The Helpline

by Katherine Collette

  ‘That’s not a problem, is it?’ said Betsy.

  ‘Should we have mentioned it earlier?’ said Gladys.

  21

  I was standing by the printer when I saw the mayor. She was wandering the building. Every now and then she did that, walked through the office and talked to people or photocopied something. It was unnecessary, Stacey could just as easily set up a meeting or make copies of whatever it was, but that’s why everybody loved it.

  She stopped to talk to one of the cleaners. ‘Hi, Bob,’ she said. She knew everyone’s name, even the names of people who didn’t really matter.

  Mayor Bainbridge, in short, was a charismatic person. Charisma is an important attribute to have if you want to be successful. It’s even more important than height or appearance and those things are very important. CEOs and leaders of big companies (and, incidentally, psychopaths and serial killers) are always charismatic. Charisma is a way of getting people to like you, and because they like you, they suppress other emotions like jealousy or scepticism or even distrust. I had a bit of charisma already, I knew, but it was something I was keen to cultivate.

  The printer beeped: paper jam. I flicked the side panel open and peered in, moving slowly, waiting for her to see me. Which she did. ‘Germaine, I was hoping to run into you.’ ‘Mayor Bainbridge.’ I freed a piece of crumpled paper and shut the printer flap.

  ‘How’s that cousin of yours?’ she said. ‘I believe she’s renewing her vows.’

  It was unfortunate Mayor Bainbridge knew Kimberly. Having her in common meant we often ended up talking about her and since I didn’t like Kimberly, I didn’t want to do that.

  I’d have preferred to talk about myself. I wanted to tell the mayor my hopes and dreams and hear her talk about how she got to where she was. It would be exciting to be her protégé, to have the sort of relationship I could mention if I ever had to make an award acceptance speech. I wouldn’t attribute everything to her, but I could point out it was she who’d seen how special I was when others were being short-sighted.

  ‘It was a beautiful invitation, wasn’t it?’ said the mayor. ‘And the Park Hyatt is a lovely venue.’

  It hadn’t occurred to me that Kimberly would invite Mayor Bainbridge to her party. Maybe I’d ask if I could sit on the mayor’s table. It would mean Sharon would have to sit on her own, but I could have dinner with her any old time. And we could always talk or text in the breaks between courses.

  But alas:

  ‘I’m so sorry Christos and I won’t be there. We’re taking a little holiday in Fiji before everything ramps up for the state elections. You know how it is.’ The mayor checked behind her before moving closer. ‘Germaine…How’s our special project coming along? Has Celia moved on?’ The way she said ‘moved on’ it sounded like a euphemism for ‘passed away’.

  I was annoyed. I’d been hoping to give her good news but Gladys and Betsy’s incompetence meant I couldn’t. Yet. ‘There’s been a small setback,’ I said. I told her it was no big deal, nothing I couldn’t sort out. I was quite sure it would be all tied up by the end of next week.

  She was disappointed, I could tell by her face.

  ‘Could Francine help?’ she said.

  Francine? What possible help would Francine provide?

  ‘I doubt it,’ I said.

  ‘Okay, so long as things are moving. Don will be happy when it’s sorted. You know he really likes you, Germaine.’

  ‘Does he?’ I willed her to elaborate. Willed it with all my person.

  But she continued at a tangent. ‘I shouldn’t say this but the golf club is not doing very well at the moment.’

  ‘Oh. That’s unfortunate.’ It was as I’d suspected—Don was broke. He needed help. My help; help only I could provide.

  ‘Look, I only mention it so you know how important it is. How much he—and I—appreciate everything you’re doing.’

  ±

  And so getting rid of Celia Brown had fallen to me. The more I looked into it the more complicated it seemed. The committees and leases had been deliberately set up to ensure they were independent of the governing body—they were meant to sit outside the mayor’s sphere of influence. Achieving the desired result would require ‘creative’ thinking. Luckily, this type of thinking was second nature to me.

