The minibus’ doors fold open to reveal the central plaza of the Cambodian river town Kampot. Obscuring any further inspection of the locale, however, is the throng of tuk-tuk drivers. Darkly sunned men ranging in age from high teens to low fifties cram the bus’ side. Their hands reach in, waving for attention. Their voices carry further, shouting “Taxi!” “Hotel!” and other similar buzzwords. The words tumble over each other just like their bodies. Some faces wear smiles, others don’t bother.

One by one the dozen travelers from Phnom Penh step down and the horde shuffles out of their way. For each backpacker there are two or three drivers, each one falling over themselves to grab a newly arrived traveler’s bag from the front of the van and haul it into his cab. As though this automatically earns the fare.

“Get off! Let go!” Matt writhes as a pair of men try to slip the straps of his backpack off of his shoulders.

“No thief!” one tells him, grinning.

“Hotel! What is name hotel?” the other asks, still trying to get the pack free.

“No,” Matt huffs like a put-off toddler. “I don’t want a tuk-tuk, I’m just going to Mad Monkey.”

“Ohhhh,” the second man laments, finally removing his hands. “Mad Monkey far. You need tuk-tuk. Very far. Two dollar.”

“No, I’ll just walk. And you guys always say it’s far.”

With more insistences of his capability, Matt sets off on his own. He looks back to watch the rest of his minibus being apportioned out into an assortment of taxis. The backpacker auction goes fast in most places, here especially.

Kampot is an easy three hour drive southwest from Phnom Penh, though it’s far more appealing than the concrete sprawl of the capital. It’s built right on a river, nestled near a forested national park, and is close enough to the coast to have some rather moderate temperatures (for Cambodia). Historically, it’s been a sleepy town that focuses primarily on fishing and agriculture. And tourism. When the French arrived many years ago, they built Kampot up as a premiere location for vacation homes and European-style architecture. Though the colonial powers are gone, the infrastructure and aesthetic still remain.

It’s up one of the town’s wide, grass-medianed boulevards that Matt peers now. He turns slowly to squint down the opposite direction. Which way is the hostel exactly? Though the weather’s not quite as hot as some places, forty pounds of weight on his back does not make wild goose chases through the city welcome. His pack is stuffed to the brim with the two custom-made suits from his time in Hoi An.

“You need taxi?” It’s a scrawny, middle-aged local, his face wrinkled from the sun. He smiles to reveal some of the lines have been worn in by his grin. “Moto-taxi?” He’s standing astride a motorbike. “One dollar.”

“No, I just want to walk.” The overzealous traveler forestalls any further offering. “Thank you, but I just want to walk.” He pauses. “Do you know the way to Mad Monkey?”

“Mad Monkey? Is far. I take you, one dollar.”

Matt fumes at the relentlessness. “No, I don’t want a moto-taxi, I want to walk!” He’s been cooped up all day and wants to stretch his legs a bit.

The man laughs. “Okay! We walk! One dollar, I take you! We walk.” He rolls his bike onto the sidewalk and lets it lean on its kickstand.

Just like that, the pair find themselves walking down the streets of Kampot, making conversation.

“And what’s your name?”

“Ey. My name Ey.” The man spells it: ‘Aehe’.

“Aehe? That’s gonna be easy to remember.”

“You marry?” Aehe asks. It’s a common question.

“No, but I have a girlfriend.” The usual answer.

“Ah. You and girlfriend, you boom-boom?” An uncommon follow-up.

“Boom-boom?” Matt quirks an eyebrow before coughing laughing, “You mean sex?” Aehe nods. “Yeah, we boom-boom. All the time,” he brags. “But she doesn’t come to Cambodia until three weeks from now. So no boom-boom for the past two months and no boom-boom for the next three weeks. Then lots of boom-boom.”

Aehe grins. “I like boom-boom.”

“Everybody likes boom-boom, Aehe!”

“Will you help me make boom-boom with Western girl? Western girl very pretty.”

“Well, all I really know is how to have a good conversation and flirt that way. How good’s your English?”

“What?”

“How good is your English?”

“What?”

“Question answered.”

“I give Western girl free motorbike rides?” Aehe suggests.

“Nah, that’s a sucker’s game.”

