically alter seeds such that simple shapes can be found in the fruit’s flesh. Not all of them. In fact, the numbers were worse than one in every hundred thousand and there was no cost effective way of actually checking the inside of the fruit itself. The advertising team actually spun that as a benefit: even if people knew about the campaign, the odds of it happening to them were so low so it remains a noteworthy experience when it does.
Viral marketing is not all that different than the lines we have to walk when manufacturing whimsy. Goldilocks in a house where all the rooms and their contents keep changing all around you. ‘Just right’ doesn’t stay that way for long. Even the best parts of an Experience eventually become routine and have to be revised, if not thrown out. That’s even more the case with the platinum club.
We planned to make a candidate dream their election results in the week before an election. Management stepped in after the dream had happened. The entire team had to be repurposed on the fly to save the investment that had already been made. The company hates throwing away money, but I appreciated their hesitance: Phase three was technically electoral fraud. Cold feet is entirely understandable.
Very few members of the executive team are former operators. Anastasia being one of the exceptions. The traits that operators need to be good at bringing whimsy into people’s lives are not ideal for worrying about the company as a whole, because crafting Experiences always involve tunnel vision and strong emotions. Anastasia had been right that it was a well rehearsed line, but I really did love my clients. That doesn’t work for everyone. Marcus, for example, got inside his clients’ heads by fixating on their flaws and building Experiences around those. I suppose a prisoner Experience was inevitable given his disposition. Everyone finds their own way at w.
We aren’t selling whimsy. We never have. Not really. Even back in the early WhimsyBox days when there was actually a box. It wasn’t standardized, but the whole thing had a routine to it. You always knew what you were paying for. When the experience was good, it was easy enough to get people to tell their friends about. The word-of-mouth referrals were through the roof in those early years, but retention was terrible.
People who had been referred had too high expectations and their first boxes couldn’t live up to the story that they had been told. Worse still, some folks started to see their WhimsyBox as a chore that piled up. Imagine planning to change someone’s life, if only for a short time, with an entire personalized box of happenings that never happened because nobody took the time to open it. Work is work, but even the best operators struggled under those conditions.
Dr. Werner managed to steer the company through that period, but at the cost of it remaining hers. She threw herself into making the product of WhimsyBox work and delegated everything else to people who knew what they were doing. Instead of waiting for the bubble to burst, Dr. Werner burst it herself. The industry collapsed when Experiences debuted and and WhimsyBox was ready to pick up the pieces. Because everyone else had done their jobs, what could have simply been a new entertainment product on the market instead became a massive acquisition of anyone in the box industry with any talent and, more importantly, their distribution pipelines.
That last was a point that Dr. Werner emphasized whenever she talked about the company that WhimsyBox became. By leaving the company in the hands of people who knew how to run a company, she had access to more resources than had been possible before. Each Experience was an opportunity to let her imagination run wild.
It can be hard to appreciate Experiences out of context, because they’re so closely designed for each particular client. What works for one person might be a tired cliche for another. If you’re unfamiliar with tech limitations, we might lean on Experiences that rely on hacking. Hopeless romantics are straightforward. Personalized climate Experiences might not be useful for those who don’t pay attention to the weather.
There’s no way to get around the problem either. Not for us, anyway. What sets w. apart from other companies is anonymity of it all. There are no hidden sigils or pass phrases for clients to recognize. Our actors have strict orders to maintain character. We don’t even offer a vague yearly summary that you can look at to feel like you’re getting their money’s worth. People will inevitably make guesses, maybe even accurate ones — but they won’t know and that makes all the difference.
Plus it means we can reuse content for long-term clients. Callback Experiences save a bit of work down the line but they aren’t simply cut-and-paste jobs. We have to decide which elements of a past experience are ideal to recreate and which can be distorted. We have to let enough time pass that the reoccurrence feels strange but not so much time that the original memories have faded. That gets easier the more time you spend with a client. You learn the kinds of details that they tend to hold onto and the patterns of their thoughts. Getting in their heads is necessary to make their lives more whimsical. I once had the better part of an Experience fall apart because the client was blue-green colorblind and I hadn’t even known there were different ways of being colorblind.
Those kinds of mistakes were far enough back that I rarely thought about them anymore. I had made so many more interesting mistakes since then, but it was a good reminder to be mindful of gaps. No amount of talent can make up for insufficient research. Although that might just be something people with insufficient talent say to get themselves through the day.
At any given point, my time at w. involved supervising a handful of medium- and long-term Experiences. It’s rare to be running anything that requires daily updates. Occasionally a prospective client will come to w., either for themselves or as a gift, and expect there to be a package that includes ‘everything’. They want every day to be an adventure. We almost always turned those folks away, because they’d inevitably be unhappy with us in the long run. Sure, we could throw a couple of interesting Experiences at them early on and maybe rope them into a big contract, but those kinds of contracts are never worth the hassle. No operator — no team of operators even — can make someone’s entire life whimsical.
