Page 92 - Labelle Gramercy, On the Case

Overtime

swimsuit issue of that sports magazine—but this folder is locked up
with none of them. You can get access to everything, right?”
“Well, I suppose so. Don’t you think Maisy should look at them
first?”
Hardin contorted his ferrety face into a smile. “Certainly. She just
hadn’t come in to work when I looked into her office a few minutes
ago, so I thought I should show some initiative and contribute to the
team effort.”
Damned buzzwords! We had to show the auditors that our
personnel were getting indoctrinated in classes run by consultants
trained in the latest motivational methods, so the cloud of jargon had
descended on our people like a plague. The subtext of the ‘new
paradigm’—one which had to gnaw at the obtuseness of even
benighted characters like Hardin—was that employees and employers
rightly but discretely strive for the minimum of both personal and
mutual responsibility, that nobody was encouraged to stay around
long enough to collect any of the heavily-backloaded retirement
benefits, and that the point of having a job was to procure a place in
which to prepare for the next job by sucking up as much training as
possible and puffing up its abbreviated and therefore consequence-
free real-world application on a résumé prepared on company time.
“Thank you for your concern, Terry. By the way, this is Labelle
Gramercy, our new administrative assistant. I was showing her
around the department.”
Hardin nodded in the bobbing manner typical of his generation; it
reminded mine of dashboard dolls with pendulum heads. Thwarted
in his attempt to get into Kates’s PC, he lost interest in me and my
companion. “I’d better go see if Maisy is here,” he rasped, and
lumbered out of the chair. He was not particularly tall, but he was tall
enough to reach the closet shelf on which that volatile cleaning
solvent had been stored. My eyes followed him down the hall toward
the managers’ offices for a moment; then I turned to speak to
Labelle. Once again she had moved more quickly than I thought
possible. She was on the PC, pointing and clicking and typing with
blinding speed.
“Find anything?” I asked, unable to make sense of the fast-
shuffling series of menus and panels and button-filled boxes. My
knowledge of computers was, as I have indicated, rudimentary. I did

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