It took a couple of weeks before I called Madam Stella. Dorothy broke down my wall of procrastination with love-filled nagging. Although not a complete skeptic, I had never been to a psychic or fortune teller before. Since her sister worked with my wife, Madam Stella agreed to see me for "free" as long as I treated her to lunch. If she could help break the Curse, what's the cost of one lunch compared to the cost of thousands of employees losing their jobs? How many CEOs have thought that before, but with different consequences?

Madam Stella was not how I mentally pictured her. I imagined a frumpy, gypsy woman entangled in scarves and costume jewelry, perfumed with hemp and incense, and a cigarette-long ash glued to her bottom lip. Oh no. I was wrong. Madam Stella was a perky, girl-next-door, college student dressed in jeans and a baggy sweatshirt, with her hair pulled back into a ponytail.

I told her everything about the Corporate Curse and my timeline of devastation.

"Then, there was Zeros & Ones, a software retail company. Ironically, their stock hit between zero and one when they declared bankruptcy. For five years, I climbed that corporate ladder at three of their stores and did product research at the headquarters before the company crashed and burned. On my last day, the ex-president of the company and I played paddle ball. Other newly-dubbed 'ex-employees' looted office supplies and corporation t-shirts. Those office supplies helped pay for the rest of my bachelor's degree," I said.

"You didn't really swipe office supplies and sell them, did you?" Madam Stella asked.

"I did, really. Freshmen will buy anything with mommy and daddy's money."

"Okay. Get on with the rest of your story," she said.

"At Vanguard, the CEO promised great things and vowed to squash our competition. The 'great things' he promised turned out to be sweatshop conditions, frequent 18 hour work days, shanty-town cubes, and aimless leadership. One of the VPs said, 'If you work this weekend, you can have next weekend off.'"

"Did he really say that?"

"Yeah, but he lied. We ended up working the next weekend, too."

"Okay. I think I've heard enough. That's too many companies to be coincidence. It sounds like a curse alright," she said.

"Told you. At my last job, we even came up with a ceremony to break the Curse. They dyed socks purple and orange, the company colors, and made me wear them for a week. At the end of the week, we burned the socks while someone read an incantation they scribbled on a napkin. Then, we burned the napkin, too. It didn't work."

"No. Of course not. That's no way to break a Curse. That's just a bunch of silliness," she said.

"Can you break the Curse?"

"No."

I shrugged, gulped down the rest of my iced tea, and mentally noted to update my résumé.

"I can tell you who can. The CVO of your company," she said.

"CVO?"

"Mm hmm."

"V as in Victor?"

"Yup."

"What does the V stand for?"

"Voodoo."

"What!"

"I'm serious."

"Chief Voodoo Officer?"

"All companies have a CVO. They're really the ones behind the curtains pulling all the strings."

"Then why haven't the 'CVOs' protected the companies from my Curse?"

"They might not have known you were cursed."

"Where do I find this CVO?"

"Their offices are always on the 13th floor."

"Oh, come on! Our building doesn't have 13 floors! There's only six!"

"All buildings have a 13th floor. You just need to know where to look."

We left the discussion of the Corporate Curse there. Throughout the rest of lunch, we talked about her business and courses. She read my palm, and told me I was going to live a long life. All the while, I wondered about the credibility of Madam Accounting Major.

That night, I told Dorothy all about lunch with Madam Stella. I questioned the mental stability of Melanie's sister. Dorothy pleaded with me to keep more of an open mind, and I begged her to drop the subject of the Corporate Curse. For the next week, Dorothy looked at me with pity, as if my Corporate Curse was a terminal illness with no known cure.

Over the next couple of months, I thought about the conversation with Madam Stella and my wife's pleading. I couldn't get it out of my mind. I toyed with the idea of a CVO and a 13th floor. Even though I doubted our building had a 13th floor, I pondered how one could find a 13th floor in a building with any number of floors less than 13. Other employees caught me simultaneously holding the "1" and "3" buttons on the elevator. I took breaks from my work to explore the staircases. One staircase went to the roof, but the door at the top was chained and padlocked. I searched for "CVO" on our company website under information about the senior officers. No luck. Even the front receptionist hung up on me when I asked about the building's 13th floor and any information on the CVO.

The company released the quarterly results, which were not as good as the officers' expectations. Rumors of lay-offs buzzed around the halls like the hum of bees in spring. My hopes of finding the elusive 13th floor and CVO dropped like the company's stock.

Three weeks later, the rumors subsided, the stock leveled off, and I found the CVO. I looked up "Xavier Balderas," the localization manager, in the company database. I had questions for him about the upcoming foreign releases of our software tools. I couldn't remember Xavier's last name, and searched the database by first names. Listed two names below Xavier was "Ziggy Silverman, CVO." The database listed Mr. Silverman's office number as "13N-A01." The thirteenth floor, north side of the building, first office in section A.

One problem. I still didn't know how to find the 13th floor.

Mr. Silverman never returned the email and voice mail I left him. No doubt he was a busy man. Even if I got a hold of him, how was I about to ask him how to get to the 13th floor in a six-story building?

A few days after finding Mr. Silverman's information in the database, that question was answered. Once again, Xavier aided my search for the CVO in office 13N-A01. One of Xavier's minions, Katie Drumlin, had difficulty with the French localized installer. Apparently, Katie reported the installer's error messages only displayed in German.

My cube was on the third floor. Katie, Xavier, and the rest of the localization clan worked on the first floor. I took the stairs down, walked past the cafeteria, and headed towards the localization department. I had been there a couple times before, once on my welcome-to-the-company tour, and another time for a group meeting in the conference room around the corner from Xavier and his team.

Katie's cube was a lot like mine. Her desk was carpeted corner to corner with machines and monitors with barely enough clear desk space for a pack of gum. I pulled up the spare chair in her cramped cube and looked over her shoulder as she duplicated the error. She reproduced the same error message, "Warnung: Die akte wurde durch einen hungrige hunde gegessen."

I scratched a couple of notes in my spiral notebook, then asked her if I could take the driver's seat. She rolled her chair out of the way to one of the other machines and checked her email. She was consumed in what looked like a long, personal email, and I was engulfed in the installer. We volleyed a bit of unfocused small talk. Each sentence began with, "Huh? Oh..." Too distracted by the installer, I did not at first realize I asked myself aloud, "Where is Mr. Silverman's office?"

Katie, with email glazed eyes, pointed and said, "Around the corner, and down the hall."