Devonte Best’s first day had been substantially better. While Jim Brightest was already drinking away the remainder of the $200 his great aunt had given him to help him move in, Devonte was becoming acquainted with an open-plan office at Bizner, a startup incubator in the South Bay.
There was a slide, free lunch from a communal cafeteria, office cats (in a hypoallergenic cat room) and the walls were whiteboards. The office “community service work” board was plastered with flyers for the “Yes on Six Californias” campaign and its various events. None of the flyers described how the future state of Silicon Valley would get any water, but that was a problem for bureaucrats, not disruptors like them.
Boxxr was the only company in the office which produced a tangible, physical product. Their Smart Tupperware would, they claimed, revolutionize the way the kitchen left the home. What that meant, really, was still unclear to Devonte Best. He had been hired for the customer support team, to deal with and patch bugs after the initial rollout of the product, next week. He got a workstation, and a bouncy ball desk chair, and a large stuffed dog holding a tupperware in its mouth, which was Boxxr’s mascot.
The revolution in tupperware, however, was a surprisingly common idea. As it turned out, Boxxr was beaten to the disruption point in the market on Devonte’s second day at work by competing smart tupperware maker TupperCloud, the first cloud-based storage food storage. Inspired by the Dabbawallas of Mumbai, TupperCloud disrupted the food storage market almost instantaneously, making use of Uber and Lyft to revitalize an industry which was dying only in the minds of Six Californias techtrepreneurs.
Though they had been beaten to the smart tupperware punch by TupperCloud, (who also got a glowing write-up in the New York Times and several business magazines) this was not a death blow for Boxxr. In fact, Devonte Best was still enjoying the new job honeymoon as he waited at the port of Oakland on Monday of his second week. He had been asked to drive the Zipcar pickup truck to the port to collect the first batch of AlphaBoxxes, as he was one of three employees with a valid Driver’s License, and the other two were busy coding. They sent Nick Alexanderov, the only middle manager they had, to coordinate the shipment.
On the drive over, Alexanderov made jokes about the driving quality of Asians and disparaging remarks about Latinas. When they got to the port, the sun was just beginning to burn off the marine layer, and their container was scheduled to be ready soon. According to the Maersk Line, their shipment had been offloaded in a shared container at 8:33 AM.
At 8:34, Alexandrov began a string of racial invective against the dockworkers and their apparently slow speed. At 8:45, Devonte turned off the engine and rolled down the windows. At nine, ten, and eleven, he stepped out of the truck for a walk. It was almost noon when a port police officer came up to their car. He knocked on the window. “See some ID, please.”
“Yes sir,” said Devonte Best, as he took out his license.
“What’s your occupation, Mr. Best?”
“Tech Associate, for Boxxr”
“That some kind of startup?”
“Yes sir.”
“You here to receive,” and he looked down at his clipboard, “27 boxes, of various size, containing...”
Alexandrov, who had stopped talking when the officer came over to the car, interjected. “I will receive shipment of boxes. I must investigate and ensure all boxes there.”
“Ok, then. It’s you who I’m here to arrest. Put your hands where I can see them and get out of the car.”
Alexandrov reached down by his boot, and lifted his gun up to Best’s right temple. “If you fuck me, I fuck you.”
“Put the gun down, sir,” said the officer, now holding his own gun, aiming it at Alexandrov.
“I shoot dirty black cocksucker unless you give me boxes.”
And then the officer on the other side of the car fired his taser. As Alexandrov was convulsing, he dropped his gun between the seats. Devonte Best leapt out of the car, the officers leapt in, and it was over.
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