Alyssa Greenberg
Every April, a string of increasingly passive-aggressive emails reminded us to complete our Security Awareness Training. “Complete” was a misnomer, we felt. One’s Awareness of Security could never be complete if it needed annual affirmation. Although our more-tenured employees occasionally noted small changes to account for new Threats, the training remained largely unchanged from year to year.
We’d hit start, and groan in mirthful resignation to find our friend Gaurav at it again. Gaurav lived in a Groundhog Day of corporate security hypotheticals, refusing to retain lessons no matter how many times we scored above 80% for him. Every year we’d find our tutelage once again wasted on Gaurav, the same dilemmas facing him once more:
- Let a uniformed delivery man follow him into company headquarters for decency’s sake, or let the door close in his face?
- Let his adorable daughter play games on his company laptop while he makes himself a sandwich, or fetch her the iPad?
- Share a password with his forgetful teammate, or direct him to IT?
Gaurav had a tragicomic Russian aura about him, a bumbler out of Gogol or Chekhov. At best, he was one of Tolstoy’s holy fools. Gaurav was always destroying the only hard copy of critical documents, opening attachments without checking the file name or sender address, or conducting work calls on unprotected public wifi. We couldn’t make Gaurav understand that we lived in a world of malefactors in search of internal pitch decks or one-sheets, through which they could inevitably access the company’s vital infrastructure. These bad actors would delight to find their work cut out for them by someone who couldn’t be bothered to use a screen protector at Pret-a-Manger. Gaurav! we’d exclaim in the office kitchen, shaking our fists. Why make things easier for people who mean harm?
If we found Gaurav’s limbo of security mishaps infuriatingly banal, we found Sandrine’s problems aspirational. Sandrine was the star of the Anti-Bribery and Corruption training. She moved in a world of cosmopolitan mystique, in what were implied to be our holding company’s European back halls. There were no cramped cafes for her, no aggravating work-from-home interactions with children. Her children either did not exist or were with nannies. Sandrine instead interfaced briskly with real people, who approved multibillion-dollar mergers and went to Cannes to accept awards won by others. This is why it never surprised us when a vendor she’d taken to dinner abruptly offered her a cash gift or, more commonly, an expensive watch.
The vendors were always handsome older men, tan, sleekly attired in Euro-sporty blazer-jean combos. There was something so clean about their offers, though. We accepted there was no sexual element involved, and that they really did just think Sandrine deserved a Patek Philippe for her excellence. And why, we wondered, should Sandrine not have the watch? There was nothing to suggest nepotism in her background. The narrative clearly indicated she’d obtained her high rank through hard work. Weren’t we supposed to applaud women who ascended the corporate chain, for god’s sake? Would we give her the third degree if she were a man? More importantly, didn’t a base exchange like this underpin virtually every interaction in the world of industry? Wasn’t it all just gift watches in the end?
Actually no, the module’s female narrator told us sheepishly. There were acceptable parameters for gifts, strict expense reporting guidelines. Any improper solicitation from clients or vendors, like those perpetually plying Sandrine with luxury goods, should be immediately reported to HR, the Global Head of Security, and, for good measure, “your” manager.
The “your” always got us. We howled at the idea of landing in situations where we’d have to turn down such a gift. Sandrine occupied an atmospheric layer unknowable to us. Her jetsetting pantsuits and lavish company dinners made her, effectively, our boss, although she would never know it. Decisions Sandrine made over her morning croissant, thousands of fictional-yet-real miles away, could send winnowing chains of cutbacks across the Atlantic, devouring our jobs before we’d had time to get the better ones we’d been trying for vainly.
Something we figured out: Sandrine would never in a million lifetimes actually accept the watch. We would, because we were rubes. We ate limp salads at our desks while curling our fingers over our keyboards, preparing to post the GIF that would make everyone fall in love with us. The watch was bait placed under a box propped up on a stick, set for people like us, by people several pay grades below Sandrine.
By design, Sandrine was the sole master of Security as a concept. Yes, her home was somewhere in Europe, but more specifically, she lived in a glowing orb of Security. (She had no need for a watch in there.) Unlike Gaurav, who could ruin everything and be identified as the single origin point of ruin in the same instant, invisible networks of power cocooned Sandrine. Nothing she did would ever be treated as real destruction. Sandrine was the one who finalized deals that would change everything for us, and nothing for her. This was why we loved Sandrine, and felt itchy when we considered Gaurav.
We could make Sandrine take the watch, but it wouldn’t be true. Furthermore, selecting the wrong answer would make the nearly-forty-minute session even longer, and we’d have to stay even later at the office. You could retake questions, but they were now flagging excessive failures, someone warned.
It stopped being funny to make Sandrine take the watch.
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Alyssa Greenberg is a writer living and working in Brooklyn. Her short fiction has appeared in Evocations Review, Subnivean, Surface Dwellers’ Los Suelos, CA anthology, and elsewhere. She is currently completing a novel.