I felt him move past me on one side. Cress, a less blisteringlyhot spot, moved forward on the other side. “Your workspace is ludicrously small,” she called out.
I pressed my lips together.
“I was under the impression that you were the leader of a team of workers. There is no ‘team’ in here for you to manage.”
“Well, I always make a point to be the first to arrive,” I said, trying not to laugh.
“Your underlings must be miniscule creatures.” Cress’s voice was filled with disgust. “There is no space for me to even swing my sword in here. Why do you not commandeer some of that cavernous space out front for you to conduct your business? Perhaps next to the banshee’s husband? Or beside the troll?”
“This tiny cubicle is totally unsatisfactory.” I heard a knock on the elevator wall; Donovan was tapping it, trying to see if he could magically widen it. “How could you work in such conditions? It is an insult, even to the likes of you?—”
The doors began to slide close.
“Chosen!”
The doors snapped shut. I giggled like a schoolgirl, watching the buttons light up as the elevator ascended, first floor, second floor, third floor…
Silence. Blessed silence. My head was clear; there were no mythical creatures surrounding me. I took a deep breath, pushed the button again, got into a different elevator, and hit the button for the thirty-third floor. The lift didn’t stop on any other floors; the building was probably still mostly deserted.
I always came to work early. It was a power move I’d learned in my broker days. If you came to work a little early, you got the jump on the day before anyone else had the chance to throw back their double-mocha Frappuccino andshamble inside the office. I didn’t come too early, though. I was a workaholic, not a psychopath.
Well, I was also a psychopath, apparently. But this time, I hadn’t hurt anyone.
Not yet, anyway.
The call center of Base Budget Insurance occupied a full level of the thirty-third floor of the building. Just above us, on the thirty-fourth floor, was the product team, compliance, accounts, and human resources, and above that, the executive offices and board room. The technical team, for some reason, were in the basement of the building, level minus zero-one—something to do with the servers needing to be close to the ground to stay cool. Occasionally, one of the pale, dead-eyed wraiths from the tech team would stumble out of an elevator on the thirty-third floor, float through the call center with dead, empty eyes, lurch over to whatever poor idiot had summoned them, and wordlessly switch their desktop off and back on again.
The lights of the call center automatically flicked on as I walked through, illuminating the whole floor and highlighting the soul-sucking worn gray carpet, the concrete-colored cubicle dividers, and the pee-yellow walls. Four small glass offices in each corner of the open-plan floor were the only redeeming feature of the place; three were department manager’s offices, one, a large meeting room.
I had my eye on the one on the far side—the Client Experience and Support Senior Manager’s office. That was the next rung on the corporate ladder, one step up from where I was as Client Experience and Support Team Leader. I’d get there if it killed me.
Only two years ago, I used to have a private office suite, with Judy, my scary-as-hell executive assistant, in a vestibule outside my door. Now, I coveted one of the tinyglass fishbowl offices in the corner of an open-plan office hell. How the mighty had fallen.
Swallowing my grief, I straightened my shoulders and marched over to my desk. The other team leaders had been confused when I pulled my designated double-wide cubicle away from the wall, removed the partitions, and put my seat on the other side, creating more of an open space—a desk in front of the window instead of a pokey box to hide in. But, thanks to a careful arrangement of my team in their cubicles into a square U shape in front of me, I cut the rest of the call center off and provided myself with a tiny bit of privacy. Unlike the other team leaders, I wanted to be seen, and I put myself in the perfect Feng Shui power position where nobody could approach me without running the gauntlet through my team’s cubicles first. It was the little things that made all the difference.
I sat down, switched on my desktop, and logged in.
A billion new emails lay in bold font at the top of my inbox. I scanned them all quickly, deleted the pointless ones, filed the ones I didn't need to respond to, and started working my way through the endless drudgery of customer complaints, staff requests, petty squabbles over budget allocations, over-excited declarations from the social committee…
This meeting could have been an email. This email could have been a cage fight.
Slowly, some of my team began to drift in. Once called “call center operators,” then “customer service officers,” then, briefly, “client relationship development and liaison partners,” the twelve Client Experience and Support Representatives in my team could be roughly divided into two distinct camps. Ironically enough, in my head, I’d always called them the sprites and the dragons.
The sprites were all young and flighty, full-time or part-time students trying to fit a paying job around college, where they studied art or design or some kind of sports-related science. This job was a means to an end; they didn’t put much effort in. Bare minimum only.
The dragons were all older men and women—career call center workers, hoarding their knowledge of the outdated tech systems we used, grunting to each other moodily at their desks, and guarding their cartoon bobblehead figurines in their cubicles like piles of gold and silver.
The dragons always came in first, and none of them ever said good morning to me. I always made a special point to call out to them as they arrived and started to log in. All of them had been working at Base Budget Insurance much longer than me, and they always defaulted to their normal grumpy state first thing in the morning. It never took me long to reestablish dominance, though.
I waved and called out to the head dragon, Thomas, and asked him how his mother’s colonoscopy went yesterday, then deliberately called Cherry over to ask her about her leave request, forcing her to leave her desk and come to my territory.
Office politics. I lived and breathed it. I used to play the most high-stakes version of it. Now, it was more like checkers instead of war games, but I had to take my kicks where I could get them.
Stacey, a kinesiology major at USF, was the first of the sprites to arrive, swinging her satchel off her shoulders and shaking out her honey-blonde braided hair. “Morning, Susan!”
I gave her a wave, deliberately not looking at Owen, another sprite, who walked very slowly in behind her. “Hi, Stacey. How was your spin class?”
She blew out a breath, and her bangs flew up. “So good. Juanita, the instructor, shekilledme. Iliterallydied. Rest in peace, me.” Shedropped into her chair with a huff. “Oh. Hi, Owen,” she said, her tone deliberately casual.