“I give money?”

“Money? Does that work? Like, on Cambodian girls?”

“Yes,” Aehe grins again. “Yes.”

“Okay, so whatever you do, do not offer money to Western girls. They won’t react well. You gotta… connect with them somehow, show them you’re a real human being and not just some guy doing whatever it takes to get in their pants.” Matt eyes his companion. “Even if that’s exactly what you’re doing. Do you have any hobbies? Do you do any art?”

“Heart?”

“No, they sound the same–and I guess they kind of mean the same thing here–but I’m saying ‘art’. Do you do any art?”

Aehe shakes his head.

“Okay, maybe I can teach you some origami or something…” Matt’s voice trails off as the pair continues down the tree-lined path past ignored French Colonial homes, discussing the intricacies of intercultural flirting.

* * *

Once again carrying his pack, Matt finds himself on the main boulevard of the town. This time it’s with more understanding of where things are. It’s his third day in the sleepy river town and he’s just finished a bit of a late lunch/early dinner of ribs at Rusty Keyhole. The restaurant advertises the dish as ribs, though it’s more of a brick of succulent meat with a few bones peeking out of the side. At a price point of five dollars for a half-rack, more than enough to satisfy any hungry traveler, it’s a tough deal to pass up.

The American had checked out of Mad Monkey a bit after noon and aims to check into Arcadia Backpackers before sunset. Arcadia is another hostel a few miles upriver that comes highly recommended from his Ho Chi Minh City buddy, Hugh.

“Matt!” a Khmer-accented voice calls from across the street. It’s Aehe, rushing over to him in the reddening afternoon.

“Hey Aehe! You able to take me to Arcadia? You know where it is?”

“Yes, yes!” He’s all too eager for the fare. “Arcadia, yes. Come!”

A minute later and they’re sitting on the scooter, the pack is at Aehe’s knees and Matt is hugging the thin man, wearing his only helmet. Despite being in Southeast Asia for a little over six weeks now, this is Matt’s first scooter ride. It starts to drizzle, a near nightly occurrence in Kampot when the rainy season is still coming to a close.

They take off through the quaint town center, over a bridge, and follow the long stretch of pavement along the river. Way back in high school, in Driver’s Ed, Matt learned that this period, right as the first rain of a storm is starting to fall, is the most dangerous time to be on the road. The oils and dirt that have been collecting on the asphalt are just starting to mix and glob with the droplets of water. None of it has been washed away yet, so it creates a slipperier surface than water alone. It’s as this is running through his mind that Aehe pulls over.

To pull out a beat up leather case and, with care, put on his glasses.

“You waited this whole time, until we’re halfway there, to put those on? Now I feel safe?”

Aehe doesn’t dignify the comment with a response. He just starts back up the road.

The nearsighted driver soon drops his passenger off at Arcadia Backpackers and Matt pays him (four dollars) and takes in the measure of the place. It’s different than the brick and plaster hostels seen thus far. A multi-layered bungalow built on and over the water, Arcadia is more reminiscent of a treehouse playground than any sort of guesthouse. One floor holds a lounge with a television and a string of hammocks. The floor above it has the bar and variety of dining tables, all with views that look out onto the river. A rope swing is pulled up to a small platform off to the side, ready for anyone adventurous enough to use it.

“Hey there!” a shirtless guy behind the bar greets. “Welcome to Arcadia!” His name is James and he’s one of the many staff who have found themselves either in love or debt (or both) with this place after their stay. As a result, they’ve extended their visas to earn their room and board until continuing their travels after a few more weeks at the hostel.

It doesn’t seem like a bad life when you can watch the syrupy sun dissolve into the ripples on the water every night. The evening festivities are about to pick up, but not before a final word of advice.

“See that bell over there?” James drops his be-stubbled smile for a moment and points to a small bell pinned to a wooden beam by the bar. “Don’t touch it. Don’t ring it. If you do, you have to buy everyone here a shot. I’ve seen it happen, with a crowded room of fifty or sixty people. Don’t ring the bell,” Unless you want to have to work your debt off, his knowing look finishes the sentence.

