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“What was the story, sir?”
I looked at her. She was still playing with me. And I was not a man who liked to play.
“Oh, come on,” she said. “You can’t tell me about the story without giving me details. It’s just you and me here. I won’t tell. I promise.”
She mimed zipping her lips, locking them up, and then swallowing the key. No matter what I told her, she was going to continue doing this, acting like herself, so I would just have to ignore her.
“I suppose it wasn’t actually a story,” I said. “More of a comment, but it related to his approval of a recent surgical procedure one of the aids had,” I said.
“We talking above or below the neck?”
“Below,” I said.
Sloane gave me a thumbs up and a wink. “Got it.”
“At any rate, somebody reported him, and his comment and the office had no choice but to let him go. He lost his job on the spot. All because of an unnecessary comment.”
That wasn’t the full truth. Mark was also sleeping with Julia Burman from Prestige Reality, who was using him to access customer records and steal leads. The full truth was that Mark had a nasty combination of thinking he was smart while also being unbelievably stupid, making him an easy mark for Julia. I couldn’t even blame her. Realty is a competitive business and people used whatever they could to get ahead.
“There’s a lot of pressure in the real estate industry right now,” I said, “and the board is taking this kind of thing very seriously.”
Sloane nodded. “How so?”
“For one thing, they’re paying an outside agency for a service to send workplace climate investigators into the offices from time to time to perform ‘office environment’ audits. Completely unannounced.”
“Are they allowed to do that?” she asked.
I had the same question when I heard about the plan. “We gave them permission. So yes. If one of them happened to be in here today and for all I know they might have been…”
“Like I said, Mr. Hartford, I’m very sorry and it won’t happen again.”
“Make sure it doesn’t,” I said. “Do you have any questions?”
“Yeah,” she said, pausing for just a moment. “When was the last time you smiled?”
“Ms. Saunders…” It was clear she still didn’t understand the severity of the situation. These audits were terrifying to me because they wouldn’t just result in an employee getting fired — I’d be reprimanded, too. It wasn’t that I disapproved of the very idea of such audits — I maintained a professional environment in my office and preferred to keep it that way, unlike many of my colleagues — it was that handling such disciplinary actions was distracting from our bottom line.
And that was exactly what was happening right now in my office. Rather than discuss specifics related to Sloane’s lack of progress, I was forced to scold her for telling the others in the office about the time she shoved a shoe up Bradley Burke’s ass. Something, incidentally, that many of us have wanted to do for a very long time.
If the people in the office — not just Sloane but the people hanging on every word of her story — would just behave like adults, this wouldn’t be an issue.
“I find that to be an inappropriate question for you to be asking me.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t mean that as a joke or anything,” she said, flustered, “just you never seem very happy and if the image of a guy getting a high heel stuck up his butt doesn’t make you laugh, then what does?”
“I am a very happy man,” I lied. “I just know how to keep work and my personal life separate.”
“Hmm,” she said.
“What?”
“Nothing,” she said.
I didn’t respond. I waited for her to finish her thought.
“I just don’t want to upset you,” she said.
Sometimes the best way to get someone to tell you what they’re thinking is to just wait patiently.
