"LISA, you'd better have that page made up for me by the end of the day or there'll be trouble my girl. It has to go in tonight otherwise everything will get out of sequence, and that will be disastrous!"
Jackie Palmer, the editor of Tops and Bottoms, a glossy lingerie magazine for the modern woman, glared as she ripped into me like some bullying headmistress. There was spite in her brown, almost jet-looking eyes and while I thought she was being unreasonably officious, she was the boss and I thought it wise to just bite my tongue and sit tight. But it was difficult not to react to her overbearing attitude. She continued in much the same vein...
"And if I catch you filing your nails and staring out of the window again, you and I are going to have a serious chat about your future, young lady."
The door slammed loudly when she went out and the picture of Brad Pitt (Mr July) on my poster calendar, on the back of the door, rustled and flapped in Jackie's expensive perfumed slipstream. I felt the hot colour coming up from my chest and neck and into my cheeks. God, she was getting unbearable. I felt a mixture of embarrassment and outrage. How dare she talk to me like that!
Fair enough, she had caught me daydreaming again when I should have been hard at work getting my pages ready for the night run. But they were all virtually made-up. I just had a bit of editing to do, a bit of fine-tuning. I was a good worker and furious at the way she had spoken to me. She was treating me like I child lately, not a twenty-year old woman. It was most unfair. I had never let her down with the quality of my work or my commitment.
Okay, so I was still only young and lacked experience, but I knew I was one of her best designers, perhaps the best and I'm sure she knew it too. I guess she saw me as a threat because I was much younger than her, prettier, and more talented. I knew I'd less than an hour's work for my five page feature to be finished well on time. It was only two-thirty in the afternoon so what was she panicking about? The print run wasn't until around ten o'clock that evening and I wasn't the kind to knock off early anyway if there was work to be done. I'd always stay to get things finished and had never missed a deadline yet.