The next morning, Matt steps out of the dorm room (only three dollars a night) and into the mid-morning coolness. These cheapest dorms open right onto the bar area, though few guests are awake to take advantage of the serenity. Only two other backpackers are there, sitting at separate tables with just their laptops and breakfast for company.

“You left early last night,” Kiki the tall, surfer-themed woman tending the bar says with a drawl to her voice that insinuates other ‘social’ activities, the kind that prefers privacy.

“Huh? Oh, no I didn’t hook up with anyone, I just went right to sleep. Slept straight through the night.” Matt had been exhausted last night and had only made it through a half hour of the live music (a man with a guitar who knew what he was doing) and raucous socializing before shuffling off to bed.

“Really? We were going until two, maybe three in the morning. And you slept through that? You must have some pretty strong earplugs.”

He doesn’t feel the need to explain that he actually didn’t have any earplugs, that he’s just a stupid-heavy sleeper when he’s tired, and orders a plate of red curry chicken.

He’s eating and working on his laptop, having just put the finishing touches on his Poker, Pool, and Prostitutes post, when he strikes up a conversation with the man sitting next to him. “So you’re a blogger too?”

“Oh yes,” the man says with a touch of an unknown accent. It sounds vaguely…Hispanic? “I’m finishing some of the code for one of my pages now.”

The man’s name is Gigit and everything about him seems to ebb and flow, pulsing in a calm and balanced dance. He’s among the first Filipinos Matt has met traveling, so it’s uncertain if everyone from his country speaks in the same eager voice. He sits with ease on the raised wicker seat at the bar, clad in only a pair of khaki shorts. The rest of him is covered in an even tan and lean musculature. He’s in good shape for someone who looks to be in his mid-thirties.

“I’d say…” he pauses to think when asked exactly how long he’s been keeping a travel blog. “Over ten years, fourteen, I think.” He smiles broadly, exposing brilliant teeth, a rarity for one who’s been traveling as long as he has.

Gigit originally started his blog, www.thelonerider.com, with the intention of focusing on his passion of mountain biking, hence the name. However, it quickly morphed into a general blog about where to visit and the exotic locales to which he makes his way. For how open he is, he gets shy when talking about the popularity of his blog, either back home or worldwide. “I have enough hits,” he’ll say. “I have enough.”

“But you don’t know how many exactly?”

“No, not exactly.”

Gigit stopped checking a few years ago. He stopped when his pageviews started cresting 350,000 a month. With that kind of readership, he can afford to travel. Mostly he supplements his travels by offering to mention/write up various hotels in exchange for a few nights of free accommodation.

“But enough about me, Matt,” he waves the attention away. “How is your writing?”

“It’s good,” the younger writer sneaks a glance at the words on his laptop. “Though I write in third-person, it’s more like a novel. And the posts can get kind of long, also like a novel. I’m falling behind on it all, which I guess is okay, because I take notes.” Gigit appears completely absorbed in the act of listening, which has Matt opening up more about his own writing. “Sometimes I wonder how much of what people tell me they’ll feel comfortable with me putting online, you know? Like did they not want me telling people they said or did that? Am I portraying them wrong? I just finished writing up a post where a guy accidentally sleeps with a hooker. He was totally okay with my publishing it, but I dunno where to draw the line.”

Gigit nods. “Sometimes that happens, of course. I once was friends with a woman who told me that she had eight best friends. I was thinking to myself, eight? I don’t even think I have one person I would say is my ‘best friend’, but she has eight.” He continues in that cadence where none of his words are rushed, each has a purpose. “So I wrote about that conversation on my blog. And she comes up to me and demands that I take it down. I didn’t even use her name, just the story, but she said “Those are my personal thoughts! You had no right to write about them!” No right? But you told them to me. If they were really so personal, you wouldn’t say them to me so casually.”

“So did you take it down?”

“No, that wouldn’t be right. So I lost that friendship, but that was her decision to make. My dad told me–he’s the kind of guy who will talk to everyone, will make friends everywhere he goes–he told me that if I lived and had only one true friend in my life, that it would be an achievement. And I have many friends, but a true friend? I don’t think that’s so common. I don’t think she really had eight ‘best friends’.” Gigit thinks on that. “I’m fifty already and I am still not sure that I’ve had a true friend yet.”

