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‘Tell me what?’
He lowers his voice conspiratorially. ‘The truth is that I gave Harmony that contract on a plate. Their sales guy was so green that I could have wiped the floor with him if I’d have wanted to.’
I stare at him in horror. ‘Are you saying…?’
‘Yup,’ he grins. ‘It wasn’t hard, you know. A little tweak of the presentation here, a small adjustment of the numbers there. Oh, sorry. I’d better take this.’ He grabs his vibrating phone and I hear him say, ‘Hi, Tom! No, not a bad time at all. What’s up?’ before he disappears outside.
I feel like I’ve been kicked in the gut. I want to get up from this table and storm out, telling him he can go and fuck himself on the way. No, I want to empty a whole bowl of pasta over his head, followed by a glass of red wine, and then tell him to go and fuck himself. How can he sit there, all smug and pleased with himself, knowing that what he’s done is not only unethical and dishonest, but that it’s his fault I’m unemployed?
I try out a number of scenes in my mind, each more extreme than the one before, but they’re not helping. I know I’ll never have the guts to actually do any of them, and they probably wouldn’t play out the way I anticipated anyway, although the one where I replace the shampoo with hair removal cream does sound sorely tempting. As the heat of my rage starts to dissipate, it’s replaced by something much colder, and I have an idea.
I’ve just put my phone down when Lee reappears.
‘Sorry about that. They don’t seem to be able to get enough of me. Where were we?’
‘You were telling me how you handed the contract to Harmony on a plate,’ I remind him acidly.
‘Oh, yes.’ He’s just about to continue when our starters arrive. I ordered the calamari, but my appetite has deserted me. I take a swig of my wine and pop a piece into my mouth. I can tell it’s delicious, but it takes me ages to swallow it. Lee is tucking into his beef carpaccio with gusto.
‘So, here’s the dilemma,’ he tells me quietly between mouthfuls. ‘I’m pitching for a job with Harmony, but I’m also up against them in a sales cycle. What to do? I can either prove what a brilliant salesman I am by mashing them into the ground, but then they’d be pissed off because they would have lost the contract, or I can let them win and take the risk that they wonder if I’m actually as good as they thought.’
‘I can see how hard that must have been for you,’ I say, trying desperately to keep the savage sarcasm out of my voice.
‘It was,’ he replies, completely oblivious to the waves of loathing coming from my side of the table. ‘In the end, I decided it would be better all round to let them have the contract, particularly as they made it pretty clear they were relying on it to fund their expansion. I have nothing to prove. My history shows how good I am and, now that this trust has signed with Harmony, I can prove my worth by landing all the others.’
‘So they basically told you that you’d only get the job if you scuppered Orchestra’s bid? Isn’t that illegal? If not, it ought to be.’
‘They were very careful what they said, but yes. They made it clear enough that I knew what they meant.’ He taps the side of his nose.
‘So what did you actually do?’ I ask him, trying desperately to keep my voice level as the scale of his duplicity unfolds.
‘Nothing big. Nothing that Orchestra are going to find, anyway. The truth is that, although the Harmony software knocks Orchestra’s into a cocked hat in terms of how it looks and how modern it feels, it isn’t as mature. There are a couple of modules that either aren’t as well developed, or simply don’t exist at all yet. Normally, I’d point this out and use it to drive home the point that software needs to be more than pretty, and that Orchestra has a mature offering that’s well respected in the market. I’d go pretty big on it, doing my best to instil doubt in the customer that Harmony was everything they’d been told.’
‘And you didn’t do that this time, I’m guessing.’
‘Never mentioned it. Glossed over the slide completely.’
‘Uh-huh. I admit sales isn’t my game, but that doesn’t sound enough to me.’
‘No, you’re right.’
‘So what else did you do?’
‘You know your project plan, with all the costings?’
‘Yes.’
‘I added a contingency percentage.’
‘Why? I explicitly told you that I’d already done that!’
‘Keep your voice down. People might be listening. Maybe you did tell me, but I must have “forgotten”.’ He makes quote marks with his fingers and smiles as he says it.
‘So how much did you add?’
‘The standard 20 per cent.’
‘But that would have completely priced us out of the deal!’
