Trilemma (21 page)

I flick to the end of the section, put it down, and get out of bed. “I'd better get ready.”

When I emerge from the bathroom, Ben is in the kitchen making toast. I get dressed quickly and sit in front of the mirror.
I hold my face between the palms of my hands and feel the heat of my skin, still flushed with anger. Then I paint on my corporate face, stroke by stroke, tint by tint.

He carries in a plate of buttered toast dabbed with Marmite and places it beside me.

“I don't have time to eat that.”

Ben stands behind me holding the plate. In the mirror I watch his smile slowly fade.

“Right,” and he turns away and goes back to the living room.

“I'll be off then,” I say, taking up my laptop case. “Can you leave the key under the pot when you go?”

Ben looks at me and I look back at him. I don't move. Then he walks over, puts his arms around me and kisses me. I hold myself rigid.

“Good-bye, Lin,” he says, and his hands slip away from my shoulders to let me walk out the door.

And I walk down the path, get in my car, and drive to work.

I don't think about him. There's no point. No point at all.

Helen brings me my schedule for the day. My schedule is always full. I wonder for a moment if there is anything I can get Tom to do instead of me. He seemed happy to write the final summary for the Board. I shouldn't have to do everything myself.

“Did you have a nice weekend?” she asks.

I glance at her and see nothing but friendly interest in her gaze. But I'm sure she's probing, wondering why her workaholic boss got in late for once.

“An old friend was visiting,” I reply. “We took a trip up to Hawke's Bay.”

“Oh, yes?” she says. “What did you think of Napier? All the Art Deco buildings are marvelous, don't you think?”

“We didn't make it that far. But I'm spending Christmas there, so I'll make sure to visit Napier.”

She nods, relieved that I won't miss out on some of the wonders of New Zealand.

“It's great you're getting to see more of New Zealand, Lin. And that you're taking a bit of time off. You know what they say about all work and no play?”

“But I am a dull girl, Helen.”

“Nah! You're so clever and so energetic, no one would think of you as dull. And you're always dressed in nice colors, and your hair is lovely.”

I smile back at her and she nods again and leaves. I follow her out and go into my bathroom to check that my lipstick is still perfect.

In the mirror the immaculate image fades under my gaze. Instead, I see the dull-brown little girl growing up in Mom's house, the grind who always did well at school but was never invited to parties. Never got the cool guy as the boyfriend.

When my cell phone rings, I see my home telephone number displayed. Even though I know there's no point, my pulse starts racing.

“Ben?”

“Lin, I—” but the phone goes dead. Damn. Forgot to connect it to the charger last night.

My anger has ebbed away, leaving me feeling foolish and anxious and regretful. I hurry back up to my office.

Helen looks up from the phone and says, “I've got Mr. Smith on the line for you, Lin.”

I point two fingers in the air and vanish inside, closing the door behind me, and call home from my desk.

But the call switches to voice mail. “This is Lin Mere. I can't answer your call right now so please leave a message after the tone. Beeeep.”

Helen puts her head in the door. “He's been on hold for a couple of minutes, and I think he's getting annoyed.”

“Give me a minute.”

But when I call again the telephone rings and there is no answer.

I sit at my desk and let out a long sigh, and then I pick up the phone again.

“Okay, Helen, you can put Robert through now.”

When I hang up the phone after being yelled at by Robert, the breath of the wolves tickles the back of my neck. I had promised I would give Hera my complete commitment and I had failed. I reach up and try to rub the coldness away. I had relaxed and spent a weekend without any thought for the job.

And now I had to pay the price.

“Tom,” I say calmly when he answers, my voice under control. “Why did you put all those red flags in the Board summary?”

There is silence on the line. “Scott helped me write it. We've got a lot of issues, Lin.”

“Issues, yes, but nothing we can't solve. And I always provide the solutions as well as any problems in the report.”

“But we don't have any solutions.”

“There are always solutions. Let's have a meeting with the team and see what we can flush out.”

I am still fuming when Helen puts her head around the door. “It's the chairman,” she says.

“Linnette,” Stewart Hobb says, “we are extremely concerned about the number of red flags in the report this month. And why was Heke writing the report?”

“I asked Tom to prepare the summary. Obviously, I should have reviewed it before he sent the report out.”

“If there's a major problem with quality, then it's important the Board gets to know about it.”

“There isn't a major problem with quality.”

“That's not an answer, and you know it. I am not happy about this, and I'm not happy that you are misleading us.”

I hold the phone and curse silently. “I am sorry you feel that way, Stewart,” I say in a clipped voice. “I can assure you that we have practical work-arounds for all the issues listed in the report. On the up side, we've managed to get the council to agree to let us work on the esplanade between the hours of midnight and five a.m.”

