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She glanced up at him as she finished speaking and his expression flashed back to keen obsequiousness.
"Absolutely, Maggie," he said, giving her a nod, "I'm sorry about that being late. I'll get those signatures to you immediately."
He hesitated, waiting to see if there was more but Maggie simply went back to what she was doing and after a moment he turned to walk away. Fucking bitch, he thought, sucking a deep breath to master his anger. This is ridiculous. Craig stormed back to his desk and pulled out the sheaf of blank sign-off sheets that he had in a file there, filling out the top of one with the report's details and the date before heading off to find the various team leads' offices. Five minutes later he was standing at the ele
vator band, leaving his desk and the actual work he had to do behind to chase pointless signatures from a series of disinterested executives.
- - -
When six-thirty rolled around Craig was leaning back in his chair, stretching after a particularly back breaking stint over a beast of a project plan. He had managed to get five of seven signatures but two of the executives he sought had been MIA. He glanced at his watch, shaking his head. No point going looking for them now, they were not the hardest working execs and by now they would be long gone. Fuck, thought Craig, he had a status meeting with Maggie in the morning and he knew it would come up.
He stood up. This is fucking ridiculous, he thought, and stomped over to the filing cabinet outside Maggie's office where she kept the signed off documents. There was no way he was going to get into shit because of something as arbitrary as a project sign-off sheet. He would find the signatures of the people he needed on other sheets and photocopy them onto his.
Locked. Shit.
He knew where the key was: in Maggie's desk drawer, but sure enough her office was locked too, as it always was. But in a perfect example of office moronity the key to her office was in her assistant's desk. So a minute later Craig was opening Maggie's door and retrieving the key, all the while rehearsing excuses in case he was caught. After a brief rifle through her desk and a slightly longer one through the cabinet he was back at his own desk, a whole bunch of sign-off sheets in hand ready to copy and paste, literally.
It was not until he had finished copying a couple of previous sheets and cutting out signatures that he noticed it. Dave Wright's signature was where it was supposed to be. And it was clearly Dave Wright's signature, but the date was all wrong. Dave Wright was Craig's old boss, and he spent July, every year, in Nantucket. But here was his signature on July 15th. Craig glanced at the title of the document Dave had apparently flown back from Nantucket to sign: Project Costing and Risk Report.
Wait a minute. Craig looked again. Comparing Dave's signatures on several documents. They were all his. No fakes here. But wait. They were all the same. Exactly the same. In all the costing reports they were completely identical, down to a tiny mark above the W that was not a part of the signature, but a pen mis-stroke, yet it had still found its way onto all of the reviewed documents.
Maggie was faking signatures on her risk reports. He was going to talk to Dave in the morning and get this bitch fired. CIO or not, faking your costing reports was a fireable offense. Heck, as an officer of the company it may be worse than if a lowly SVP had done it. Either way Maggie's time was up.
Craig smiled and went back to the filing cabinet.
- - -
Craig's night was restless. It was all very well to talk about getting executives fired but the truth was Maggie was a very dangerous woman. It came down to whether Craig really had the balls to call her on her hypocrisy. And so it was a very nervous and unsure Craig that arrived at his status meeting with Maggie. He was on time, having been keenly aware of his coming meeting with the woman he had discovered was perpetrating fraud against the firm, and he sat down in silence. His work was in good shape. He actually had a couple of things he needed her to help him with: chasing down answers from the steering committee, that kind of thing, but before he could get into the actual value-added side of the meeting she came back to the signatures.
He flinched. In all the excitement of the night before he had not actually finished faking up his sign-off sheets, but had focused on amassing his board of evidence instead. He blanked. Errr.
"Sorry, Maggie, I got five of the seven but . . ."
She cut him off, "Craig, I don't understand what the problem is here." she said with an undertone of contempt, "It's a simple task. Get the signatures. Why do you have so much trouble doing it?"
Craig seethed. He struggled with his anger, not trusting himself to reply but instead waiting for her to move on to the next agenda item.
But she did not desist, pushing onward with her mean black eyes shining out from her pudgy cheeks as she badgered, "Well, Craig? Is there some valid reason why you can't get this done?"
He did not reply.
A moment passed.
"I'm waiting."
Ordinarily Craig would have been mortified. It was not the first time he had seen this kind of childish behavior on the part of an executive, nor the first time he had been on the receiving end of it, and usually the moral superiority and rank of the executive would have made him meek and pliant. But now it was not bureaucracy it was hypocrisy, and Craig felt his patience snap like an overstretched elastic band.
"Well, Maggie," he said with cold venom, "maybe I should just have faked the fucking signatures."
They both froze, equally surprised by what had just come out of his mouth. Craig was flabbergasted, a part of his mind seeking some way to cram his own words back into his mouth. But a part of Craig also registered a look he did not recognize on Maggie's face. Something unfamiliar on that haughty visage.
In an instant it was gone again, masked by a veneer of superiority, and she postured with masterfully feigned indignation, "What did you just say to me?" her face the picture of righteousness.
And then Craig recognized that emotion he had seen in her. It was fear. Something she never felt around such peons as himself. But he had made her feel it and he intended to push onwards.
"I said, Maggie, that maybe I should just fake the signatures, like you do on the project costing and risk reports."
Her eyes opened wide. Her mask was shattered. She struggled to restore her cool but it was a poor imitation of her previous posture. An imitation which fooled no-one. She was mute, and Craig went on.