What we offer is more subtle. The behind the scene methods might not always be, but we’re at our most successful when w. leaves a light touch on people’s lives. Clients can’t always place everything that has changed and that’s an advantage to how we do things, even if it makes life hard for marketing and retention teams. The trickiest part to running your first few long-term contracts is knowing when not to act. If your Experience has too much happening too frequently, people don’t have room to fill in the details and make connections of their own. You want to make the client an active participant in the Experience instead of just a passive observer.
For some clients, w. opens a door to the possibility that life is stranger than they had thought. They start finding connections between things that are seemingly unconnected, including details that have nothing to do with an operator’s prepared Experiences. Those clients can be hard to convert to long-term contracts, because they start to think the world itself is the Experience rather than anything w. has done. To their credit, management isn’t particularly bothered when that happens. Better for those folks to self-select out rather than risk the bad press that comes from them pulling at the seams of what we do.
Besides, most former clients come back on their own. Some can’t even point to anything specific that they missed since they cancelled their subscription. It just dawns on them, one day, that something is gone. Ana once had a client who, six months after his last Experience and without any prodding from us, signed a two-year contract. In his intake interview, he talked about how normal shopping had become and he kept asking how we pulled it off. ‘It’ being how the one thing at the top of his shopping list was always out of stock. He obviously felt awkward trying to explain why he missed that Experience and insisted that he knew we wouldn’t simply recreate it anyway, but he wanted “something like that”.
Ana obviously didn’t tell her bosses that she’d done nothing at the sort. We’d been planning to make his pharmacist shorter, week by week, but that was still in the design phase when he first cancelled his subscription. All the cleverness in the world can’t beat being lucky in the right moment.
Ana hated when I talked about w. like that. She preferred to think of us all as capable professionals who occasionally made mistakes. Accordingly, she wasn’t fond of my view that we were being grossly overpaid to conduct a bunch of half-cocked undergraduate psychology experiments. Don’t get me wrong, I love the work. I’m just skeptical that it’s anything more than extremely well-funded amateur theatre. In Anastasia’s defense, our yearly earnings reports speak for themselves. In mine, w. does have a fair number of scriptwriters and actors on staff.
She and I were a thing for a minute, but found we preferred our relationship when were not, so we found a way to make that work. She became my boss and we found a way to make that work too. When that had happened Dr. Werner had already long stepped away from w. and was enjoying retirement, but she was at the celebratory dinner nonetheless.
“You know, I never did understand what she saw in you,” Dr. Werner said. We were at a not-quite-wallflower position at the end of the table.
“Any port in a storm, I suppose. People will do get anything to get away from their family,” I said.
“We’re barely related,” she said in feigned protest.
“You, not an hour ago, called her the daughter you never had.”
“Oh sure, but I think I wrote that on a card for you at some point. It doesn’t mean anything,” she said. I laughed. That card was one of the few things I kept on my desk.
“You’re meaner than grandmothers are supposed to be.”
“For someone whose job it is to sweat the details about people, you’re astoundingly bad at the details about people. If you know that I never had kids, then you should know I can’t be a grandmother.”
While I was trying to come up with a clever reply, she moved on.
“Would you say I bring whimsy to your life?” She looked down the table towards Ana.
“No, I would say that I bring whimsy to my own life and sometimes you just happen to be there.”
It may not have been Oscar Wilde but there was usually a game to conversations with Dr. Werner. She didn’t see the point in not playing when one could be. It didn’t always make sense, but it didn’t have to. The play was the thing. Following along always got her talking and she had more stories than there was time to tell them all. She rarely came to a story head on though. They usually started as casual asides on the way to what she felt were more interesting points.
Ana once described her great aunt as a labyrinth of answers to questions that nobody had asked. Dr. Werner had loved it, as was to be expected. She pulled the line out as a nonsensical retort whenever it suited her. She was an earnest mad scientist and asked questions that were almost childlike in their starting place, before marshaling all her considerable talents and resources in service of answering them. She was also easily bored of other people and never ashamed of showing it.
She wasn’t perfect, but she made such glorious messes. If it sounds like I loved this woman that’s because I did. How could I not?
“Dying wishes seem like an unfair thing to do to someone you care about,” Dr. Werner said from the bed where she would spend these last days. “But it’ll be a lot harder to traumatize you when I’m gone.”
“You’ll find a way, I’m sure.” I said, not knowing how true that would be.
“I’m feeling pretentious,” she said, quietly enough that I got up and moved to the chair next to her bed.
“You could have just said moody.”
I had heard the seriousness in her voice, but wasn’t ready to talk myself. We had been circling around saying goodbye for a while now, filling the spaces between words with anything else that struck her mind fancy and she was easy to distract. “Shouldn’t we be playing Go or something like that?”
“That would probably make all this easier for future biographers. Visually interesting, if nothing else. You’re quite boring, did you know that?”
