Charlie
Where the hell are you? Mike’s on the warpath.
You’re the target, by the way.
Thanks, Stevie.
I fire the phone back into my bag and barge through the glass doors of Dunley Tech, doused in the perfume of the London underground.
Jackie, our darling receptionist, looks up from whatever influencer’s Instagram she’s trying to imitate this week. She’s packed so much powder on her face that she looks like a cake.
“Morning.” I nod curtly.
“Wow.” She drags her eyes from the screen. “Your skin looks really…”
I raise my eyebrows, waiting.
“Grey.” She screws up her face. “Were you boozing last night?”
“Thanks, Jackie,” I reply, fumbling to find my security pass in my bag. “That’s almost as nice as when you asked me if I had washed my hair with conditioner. I was up until 3 a.m. sorting out the server outage if you must know.”
“Fascinating.” She turns back to Instagram. “They’ve started without you. Mike’s raging. He says you better be ill or dead, arriving this late.”
Damn.
I look at my watch. It’s 10:20 already.
Mike Chambers is our Head of I.T. and has been since the company started a decade ago. An absolute dinosaur in the workplace. He hates change and any ideas that don’t come from him. Greasy, uptight, and in desperate need of a good seeing to. We’re convinced he’s a fifty-year-old virgin.
I brace myself and push the doors of the boardroom open. It’s our weekly management meeting where we sit through Mike’s dick swinging, with a slideshow in the background. For an hour, he rants and stomps his feet while the rest of us wait patiently for the peacocking show to draw to a close.
Everyone has strategically chosen seats away from Mike. I walk to the only remaining seat next to him. “Sorry, Mike, I’m running late this morning.”
He leans over and breathes directly into my face. Any closer and I’ll dry retch. “I can see that. We’re discussing why the India office was offline for two and a half hours last night. Thirty staff members were unable to do any work. Not one line of code written!”
“I understand your frustration, Mike—” I start.
“That means horse shit, Charlie.” He slams his fist onto the table, making everyone in the room wince. “Can you explain what happened? Can you explain to the board why our most critical software release won’t be out on time?” He juts his finger in my face as he leans over the table. “Can you explain what the fuck went wrong?”
I draw in a sharp breath and refrain from vomiting profanities at him. “It was a problem with the network again. Once the problem was established, I logged a severity one call. This was the fastest they could do it.”
“The fastest?” he scoffs. “Don’t be ridiculous. Who fucked up here? I NEED ANSWERS.”
With every word, he jabs his finger on the table. He likes using his fingers for effect; we suspect he’s read it in a Management for Dummies or Control your Workforce book.
“Contractually, they can take up to twenty-four hours for these types of problems. Those are our SLAs.”
He blinks furiously. “How are you going to make sure it won’t happen again?”
“I can’t,” I reply through gritted teeth. “Unless you let me move us to the cloud, we’ll never have the resilience you want.”
“Bullshit!” he howls. “We are not creating a bloody cloud, Charlie!”
I open my mouth and close it again. I drew Mike basic diagrams, but he didn’t get it. “We don’t create the cloud,” I say slowly. “Amazon has already done that.”
Mike is Head of I.T. but doesn’t understand I.T. He believes a company’s software and hardware should run by pressing a large green ‘Go’ button. He can’t understand why the button sometimes stops working, and because of that, he gets mad.
Very mad indeed.
If a bug was found in the Operating System—it was my fault. If the payroll software had bugs in its latest version, again, my fault. His printer running out of paper, my fault; his mate sending him an email with a virus attached, my fault; and the company firewalls blocking his porn sites were all my fault.
The last one was actually my fault.
None of us took Mike seriously, but we had to go along with the charade.
After five years of dedication and hard graft, I had reached the soaring success of lower-middle management.
My eyes scan the table for support. Dana shrugs her shoulders. Tim picks his nose subtly by pretending to remove fluff from his cheek. Everyone else is staring at their phones or out of the window.
I glance over at Stevie. He gives me the blowjob sign by pushing his tongue into his cheek.
Fuck off, I mouth back. Great bloody comradeship in this office.
“Can we talk about the acquisition, Mike?” Tim interjects, breaking our standoff.