“You’re fifty?!”

Gigit nods, laughing. “I like to take care of my body, take care of my mind.”

“Sure, but fifty, wow, you definitely don’t look fifty. And you’re still out traveling, partying with backpackers?”

“Eh,” his face sags, “I don’t really party like these backpackers; I don’t think of myself as a backpacker, not like you. Oh, they’re nice people and we get along. But it’s like trying to swim with a school of fish, it’s like you are all a different species. We swim together and then all of a sudden everyone swims one way, they just know where to turn, and I’m left standing here thinking, ‘Where did everybody go?’ It’s fun sometimes, but no, I’m a different species.”

“Sure, maybe, but it looks like you’re doing a decent job of it to me. I don’t think I’m the party-party kind of guy either, though I can get into the mentality if I’m in the mood. Mostly I’m just exploring what I can of the world, meeting people, seeing cultures, et cetera, after quitting my desk job back home.”

Gigit chuckles. “Yes, I had an office job for a few years too, in Canada.” That helps explain where he polished his English so perfectly. “But then I got fired.”

“Fired?” Matt can’t believe anyone would want to let the kind man go.

“Yes,” he sighs. “They changed the programs we were using and they had us filling out these forms by hand, work that could have been done way faster and better right into the computers. You know what I’m talking about! So I told my direct manager this fact and he didn’t like it. I don’t think he liked being called ‘incompetant’! I had a friend in HR, he told me that they didn’t like my insubordination, that if I didn’t shut up right away, that not even he could help me keep my job. But I didn’t want him to bother, I had lost my desire to work there.”

“I know what you mean,” Matt tells him. “I had a similar experience at my first job out of college. I was still…rough around the edges.”

* * *

Matt’s sitting in his Keene, New Hampshire cubicle farm. The sounds of scattered conversation roll over the metal-and-cheap-upholstery dividers and mix with the clacking of keyboards. It comes together to create the white noise of the white-collar lifestyle. Matt’s one of the most junior employees of the company, only twenty-two years old and just six months into his first ‘real world job’. ‘Development plans’, ‘expense reports’, and ‘project updates’ are becoming common vocabulary. He’d better get used to it.

Still, it’s nice being in the office today, since most of his time is spent on-site in York, Pennsylvania. Or Mauldin, South Carolina. Or any number of middle-of-nowhere towns across America. He works in ‘Supply Chain’, specifically for supermarkets, at one of the largest such suppliers in the world. Tens of billions of dollars of food and myriad sundries pass through the company’s dozens of warehouses across the continent. And where do you put big, blocky buildings with loud, hydraulically-powered machines?

The middle of nowhere.

Not that Keene is a thriving metropolis, but it’s a nice enough town. Perhaps a little small for a city-kid, but it’s got rather cheap happy hours (dollar pints and twenty-five cent wings at McCue’s Bar) and his coworkers are fun. His managers not as much.

To be fair, Matt’s direct supervisor, Shannon, has been a dream to work with. She’s responsive, encouraging, and realistic in her expectations. No, the manager he most has a problem with is Shannon’s boss, Rafael.

Rafael is greasy, which has almost nothing to do with the fact that his greying curly hair seems perpetually slicked into a small, damp mini-afro. The man saunters into meetings and discussions, usually late, deferring and kowtowing to any of his superiors that happen past, all while making harsh demands of his own team’s performance and providing little guidance in how to get anything done other than ‘just do it’. He’d been an outside consultant that was brought in at a senior level due to his ‘vision’ and management skills.

Clearly Matt’s female colleagues hadn’t been consulted, since whenever the consultant-cum-manager is mentioned, they lapse into agitated whispers of creepy touching and lecherous stares. But Shannon seemed fine enough to put up with him, and so he’d been given a division in Operations, tasked with optimizing certain processes.