“You’re the one getting high and waxing poetic about your legacy. Why is it always the dullest people who worry about their legacies?”
“It’s not for my sake. I’m not sure if you knew this, but I’m kind of a big deal. There are buildings named after me. Some nice ones too. I’m more worried about making sure they get someone attractive to play me in the series based on my life than I am about my legacy.” For some reason she reached for an invisible gun, making a joke that I didn’t understand. Maybe she didn’t either. “I just hoping that I’m interesting enough in our conversations that they’ll include you in the series at all.”
“I have even less interest in my own legacy than I do yours.”
“True as that may be, something has to be done about the company.” It was a long-standing topic of conversation between us. As far as corporations went, w. was not an outright bad one. Obviously a considerable amount of criminal activity when into providing Experiences, but we never broke any important laws and we certainly never deliberately interfered with anyone who wasn’t a client. At most, people who happened to live around the edges of our Experiences might incidentally find their lives a bit more whimsical.
Nobody would mistake w. for a charity, but Dr. Werner cast a long shadow and the company wasn’t going to change into an evil empire overnight.
Still, she worried.
“You’re the one who put it in the hands of the professionals. Whether you like it or not, w. is all your fault.“
“That’s a necessary part of a good dying wish. It has to be something impossible that I couldn’t be bothered to fix in my lifetime,” she tried to maintain eye contact, “but I want to guilt you into taking care of.”
“Ana’s actually in a position to do something about it, you know. Unlike dotty old founders and operators who hang out with them, I’m pretty sure senior vice presidents actually do something.”
“What makes you think you’re my first choice? Or my only choice, for that matter?” She said and her exuberance disappeared when she closed her eyes. Just being her was too tiring keep up for long, but that’s all she wanted to be. It meant that all her conversational bursts of energy were marked by long interludes.
When she opened her eyes, she took a moment to make sure I was paying attention and spoke without a hint of a joke. “When was the last time you had a client who wasn’t an asshole?” I started to shake my head in protest and nod in agreement at the same time, and she smiled. “You’re a hopeless romantic, but even you can’t help admit that w. is only going through the motions of having a soul.”
“w. isn’t a bunch of supervillains. You’ve got lofty expectations for the entertainment company you founded.” I said.
“No, I’d just prefer if you weren’t so boring.”
There were kinder conversations. Most of the time blurred together in tiredness and grief. She talked about her old Experiences. Her favorites were those that went disastrously wrong. The sleepless nights frantically improvising solutions on shoestring budgets. She had once tried to change the order of succession for one of those once upon a monarchies. It worked when a far-removed duke abdicated his claim, but then stumbled into a monarchist plot to overthrow a democratically selected algorithm. She kept running the Experience from inside the capital while the coup was ongoing, providing the client with impossible slices of normal amidst the chaos that their life had become. All her best stories ended something like that.
I was never far away and, in the last couple days, neither was Ana. Others came, some of whom Dr. Werner had energy and inclination to speak to. It felt strange that so many of the people who visited were strangers to me. I had expected to recognize more of them, given how many stories about her life she had shared. As a change of pace from being sad and tired, I spent some time being childishly jealous of everything that I wouldn’t get to know about her.
Included with her will was a handwritten letter for her lawyer to read allowed. He lacked her style, so I was skeptical that it would hit home. Ana assured me that it was still fittingly uncomfortable for the whole family. That may have had to do with the fact that they hadn’t really known her at all and expected at least something of the Werner fortune simply for having been relations through either blood or marriage.
Ana was the only one of them to receive anything. Together her and I got a meticulously organized media library, a few boxes of unlabeled stuff that was either mementos from Experiences or possibly trash, and an actual castle that she had been gifted decades prior. The castle we donated to the national government in what the press thought was a magnanimous gesture, but was solely a matter of self-interest. As generous as my w. salary was, I certainly couldn’t afford to maintain an actual castle and Ana had no interest in trying. The upkeep on those old buildings were unfathomably expensive. Even if Dr. Werner had left us any amount of money at all.
That she hadn’t was hardly a surprise. Instead, there were funds, scholarships, charities, projects, and institutes. There were countless exceptional individuals that she felt deserving. The week before she died she sold off all her shares in all the companies that she’d been involved with over the years, including w. save two, one share each for Ana and I.
Subtlety was not in her nature.
I took a leave of absence after her death. I pretended that I was off soul-searching, but mostly spent the time moping. I hadn’t made up my mind about how long I wanted to take off, but moodily — scratch that, pretentiously — missed the office after a couple days and went in after hours. Nobody was there, but the team had apparently prepared for the possibility that I would do exactly this.
When I arrived at the office, every display I walked by turned on and flashed a moody photo of me from the w. website and the subtitle “w.here is the w.heir?”. That was exactly the kind of thing the team knew would irritate me, as much for the attention as the unpronounceablity. It felt like a gentle reminder that, whenever I was ready, there was work to be done.
