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Sensing the conversation was going nowhere productive, I slid my phone into my pocket. We did have a meeting later, which Winston referred to with ‘save it for later’. It was much harder for the conversation to get derailed when I could glare at my brothers in person. Emojis didn’t quite have the same effect.
I needed to compartmentalize, to not let Apollo’s threat get to me. It changed nothing. I’d been preparing for this for a while now.
And what I needed at this moment was a break. Though it almost physically hurt to take a break from work when I was in full flow, I knew in the long term it was better if I was well rested and, well, sane.
Plus, it gave the employees a boost when I did one of my tours. The company was big, and these weren’t our only offices, but they were our biggest, and they were where I, the CEO, was based. I couldn’t tour the whole place in an hour, or even a whole day, so I made sure to give each department and project team their turn.
Today, it was the main cafeteria’s turn to receive a visit from me and my Chief Operating Officer. Perked up by this thought, I set my worries aside as best I could and departed my office.
This floor of the building was cool, calm serenity. I’d have preferred to be in the thick of it a bit more, with the teams downstairs, but Mandy, the COO, maintained that we needed a place to get away from the hustle and bustle. I was sometimes grateful for her ruthlessness.
I skipped over to the window to her office, pressed my face up against the glass and gave her the creepiest little wave possible until she noticed me. She’d had extra soundproof glass installed in her office, so I couldn’t technically hear the groan she made upon seeing me. But her despair was so palpable it was as if I could.
She looked up from her hands, where she’d put her head upon seeing me. “Is it that time already?”
I couldn’t hear her, of course, but I’d gotten good at lip-reading. I nodded gloatingly and beckoned her with a single finger.
She looked with further despair around her office than stood up resignedly and opened the door. “You do this just to punish me.” Her voice was deep and stern in the silence of the corridor, tinged with the German accent that remained despite decades in the US.
I beamed in a way that would have charmed most people. Whenever I beamed at Mandy like this, I knew it was because there was no hope of ever charming her. “No, I do it because it’s good for the morale of the company. It’s nice to be checked in with by the big bosses.”
She practically rolled her eyes. No one else at the company could get away with this attitude towards me. “I check in with them all the time. All of them. Constantly.”
“Yes, but your definition of ‘check in’ is a bit more... leering... than mine is. If you turn up, they assume someone’s getting reprimanded or fired.”
That made her smile off into the middle distance, as if she was fondly imagining getting to reprimand or fire someone. “They usually are.”
“But we need to check in on their welfare. Morale. Make sure the teams are happy and working well together.”
She scoffed. “Happy.”
I gave her a look.
She swatted me away with her big hand and led the way to the elevator. “Don’t look at me like you’re the saint. You hired me to be your bad cop, remember that.”
“And you’re very good at it.”
“Which floor?”
“To the cafeteria.”
“Thank heavens. At least I can pick up a sandwich.”
Brock Technologywas the one-fifth of my departed father’s businesses that had ended up in my hands after his timely death. I’d worked hard since then to turn it around from a cold, unfeeling and frankly frightening place to work into one of the highest-voted ‘best tech jobs’ around.
I’d have found it harder to convince the higher-ups to let me bring in a more comfortable workplace upon assuming the CEO position if it wasn’t for the fact that happy workers were more productive and more likely to stay in their jobs. Funny.
As Mandy and I made our way through the cafeteria I was greeted with happy but respectful ‘hello’s from most of the employees we passed by. It was amusing to watch their expression fade upon realizing they also had to greet Mandy.
I didn’t enjoy firing people or disciplining them. My background, even before assuming the company, was computer science. I liked the work, and I liked rewarding people for good work. That’s what I was good at. Mandy was good at, and took specific enjoyment in, the parts of our shared role that I considered most unpleasant.
She was the best bad cop there was to my good cop. Even if sometimes I too fell afoul of her wrath.
After shaking hands with members of the cafeteria staff, giving Mandy permission for an extended lunch break to recover, and returning to my own work for a few hours, it was time to head over to Jude’s for the Brock brothers meeting (sans Apollo, who was estranged from all of us).
I hadn’t done enough at work to be satisfied. But I never was. I resignedly shut down my computer and gathered my things.
Since Sylvester had revealed to the other brothers last week that I had something ‘up my sleeve’, I’d been pushing hard to get somewhere with my Apollo campaign in time to reveal it to them all tonight. But all I’d really earned, besides a sophisticated algorithm that could analyze Apollo’s moods and tell whether he was sleeping, was Apollo’s wrath and a promise that I was ‘next’.
