You know you have been at work for too long when you eat your third straight meal at your desk. In this case, an underwhelming pizza that was rapidly congealing next to my keyboard. I should have gone back to my house to get a shower and some decent food, but I didn't. Instead, I scanned another few lines of the spreadsheet on my screen while shoving in another greasy slice of double pepperoni.
As I read, I made corrections to content and format. The fact this piece of shit had got as far as my desk without one of the department heads doing some quality control did not surprise me, though it did still infuriate me.
From a few offices down the corridor I could hear Holly curse about the lack of quality control in the organisation as she made corrections on the sister document to the one I was working on. Hers was the write up that accompanied the figures; it was is a similarly shitty state.
I was delighted to hear she was having as bad a time as I was. Holly and I were the Israel and Palestine of the office, but without the UN working to keep the peace. I couldn't even tell you how it started, but I fucking hated her, and she made it clear that it was entirely mutual. At any opportunity, she would try to undermine me, pouring honey and poison into any ear that would listen to her thoughts on how overrated she thought I was. For my part, I challenged every single idea she put forward in any working group, trying to offer a cheaper or simpler idea of my own.
Despite her arrogance and poisonous tongue, the reason she was still cursing away in her office down the corridor was the same as mine. She was a workaholic, deeply committed to her professional life and incapable of turning in a half-arsed product. Which is why, at 6pm that day, when we had each, separately, received the GCSE-level garbage from two of the other teams, we had immediately sought each other out. The deadline was tomorrow morning when the Executive Board would discuss the key points and while neither of us had been responsible for producing them, our respective bosses would be required to brief them, hers on the media and communications side, mine on the project management side. Both sides needed to tell the same story.
So despite the fact that just being in the same room as Holly boiled my fucking piss, we quickly divided up responsibilities and drew a time line for how we would rescue the situation by the following morning. It was the funny thing about Holly and I, we actually worked together quite well when we weren't trying to knife each other in the back. I suspect we were just too similar and our ambitious natures made the other one the obvious competition. Regardless, I still loudly rubbished a few of her ideas for good measure and I was sure she was keeping a list of things that I should have done differently so she could tell her boss in the morning. Bitch.
One or other of us checked in to clarify a point every thirty minutes or so; the conversations barbed and hostile. These interludes still provided welcome distractions despite the vitriol, such was the boredom of working on the spreadsheet. The evening progressed in that fashion until I leaned back in my chair at about 1030 pm and decided it was as good as it was going to get. Almost at that exact moment, Holly stuck her head into my office.
"Tim, I'm done next door if you want to make sure you've not fucked up your charts any worse than they were earlier." I didn't even acknowledge the slight, just got up and followed her into the corridor while thinking, not for the first time, how nice Holly's butt looked in the skirt she was wearing tonight. As we entered her office I pointed out a few things about her monitor setup that could be improved; we never stopped going for each other, even when I was admiring her legs.
I sat down at her desk and immediately adjusted her swivel chair so it would fit me (and no longer fit her). She huffed in frustration but ignored me, waiting for me to finish reading the executive summary. I made a couple of needless grammar changes, but really the write-up was the perfect covering note to the reams of data now sat on my desktop. She had done a good job, as usual.
When I clicked to the annexes, Holly excused herself to the toilet. It was late and she looked tired; her bobbed blonde hair was a bit messy and she had smudged her makeup at the corners of her eyes, presumably from rubbing them in fatigue. I watched her walk out then quickly scanned the annexes. They were similarly good and nothing in them was contradicted by the data. We were finished. I pulled my eyes away from the screen and let myself relax. Going back to an empty house was not appealing, but the thought of sleep certainly was.
Just then my eyes focussed on a small piece of paper protruding from a folder at the edge of Holly's desk.It was a receipt. It looked like it was for a hotel stay. We were required to submit copies of all our expenses when we claimed them so there was nothing unusual about that. What was unusual was the piece missing.
Someone had very carefully sliced a small rectangle of paper out of the receipt where all the costs should have been. Instead there was just the item and then a blank space. Interested, I flipped the folder open and saw what she had done.
Holly had removed the costs of her four nights in a hotel and then printed new costs on a blank sheet of paper. When carefully positioned, the two items could be photocopied together to make a convincing receipt where everything was 20% more expensive. It was not enough to be noticed in accounting, but the little bit of fraud looked like it had earned Holly about £500. Underneath that were other receipts. Each of them had been doctored, and it was clear that this had been going on for months. Holly must have fleeced the company for thousands of pounds this financial year alone, let alone in previous years.
Making my mind up quickly, I pulled out my phone and snapped photos of all the receipts and other evidence in the folder. I then scooped it all together and tucked it under my arm. Reaching up to the top of the pinboard behind Holly's desk I pulled down the little 'countering fraud' flyer the company made us have up in every office (because that obviously worked) and dropped the flyer where the folder had been. Pleased with that little theatrical note, I walked back to my office and locked the folder in my safe.
I could hear Holly walk back to her office. There was a moment of silence, then the sound of things being frantically moved around on a desk as she looked for the incriminating evidence. Then more silence. I picked up my desk phone and dialled the number from the fraud leaflet. Once it was ringing, I pressed the conference call button and dialled Holly's extension. She picked up and joined the call at the exact moment the soothing female voice of the automated answering service kicked in.
"You have reached the national fraud reporting service, a joint project of HSBC PLC and the Metropolitan Police. We are experiencing higher than normal call volume at the moment.We appreciate your call and ask that you stay on the line. You are the 'SECOND' caller in our queue and we expect your wait time will be approximately '5 MINUTES'. Thank you."
A second, male voice had added the details of the queue position and timing, giving the message a jarring tone. I laughed to myself a about what high call volume must look like at nearly 11pm on a Thursday evening. I placed a silent bet that the sole operator on duty was locked in the toilets of whatever office they were based in, masturbating to relieve the boredom of another night where no one calls in to report fraud in the middle of the night.
I had called Holly's phone to make it clear to her that I was fucking her over, but I was also interested to see what she would do. Holly rarely took things passively. Despite this, I had underestimated how aggressive her response would be. I had been on hold for less than a minute when my email inbox chimed on my computer. Guessing it might be Holly, I opened the email. It contained a single word; "Please." The read-receipt window popped up and I selected the option to respond that the message had been deleted without being read.
I went back to waiting for the fraud hotline to warm up and was disappointed to hear the automated voice update me that it was now likely a seven minute wait for an operator. My inbox chimed again.
"Please." The second email repeated. This time, it was accompanied by closeup picture, obviously taken on her computer's webcam, of the lower half of Holly's face. Her lips were parted seductively and she was chewing on a pen in the corner of her mouth. Once again my read-receipt told her I had deleted the message, but I actually dragged it to a folder for future use.