I went home, got some sleep, and was back at the office the next day. Despite it being neither whimsical nor even interesting, a crown was waiting for me and glued to the desk.
Instead of taking on any new projects, I threw myself into cleanup work.
When an operator runs into trouble mid-Experience, they’re supposed to consult with the cleanup team. The newer they are, the more likely they are to avoid making that call and instead try to fix things for themselves. That’s a bad instinct. Working a cleanup team into a live Experience is a skill that needs to be practiced. Otherwise, when you actually need help but have no plan, cleanup is just going to take over and that’ll hurt your reputation with management more than having learned how to ask for help.
It is natural to think of cleanup as fixing mistakes. An essential actor has disappeared, died, or quit. A constructed set wasn’t built to specifications or the specifications were wrong. A client missed the important lead-up to an expensive final act of an Experience, so the conclusion is on track to fall flat. That’s how most operators treat cleanup: as a way to get an Experience back on the right track. That’s often possible, but it is usually a lot easier to treat the available pieces as if it were the starting point of an Experience.
I’ve always appreciated the intellectual exercise of figuring out how to get the most out of limited resources that someone else had decided on, but you’d be surprised at how often one of those resources was a mime. Give me an out of work actor over a mime, every time. In a pinch, you can teach the actor a couple Slavic phrases, throw them in a trench coat, and you’ve got all the pieces needed to run an honourable schoolboy. Do the same to a mime and all you’ve got is a mime in a trench coat.
A real cleanup operator would just scrap the mime and focus on the useful budget items, but I was approached cleanup from another angle. I wanted to leave the lightest touch possible on the original Experience. That wasn’t just a matter of keeping them from going over budget. It meant finding and matching the operator’s design philosophy and voice. If the operator was painting whimsy into a client’s life, I tried to match their brushstrokes so that the client never noticed a change. Cleanup as forgery.
Mimes or not, it was the closest to honest work I’d done in a long time.
The most frustrating part about going back to work after Dr. Werner’s death was that she had been right. w. wasn’t terrible, but the platinum team in particular was an awful lot of effort to bring a bit more charm to people already leading charmed lives. If they put their mind to it, any given staff meeting could probably plan the overthrow of an authoritarian regime. The money was a good incentive, I’ll grant, but that wasn’t why people stayed on the platinum team.
It is the nature of whimsy work that it isn’t public. w. doesn’t take credit and neither do individual operators. There are always going to be leaks and disgruntled former employees, but the company has done an incredibly good job at shrouding platinum Experiences in mystery. Nobody really knows what we’ve done, but everybody knows that we did it well. The w. name could open more lucrative doors, for any who were so inclined to give up the work. Yet more people leave the platinum team from burnout than by choice.
It is about the challenge and getting paid is the reward. Management is more than happy to cultivate that attitude in us, because there are people willing to pay gross sums to feel more interesting. As long as you can do it without reminding them that they’d paid for it. Solving that is a puzzle that changes while you’re looking at it and then changes further still when you try to solve it.
Of course, not every w. client is an interesting puzzle. There are a fair number of people who have no desire to be interesting, they just want to have interesting things happen to them. It sounds like a value judgment when I put it that way, but it’s no different than people who watch streams instead of playing a game for themselves. Some things are not worth the effort of doing yourself, but are worth sitting through ads to watch someone else do. On top of that, naturally occurring whimsy is hard to find and harder still if you’re looking for it.
There are, however, people with both the will and the wealth to lead lives that make it difficult to craft Experiences. Even then, most of those are only briefly interesting for operators. Once the logistics have been solved once, lots of different kinds of Experiences can be delivered down that pipeline. Regular haunts rarely change. A paid off staffer can be paid again. A device that has been hacked, stays hacked. Of course, you still have to monitor long term clients in a bunch of different ways to make sure that their lives haven’t veered off in ways that are incompatible with planned Experiences. Everybody drifts from the plan, so even the best operators can juggle only so many clients at once.
That juggling was the vast majority of the job though, marked by occasional bursts of creativity and stress. It might be interesting but not all interesting things are whimsical. On top of that, w. employees aren’t allowed to have Experiences. That is mostly just management protecting themselves from weird edge cases though, because operators make for poor clients. It’s hard to keep your childlike sense of wonder when your job involves manufacturing it.
“So, it turns out that the ‘w’ stands for ‘vvampire’?” Ana said. She made her fingers into fangs.
“That joke doesn’t even make sense when you say it out loud,” I replied, “and I’m not being dramatic.”
“You just got through telling your boss that your job is sucking the whimsy out of you and selling it to the highest bidder,” she said, still laughing to herself. “You’re not just dramatic. My aunt infected you with her madness and, decades from now, you’re going to pass it on to some hapless operator. It’s the circle of life for people who can’t help but scratch at an itch. Let it go.”
“You make it sound like you don’t hate the place too.” I said it quicker than I’d meant and she knew it.
