This one came to me as I was stuck in rush hour traffic. Needless to say, the drive went a lot faster with these characters to keep me company.
*****
I was stuck in one of those protracted managerial pissing contests that caused lower ranking non-combatants like myself to feel acutely uncomfortable. When my BlackBerry vibrated, I was grateful for the distraction.
I had an instant message. I read: I suppressed a smile and the surge of desire that the sender aroused in me. Vivienne.
The next message came:
After the passion / Your come is like cinnamon / on a thirsty tongue
I almost gasped and looked around the table, worried that someone might have seen the message. No one was paying any attention to me.
Another message.
I wrote it under my desk
.
I replied:
Tell me you didn't.
The reply came a moment later:
In permanent marker
. There was a wink icon.
I didn't think for a moment that she hadn't done so. She'd already surprised me. I didn't know whether I should be alarmed or excited.
It'll be our little secret
, she IM'ed back.
Not a secret if company is monitoring this chat.
She sent me a kiss icon and my nether regions tingled at the memory of yesterday.
I was a team lead for a group of technical writers in a small software company. This meant that I was responsible for them and the quality of their work but had no real power. I had earned the position by having outlasted everyone else who, by dint of greater ambition, had gone elsewhere. I now supervised a department that consisted of a middle-aged harpy who was waiting to be packaged out, a guy by the name of George whose sexual orientation had been a topic of idle speculation, and a young Asian woman who, until yesterday, had seemed so impossibly demure and proper that I couldn't imagine her applying graffiti to the underside of her desk, let alone becoming acquainted with the tang of my discharge.
Vivienne had stopped at my cubicle as she did several times a day. There was nothing in this visit that suggested anything unusual.
"Did you get my email?" Vivienne leaned against the wall of my cubicle, backlit by the late afternoon sun that shone over the canyons of the cube farm and into my space. I squinted against the brightness. Normally, the harpy would have closed the blinds against the glare, but she was taking a mental health day, as a result of which the team was short-staffed on the eve of a release. I noticed, not for the first time, Vivienne's gentle curves -- shoulders, waist, hips, and long, lean legs that ended in lovely black pumps. She was, in a word, willowy. She was also, I reminded myself, a direct report and probably out of my league anyway. She had a hand on her hip and despite the dazzling brightness of the sun, I could make out the delicate, pale fingers against the black leather skirt that I thought was perhaps a bit too racy for the office, but for which I was nonetheless grateful.
I scanned my inbox and there, buried amid the other emails I was ignoring, was Vivienne's.
"It's a procedure," she said helpfully.
I opened the attachment and read the following:
From the File Menu, choose New.
Unless your system access is restricted, the New dialog appears.
Click OK.
Key in the desired values.
Modify the default values as required.
Exit the dialog when done.
"What do you think?" asked Vivienne, who had approached my desk and now leaned over it.
I smelled her perfume, little more than a hint of fragrance. There were rules against perfume in the workplace, but to my nose, perfume was infinitely better than the more offensive, end-of-day funk it was designed to mask. "As a procedure, it's weak. Step 2 isn't even a step."
Vivienne shrugged. "Anything else?"
"I don't see what this has to do with our product."
"It doesn't."
"Then why send it to me?"
"You'll figure it out."
I moved the document to my secondary screen and forgot it, burying it under a growing pile of electronic refuse.
It was dark when I decided that I'd had enough for the day. George had vanished, claiming some pressing engagement.
"It's probably an illicit assignation," suggested Vivienne wistfully.
The cleaners had come and gone and in the unnatural silence of the office I could hear Vivienne's fingers dancing over her keyboard. I cursed her dedication. I had this rule that I'd never leave the office before any member of my team. Successful leaders -- so went the corporate truism -- had to demonstrate that they had less of a life than their direct reports.
In anticipation of my departure, I started deleting the electronic refuse on my secondary screen until only two documents remained. A report and beneath that, partially visible, Vivienne's procedure. What I saw was this.
F