  To start, I identified the variables of interest:

  C = Celia

  M = The mayor

  E = Election

  As an afterthought, I added G = Gladys, because she was the one who was going to replace Celia but in fact the G could just as easily have been B (Betsy) or O (some other person).

  Next, I worked out which were the ‘known’ variables and which were the ‘unknowns’.

  The ‘knowns’ were E and M. This was because I knew what I wanted E (the election result) to be and I knew what the mayor (M) wanted the election result to be. Given these were the same, I assigned E and M the same values.

  This left G and C as unknowns or unpredictable variables. They were the ones I had to worry about. One thing I learned at Wallace Insurance was when it comes to complex equations, unpredictable variables can wreak havoc on your overall result. Low likelihood (probability) does not take things out of the realm of possibility: one in a thousand doesn’t sound like much but it’s a whole lot more than zero.

  I fiddled around for ages, trying to identify the best- and worst-case scenarios. I focused on optimisation, which involved:

  1. Making the worst-case scenario so unlikely it was essentially impossible; and/or:

  2. Reducing the impact of the worst-case scenario. That is, making the worst thing that could happen not that bad.

  I was shuffling C, M and E around to get G on its own when I had a revelation. I’d been looking at things the wrong way. Instead of trying to convince Celia her time was up, I should make it so her time was up; I should engineer the up-ness of her time. If she wasn’t going to walk, she’d have to be pushed. Once I worked that out, it was easy. Barely an hour later, I’d created:

  THE DEEPDENE POLICY ON COMMITTEES OCCUPYING COUNCIL BUILDINGS.

  Specifically by-law 1.2:

  Members are prohibited from serving as president for a period of more than five years. Individuals who have served five years are deemed ineligible for re-election for a minimum of seven years thereafter.

  I added a fictitious date and put the whole thing in typewriter font to make it look older and more legitimate. Then, with the satisfaction of one who has devised an elegant solution to a difficult problem, I sat back to envisage the precise nature and magnitude of Don’s appreciation.

  ±

  Next time we had lunch Jack and I went to the café. I got a sandwich and he got a vegetable pasty. While he was eating, a bit of pastry broke off and got stuck on his cheek. I could have told him but he was being weird about Don, and thinking about his future embarrassment made me feel better.

  He kept calling Don ‘Greg Norman’. ‘How’s Greg Norman?’ he said. And: ‘What’s his handicap?’ He pressed me for information about our relationship but I didn’t say much. You might say there wasn’t much to say. Or you could say, and this was my preferred way of thinking, that Don and I were taking things slow. We were letting our relationship evolve organically. The mayor’s words kept running through my head, He likes you, Germaine, and for now they were sufficient. It was almost more convenient this way than if we had been in an actual relationship. Not only more expedient but less irritating. This way he was everything I wanted him to be. Aspects of his personality I didn’t like—I hadn’t identified any of these yet, but inevitably I would—couldn’t get in the way.

  Jack squeezed tomato sauce onto his plate. ‘What’s Greg doing today? Still whining about those little old ladies?’

  ‘He wasn’t whining, Jack. He had a perfectly valid complaint. But anyway, that particular issue is close to being resolved.’ Though it was too short to do properly, I swished my hair over my shoulder.

  Jack gave me a funny look.
‘What do you mean, that particular issue is close to being resolved?’

  I shrugged. I hadn’t told Jack about my special project but perhaps I should.

  Trying not to sound smug, I explained what I’d been working on. The gist. I glossed over some of the detail, and he may have thought the policy I’d created was pre-existing.

  ‘Germaine,’ he said, ‘be careful.’ He sounded serious.

  ‘Yes, Jack.’

  ‘I mean it. Be careful of the mayor. She’s…self-interested.’

  ‘Everyone’s self-interested, Jack. Just because you do something that’s good for you personally doesn’t mean it’s not good for other people.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean it is.’

  That was the problem with Jack in a nutshell. It wasn’t that he was stupid, he was just easily satisfied. He’d cultivated a kind of contentment, a satisfaction with mediocrity. He was happy to plod along, to lead a small life filled with small things.