“I don’t hate the place.” She stopped and sighed. “That’s the part you don’t get. I complain about my job because sometimes my boss can be an asshole and sometimes I have to do things I don’t like. That’s called having a job. I don’t hate w. any more than I hate you for all the things you do to irritate me.
“You can tilt at windmills all you want. You can even do it when I’m trying to work. But you’re complaining that an entertainment company isn’t living up to a name that it hasn’t had in years. At some point you have to either quit or take over.”
I looked over at her from across the office and tried to gauge her mood.
“Is that something you’d help me with?”
She ignored it for the joke that it wasn’t. Ana hadn’t become my boss because she was Dr. Werner’s great niece. If anything, that had held her back. But she pulled off a series of Experiences for some bio-tech CEO during a hostile takeover of his company. The whole thing really came together when the CEO realized that all of the revisions that he had made to a couple-hundred page contract were written in iambic pentameter. When he couldn’t get w. to admit that it had been part of an Experience, he cancelled his contract on the grounds that he was naturally whimsical and didn’t need to waste money on something he could do himself. He even did an interview saying that w. was a shadow of its former self and that he’d come for us before long.
Even the best operators can become victims of their own success if they lose focus, but Ana didn’t blink. Instead she kept the Experience running and helped fend off the takeover attempt, but, when all was said and done, w. held enough shares in Boletus Industries to start a takeover of its own. It wasn’t, strictly speaking, whimsical for anyone when w. announced the acquisition with a Shakespearean sonnet, but you don’t get a lot of opportunities to take a curtain call in this business.
Mushrooms were their big thing, researching ways to use mycelial networks to remove traumatic events from people’s memories. It looked a lot like standard psychedelic therapy wrapped around the latest tech buzzwords, but apparently they held some impressive patents — all of which w. became the proud owner of. The former CEO even eventually tried to renew his contract when he realized just how lacking in whimsy his life was, but he was never interesting enough for the platinum team to get involved.
It was hard not to promote her after that.
“You’ve become one of those operators who keeps adding more detailed elements to an Experience that never reaches a payoff,” Ana said with more seriousness than she had brought up in front of the team. Even with just the two of us in her office and despite the fact that she was still working, it had the feeling of an intervention. We were both quiet. Her, it seemed, because she had said what she wanted to say and had gotten back to work. Me, because I didn’t know what to say back and was pretending to work.
I tried to break the tension by sending her a screenshot of the top results of a search for “how to stage an intervention”, but before it had even arrived in her feed she had already sent me a screenshot. It was a search of her own: “how to fire your best friend”. I stared at the results long enough to see that they promised compassionate step-by-step guides. Ana had stopped working and was looking at me from behind her desk.
“I’m almost positive this isn’t one of the steps,” I said, looking particularly undignified from my lounged position on her office couch. It was late enough for a shouting match that nobody would be around to hear, if I’d been so inclined. Now I wondered whether she had planned it that way.
Instead of pouting, I tapped at my display and sent her same screenshot back, having replaced ‘best’ with ‘only’ in bright red. She glanced at it and let her severe expression drop just a little bit.
“Not everything has to be a crusade,” she said.
Not enough things are, but instead of saying that, I quietly asked if she was actually firing me.
“Tonight?” She shook her head. “The press would have a field day with it.”
She sent a few tabloid clippings to my feed. They were entirely devoid of facts. Filled with all manner of speculation about Ana and I. Actual photos of us going about our lives. Most were fairly tame, but one included an outright lie of an anonymous quote. It was the definition of a salacious.
“That’s what is bothering you? That people think you’re getting laid?”
“The stories aren’t just about me.” She paused for a moment to send me an entire folder filled with clippings. “If you actually paid attention to the news instead of whatever happened to cross your feed, you’d recognize that you show up as often as I do whenever w. makes headlines. You’ve been standing in my aunt’s shadow, but you aren’t some nobody, Ismay. and you haven’t been one since long before she died.”
As she spoke, I scrolled through my display and saw the truth of what she said. Some of it went back years. Lots of it was no more accurate than gossip ever was, but there were enough details that were close enough to true.
“You spend so much time talking about how impressive other people’s Experiences are. Did you think that nobody talked about yours?”
I looked dumbfounded. I had just come across a story about how I’d once caused an earthquake to bring a bit of adventure to some mining baron. Obviously, I hadn’t made an earthquake happen, only capitalized on one as it happened, but it was surprising to see my name attached to it at all.
“I didn’t do this.” I gestured vaguely with my display. “I didn’t ask for anyone to write this.”
“In any given year, you’re working with an army of employees and contracts you oversee budgets that rival some nations. When are you going to realize that you’re kind of a big deal.” I opened my mouth to object, but she cut me off. “No, just listen. This isn’t a pep talk, It’s a warning.
