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Chapter Three
I'm the President of Public Relations for ExploreR, the leading tech company in Silicon Valley, focusing on medicine, AI, and of course, space exploration and eventually sustained human settlements.
That's the ludicrous dream, anyway. It's my job to make sure the public thinks we can do it, and do it ethically.
It's a pretty big job and a lot of things fall under the public relations umbrella. My department actually absorbed the marketing department, in addition to the usual PR responsibilities of handling press releases and conferences. Legal also moved under my purview.
Rob's been talking about changing my title to President of People, but I told him that sounds like HR, and I refused to wade into that quagmire.
His reasoning for rolling so much into my area is that my job is simple: make sure people like us and we never get in trouble. With billions of dollars in revenue, sites in over 80 countries all over the world, and 135,000 employees, not including contractors, there were a lot of places things could go wrong.
I'd always been great at organizing my own stuff, but after a few missed meetings due to double bookings and my reluctance to delegate, the other Presidents forced an ultimatum on me in the kindest way possible.
Get a Personal Assistant or else get promoted to Chief Officer of People, which would mean HR would roll under me, along with the annoying Employee Experience team who were constantly remodeling our buildings and organizing nauseating team bonding outings.
It'd also mean I'd have no time to actually do the part of the job I liked, which was drafting and writing things that people might actually read.
So I got a Personal Assistant. They were supposed to help organize my entire life, not just the professional side of it, which I was excited for. Finally, I could send an email and things would be done, instead of me having to call and make my own appointments.
It might seem like an infinitesimal time saver, but when you needed seconds to make world-changing decisions, like we did at ExploreR, then you needed all the time you could get.
I didn't do the interviews for the PA. I left that up to my eager associates in HR.
Of course, they forgot to tell me she was coming. So when I walked into my office one morning, there was a slender woman with hay-colored hair looking at the art on my walls.
She wore a soft mauve sweater in cheap fabric and blue slacks. Her shoes were flat brown oxfords. Her hair was shiny, healthy, but also flat, nearly pasted to her head. It fell smoothly all the way to the bottom of her sweater.
She had on no makeup. Just a fresh face with scared, doe eyes and pink, cracked lips that easily shifted to a wide smile when she saw me.
She looked terrified and elated. It was the most innocent, softest face I'd ever seen. Every feeling she had shuffled across her face unabashedly, even when she was ashamed.
“Good morning, ma'am,” she drawled.
Southern? I couldn't quite place it.
She waited.
“Are you lost?” I cooed, “You sound like you're certainly not supposed to be in California.”
She laughed, like I was being playful. She said, bubbling over, “No, ma'am, I supposed I don't sound like I'm from around here. I'm not! I'm from Tennessee. Not even from Nashville. From nowhere in particular, really. Where are you from?”
People always asked because they assumed I'd say Moscow or St. Petersburg and confirm their stereotypes. I didn't say anything, usually.
Though with her it felt like she wasn't so much annoyingly curious as just making polite conversation. I still didn't know why she was here.
“Would you like me to have these paintings framed, ma'am? I have to say, they look kind of naked with the edges of their canvas hanging out like that,” she cringed at the thought of them hanging nakedly on the wall.
I looked. I'd never even noticed, but she was right. My thousand-dollar landscapes had been hung without frames.
“Who the hell didn't see that when they put them up?” I said aloud, forgetting she was there while I looked in anger at my pictures.
She scurried into view and said quickly, “It's no biggie, ma'am, I'll have a professional in and we'll get them spruced up. I also thought you might like the furniture updated in here? Unless you picked it out yourself, ma'am, in which case, I'm sorry I insinuated we should get something else.”
We? I stared. She smiled uncomfortably.
Oh. It clicked. She's the Personal Assistant they're foisting on me.
“What's your name?” I said.
