There are 8 million people in the Naked City, and each one of ’em has a story. Maybe if Sears did a better job of targeting, those Naked City residents would have clothes, too.
My name is Sam Chaid, but the lettering on the glass of my office door says “The Segmentation Shamus.” I couldn’t verify that firsthand this morning, though, because standing between the door and me was a dame in a wide-brimmed black hat with a veil, a form-fitting black dress and a pair of Manolo Blahniks that wouldn’t be allowed into most gin joints without proper escort.
“I need a man, Chaid,” she said, crossing the room to my desk. “Or more specifically, 50,000 of them. The word online is that you’re the private click to see for prospect names.”
It was then that I pinned her. Fabrica Royale Hart, the very recent widow of J. Brooks Peterman Hart, a fashion magnate who’d made his fortune selling fill-in fabric swatches for cutaway coats. But why was the late Hart’s last piece of eye candy dabbling in the bare-knuckles world of men’s apparel cataloging?
Fabrica must have seen the question on my face. “After my husband died, I tried enrolling in the Barnard School for Long-Form Shorthand–“
I cut off her missive with a dismissive wave. “I’ve had the occasional run-in with Barnard gals,” I said, not mentioning that I have scars proving their #2 Ticonderogas aren’t the only things they keep sharp. “Let me guess,” I continued. “They were calling you ‘The Black Widow’ before you’d made your first squiggle on a Gregg-lined pad.”
“Actually, it was ‘The African-American Widow,'” she said. “The school’s gotten awfully P.C. recently.”
She hadn’t come to me to discuss her difficulties with the shorthand sisterhood, and I told her so. In response she unsnapped her purse and pulled out a men’s outerwear catalog blueline and a Zip disk.
“I’ve got 50,000 of those rolling off the presses in a week,” Fabrica said, tossing the blueline on my desk. “And a file of customers I can’t make heads or tails of. Can’t profile them, can’t model them…I might as well take my catalogs and scatter ’em along Fifth Avenue.”
I grabbed the disk and pulled up her customer list on an old database system I keep around for instances just like this. I saw what she meant. It was a flat file — row after row of customer data that wasn’t going to be sorted or modeled without putting up a hell of a fight.
I told her as much. She didn’t take it well.
“So that’s the end of the male mailing,” Fabrica said. It was moments like this that made me glad I was born well before the dot-com boom. A little historical perspective has kept my own business running, if not flourishing, more than once.
“Not necessarily,” I grinned. “I’ve got a friend — a database analyst. He’s mostly retired, but I can probably still squeeze a favor out of him.”
I stuffed the blueline and her disk into a manila envelope. I saw her eyes flick over the package nervously as I sealed it.
“You…you’ll take care of those, won’t you?” she said. “I mean, I don’t have a backup.”
I didn’t bother telling her that if my man Bugsy One-Eye couldn’t convert the file, the only good it would do her would be as a highball coaster. With a looming 50,000-copy catalog print order, she had enough to worry about. But I had faith in Bugsy One-Eye: Due to his unique perspective, working with flat files came naturally to him.
After dismissing Fabrica, I hightailed it over to Bugsy’s apartment, where my natural charm and a fifth of premium bourbon proved more than a match for his soft protests of retirement. He promised that he would have the information on the disk converted to a workable format in a matter of hours.
Later that afternoon, when he called me at my office, he proved as good as his word. The file was converted, he said, and ready to be manipulated or augmented to Fabrica’s whims. And Bugsy made it clear that, should I realize a large profit from such endeavors, he was entitled to a small profit himself.
I was just about to hang up when Bugsy asked, “The Hart dame’s blueline: You didn’t take a good look at it, did you?”
I hadn’t. In my line of work I’ve learned not to look too closely at what clients want to send out: It might lead to a crisis of conscience. And conscience, while a nice indulgence, is rotten for paying the bills.
“She’s got six different covers bound onto it,” he said. “And the innermost signature — the 16 pages dead center? She’s got four different versions of those.”
“That’s 24 versions,” I calculated aloud. “How does she figure on getting any sort of valid test results on a 50,000-piece mailing with at least 24 cells?”
“If you think that’s strange, you should see the bulk-rate indicia,” Bugsy said. But I never did learn what was odd about it, because before he could complete his thought I heard a sharp crack, a moan, and then a click as his phone was replaced in its cradle.
By the time I was able to flag a cab, the only reason I told the hack to step on it was for form’s sake. I knew what I would find when I got to the apartment: Bugsy One-Eye dead on the floor, with a crease in his skull that, if I’d bothered to measure, would conform to the dimensions of a shorthand-taker’s pencil. And I knew what I wouldn’t find: A disk containing the J. Brooks Peterman Hart customer file, and the curiously paginated catalog blueline.
But when I returned to my office, what I didn’t expect to find was Fabrica Royale Hart leaning against the cabinet that contained my entire data warehouse. She was holding an ugly little electromagnet, and her thumb was threatening a pas de deux with its on switch.
“Nice analysis, Chaid,” she smirked. “The 50,000 men’s names were just a taste. You’ll download your full male select onto a CD, or your data file gets the Ron Popeil treatment — scrambled in its shell.”
She certainly had the icy nerve to be a catalog marketer, but she lacked the brains to realize the importance of learning the racket before playing in it. If she’d had ’em, she would have known that, along with the calculator and the fax machine, a key tool of the list trade is the snub-nosed .38. And mine was pointed right between her eyes.
“Sorry, babe,” I said, as I pulled the trigger. “Your males’ been canceled.”
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