  I had been living a small life too, but now I was outgrowing it, my life was expanding rapidly. Like the Big Bang.

  ‘All I’m saying is, be careful.’ Jack raised his eyebrows in a knowing way and took a bite of his pasty. I watched with irritation as the flake of pastry fell from his cheek and landed on the plate.

  22

  Jack’s misgivings didn’t deter me. The opposite: they reminded me that it’s important to have vision in life, and if that vision requires a little manipulation or creativity, if you need to operate in the grey area instead of the black (or the white, as the case might be)—so be it. Utilitarianism dictates the greatest good for the many; people don’t realise that invariably involves a fair amount of bad for the few. If you need to upset a small number of people (sometimes as small a number as one) to get something done, it’s not the worst thing. What’s important is the final result:

  A lot of happy old people, one happy mayor, one happy

  Don >>> a single, sad Celia.

  I wrote Celia a letter, informing her about the policy and what it meant for the current committee. I outlined the key provisions and advised that we would require records outlining who had held what position across the previous five-year period. If she herself had been president for that period of time or longer she would, in accordance with the policy, have to stand down.

  Celia responded a week later saying she had received my correspondence and determined it did not apply.

  I filed her letter and drafted another.

  This acknowledged the committee’s efforts in previous years but repeated: the council had a policy. I said I was happy to attend the next committee meeting and explain it further. This would also be an opportune time to check records. Best, I signed, Germaine Johnson.

  One final letter arrived. It said my presence at the next committee meeting, much less my involvement in the selection of said committee constituted a—quote—‘ridiculous waste of time’. If I needed things to do, Celia suggested I start by picking up the rubbish at the train station, there was plenty of that. Or culling stray dogs, she knew of a few mangy mutts (mangy owners too). Regards, the letter concluded, Celia Brown.

  Our correspondence ceased after that.

  In addition to progressing the mayor’s special project, I’d organised to meet with Francine to show her my spreadsheet. She was sceptical when it came to the idea of automating the helpline but according to Professor John Douglas (as per the article), once someone had the facts in front of them, it was much harder to dispute what was really going on.

  Normally we would have met in Francine’s office but they were installing software on her computer, so she came to me. She sat in Eva’s seat, which was vacant at the time.

  When I opened the spreadsheet I took a good bit of delight in hearing Francine gasp. Yes, there was a lot of information. I’d recorded everything.

  I went to the first tab. ‘This is where I input the data. These are all the calls I’ve answered. If you want to know how many Eva’s answered, you could go to the centralised data set and deduct my calls from the total number. You could also deduct my total call time from the total call time for the helpline overall. That might be an interesting thing to do.’

  Interesting and enlightening. But Francine wasn’t jumping at this suggestion. Hopefully, she’d be more proactive about other items.

  I clicked a different tab. ‘This is where I’ve done trend analysis to work out what most of the calls are about. And this’—another tab—‘is where I’ve matched call time with category, so you can tell what categories are most time-intensive to talk about.’

  Francine said, ‘It’s a lot of work you’ve put in, Germaine.’

  ‘I spend all my time working when I’m in the office.’ I looked pointedly at Eva, who’d just walked in holding a Slurpee.

  Francine had to stand up to give her back her seat. ‘Maybe we should talk about this later.’

  But I had only one other major point to make. ‘If we did automate the helpline, we could probably cut back on staff.’

  ‘Automate? Do you mean recorded messages?’ Eva had not been invited to participate in the conversation but was offering her opinion anyway. ‘I hate those things. Lucky I know how to get around them.’

  I’d been holding a pencil to point things out to Francine on the screen. Now I wanted to snap it in two. ‘You can’t get around them, Eva. That’s the whole idea.’

  ‘I can. I know how to bypass all recorded messages and go straight to an operator.’

  ‘How?’ I was humouring her.

  ‘You just press star four times, followed by the number seven.’

  ‘Yeah, okay.’ I made a face at Francine in the hope she’d make a face back but hers stayed straight. I wished the mayor were here.

