“The consequences of our public testimony must be obvious to you. Our marriages will be destroyed. Our families will be devastated. We will never recover our lives. But you won't recover your life either. You will be defrocked. Excommunicated. Likely imprisoned. Destroyed.” Mary stared at the priest. “It's MAD. Mutually Assured Destruction.”
“More accurately, Magdalene Assured Destruction,” Marilyn laughed uneasily. “I would like to say a word about abuse because that is the most delicate part of our deal. We are offering ourselves for physical abuse to make sure that all of your needs are met, including the dark ones, but there are obvious limits to what you can do to us. We can't explain or hide too many visible marks nor can we be kept away from our homes without making prior arrangements. Guide yourself by what you think you could get away with if you were inclined to abuse an altar boy and you'll be on the right track. I think we've already shown you that our limits will give you ample latitude to make our lives a joyless hell if you need to do that. None of us enjoy being abused, so we are trusting that you won't be any harsher with us than you need to be.”
Father Luke remembered about the things that the women had demanded as penance. He could not imagine himself being any harsher than they had already been with themselves. But he could think of a few more punishments that would be interesting to inflict on these sinful woman.
As far as he was concerned, the greatest sin of all was to lead another person into a sinful life, especially a righteous person like a parish priest. These women would learn a whole new level of contrition before he was done with them.
Mary finished by saying, “So the bottom line is simple. You use us to satisfy your needs and you stay away from everyone else. And you keep quiet about it. We let you use us while we keep an eye on you. And we keep quiet about it. In that way, we will all protect the church and serve God together.”
The priest was silent. His eyes were locked on the skirts that the three women were still holding bunched up at their waists, baring their lovely legs, crotches, and lower bellies.
“By the way,” Maria added, “the whole confession and penance thing during the last six weeks was our way of introducing you to our services. If we had simply told you what we were offering, you would not have believed us. We had to show you exactly what we had in mind. But, from now on, you don't have to wait for us to come to confession. When you want us, all you have to do is turn on a red light in your office. Get a lamp with a red bulb and put it by the window. We'll each check at least once a day. If you turn on the light, one of us will make an appointment to meet you in this room as soon as possible. We are here to serve.”
“That's pretty much it,” Maria said. “I believe that Mary and Marilyn have things to do but I have some free time so I'll stay for a while and let you entertain yourself if you wish. I haven't been whipped or buggered in the service of God for quite some time. I believe that there is a strap and lubricant in the cabinet.”
While the other two dropped their hems and left the room, Maria turned and bent over the table, offering her naked ass for the priest's use and abuse if he wished.
He did.
And when he was finished, he gave heartfelt thanks to God and gratefully blessed the three sinners in his congregation.
He could see himself serving this parish for many wonderful years.
The Middle Manager
“I like your logic chart,” William said. “I’m going to run it up to Chuck personally when he gets back from Chicago. It’s about time that we made him understand how your division supports the rest of the corporation. We can’t let our CEO keep thinking that all you do is run a help line for our users. You’re central to the whole organization. We can’t let you keep flying under senior management’s radar like you have been.”
Keri flushed with pleasure. She had accomplished more than she hoped. It wasn’t just the CEO who had been underestimating her importance. William wasn’t admitting it but, until he saw her chart, he hadn’t understood how important her Assistance Systems Division was, either. Now that her logic chart had made clear the working relationships between ASD and all the other divisions of IMDAZD Inc., he’d be able to protect her from the coming cutbacks. She might even see an increase in her resources. The Communications Division had been underperforming for some time. If she could convince William to let her absorb them, she’d be the leader of the biggest division in his branch. That would put her in line to inherit his corner office when he retired.
“There’s only one problem, Keri,” William said.
It’s never good when your vice president used the word problem and your name in the same sentence. She oriented toward him like a setter on point. “Yes?”
“One of your techies, Eli Smith, sent me an email yesterday.” William paused to watch her reaction.
A good manager was always proactive. If Eli had sent an email to William, it could not be saying anything that was good for her. She had to start undermining his credibility immediately. If she waited until William told her what the email said, she would be too late. “Eli? He’s a bit of an odd duck. If he wasn’t so productive, I’d have laid him off when we restructured last year.”
“His email accused you of plagiarism. He claimed that he was the one who created the logic chart. That you’d taken his name off and put yours on it.”
“I see,” she replied, keeping her tone neutral.
“I don’t like loose cannons on deck,” he said. “You know that. It’s your job to keep your staff in line. When one of your techs breaks the chain of command and tries to communicate directly with a vice president, it reflects badly on your management skills. Do you understand?”
“Yes, William. I’ll get right on it. Don’t worry. It won’t happen again.”
“You might consider terminating this Smith fellow. If he’s a loose cannon then I’m sure that you won’t have any problem finding cause. His kind always has a history of insubordination.”
