Targets: Know Your Goal

By Marcus Toni Hilden

Targets: Know Your Goal tells the story of office rats ready to devour each other in a corporate dog eat dog world. And getting what you want doesn't always mean playing by the rules. Or abiding by the law. 

Kenneth finds himself in a cubicle landscape with slim chances of career progression. But he is not alone. His best friend Frank is also in a dead end. They decide to drown their sorrows in alcohol and a daunting confrontation takes place.

What happens next is more than Kenneth's mind can comprehend. Frank is taking him on a ride, and Kenneth is a mere passenger, whether he likes it or not.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Marcus Toni Hilden
• Release date: May 27, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386690757

Book preview

Chapter 1

Targets came from tall skyscrapers in America. And targets ruled the world. Someone at some point in time had sat down over there and figured out that the more you measure, the more control you have. By implementing specific targets you can create a specific behaviour among a group of people. Kenneth remembered all the discussions his parents used to have about how it was so different in the past. When they were young, you just went to work and did your job. You had deadlines of course, meaning stuff needed to be done before a certain date. But there were no targets controlling your behaviour. You worked forty hours per week, nine to five, and occasionally you did overtime if your boss was concerned you were not going to make the deadline. If your customers kept buying, you did well. If they were not, you had to change your business model. There were no customer satisfaction surveys sent out for people to fill in. If you were really unhappy with something, you simply wrote a letter and sent it by post. A few weeks later you would receive a response and maybe a discount voucher. Or, you just did not get a reply. It was different back then. It was nice. But it was not always as efficient as it was today. And Kenneth had set up his own targets in addition to the ones his company had outlined for him. To be efficient.

There were no skyscrapers in Sider City. This town was traditional. It was a beautiful place. A cultural place. At the same time it was a gritty place. The junkies paradise. So beautiful and yet so horrible. Kenneth remembered growing up in the city. He was lucky enough to do so on the side of the river where the estates were less gritty than the other. There were loads of people living on the south side who never crossed the river. The river divided the city centre into north and south. And once you crossed over to the north side things changed drastically. Trash bags on the streets, junkies on every corner,  people in tracksuits walking around with jarhead haircuts pulling pranks on pensioners, and beggars who harassed people for coins. Do you have any change, love? was a common line on the streets of the north side. The list of bad things was long. But cross the river back to the south side and instantly, Kenneth felt at home again. Flowers bloomed outside the bars and even the names of places were more beautiful than on the other side. You could walk around in all that area on the south side and feel safe late at night.

Funny enough, Kenneth now lived on the north side despite how much he loved the south part of the city. He worked on the north side and had therefore decided to live there. It just made no sense commuting all the way from the south side to work. And according to his neighbours the north side was of course the best side. It had a genuine feel and more personality. It was more real than the south part of town, he was told. Even though he initially was very skeptic, he now felt he was becoming a member of his north side community. The north side was on the way up. It was growing with new estates. The buzz on the north side was getting better. More venues and better shops. And Kenneth liked that, even though he still missed the south side of town.

Another day at the office had run its’ course. Another paycheque. Another blank space of emptiness behind. Kenneth looked at himself in the bedroom mirror with desperation. Thirty years of age and nothing but a stinking nine to five job that barely paid the bills to show for it. He was a professional sales agent. Professional at what? Bullshitting people? He helped himself to a second glass for the evening. Whiskey. I’ve had my mind on whiskey a lot lately, he thought. Or should I say, my mind in whiskey. He smirked thinking about it but he knew it was serious what he was up to. The whiskey had become a proper habit. It took five big serves of it now before he even felt it. A while ago one was enough. He had raised his tolerance level completely and that was not good.

Sometimes Kenneth got the blues from thinking about where he was in life, and where he wanted to be. He had not pictured himself in a small flat at thirty with a mediocre sales job, a somewhat ok salary, drinking by himself and left with very few friends. He was just like the other sales reps he knew, a heavy drinker. What was it with sales people and drinking? It was almost like it came with the job. He felt lonely. And so did all alcoholics, he figured. Nobody wanted to have anything to do with them except for other alcoholics. And the reason alcoholics became friends with each other was because they wanted to have someone to drink with.

Alcoholics drank regardless if they were with other people or not of course, it was not like they could stop because they were alone. The alcohol controlled them, not the other way around. But drinking with someone else was sometimes more fun and made them feel less lonely. And it gave confirmation. I am not the only one, Kenneth thought. I am not the only one in the world with this problem. It made him feel better. It even made it easier to drink. It almost made it into something normal because there were other people around doing the same thing. Kenneth knew he only attended voluntary work events for the drink. Without it, there was no way he was going to be present. And the hangovers he got these days were deadly. He woke up time and again all alone in his flat staring at the ceiling thinking about how long he could make it before having another drink.