Everyone sits up, interested.
Mike shifts his weight and sucks in air like Tim has said a naughty word.
“They still won’t tell us who’s buying the company?” Tim continues. “I heard it’s one of the tech giants.”
Mike’s eyes dart around the room. He’s nervous. “I expect we won’t see any changes.” Translation: I have absolutely no fucking idea.
“Will our pay stay the same?”
“Will our jobs stay the same?”
“Can we still get the Costa Coffee discount?”
“Will there be redundancies?”
Redundancies. Shit.
I haven’t paid attention to the subject of the company takeover these past few weeks. I’ll have to find out from Stevie what he knows.
Mike raises his hand to quieten us. “It’s business as usual, as far as we’re concerned. Nothing will change.”
There are a few murmurs.
“Comms will go out in a day or two,” he says firmly.
Comms. I hate that word. Comms, vision, strategy, strategic vision, all words that got Mike licking his lips. “There will be comms” is what he says when he has no clue what’s going on himself.
Our barrel of questions is interrupted by a knock at the door.
“Excuse me, Mike.” Jackie smiles with fake sweetness. “I have an important message for Charlie.” She looks stunning, but that’s because she uses the reception as a salon.
Mike nods at her to continue.
“It’s your sister. She says it’s an emergency.”
Oh, God. My stomach heaves.
This is bad.
Someone’s dead.
Dad’s dead.
There’s been news from Ireland that he’s had a heart attack … or he finally overdosed on drink?
No, Mum’s dead. Someone crashed into her when she was driving too slowly.
Both are dead.
“That’s fine.” Mike waves his hand to dismiss me.
Shakily, I stand up. Be strong, Charlie. You must be strong for Callie.
Although why does Callie know before me? Surely it should be the older sibling that delivers bad news. Why isn’t Tristan calling? Is there something wrong with Tristan?
I follow Jackie out to reception, getting out my phone. Sure enough, there are ten missed calls from Callie. Shit!
“Did she say who it’s about? Is it Dad?” I ask in a high pitch.
She shrugs. “Not in my job description to ask.”
Bitch.
I grab the phone. “Callie?” I stammer. “What is it?”
“Charlie!” she shouts over the noise of traffic. It sounds like she’s on a busy road.
I’m right; Mum’s been in a car accident. “Yes?” I shriek. “What is it? What’s going on?”
“Thank God.” She exhales heavily. “I’m in such a dilemma. I’m just outside Selfridges with a hundred bags, and I can’t move! You’ll have to come here and help me carry them to the train.”
“What?” I hiss in a lowered tone so Jackie can’t hear. “You got me out of a management meeting because you have too many shopping bags to carry home? That’s the emergency?”
“Yes!” she exclaims. “I’m stranded, and Mom says I must be home in an hour! It wasn’t until I went to the shoe section and bought the three pairs of boots that I realised I couldn’t lift everything! I had to call for a security guard, and he helped me get to the door with the bags but with an appalling attitude considering how much I’d bought, complaining that it wasn’t in his job description—”
“Callie,” I cut in, furious. “Do you realise I’m working? You cannot call one of your shopping sagas an emergency and demand I leave a meeting for it! It’s 10:30 on a Monday morning. Why the hell are you not in school?”
“Keep your knickers on, it’s not like you’ve got an important job like Tristan.” She yawns. “So, how long will you be then?”
“You’d better pray that I don’t come down there, Callie. Because if I do, you are going to find a stiletto lodged deep into your arsehole. Now fuck off!”
I slam down the phone.
Unbelievable.
Jackie coughs behind me.
I whip around to face her.
“That sounds like quite the dilemma,” she purrs. “Your poor sister.”
I shoot her a venomous look. “It’s not in your job description to listen in on private calls.”
“And it’s not in yours to take them,” she fires back.
“Go back to your hashtagging, Jackie.”
She rolls her eyes. “I doubt you even know what that means.”
“I am very aware of the usage.” Snatching a sheet of paper from her desk, I scrawl furiously. “Have you forgotten that I’m the head of I.T. Support?”
I place the paper on her keyboard. “Hashtag this, Jackie.”
#GOFUCKYOURSELF