“I can do that if you think it’s necessary.”
“No, Keri. You do that if you think is necessary. It’s not up to me to manage your staff. That’s why I have you working under me.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And, Keri?”
“Yes, sir?”
“When you get back to your office, email the logic chart to Miranda. I want her to make a couple of changes before I show it to Chuck.”
“Yes, sir.” She knew perfectly well that the only change that he was going to make was to erase her name and put his own in its place. That was how people became vice presidents.
* * *
Keri stormed into her office then back out onto the floor. “Eli!” she called across the tops of the cubicles, “Get in here now!” She was going to have a reckoning with that miserable twerp. If he didn’t fall to his knees and beg her to save his job, she’d throw him out on his ass. And he better not ask her for a letter of recommendation. When she got finished talking to a few friends over lunch, he’d never work in this city again. She had connections.
As she stormed back into her office, she could hear the cubicle rats whispering loudly to each other: “Where’s Eli?” “Keri wants him ASAP!” “She sounds pissed.” “He better get in there quick.”
They were damned right. She was pissed. And she knew how to crack the whip. Hard. She was a fast-track manager in one of the very few mid-sized manufacturing firms that was surviving the Great Recession with barely a noticeable drop in revenue. That meant that she had power, both inside the company and out.
He was just a miserable little, dime-a-dozen geek who did low-level technical stuff on command. Her command. And now, he’d dared to send an email to a vice president? Her VP? Complaining about her management? He was going to pay a stiff price for that impertinence.
She was still fuming ten minutes later when Eli sauntered through her door as though he didn’t have a care in the world.
“Where were you?” she demanded.
“I had a few lines
of code to clean up,” he replied. “Always working, you know. The syntactical regression coefficients were overweighted toward–”
“Whatever,” she snapped, cutting him off. She didn’t need to hear a lot of geek mumbo-jumbo. She was a big-picture kind of person. The kind of person that was destined for a corner office before she was thirty-five. Maybe CEO before she was forty-five if the right people retired quickly enough. There was a lot of churn at the senior management levels.
She glared at him and said, “Shut the door.”
He did.
“I was informed that you sent an email to William Cox complaining about me.”
“Yeah, I guess. I told him that I was the one who made the logic chart and that you were plagiarizing my work by taking my name off of it. I thought that he ought to know.”
“Do you think that Mr. Cox cares about that? It’s work product from this division and I manage the division. It’ll have whatever name on it that I choose.”
“If you presented it as a division document with no name on it, then it wouldn’t be plagiarism. But when you put your name on it so that you could take personal credit, you were wrong. That’s Ethics One-Oh-One.”
He wasn’t meeting her eyes – he never did – but she could read his insolence in the way he gazed out her window.
“Do you understand that I’m considering letting you go? Terminating you right now?”
“You’d be cutting your own throat if you did that. Your career won’t last a month without me propping you up. Haven’t you figured out at least that much by now?”
“You’re deluded! Insane! You have nothing to do with my career. You’re a nobody. A miserable technician. I got where I am on my own merits and I’m going to be promoted out of here before you figure out how to find your own ass with both hands. You leave and I’ll hire another guy just like you to sit in your chair and pound on your keyboard all day. Guys like you are a dime a dozen. Community colleges churn out new geeks by the hundreds every year.”
He raised an eyebrow at her credenza. He couldn’t make eye contact even for that gesture. “I didn’t come from a community college. Don’t you remember? I have a master’s in computer science from the University of Waterloo.”
“So what? You pound a keyboard all day. That doesn’t make you smart. That just means that you’ve read the damn manuals. It’s all written down for you. Working with people is what takes skill and intuition. No book can teach that. You’re going nowhere because you’ve got no people skills at all. Look at you. You’re what? Almost thirty years old? You’re almost my age and you’re still stuck in a cubicle. I bet you’ve never had a date with a woman in your life.”
At hearing that last insult, he flinched as though he’d been struck. “I do a little more than read manuals and type code,” he said, avoiding mentioning the real face slap at the end of her diatribe. He paused.
She waited while he tried to muddle through his own mind.
Finally, he said, “I ought to quit right now, but I’m going to do you a favor. I’m going on vacation starting today. I’ve been here for five years and I’ve never taken a day off. You owe me about four months of leave but I’m only going to take two. I’ll come back on the Cinco de Mayo and you can tell me if you’re ready to apologize or if you want me to stay out for a couple more months.”
“You haven’t read your contract,” she sneered. “Your vacation doesn’t carry over past the end of the fiscal year. If you didn’t take it, you lose it. We owe you the three weeks that you earned last fiscal year plus a little that you’ve earned in the last couple of months and not a day more.”