His apartment was in a mediocre area surrounded with other mediocre apartments and terraced houses. The people around him were mediocre. The place was so mediocre they should have named the whole suburb Mediocre. It had everything you need: pharmacy, supermarket, barber shop, dentist, doctors clinic, petrol station, restaurants, cafes, and of course, plenty of bars. It also had an off license so you could get more drinks for home. When Kenneth was younger he had pictured himself at thirty with three kids, a wealthy bank account, a large detached or semi-detached house, a gorgeous trophy wife and some fancy sports car or SUV.  He had none of those things. And it was much so because he drank too much.

Just like drinking with friends had its’ perks, drinking alone at home had benefits too, Kenneth figured. You did not have to offer drinks to anyone else. Nobody was going to look at you funny when you got wasted. Nobody was going to think you had had enough. No one was going to bother you. You could just indulge as much as you wanted with nobody to stop you but yourself. And let’s face it. When you reached a certain level, you were not going to stop until there was nothing left in the house to drink. So even though it sometimes felt better to drink with other people, alcoholics had most of their binges all by themselves, Kenneth figured.

There were a lot of addictions around that people got caught into. People got addicted to shopping, drugs, sex, cars, coffee, energy drinks, decorating their houses, bling, cigarettes, books, chewing tobacco and plenty more. Kenneth had tried pretty much everything and liked most of it but he had never fallen in love the same way as with alcohol which literally swept him under his feet. Alcohol, in any shape or form, was his achilles’ heel. Just like love, it hurt and felt great at the same time. Alcohol was like a tattoo on his body. It would never leave. And even if he got his tattoo removed with a somewhat good result, there was nothing in the world stopping him from getting another tattoo. In medieval times people used to cut out unwanted tattoos. Cut out alcohol and it would leave a scar too.

Another problem with alcohol was its’ place in society. It was accepted. It was even more accepted than cigarettes. Some doctors and dieticians recommended smaller amounts of alcohol as health beneficial. But the truth was that alcohol was like a beast in the water waiting to attack. It sneaked up and caught you in its’ jaws at your weakest moment. And when you realised what had just happened, you felt stupid that it had caught you so easily. So people claimed it did not have it’s teeth in them at all in complete denial.

However, Kenneth was now smart enough to realise that he had a serious problem with alcohol. He was past the denial stage trying to convince himself that his drinking was normal. But he was not smart enough to do anything about it. And neither was the people around him. They fed him drinks like coins to a vending machine. And Kenneth did not say no when people were buying. Why would he? He got what he wanted and did not even have to pay for it. But the grim future held the fact that he was going to have to address his drinking issue if he wanted to have a normal life in his early forties.

While spending his evening alone in his apartment he went over his day. Linda had given him a hard time at the office. She had been winging about his cross-selling and his close ratio. Kenneth was not selling enough accessories with his computers, his CPUs, as they called them. He had heard the acronym so many times he wasn’t sure what it stood for anymore. Central processing unit? Whatever. And his sales per customer contacts ratio was not good enough. Not to Linda anyway. She said his metrics were below target and that he needed to do something about it. Unofficially that meant he had a couple of weeks tops to produce improved results or disciplinary action was the next step. He knew the numbers were down but there was always a couple of days in the quarter when that happened. You just couldn’t be on top all the time. Everyone knew that. But not Linda. She was never happy. She always had something to moan about. As if saying you need to work on your close ratio Kenneth was going to fix the problem. Oyeah, I almost forgot, we do not have problems, Kenneth reminded himself. We only have areas of improvement. Corporate talk. Professional bullcrap. Kenneth was one of the best sales agents on the floor. Did he not deserve a thanks or good job once in a while?

He felt the strength of the whiskey burn in his stomach. The warm feeling got him in a better mood. He really did feel better because of the whiskey. But that did not change one thing in his life for the better. It was just a way of escaping boredom and possibly, depression. Too many years of nine-to-fiving a job he did not like without getting anywhere had made Kenneth almost immune to happiness. He was sick of doing the same thing every day. He was sick of saying the same thing every day. And he was definitely sick of being told the same thing, everyday, over and over. Enough was enough. But perhaps it will change soon, he thought. Another whiskey. Glass number three.

The new manager position made available after the previous manager moved on to new opportunities was a way out. Kenneth had rewritten his application five times just to make sure it said exactly what management wanted it to say. How the position was the perfect fit for him considering his skills and why he was the most motivated candidate. That this was a win-win situation, a great opportunity for himself, but also a great opportunity for them. That he was a consistent performer on the job, a person leading by example, and that he was not afraid of hard work. He was a people person he had written. Did he mean it? Not really. He was like everyone else. It was all about the money of course. Kenneth spent a lot of time thinking about money.

In todays world people were in need of money to be able to do anything at all. Everything cost money and the more you had the more things you could do. The dark side of the equation was obviously that the less you had, the less you could do. Everyone was in a constant chase for money. Money to survive. Money to thrive. Money to be able to go down to the corner store and buy a can of cold drink to accompany finishing another chapter in an ebook recently downloaded to a tablet that had the latest high tech display worth a whole lot of more money. Money and what became a better life with better social status. Money and power.

Kenneth wanted to get paid to watch other people work. He wanted to get paid to