Which is how Matt, in turn, was assigned the task of designing a new prioritization logic for Lift Operators and Selectors. See, warehouses are enormous, with rows on rows of pallets of goods stacked up dozens and sometimes hundreds of feet into the air by sturdy metal racking. Day and night the blue collar Selectors scoot around the maze of a facility on heavy-duty, battery-powered pallet jacks, picking four cases of granola bars for this supermarket, eight boxes of frozen Hot Pockets for that supermarket, and so on, until they have everything for a shipment and that gets loaded onto a truck. Right on the Selectors’ heels are men in even heavier machinery, Lift Operators in multi-ton power lifts that get rid of empty pallets from the bottom level of racking–the ones the Selectors can reach–and retrieve full pallets from the layers higher up to replenish these ‘pick slots’.

Following so far? Good.

This type of activity, selecting and replenishing, is done by thousands of employees almost twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. And all of them are directed by a central computer system that tells each employee where to go and what to get, like an industrial-strength ant colony. Given this control and scale, even a slight improvement to the process, one that saves only a fraction of a percent of time or wastage, can get magnified to save thousands, even millions of dollars each year.

It is this project, determining the best way to direct these countless workers that Matt, the fresh-out-of-school Analyst, is tasked. He spends a week reading up on the logic and thinking behind the current process. Two more weeks go into interviewing and following employees on-site to understand their experience. Further weeks of math and testing and modeling and error-checking go into it, until he’s designed a new method of ranking tasks to give the computer a more nuanced method of prioritization. Conservatively, Matt and his mentor Noah estimate a four-percent savings, which would be huge. It’s some baller logic.

So it comes as a crushing disappointment to be told that he wouldn’t be able to present his crowning achievement, the work of months, to the General Managers and Vice Presidents. Instead, he needs to explain it to Rafael so that he can present it for consideration. But whenever Matt gets a hold of him, in meetings and check-ins, he doesn’t have time to hear it. A man as important as he doesn’t have time to hear all of the proposals put in front of him, now does he? Can Matt just condense the explanation? Into something that takes less time to explain? Fine.

Simplifying as much as possible without resorting to ‘just trust me’, the entire process pares down to a mere three-page document. Scanning it over and over, neither Matt nor Noah can find anything too flashy, too abstract, or too complicated for even the busiest executive to digest. They submit it early Friday morning after a week of scrutinization and heavy-duty editing.

So it comes as a shock when Wednesday morning, the day the discussion with the ‘higher-ups’ is supposed to take place, Rafael calls Matt into his office to discuss it all for the first time.

Matt pokes his head into the office and at an impatient wave, steps inside. The room feels deserted after coming from the grid of cubicles down the hall, though it’s filled with wooden furniture. The heavy carpet feels strange under a foot used to office linoleum and warehouse concrete. It’s easily six times larger than Shannon’s office, dwarfing the short man seating at the desk leaning back with his hands clasped over a rounded belly. Shelves of books on management crowd for space around plaques and engraved baubles lauding past achievements.

“You wanted to see me, Rafael?”

“Yes. Matt,” he says in his deep voice, smiling. “Please explain this…new logic change to me. Briefly,” he holds up a finger. “I’m presenting it in an hour.”

“What? The whole thing? An hour?” Matt panics. “Did you have print the write-up?” Matt scans the cluttered desk for a sign of his proposal. “The graphics are pretty helpful if you need a visual–”

“No, I didn’t have time to read the whole thing. But I skimmed it. I saw the four percent loss savings. That seemed pretty good. Not bad.”

“You skimmed it? It’s only three pages.”

“Matt,” he says, still smiling, “you couldn’t just simplify it?”

“But we did! Our first draft was ten! We took out everything we could, everything that wasn’t essential.”

“Surely you of all people could make it easier to understand. Maybe, one page.” No question mark there.

“With all due respect, the old TRON system wasn’t bad, the logic it used was just pretty basic. So it takes some space to describe how the system works and then what we did on top of that.” Matt and Noah had been hoping to suggest that they call their system ‘New-TRON’ or ‘Neutron’.

Rafael says nothing. He probably hadn’t noticed the new name in the report title.

“Alright. What do you want me to explain?”

“The beginning. The whole thing.”

“Um, ok.” He really didn’t read it? “Well, we assign multiple priorities, one through nine, to every lift transaction for the pick slots based on how many Selectors are going to be getting there in the next few minutes and how many cases they’d need and how many are already there.” Matt knows the process backwards and forwards after all of the revising he’d be doing. Revisions that didn’t even get dignified by a few minutes of reading! “We balanced that against the speed of the lifts and the distance to the pallets that were being stored in the higher tiers–”

Rafael cuts in. “Matt, you lost me. How are you balancing them exactly?”

