“You get a promotion and the fancy office and you’re still playing secretary,” Ronaldo snorted as the feet of his chair slammed back to the ground. “Dizzying heights. Let me know if you get a nosebleed, honey.”
She bit her tongue and handed him the printout and a pen.
He raised his eyebrows. “Physical paper? Seriously?”
“I don’t know, they said they wanted a scan,” she said. He was going to be condescending? Fine. She could lean into that. Asshole. Lamp time for you, or at least lamp time whenever your liver gives out. “Don’t blame me for jumping through their hoops.”
“Jump a little higher,” he smirked. But he signed.
She wanted to pump an arm, maybe hit that stupid little gong. But she restrained herself. She waited until the glass door swung shut and carefully kept her body language from becoming too triumphant. But still. One down. She could finally breathe.
“So?” she asked.
Luke’s eyebrows pinched together. “It didn’t… It doesn’t…”
He reached out for the contract and she handed it to him. He concentrated. Then looked up at her, despair across his face. “It didn’t take.”
11
Maybe it’s because he didn’t realize he was making a Deal,” Luke said, tapping at his keyboard with his index fingers alone. “I guess the signer needs to actually understand what they’re committing to.”
The building management swore that the plastic sheeting taped to the ceiling would stop any more liquids from upstairs; Morgan was dubious. No dry clean-only clothes this summer. But at least Luke’s interference had bought them an entire day of blessed silence. Alas, the construction had resumed today, with a deep thrumming sound punctuated irregularly by squeaks.
“How do you not know this?” Morgan demanded, trying the screen recording yet again. They’d been through this argument yesterday and again this morning, and she was sick of it. Just like she was sick of trying to make this demo; she couldn’t get through the mouse movements she needed smoothly. Other companies’ demos looked so much more polished. Then again, other companies probably had an actual video team doing their animations. She’d hoped that she could use her own product to find potential Deal targets while recording—two birds, one stone. She’d feltguilty about it, until she realized that she couldn’t seem to manage either task.
“How does your product work?” he demanded.
“You set the parameters you want, and then it sorts through all the publicly available candidates, and uses quantum-but-not-really-quantum predictive analytics to present you with the best options,” she replied. Never mind that they were an HRIS platform now; there weren’t any HRIS features, so she was just trying to make the original functionality look nice. Except she had created a fictional person with the perfect profile and it wasn’t coming up in the results. If the predictive analytics were so good, and she knew profiles who fit the requirements existed, why did none of the results seem remotely suitable?
“No, I mean how do the algorithms themselves work?”
“I don’t know the details. That’s what the developers worry about.”
“And I don’t know the details of what makes a Deal work, all right? People don’t contact us unless they already know what a demon is and actively are interested in making a Deal. I need to tell Ronaldo what I am,” he retorted. “Also, none of those guys match your parameters.”
“Thank you so much for your contribution,” she snapped. “If you go over and announce you’re a demon he’s going to think you’re on acid. And if you show him your demon form, he’s going to thinkhe’son acid. Maybe if I adjust the geographic requirements?”
He peered over her shoulder. “Doesn’t look like it helped.”
She should ask someone for help, she knew. But she’d been here for months—how could she confess she still didn’t know how the demo actually worked? She’d seen otherpeople do it; apparently, she just hadn’t been paying close enough attention. A wave of mortification swept over her and she beat it back, reminding herself of that moment in the webinar where everything clicked and she felt like she was finally where she was supposed to be. She just needed to try harder. “Maybe it can tell that these people might not match on paper but it can predict they’re going to do a great job once they start. It’s supposed to be finding diamonds in the rough.”
“You asked for an on-site role in NYC and it found you a diamond in Albuquerque.”
“… Maybe he’s willing to move?”
“Heyyyyyy party people,” Hayley stuck her head in the door. “Are you ready to boogie boogie?”
Morgan pasted a smile on her face. “Oh, definitely!”
“Every day I’m shuffling!” Hayley sang. When neither of them laughed, she added, “Because we’re going to go play shuffleboard, get it?”
“Shuffling, shuffling,” Morgan replied weakly.
“That’s the spirit! We’re leaving in fifteen, so wrap it up!”
“I still don’t get it,” Luke muttered after the door closed. But he did start shutting down his laptop.
“It’s a song.”
