No matter how you added it up, she couldn’t do math.
“I’m lucky I caught it. I expected the net to be higher after the changes we’d made. It was less than last quarter so I went back through and noticed it. I just canceled my meeting. You’ll have to reschedule it for everyone once this is done.”
“I’m sorry, Ethan. I’m not sure what happened. I thought I double-checked everything. I’ll get to work on this right now.”
“I need you to do something else for me first,” he said. “Then you can do that. Since it’s internal and you’ll reschedule, it’s not a priority like the other things I needed today.”
“Got it,” she said, her face flame red. “Anything else?”
This was the last thing she needed. To put them in a position where he was going to doubt she could handle her job.
Or think that Blair had been covering for her the first two weeks.
“No.”
She moved away from him, but he reached for her hand and held it. “Yes?”
“Shit happens. Let it go. There are worse things, just pay attention.”
She nodded and slipped back to her office, pulled up the email requesting the information from accounting, noticed that she had asked for the right dates and put her head back. Dang it. She must have pulled the wrong file.
But then she pulled up the reports from accounting on the attachment she was sent and sawtheysent the wrong year.
Still her fault for not catching it.
She emailed back the person who pulled the reports, explained that she was sent the wrong ones and needed the right ones ASAP, then got to work on the rest of her duties for the day.
By three, she had finished what was needed before she could fix her mistake, but noticed she still didn’t have the information.
It might be better to go down in person. If Heather was out, someone else could pull it for her, she was positive, and she could at least meet some more staff.
“Hi. Brenda, right?” she asked the assistant at the front desk. “Is Heather at her desk by any chance?”
“Sure, Nora. Go down the hall, take a right and she should be I think the fourth on the right.”
“Thanks,” she said. There were a lot of staff here, most working in cubes.
She moved down the hall, took a deep breath and told herself to be firm but friendly. Professional. She needed this information today so she could get started. She’d stay late to get it done and then present it to Ethan tomorrow and reschedule his meeting.
She found Heather’s desk; the woman looked up. “Yes?”
“I’m Nora. You sent me a report yesterday.”
“I did,” Heather said. “When you asked.”
She didn’t understand the tone she was getting back. “And I appreciated the rapid response and turnover. I sent you another email about four hours ago looking for it again. The first one had the wrong dates.”
“No, it didn’t,” Heather snapped.
“I doubled-checked my email to the attachment you submitted. It was the correct quarter, the wrong year.”
Heather was pounding on her keyboard and pulled it up. “It’s right here,” Heather said. “This is the report I saved and sent you.”
“That might be the report you saved, and the one I need, but not the one you sent in the email. If you go to that and pull it up, you’ll see. My email earlier explained that.”
“I haven’t read all my emails yet today. I’ve had other things to do.”
“I understand we are all busy. If I need to reach out to other staff for information when requested for Ethan, I can do that. Being new, I’m learning all the protocols. What is the normal turnaround time so that I can watch in the future?”