“Aha,” the Analyst cringes and begins gesturing even more emphatically. “Well that was the tough part, but by using the formula on the first page of the write-up, with all of those variables and their coefficients and relationships et cetera, we assigned–”

“What was the formula you used?” He leans forward. “Where can I find it?”

“It’s in the document I gave you. It’d seriously be a whole lot faster if you just read the document first. I can answer any questions you have afterward.”

“No, that’s fine. Go on.” He’s smiling again, Matt can only assume, because he could see how much this is bothering his subordinate.

“Fine. We took the total time of all of the selectors that would come, and each empty or about-to-be-empty slot would predict how it would be handled–because it knows this logic that we’re using–it uses the same logic on itself. When you follow the logic, you’ll hit a natural ending: it will either get filled or not get filled–”

“What do you mean ‘filled’?”

“What?” Matt’s caught off guard.

“What do you mean, ‘get filled’ or ‘not get filled’?”

This is basic, day-one jargon in Operations. “Um, I mean whether the lifts will be able to get there in time with a fresh pallet of goods and fill that slot for the Selectors to pick from it again?”

“But how would you know that? Explain it to me.”

“From the formula in the write-up. It’s really simpler if you see it written down…” Matt tries to get back to the write-up to no avail. Rafael waves him on. “Um, we use variables like distance between the pallet in the air and the pick slot, how far away the nearest lift operator is, how many transactions are ahead of–”

“Stop, that’s too complicated. Try it again.”

“I am trying, but I don’t know what parts of the document you skimmed and what parts you skipped!” Matt hates failing, especially with something he’s put so much effort into already. “What do you know and what don’t you know?”

“Just pretend,” Rafael flutters a hand off to the side, as though watching knowledge fly off into the ether. “I don’t know anything.”

“Well that’s not very hard.” The words are out of his mouth before he has a chance to realize what he’s saying and who he’s talking to. Oops.

The Vice President goes still, all traces of the smile gone. “Start from the beginning. Try it again.”

Fine. “So you see, we have these really big buildings,” Matt gestures grandly, having lost his temper after months of being treated like a child, talked down to, and pushed around for extra work that the guy didn’t even read. “And inside of them we keep all of this stuff that other people want us to send out to other people, but only in little bits. We keep all of the stuff on pallets, square pieces of wood, about forty-eight by forty inches, and we keep all of those pallets on racking, which are giant metal shelves that go up several layers in the air.”

He’s speaking faster and faster. “So high in the air that we need these big machines,” the words are accompanied by a big gesture implying mechanical motion, “called lifts, to put them there and take them down. We also have Selectors, who zip around the warehouse on pallet jacks.” A wriggling of hands like fish swimming through a lake. “Which are these heavy electric scooters that–”

“Enough.” Rafael interrupts, quivering with fury. “I’m not sure you were right for this role. Go back to your desk. And send Noah over.”

“Gladly.” Matt stalks back to his desk, taking solace in the fact that he’d already begun applying to new companies weeks ago.

* * *

“And I didn’t get fired, not exactly, but I moved teams and then left two months later when I had another job in D.C.” Matt stops. “I never found out if they used our new logic or not.”

“What happened to Rafael?” Gigit asks. “I have to know!”

“I’m not really sure, I don’t really keep in touch with any of those old coworkers. One did tell me that he got fired or transferred somewhere else less than a year after I left, but I can’t find him on LinkedIn or anything to confirm it.”

“Ah,” Gigit admits defeat. “True insubordination!”

“Yeah, and here I’m talking about work and warehousing and LinkedIn and we’ve got a beautiful Cambodian river scene that we’re just ignoring!”

While they’ve been talking, the sun has risen high to show the gorgeous view. And from downstairs comes the sounds of a movie being played; many of Arcadia’s guests have woken up to play a movie to soothe whatever hangovers remain.

“Now which one of us doesn’t quite fit into the backpacker lifestyle?” Matt asks of Gigit.

An unenhanced sunset view over the river in Kampot