“That will cost more.”

“Inevitably, but it is the best we're likely to get. Unfortunately, we haven't been able to get the Government to budge on the launch date.”

Hobb snorts. “I told you not to bother trying.”

“We had to give it one last shot,” I reply.

He hangs up. I sigh and then I start going through the issues for which we need to find solutions. My temper is very short today. The thin veneer is wearing through.

Tom introduces the first issue on the list.

“The customer-care package doesn't match the sales process the consultants defined,” he says. “So it looks like there will be more modifications, which will push out the time frames and hit the budget.”

“Why don't we model the processes around what the packages can support?” I suggest.

“But those won't be the
best
processes.”

“
Best
is a luxury we can't afford.”

Tom's lips thin and he looks down at his papers.

“Next?”

Peake introduces the next issue. “Ian wants the customer operations staff to start in the New Year. We didn't budget those costs until March.”

“But March is when we're supposed to go live,” says Ian.

“So that's when we need salespeople.”

“They need to be trained first.”

“How long does it take to train people?”

“More than a couple of days for God's sake!”

“Surely, less than a couple of months!”

“Ian,” I say. “We can't take on any new staff until February. And we can only take on half the number you're asking for.”

“We can't give our customers the best possible service unless we have the full team and spend the full eight weeks on training them on all the processes.”

“We can't afford the extra staff and training to give our customers the
best
possible service. We can only afford a core team, enough for
very good
service, which we'll get by training them to think about the customer and use their initiative to solve problems, rather than be trained in every possible scenario.”

“We wanted the best!”

Get real!
“Sometimes very good is good enough.”

The next issue is the testing of our billing processes.

Peake gives another smile. “We don't have time to run the full suite of tests,” he says. “We need to call in some assistance.”

Fred is looking at his hands again. I know by now this means he disagrees but doesn't want to say so. He is such a very
nice
man.

“Fred?”

“It's not the lack of people working on the system, it's the sheer amount of testing we should do. It's like pregnancy—you can make two women pregnant, but it will still take nine months to get a baby. More people will just get in the way.”

Peake casts a cool eye at Fred, who flushes and looks down.

“We would run the risk of sending out incorrect bills,” says Tom, his face darkening and his mouth tightening as it does when he is angry and frustrated.

“So what? Why would it be so bad if we don't send out any bills for the first month? It's not as if we will have many customers to bill to start with. We could calculate them and type them up by hand, for God's sake.”

“You can't do that.” Tom says.

“It's what they did in the old days,” I reply.

Fred assures Tom he expects the bills will be correct. “Manual methods will be our fallback if there are any major problems with the bill run,” he says.

“But—” says Tom.

“But nothing,” I reply. “These are the tests we must complete before launch and these are the ones we complete if we can. We launch even if we don't finish those tests.”

After the other managers leave, Peake says he wants a quick word. He smiles widely as he stretches out his legs under my desk.

“We can't go on like this,” he says. “I've organized a review.”

“A review of what exactly?”

How can anyone review anything at all at the moment when everything is moving so fast that we have been giving verbal updates instead of written reports?

“I thought an assessment of Hera's maturity.”

I'm angry with him, but I don't show it, yet. We're flat out launching a smart new business in the record-breaking time of six months, but we're going to be measured on how well documented our processes are and how consistently we follow them?

“Hera is a very new company,” I say. “It's too early to expect us to be mature.”

He flashes another smile. “Never too early to start improving,” he replies. “We don't want to be considered immature.”

“The opposite of mature isn't necessarily immature. We need to be young, fresh, agile, innovative.”

“I've cleared it with Stewart.”

“Cancel it,” I say, my composure cracking.

Peake's face stills.

“I'm not suffering another infestation of consultants. The distraction could be fatal. We're too busy right now.”

His smile returns. “I'll tell Stewart you're refusing to accept a review.”

I paste my inscrutable face back together. “I will reconsider your proposal after the launch.”

After he is gone, I stand up and rub my neck and gaze out the window. Wellington's waterfront glistens in the sun. White sails scud across the water and pink bodies lie in the park by the lagoon at the edge of the sea. I wish I were out there.

The job no longer makes me feel as thrilled as the night when Robert told me it was mine. The challenges keep mounting, and I don't get to feel proud when I find solutions to tough problems. There's no one to say, “Well done, Lin.” The Board couldn't give a rap about how their chief executive
feels
. I'm not supposed to have feelings, just objectives and measurements and an eye to my bonus.

But I do have feelings.

The days pass and Ben doesn't call.