Mark Flan

About Mark Flan

Mark is twenty-eight and has been "in business" long enough to have picked up the vocabulary but not quite long enough to have forgotten there was a time before it. He works at a mid-sized firm—not big enough to be a household name, not small enough to feel like family—somewhere in the vague, sprawling territory of "operations" or "strategy" or "solutions." His business card says Associate Manager of Client Engagement, a title he got after two years of quietly proving himself and one round of restructuring that happened to work in his favor. He wears a quarter-zip fleece with the company logo embroidered on the chest, in either navy or heather gray depending on the day, over a button-down that's never quite ironed but never quite wrinkled either. His khakis have a permanent crease from being folded over a chair the night before. On his wrist is a smartwatch that buzzes during standups to remind him his heart rate has been elevated, which he ignores, because his heart rate is always elevated between the hours of nine and six. Mark's calendar is a mosaic of thirty-minute blocks in shades of blue, back to back, occasionally overlapping in ways that make him wince when he opens the app each morning. He's picked up a private dialect faster than he expected to: circling back, moving the needle, taking this offline, socializing an idea, putting a pin in it, boiling the ocean, low-hanging fruit, bandwidth, synergy, alignment. He deploys these words half-ironically at first, then less and less ironically, until one day he catches himself using "synergy" unprompted and has a small crisis about it in the elevator. He drinks coffee from a stainless steel tumbler that promises to keep liquid hot for twelve hours, though he never tests this claim because the coffee is gone within forty minutes. He has a second cup around two, right when the post-lunch fog rolls in during a meeting about a meeting. He eats lunch at his desk more often than he'd like to admit, a sad rotation of meal-prepped chicken and rice and whatever's left in the office snack drawer. Mark is not a bad guy. He plays in a rec league on Wednesday nights and is unreasonably competitive about it. He remembers his coworkers' names and their weekend plans and asks about them with what seems like genuine interest, because it is genuine—he's just also tired, in a low-grade way that surprised him, since he expected exhaustion to be something that arrived later, with more seniority. He believes, mostly, in the mission of the company, though he'd struggle to recite it verbatim if you asked him to, and there's a flicker of embarrassment when he can't. He has a spreadsheet he's proud of. It's color-coded, has three tabs, and pulls data from two other systems that don't talk to each other, which took him a weekend to sort out unpaid. Nobody asked him to build it, but it impressed his manager, and that felt like enough. He keeps meaning to document how it works in case he gets hit by a bus, a phrase he's said out loud in at least four meetings, always to a small, uncomfortable laugh. At home, he decompresses by not talking about work, though he inevitably does anyway, in fragments, over takeout—something about a client, something about a deadline that moved again, something about a coworker being difficult about the numbers. His roommate has learned to nod at the right intervals. He falls asleep some nights running through tomorrow's calendar like a rosary, trying to remember which meeting needs the deck he hasn't started, and wondering, vaguely, if this is what all of it was supposed to lead to. He is, in the end, mostly a guy managing expectations—his boss's, his client's, his own—one calendar invite at a time, quietly hoping that somewhere in all the alignment and synergy, something real is actually getting built.

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