“You’re one of three people to spend more than a decade crafting platinum. That’s given you incredible access to power and influence, and your work is good enough that people talk. Your social feeds are carefully curated to be clever without ever revealing anything about yourself. Most of your clips are about other people. Until recently, the only people you seemed to spend any time with were the madcap founder of w. and her exceptionally talented great niece.” She flashed one of her most obnoxious grins, not realizing how much like her aunt she looked. “You couldn’t have run a better mysterious stranger if you tried, and the board of directors thinks you’re up to something.”
w. doesn’t let operators into people’s tragedies without special dispensation. It’s not that grief and whimsy are entirely incompatible. The company just doesn’t see those kinds of Experiences as worth the risk. Nobody likes to feel managed when they’re grieving. It’s better to let people go through their own process. It’s the same reason management won’t let anyone mess with anything that goes into space. All publicity was good publicity right up until something blows up. Admittedly, having w. associated with a lunar crash was higher stakes, but, evil empire or not, they weren’t interested in traumatizing people.
Still, accidents happened.
My first big one happened early in my career, long before the board of directors would start worrying that I was up to something. I spent the better part of a weekend with company lawyers after a client attacked an actor during an experience. Dr. Werner had taken it as a chance to lecture me.
“From the inside, an Experience shouldn’t feel like much of anything,” Dr. Werner said.
“You know they’d fire me if I said anything like that.” I sounded nervous. I “They still might.”
“Quit with the self-pity. You don’t actually feel guilty that someone was hurt.” She is matter of fact, as if she is bored of having to tell me things I should already know. “You’re just embarrassed that the client saw through your whimsy work.”
The Experience had involved a repeating number play, where the client saw the same number things appear in different parts of their life. Celebrity lookalikes. Classic cars. Parrots on a morning commute. It doesn’t really matter what, as long as there are three of them. Or whatever number you’ve decided on.
It’s a simple enough concept, but tricky to pull off effectively. You can’t be certain of when the client has started counting, so it is easy for an operator to overshoot. Especially when you want them to plausibly believe that it isn’t the company. It’s not enough to send the same message to their feed three times or anything as banal as that.
If you can pull it off properly, though, you’ve bought yourself weeks, if not months, of whimsy, because they’ll start finding that number on its own and in unexpected places. Plus, conscripting the world into an Experience just makes sense from a budgeting perspective.
If you can pull it off.
“So, straight into the hard truths conversation then?”
The problem with letting a repeating number play is how easy it is for serendipity to turn into conspiracy, left unchecked. Noticing a recurring pattern to perfectly harmless surface details of your life can be mildly delightful, but only if you don’t start searching for them consciously. That way madness lies.
“What hard truths? That you treated a client like a game and now you’re acting surprised that you lost.” She scoffed. “You’re look for me to tell you that you didn’t do anything wrong.”
Two long minutes passed before I started to form an objection despite obviously having not decided what to say. She mercifully cut me off.
“You did.” A beat. “Running an Experience isn’t something you can do casually. It’s like being in love. You can’t be halfway inside someone’s head. Casual can do you for a spell, but it’s hard to dress it up as the genuine article.
“Your Experiences are intricately crafted, but there’s too much of your ego in there. Whimsy isn’t enough, you’ve got an insufferable need to be clever too.”
It was a fair point.
I had stopped keeping a close eye on the client, because I was focused on the next stage of the Experience. A season finale, of sorts, in which a bunch of pieces came together so that two completely separate client Experiences would intersect with each other.
Put more bluntly, I wanted them to start dating so I could start sharing resources between them. It would give me a ton of room in my operating budget, which I could then go on to use to make their Experiences even more intricately crafted. Sure, that had the potential for benefiting the client, but that was incidental to how it would make me look to management.
Her point was that I was treating my job like a job, which was easy for her to say from the inside of her personal greenhouse. Still, it was her way to be the wrong person to make a perfectly good point. The operator-client relationship was a weird one. They have no idea who we are and, if we’re any good, they wonder whether we even exist. We live inside of their lives. It’s unfair not to take that seriously.
In the end, management decided against a formal reprimand, but put me under stricter supervision for a while. It was a compromise that Dr. Werner hated. “You’re not nearly a good enough operator to justify special treatment.” That was maybe an accurate reflection of my skills at the time, but it was also hardly what I needed to hear. Her mentorship style was a bit like being mauled by a bear. If you survived, hopefully the story would be worth the injuries.
Which again raised the complicated question of what, precisely, she was up to now.
Maybe Ana was right: It’s possible Dr. Werner was just messing with me. She had spent a lifetime manipulating people and calling it whimsy then left the business for more interesting problems. The kind of operator that she wanted me to be wasn’t the kind of operator that got promoted at w. Not anymore. It was a wildly successful multi billion dollar company that was constantly setting the standard for Experiences. Good wasn’t enough. When I eventually started crafting platinum, it wasn’t because I had merely been good.
