Page 94 - Labelle Gramercy, On the Case

Overtime

hygiene, and the surfaces of this one were no exception. Lieutenant
Gramercy said nothing, but I knew where the next stop would be.
We headed, increasingly in my awareness a very odd couple, for the
bosses’ corner offices.
“Maisy, this is Labelle Gramercy. I’m showing her around the
office. She’s going to report to Mel O’Dion in shared services.”
We stood just inside the doorway of Maisy Cornflower’s office.
She was the supervisor of both Kates and Hardin, younger by at least
fifteen years than the former and about the same age as the latter. But
her persona was that of a manager on the make, not a back-office
nerd with adolescent fixations on gadgetry and games. And she had
to be ruthless to get ahead in a highly technical field, for she
possessed few qualifications for and little experience in actually doing
the grunt work of programming and systems analysis. The
‘professional’ workplace now emphasized politics and outsourcing
rather than what might once have been considered productive labor.
In general, nuts-and-bolts guys like Kates and Hardin would only
respect one of their own being placed over them in the organizational
chart. But the writing was on the wall, and the present cadre of
executives was being recruited from a pool of slick operators, people
who understood how to dress for success and spin a simple project
into a multi-million dollar ‘initiative’ which would not be closely
examined for signs of success until long after its perpetrators had
moved on to greener pastures.
Maisy had hired Terry, so he at least came into our world knowing
no other TimeWarper way of doing things, and his loyalty to her had
to be assumed. Labelle probably could infer that from hire dates:
Kates would be the intransigent one, forever looking back to a
golden age when things were done right and failure had real
consequences for the responsible parties. The policewoman also
could have read the performance reviews Maisy had written for both
men, as well as the regrettably ineradicable earlier requests made by
Kates to be allowed to work temporarily outside of the building when
it was new and, according to him, off-gassing toxic substances at a
rate and in a volume sufficient to make him ill. Kates had considered
the sequelae of all this—a new manager intent on cracking the whip
and getting ahead, his rejected pleas for special treatment, the
favoritism he perceived bestowed on his coworker, Hardin—as

93