“No.”
“You didn’t feel… scared or anything?”
I could never feel scared with you.
“Not at all,” I say hurriedly, opening the door so I don’t have to hold his eye contact. My heart is pounding and I feel a little out of breath, and I just need to get out of there.
“Chase is on his way in,” I say, seeing the bullish man walking up to us from the elevators.
“Fuck. Of course, he’s early. Stall him. I need a minute to come back down to earth.”
I smirk as I pull the door almost closed behind me and wait for the inevitable explosion as Devan Chase marches toward me.
Just before lunch, I’m on the phone with Fran Morgan, who has sent several presentations outlining the recruitment drive and interview process through to me.
She is stressed, snippy, and absorbed in year-end, but every document she sends through makes me want to grind my teeth in frustration.
She uses an archaic system, with separate spreadsheets for everything. I can tell she manually plugs in all the numbers instead of bringing them in from other sheets, and I could make her life easier with a simple set of formulas.
Against my better judgment, I’ve offered to help, yet again, adding more work to my plate.
“You’re seriously saying you can get this automated?” she asks, sounding annoyed, but I’ve learned that’s just how she is. Even when she’s happy, she sounds pissed.
“Yeah. I can build you a dashboard from Excel, unless you’re already using Python. But even then, I sometimes find the appsand software outside of Excel lose a lot of the most useful features.”
“Do you even have time to do that? I know Gray has a million meetings coming up.”
“His schedule is pretty much fixed today; he’s been shouting at everyone nonstop anyway,” I say, glancing up at Gray behind his desk. He’s just visible through the door, and he looks up, narrowing his eyes at me as I say that.
“Look, Fran, I don’t want to tell you how to do your job, but I’m pretty sure with a few tweaks, this could all produce itself each month. You wouldn’t have to slug through this manual process every time.”
“Okay,” Fran says, sounding harried. “Well, if you can make a start on it and then run me through it, that would be good, but if it delays things, it’ll have to wait until next month.”
“Don’t you have people on your team who do this for you?”
“I have a lot of business analysts and HR folks, sure. But these numbers feed into finance because of the personnel data, and no one on my team is good at it. And if I steal Devan’s finance guys again, he’ll take away all our budget.”
“Well, I’m glad he’s a dick toeveryoneand not just me.”
“He’s a complete asshole,” Fran says, surprising me with her candor, and I snort. “Thanks, Jax. I owe you lunch for this.”
“No problem. Give me a couple of hours.”
I hang up and open Excel, trying to ignore Gray as he rises from his desk and saunters over to me, leaning against the doorframe and raising an eyebrow.
Jesus, the man has a good tailor.
“Are you helping other departments again?” he asks irritably.
“Just Fran.”
“She has a team of her own. Why is she poachingmyassistant?”
I smirk up at him. “You’re sounding a little territorial there, boss.”
“Damn straight I am. What is she making you do?”
“A dashboard for the staffing analysis,” I say, not looking at him. “And she’s notmakingme do anything. I offered.”
