Restlessness had dogged me the past several months. I kept waiting for it to abate, for something to occur that required my full focus. But nothing had happened either professionally or personally. I just continued to drift along, waiting for . . . what, exactly?
Your life to begin?
Jenna knocked twice and walked in. Why she bothered to knock escaped me; there was no pause between the knock and her entrance. One time when I asked her why she knocked first, she said her Midwestern upbringing was too ingrained to just barge in. I warned her that someday she might barge in and find me in a delicate situation. She’d retorted that if I actually took the time to do something bad, raunchy or out of character, she deserved to be the first person to witness it.
“You rang, sir?”
Sir. Jenna refused to call me Brady. It was “sir,” or “boss” or “Mr. Lund.” She’d been my admin for two years and I spent more time with her than anyone else in my life. When I was newly minted in my position as CFO, I’d equated her using my first name as a sign of our professional intimacy, whereas she saw using it as a sign of disrespect since she had fifteen years on me age-wise.
“Yes. Forgive my ignorance, but how closely do you work with the office temps—the floaters?”
She sat in the high-back leather chair across from my desk. “Not often. If you’ve got a large presentation that requires assembling reams of paperwork, I’ll ask for assistance. But they’re usually spread so thin down there it’s just easier to get Patrice to help out.”
Patrice. She was my admin’s secretary, which gave Patrice the false impression that she was somehow my undersecretary. And Patrice had made no bones about how much she’d like to be under me.
“Why do you ask?”
Because there’s this prim blonde I’m hot for who intrigues the hell out of me. “I ended up down on the sixth floor and publicly showed my ignorance about what the term floater means as well as what the office temp job entails.”
Jenna’s eyes widened. “I imagine that went over well with their department.”
“Not so much.”
“What were you doing down by Personnel? Are you looking for a new secretary, boss?”
“I’ll get you any secretary you want if you’ll send Patrice packing,” I said dryly.
“No deal. She’s still afraid of me. Once she loses that fear, she’ll slack off and I’ll replace her.”
“So that’s how it works with you and your minion. I wondered.”
“Back to the floaters. Did you find them lazing about or something?”
“No. And can’t someone come up with a better term for their department than floaters?”
“If you want to be technical, sir, in the past that group of employees used to be called the ‘secretarial pool.’ They’re permanent office workers who temporarily float to any department where additional help is needed, hence the term floaters.”
“I still don’t like it. Anyway . . . am I really that out of touch with this company that I didn’t know about the existence of an entire group of employees?”
“First of all, boss, the number of employees working for Lund Industries in the Twin Cities is over five thousand—fifteen hundred employees work in this building alone. You don’t know the minutiae of the dockworkers’ jobs any more than you do the floaters in the office temp department. That doesn’t make you out of touch. It makes the managers in those departments effective, because they’re not coming to you with personnel problems.”
“You should’ve gone into diplomacy.”
“It’s my job to remind you of yours—you cannot do it all and know it all, sir, though you are determined to try.” She smirked. “There are some people in this company who claim the floating crew of office workers concept is outdated and they’re proposing Lund do away with that department altogether and outsource temporary help when needed.”
“From your tone, I take it you don’t agree?”
Jenna pointed at my computer. “We have an IT department. They go to whatever department they’re needed in. I don’t see how the office temps are any different. Like with IT, it’s important to keep hiring new secretarial workers because they’re trained with the most recent technology.”
“You’ve given this more than just a passing thought.”
She shrugged. “My executive assistant title means ‘secretary with more responsibilities at a higher wage,’ so the office workers, floaters, secretaries—whatever you prefer to call them—are my sisters in arms. I get defensive when their abilities or importance is questioned.”