The Bar Is Not a Confessional
How many times have you been out to eat at a restaurant or gone to a bar and the next table over, two tables down, someone is talking really loudly about something they should not be? Maybe it's a family issue, maybe it's a merger, maybe it's a secret at work. This happens so often that I constantly wonder — if I was trying to gather intelligence about the market, I'd probably put somebody in all the major bars around Wall Street. That's probably illegal, don't get me wrong, but it strikes me as strange how often I'll be sitting at a restaurant just east of Seattle and I'll hear someone talking really loudly about some incredibly secret corporate move that's about to happen.
So in the book I write about this. And I want to be clear — the book is fiction. Rob Coleman is not me, I am not Rob Coleman. But I did put some of the places I remember from when I was living in New York into the story, and one of the bars I remember going to was called KGB Bar. It was in the Lower East Side, an area that had a lot of silly theme bars aimed at the twenty-something crowd. You'd walk into KGB Bar and it was full of Soviet-themed decorations and flags and a picture of Stalin or Lenin — I don't even know. I didn't go there because I was a believer in communist ideology. It was just a tacky place to go, and it was a little bit ironic, because at the time I was working for TheStreet.com and then I moved over to Forbes.com. So I was working for peak capitalist financial news and going to KGB Bar. What I remember about that place is that maybe ninety percent of the people there were just going there because it was a bar, but there were ten percent who you could tell might have actually been committed to the cause. That was part of the appeal — you never knew which was which.
I put KGB Bar into Redundant because I could still see the room. The actual scene is about something else: someone is talking about an acquisition loudly enough for the next table to hear. The speaker thinks the table is private, but restaurants are designed to create the feeling of privacy without providing much of it. The music is loud enough that you assume nobody can hear you, the tables are close enough that everyone can hear everyone else, and you don't have to listen — you just have to be sitting there.
The funny part is that the speaker usually knows, at some level, that they shouldn't be saying it. They lower their voice for one sentence, then get excited and raise it again. They glance around, but only after the important part has already happened. They say "I probably shouldn't talk about this," and then continue for another twenty minutes. That sentence is not a security measure. It's a signal to everyone within earshot that they should really start listening, and you can't help it — you can't help but listen, because now you're thinking, hold on, did that guy just say what I think he said? He said he's probably not supposed to say this, so now we've got to listen.
HQ 8 — Authored. Drafted from dictated notes, revised by hand, AI used for grammar and polish only.
In Redundant, the first book in The Condition Set trilogy, Rob Coleman runs the FinOps review that names the waste nobody wants to hear about. The numbers don't change. The question is who they get used against.