Start-up news from Business Correspondent Landus Aquid.
Don’t Look Now…
Down on the former Unigate site – now a Freeport and Wellness Corridor. Nestled between its Monbiot Centre and the Brunel “Bricks for Chicks” Birthing Tower, a new start-up has taken root. I’m
here to meet Ms Candida Rice, CEO of EschewYou.com.
The reception area is all soft pastels and ferns. It has the foreboding ambience of a dental surgery. The receptionist, a young guy with an alarming sense of stillness, is softly typing without looking at
his screen. There’s a constant thrum of unanswered phones, but he’s oblivious to it. Along the walls are framed headshots of former clients. Several have been turned to face the wall, as if in purdah.
I want to ask the receptionist why he doesn’t answer the phone, but an office door opens, and Ms Rice, a spruce woman in her forties, gives me a snapshot smile, and says, “come on in.” We sit down at a large desk and exchange pleasantries. I fire up my recording device, and Ms Rice leans forward, steeples her fingers, and dives right in. “Totnes is a small town. People fall out with each other all the time. At EschewYou.com we toolbox our clients with proactive security protocols. If a neighbour doesn’t return your ladder within the allotted time-frame, you may want to carry that grudge right up to the wire. Maybe even a generational thing. We don’t teach people how to shun at EschewYou.com, we ‘curate engagement bandwidth.’”
“We offer our clients tiered programmes,” she says. “From introductory disengagement to elite-level social nullification. I even coached the British team at the 2005 Shunning Olympics in Vancouver. “We were favourites,” she sighs. “But the Amish… a masterclass. Fifteen minutes before the final heat, they simply vanished. No note, no forwarding address. Locked the door of the changing room from the inside. A horse-drawn cart was seen heading for the airport. Their gold medal remains unclaimed. The perfect tactical move.”
Apart from being patently insane, there’s something weirdly evangelical about Ms Rice and her constant use of business Bro-Speak. The type of person that wouldn’t look out of place babbling in tongues and juggling snakes on a deep-south church podium.
She beckons me to a window overlooking a large courtyard. It’s gobsmacking. A full-size facsimile of the Totnes Narrows spreads out before us. No expense has been spared. All our favourite shops are there. The Slim Chance Cafe (the UK’s first Ozempic eatery serving food portions on upturned jam-jar lids), Ophelia’s Bath Bomb Boutique, The Yoga for Wasps drop-in centre and of course, The Shop With Four Items That Only Opens On A Tuesday.
There’s a thin crowd of locals play-acting their business. It all looks normal, until you realise nobody is actually making eye contact. One man points at the sky in a one-fingered Nazi salute to avoid
eye-level contact, another crouches urgently to tie an imaginary shoelace on a Croc. A woman shouting she’s “dropped a contact lens” is bent over staring at the pavement, desperate not to eyeball
anyone.
It’s a shunners boot camp. Every head is angle-poised at odds with each others. It’s a crazy testament to Ms Rice’s mission statement. “Wait,” Ms Rice whispers. “Watch the corner.” A man appears wearing yellow diving fins, star-spangled tights, a dazzle ship T-shirt, and a tutu. He prances backwards, twirling football rattles as he orbits around a woman carrying shopping bags. His hair is on fire. She is completely ignoring him.
“That’s Doreen, a Level Fiver,” Candida breathes. “Her husband went on a golfing holiday to Portugal a couple of weeks ago. He had a fling with a waitress and brought back an embarrassing down-below medical problem. Her psychic visors are down. She has achieved total perceptual shutdown.” I ask how her husband is faring. She replies, “He’s the one wearing the yellow fins.”
I hear a screech of tires. A man, so intent in avoiding another’s gaze, has dashed across the road, and met a replica Bob The Bus with a horrible thud. Even as he lies on the ground in pain, he manages to pull his bobble hat over his eyes. “That’s the spirit,” Ms Rice says proudly.
“Wouldn’t it be easier if people just talked things through?” I ask. “It all seems so brutal.” She replies curtly, “No.” It’s the only unvarnished thing she’s said during the course of the interview.
The air chills. With a manicured nail, she clicks off my voice recorder. The interview is over. I’m not even in the room anymore. Ms Rice is staring past me at the wall with a face so stony, it wouldn’t look out of place in a garden centre. Shaken, I retreat into the Monboit Centre for decent coffee and a non-politically-aligned tub of hummus. A nice couple asks to share my table. “Fine,” I joke, “just don’t expect me to talk to you.” We laugh and spend time talking to each other. They have an allotment across the way. I might be up for some parsnips soon.
Epilogue…
My “bandwidth” is restored, for now. But yesterday, I saw Ms Rice coming out of a bagel shop. Our eyes met for a nanosecond. She swung a hard left, dropped her bag of bagels, and hugged a tree.
Brilliantly improvised, it’s comforting to know we have such consummate professionals among us.