Even still, that didn’t make her wrong. At best, w. kind of sucked. But Ana was right too: complaining that w. wasn’t WhimsyBox was absolute childishness. Treating Experiences as some sort of sacred responsibility had been how I squared that particular circle for years, and I had even managed to do something noble from time to time. Management didn’t allow freelancing, but they were fine if an Experience genuinely made someone’s life better. As long as the client didn’t complain.
The reason why w. has stuck around for so long in the entertainment industry is that everyone crafting Experiences so busy trying to be it without realizing that means, at best, they’re always a step behind. w. is already pretty good at being w, so a vague hope of ‘doing better’ isn’t enough.
There are some companies trying to distinguish themselves. Douglas Quail has spent a bunch of other people’s money into trying to make The Agency profitable. He originally tried to pitch it as ‘w. with spies’. Instead of whimsy, the client gets to feel like a secret agent. It’s a cool idea, but more like a game than an Experience — and that’s an altogether different audience and market.
Even if The Agency somehow managed to be some sort of passive spy Experience, w. is bigger than any of these startups have a hope of knocking down. An Experience is the product of a massive supply chain of whimsy work. Actors, hackers, researchers, operators, carpenters, lawyers, survellience. There are a staggering number of people involved in the background of any given Experience. What happens to the client is just the end product. The entertainment aspects of w. is dwarfed by its organizational capacity.
A couple years ago, I was doing some long term planning for an Experience and, given the amount of corn I would need, it turned out to be cheaper to just buy a farm. Not only that, but the accounting department decided that it was worth holding onto the farm, on the off-chance that some future operator could make use of it. Until then, w. would run it as a corn farm. Any newcomer into the Experience industry is at a massive disadvantage when going up against a company that like can flex like that.
That is, if you try to go up against them head-on.
Long-term Experiences are difficult because we’ve all got a limit on how whimsical life can be. It’s not the same for everyone, but everyone gets there all the same. Eventually you’ve had enough whimsy and need a reset. Time does wonders, but nobody wants to pay w. rates to wait six months between Experiences. A reset is anything that gives you some distance from your whimsy so that it’s all a little bit blurrier. You second guess your memories and they become a little bit less real. The strangeness becomes less strange.
There’s a tired joke between operators about being in the office as ‘a day in the whimsy mines’, but the job isn’t about unearthing the whimsy to give to clients. If anything, operators are navigators of unwieldy ships on an irregular ocean, ebbing forth and back. Whimsy and resets changing the landscape of a client’s life.
Sometimes a reset happens without us, because we don’t have control over clients’ lives. Maybe they get into a fight with their best friend or maybe they lose their mentor slash best friend slash mean old lady.
Whatever it is, the mind wraps a bubble around memories that don’t quite fit with the world that we know. It’s a survival instinct from an evolutionary stage where difference meant danger and any major shock out of our expectations would have been considered a threat. Whenever that happens, tries to hold onto all the recent strange memories, just in case we’re under some sort of sustained attack and they need to be assessed or understood. Whimsical flourishes become potential threats and in doing so lose their charm.
That, at least, is the theory. The science here is shaky at best. Given how much money is involved, you’d be surprised at how little research has been done on the cognitive science of whimsy. There are some tech startups led by folks who gesticulate wildly while talking vaguely about the algorithm bans are killing the Experience industry, but most public-facing research focuses on the economic and organizational aspects of the business. Even w. is mostly just a battle between artists and advertisers, with a bunch of people own the middle trying to make a living while the rest of us squabble about best practices.
The real problem with either knowing or simply believing that someone is running an Experience on you is decision paralysis. Is this what they wanted me to do? Will it ruin the Experience if I do that instead? The hardest whimsy work involves clients who insist on overthinking everything, because eventually it requires getting out of one’s way and letting whimsy happen. Even the best operator will have a hard time with a client who insists on overthinking everything. ‘Hamlets’ as Dr. Werner liked to call them.
I recognize that I’m pretty deeply in Hamlet territory these days, but that’s because my life has taken on the mood of a conspiracy. It doesn’t feel particularly whimsical, but there is a distinct design to it all these days. I can see that Dr. Werner was nudging different parts of my life towards making w. more than just a shadow of its former self. Into something that matter.
The problem is that I don’t care about her legacy.
w. is a small idea wrapped in a big box. You want someone else to make your life more interesting for you. That’s it. That’s why you come to us. There are all kinds of marketing ways to say that differently, but it comes down to a desire to be entertained instead of being entertaining. The fact that I make believe that this is a calling doesn’t mean that’s what it is.
If w. is entertainment then it’s undeniably a lot of work for an audience of one. Incidental whimsy happens for those close to long-term clients, but each Experience is only ever alive for one person. Personalizing it to the client is what makes w. work. We get to know you and curate the margins of your life. w. has tried to shared Experiences, but they fall apart when the clients start talking about them. Whimsy doesn’t hold up to external verification.