“Tell you what,” he countered, “when three weeks are up, you can decide if you want to extend my vacation or terminate me for job abandonment. I’ll take my chances.”
He was grinning as he walked out of her office. The asshole was actually grinning.
Keri was tempted to go directly to Human Resources and have them cut a severance check and be done with him forever. But she felt a twinge of doubt. Maybe there was a reason why he looked so smug.
She’d never earn a corner office if she started acting rashly. In three weeks, she could give him a call and tell him to apologize and get his ass back in his chair. If he stayed away for one day after that, she’d be able to fire him without any hassle at all.
That was spelled out in the standard employment contract in big black letters.
* * *
“Sure, Jim. Sure. I’ll get right on it. No problem.” Keri clicked her Blackberry off and stared at it for a minute. Jim Goodman was wound pretty tight at the best of times. She could understand that, as Vice President of Development, he had a lot on his plate. And he had weight to throw around because his steady stream of enhancements to their product line had been keeping the company afloat throughout this recession. But that call had been over the top, even for him. He had no business yelling at her. She wasn’t responsible for telling him how to design better products.
“Natasha, get Sudeep in here!”
A minute later, she heard her secretary telling the young man to go right in.
“What’s going on out there?” she asked without preamble.
“Nothing,” he replied in obvious puzzlement.
“That’s a problem, don’t you think?”
“I don’t understand.”
“I was just on the phone to Jim Goodman. He says that he needs reports from us and he’s not getting them.”
“Oh.”
“Yesterday, Nancy Crawley in Marketing said that she wasn’t getting reports that she needed, either. What reports are these people talking about?”
“I’m not sure,” Sudeep said. “There’s something about it on the logic chart that Eli made up before he went on vacation. There’s lines showing that we provide reports to Product Development, Marketing, Communications, and the Senior Management Committee. I don’t know what’s in them, though. I think it’s some kind of statistical analysis if I’m reading the labels on the logic chart right.”
“Well find out right now and get those reports delivered.”
“You don’t know what’s in them?”
“That’s not my job, it’s yours.”
“Uh. You’re sure that you can’t tell me anything about them? They come from your office.”
“Well, I’m don’t know anything about them so it’s up to you to find out. Now.”
“You don’t know anything at all?”
“No. Get out there and get them delivered right away or I’ll hire someone who can.”
As soon as the geek was out of her office, she grabbed her copy of the logic chart and began tracing lines. Sudeep was right. One of the lines labeled UAReports went from her division right up to the Senior Management Committee. And it looked like the CEO passed them on to the Board of Directors.
It was bad enough to disappoint the Marketing and Development divisions but failing to deliver to the SMC scared her shitless. They’d flush her career right down the toilet if she they thought that she couldn’t do her job. Those guys were really connected. She wouldn’t get a decent job anywhere on the whole continent if they fired her and then started badmouthing her.
She spent the rest of the afternoon staring at the logic chart and sweating.
* * *
“You’re at home.”
“Yeah. I went down to the Caribbean for a week in March but it wasn’t much fun so I came back. Why are you calling?”
Keri could hear amusement in Eli’s voice and hated him with a passion. He knew damn well why she was calling.
“There’s a couple of technical details that you need to clear up,” she said, forcing herself to speak calmly. “You’ve been providing statistical reports to the other divisions. My technical staff needs to know where those reports are kept.”
“They’re not kept anywhere. They’re generated on the fly. You’ll have to get someone to write the code to generate them again. You know. Just hire another one of those dime-a-doz
en community college dropouts and tell him to start reading manuals and pounding on a keyboard. Isn’t that how you managers get things done?”
“Are you telling me that the reports are generated by computer programs?”
“Bingo!”
“Where are the programs?”
“On a server somewhere. In Texas, I think.”
“Texas?”
“Or maybe in India. I don’t pay much attention to that because it doesn’t matter. You really ought to listen when your staff tells you about client-server architectures, sockets, and remote procedure calls.”
“You mean they’re not on your computer? The one on your desk?”
“Nope. I couldn’t do that. Corporate Security restricts incoming TCP/IP access so I couldn’t run them inside the corporate firewall. I told you about the problem four years ago but you told me to solve it myself. I solved it. I put the programs on remote servers.”
“Well you can just call Sudeep and tell him how to get to those programs.”
“I won’t give him or anyone else access to my account on that server. You wouldn’t authorize the contract when I asked you to rent space outside the company so I had to put them on the server that I use for my personal stuff. I explained all that to you when I did it. I’m not about to give anyone my personal passwords. Security, you know.”
“Those programs are company property.”
“Not really. They’re based on the algorithms that I developed for my master’s thesis. I filed patents on them while I was still in university. My thesis advisor recommended it and I’m glad that I listened to him. But I don’t mind if you want to rewrite the code. We can discuss royalties anytime you want.”
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