  ‘Sounds like everyone is doing a great job around here,’ said Francine.

  ‘Seriously.’ Eva swished her plastic cup around. ‘It works for any phone line.’

  The senior citizens club committee meeting was being held on a Tuesday, straight after one of Betsy’s chair aerobics classes. I decided to attend both. The night before I packed my runners and five copies of the policy I’d created (stained with tea to give it an air of age and credibility) into my wheeling briefcase.

  Chair aerobics was full again but I was early enough to get the best position. This pleased Betsy (‘I’m glad you came’) but it did not please James (‘La America’).

  He came and stood in front of me, in front of the chair he used to sit in. ‘You,’ he said.

  ‘Hello, James.’

  He took a different seat but frowned through the whole class. This used some muscles but not the ones we were primarily concerned with.

  After class I changed out of my runners and put on work shoes. As I went to leave the room Betsy said, ‘Wait. I’ll walk with you.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll walk alone.’ I didn’t want to send the wrong message.

  We had to walk quite close anyway, the office being down the hall, but Betsy stayed a step behind.

  Five people attended the committee meeting: me, Celia, Gladys, Betsy and a man in a check shirt called Tom. He was the club secretary. ‘Sorry,’ he said when he saw me. ‘I didn’t know you were coming, there’s only four copies of the agenda.’ He got up to print one more but Celia stopped him.

  ‘We’re out of paper,’ she said.

  ‘There’s some in the—’

  ‘None there either.’

  I had to share with Gladys. She didn’t put her copy in the middle, she kept it more on her side, making it clear I was the outsider.

  First order of business was the minutes from the previous meeting. Tom embarked on a detailed account of a trivia night long past but mercifully Celia cut him off. She said the minutes appeared to be in order and did someone want to ‘move’ them? Betsy moved the minutes and Gladys seconded. Tom made careful notes.

  Second order of business was the treasurer’s report. Betsy began to read. ‘We have fourteen thousand six hundred and fifty-seven do
llars in the bank and another sixty-seven dollars in petty cash. We need to buy some chessboards next month and the Italians have requested a new bocce set.’

  ‘A new bocce set? Pass. There’s nothing wrong with the old one,’ said Celia. She added, ‘Tom, don’t minute that. Write The committee is considering this request.’

  We went through the moving and the seconding rigmarole again and then it was time for other business.

  I raised a hand. ‘I have other business.’

  Celia ignored me. ‘No? Let’s move on, then. Next item on the agenda is use of the communal cupboard in the hall.’

  I talked over the top of her. ‘This is regarding the Council’s Policy on Committees Occupying Council Buildings.’ Not wanting to dwell on specific details, I turned and unzipped the front pocket on my briefcase. I got out the copies I’d brought and handed them around. There was a sufficient number; no one was left out. ‘You should have this already,’ I said. ‘I sent a letter about it.’

  ‘And I sent a letter back,’ said Celia.

  I offered to read the policy aloud but Tom thought it was better if we all read it to ourselves. That was fine with me. I was flexible and accommodating.

  Tom began to read, Gladys began to read and Betsy began to read.

  Celia did not begin to read. She didn’t pick up the policy; she didn’t put her glasses on to see it better; she didn’t cast her eyes in its direction. Instead, she clicked her pen. Then she looked around the room; then she pushed her chair away from the table. ‘It really has nothing to do with us,’ she said.

  ‘It says it’s for “occupants of council buildings”,’ said Tom. ‘We’re occupants of a council building.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of it before.’ Celia clicked the pen again; the sound began to grate.

  ‘It says you can’t be president for more than five years.’

  ‘No one’s ever mentioned that.’

  ‘Sounds like they only just rediscovered the policy,’ said Betsy. ‘Is that right, Germaine?’

  Was this part of her act? I wasn’t sure if her friendliness extended to wilful naivety. But she, and Gladys, who was also nodding, really did seem to believe the policy existed. I took this as a positive reflection on my writing skills.