movie Women in Love in Ian’s office and they got to talking. The 1969
film was based on D. H. Lawrence’s novel of the same name about the
relationships between two sisters and two men in an English mining
town around the time of the First World War. Ian mentioned that he’d
toured Ireland when it came out, which would have coincided with
when Tony was still a child growing up there. That led to other
musings. Tony learned that Ian’s father had been captured in North
Africa during World War II. After initially being detained in a POW
camp in Italy, he had been marched across Europe to a different camp
in Poland, where he was liberated at the end of the war.
The conversation eventually drifted back to the here and now and to
Theranos. Tony, who like Ian no longer had Elizabeth’s favor and was
being excluded from the development of the miniLab, floated the
notion that perhaps the company was just a vehicle for Elizabeth and
Sunny’s romance and that none of the work they did really mattered.
Ian nodded. “It’s a folie à deux,” he said.
Tony didn’t know any French, so he left to go look up the expression
in the dictionary. The definition he found struck him as apt: “The
presence of the same or similar delusional ideas in two persons closely
associated with one another.”
After the move to the old Facebook building, Ian grew more sullen.
He was relegated to a desk in the general population of employees with
his back facing a wall. It was a symbol of how unimportant he’d
become.
One day, the engineer Tom Brumett ran into him at Fish Market, a
seafood restaurant on El Camino Real where he was meeting a friend.
As they stood in line waiting for a table, Ian asked if he could join
them. Tom and Ian were both in their mid-sixties and had established
a friendly rapport. The first time they’d interacted was shortly after
Tom came to work at Theranos in 2010. Upset that Sunny and other
managers were disregarding his opinion during a discussion about
what sort of engineering personnel should be hired to assist him, Tom
had walked out of the meeting in a huff with thoughts of quitting. Ian
had come running after him and assured him that his opinion did
matter—a gesture Tom had greatly appreciated.