What the heck? My status update wasn’t due until tomorrow.
I answered with trepidation. “Allison here, sir, hello?”
“How are you doing, Ally?” he asked jovially.
“Just fine. And yourself?” I returned, unable to break the rules of Southern politeness even as my stomach tossed and turned in anticipation of bad news. What other reason could there be for an early call, praising me? Not freaking likely.
“Oh, I can’t complain,” he said. “After all, if they let me start complaining I might never stop, har har.”
I decided to bend the rules of Southern politeness slightly, and if not exactly cut to the chase, at least sidle around in its general direction.
“Sorry to hear that, sir. Is there anything I can help with? Is that why you called?”
“Oh, not at all, not at all. Just calling to check in, see how things are going. I know how overwhelming it can all be, your first time out.”
My first time out on something that wasn’t swathed in pink and coded girly so many ways that a seasoned cryptologist would give up and cry, he meant, but I let it slide in the interest of not getting fired.
“I’m doing just fine,” I said. “Busy, but you’ve seen how I can juggle multiple tasks. I know my status update is scheduled for tomorrow, but I can give you a preliminary one if you—”
“Great, great, great,” he interrupted, clearly having not listened to a word I’d said. “That’s great, Ally, I’m glad. There’s just one little thing—”
Of course there was.
“It’s that Chuck—you know Chuck, great head on his shoulders, member of the old frat, knows how we do business here—Chuck has expressed some concerns.”
Of course he had.
I managed to restrain myself from saying that I’d like to express some concerns to Chuck myself, preferably with a paintball gun, and instead asked, as pointedly as I could without my boss feeling like I was ‘giving him lip,’ “Do you have any concerns, sir?”
He huffed into his mustache, annoyed that I’d even somewhat called him out on his passive-aggressive bullshit. “You know it isn’t like that, Ally.”
Oh, wasn’t it?
I bit my lip to keep from blurting out my mental catalogue of all the humiliating crap he’d thrown at me in the past with a hangdog look and an insistence that his sexist outlook was just company policy. Giving me every single feminine hygiene client, like their product was radioactive or something. Denying me the Lockheed guns contract, even though I’d been out at the shooting range since I was six and the guy he did give it to wouldn’t know a stock from a barrel. Laughing off my sexual harassment claims when the guys from accounting made comments about my legs, telling me to just ‘appreciate the compliments before you’re too old to get them.’
I concentrated on the important thing. He had, technically, said that he wasn’t concerned about me. “I’m glad to hear that. So you agree with me that I won’t be needing any oversight.”
‘Oversight’ being our polite term for ‘sending in a guy at the last second to hog all the credit.’
He sighed a deeply regretful sigh that made me want to strangle him. “Consumer confidence is our game, Ally. I can’t change the way we do business just because it hurts your feelings.”
Typical. Running around at Chuck’s beck and call whenever he threw a little hissy fit was just the way we did business but when I calmly stated my dislike for it, it was just ‘hurt feelings.’
“Of course,” I said, gritting my teeth. “And how are we planning on mollifying Chuck’s concerns?”
“Knew you’d be on board,” he said placidly, even though I hadn’t quite climbed onto said board just yet. Like most people at the company, he liked to assume reality was the way he wanted it to be, and just wait for it to conform. “I’d like Chad and his colleagues to come by and lend a hand,” he continued. “That group has some real unity of vision, you know, and they’ve been chomping at the bit to really prove their stuff.”
I’d been chomping at the bit for years, and all it had ever gotten me was patronizing lectures about how overly ambitious women came off as bitches and lost contracts.
“Sandra and Hunter and I have all the vision we can handle right now,” I said, going for a light and breezy tone that didn’t communicate, and I will let the Douchebros’ vision come to light only over my dead body.
“Sounds like you could use a little help corralling it, then.”
“I assure you, sir, we’ve got everything under control.”
“Now, now, missy,” he said, in what I had to assume was the same voice he used when his granddaughter wanted another scoop on her ice cream cone. “The client comes first, remember? We have to make him feel secure.”