All of which means that an Experience is less efficient entertainment than the blockbuster film, because w. is built on producing natural whimsy through artificial means. Operators have to know their clients well enough to know what doesn’t work, what does, and, most importantly, how to deliver it. Intimacy is hard to achieve and harder still to maintain, hence the high cost.
It would be easier to have a client explain what they find whimsical and then for operators who deliver exactly that, but then it wouldn’t be very whimsical.
I considered the possibility of asking everyone to do their intake interviews on a memory suppression cocktail, but that proved to be pretty messy legal process. Ana got word that I was looking into it and told me not to bother putting together a pitch. There was no way w. was going to start drugging clients just to make life easier for operators.
That was when I realized that w. is going about this all wrong. If the problem is that people’s lives are short on naturally occurring whimsy, Experiences make sense as a solution. The world is wrong and w. fixes it, so to speak.
But what if the problem is us?
It’s not called a childlike sense of wonder because children are better at whimsy than adults, but rather because adults are so bad it. There’s a difference. The curiosity necessary to appreciate whimsy is significantly harder when you have to act your age. Things that have to be done. Schedules require keeping.
Yet some people manage to hold onto it. I don’t mean those who have a higher tolerance for whimsy and make for better clients. I’m more interested in the people who never become our clients. It simply never crosses their mind that they might need more whimsy in their lives, because they have precisely enough. Never hitting their whimsy limit but also staying far away from empty.
I’m not talking about starting a school for whimsical youngsters. That seems like more trouble than it would be worth. Still, a very small percentage of people manage to hold onto whimsy throughout their lives. Why aren’t we studying them?
Admittedly, that’s a complicated problem to even start. Is whimsy a matter of socialization? Education? Overdeveloped frontal lobes? Whimsy particles in the blood stream? Being bitten by a radioactive manic pixie dream girl? We know so little about whimsy that we don’t even know how to identify it, let alone the matter of measurements that can’t be taken anyway. For most people, diagnostic tools and hospitals are so contrary to whimsy that we can readily use them as resets when clients hit their limit.
All that means that we have very little hard data on whimsy, but surely it’s something and I don’t just claim that because an entire life dedicated to whimsy would be incredibly hollow if it were an entirely absurd concept.
We might not be able to clearly pin down whimsy if asked, but we can identify the experience in ourselves. Call it a particular kind of entertainment. Whatever. I’m not committed to the poetry of this. The point is that there’s a feeling that we almost universally agree is good, even if explaining the feeling erodes the experience. That feeling should be put into a pill or patch or sandwich spread.
We could start there, of course. Maybe mess around with chemistry and see if we can get close to whimsy and work from there. It’ll involve complicated testing and trials. There will be debates about what counts as whimsical and what does not.
I’m not picky how we get there, but I am pretty committed to rethinking the entire whimsy industry.
This is not some unlikely career pivot where I flip from whimsy worker to neuroscientist. I altogether lack training on the whole science thing. I do, however, have a background in whimsy project management and I have it on good authority that I’m kind of a big deal in the industry. The board is apparently concerned enough about me that they’re ‘evaluating their options’ which sounds ominous enough. Ana thinks I should make clear that I’m a team player. I considered it, but decided to pursue plans of my own.
Not only am I quitting, but I’ve also lined up enough investors to take a significant portion of the administrative staff and half the platinum team — and each of them is bringing a handful of operators. As it turns out, not all of my obscenely wealthy clients are assholes. Or, at least, some of them are curious enough to see what a few of the most talented whimsy workers in the industry can get up to without the baggage of w.
Rather than waiting for her competitors to come up with a WhimsyBox killer, Dr. Werner did it herself and created the Experience industry as we know it. She had nothing more than a vague plan, but decided it was worth risking her entire company on it. w. wasn’t mine to risk, but as long as I was willing to give up the work, I wasn’t actually obligated to prop up their concept of whimsy.
When the dust settles, it’ll be a team of project management experts who have a healthy appreciation for the logistical and psychological complexities of whimsy. Most of us are on strict non-compete contracts for at least the next year, but that’s not much of an issue. The plan isn’t to have a product ready for launch when we leave. In fact, after the accompanying exodus from w., we’re going dark for a full year. We’ll drop hints in the media about what’s is happening behind the scenes, but only to to make us look mysterious. There wouldn’t be any point in leaving if all we were going to do was craft Experiences in a slightly different way than w. It has to be something else. Chemistry would cut out the need for operators at all and give people more control over how they felt. It’s hard to argue with that.
We haven’t settle on a name yet. ‘Whimsy Incorporated’ is on the paperwork because the investors needed something. I’m actually partial to the simplicity of it, but I was also partial to crafting Experiences. The whole point of this is to find a new, better way to deliver whimsy than all the inefficient ways I’m already good at. ‘Whimsy Incorporated’ might not be that.
Whatever it is, I refuse to let us become the thing we hate. We’ll use whole words and nobody’s italicizing anything.