She Gave a Single Dad the Worst Office in the Building — He Turned It Into the Busiest Room
Chapter 6
Theme:
Font Size:
24px
"I wasn't aware we'd turned the basement into a club for employees with nothing to do," Victoria said.She had come down intending something milder. She would say that later, privately, and it was true. But the room was warm and crowded, and had a kind of energy that she recognized from a place she did not want to be reminded of—which was the floor of the operations center at her father's old company before the family sold it and bought this one. And the recognition made her say the worst version of what she had planned.Graham picked up two pages from the end of the table and held them out to her. "This is everything that's been closed in here since the first of the month. Dates, owners, confirmations."Victoria did not take the pages. "Do you think a few sheets of paper make you important?""No," he said, "but they might get clients what they already paid for."It landed badly, and it landed in front of seven people, and it would have landed better if he had said it with any heat at all; he said it the way a man reads a serial number.Victoria held his eyes for three seconds, took the pages after all, folded them once, and said that she wanted a full report on her desk Monday: that nothing happening in this room was an approved process, and that no session held down here was to interfere with any employee's primary responsibilities."Understood," Graham said."I don't think you do."She was halfway down the corridor when she heard the door open behind her, and the conversation about the lease renewal pick up where it had stopped. And that, more than anything said inside the room, was what she carried back up to the 28th floor.The report she received Monday was 11 pages; she read six of them.On Wednesday, an email arrived from the senior vice president of operations at Northbridge Facilities Group, which paid Weatherington $8.4 million a year to manage 91 properties, and which had sent a letter in February indicating it was evaluating alternatives. The email was two sentences long: it asked to meet the group that was currently coordinating the open items on the Northbridge account, in whatever room that group used.Russell Keen arrived on a Tuesday at 9:00 in the morning—a heavy man in his late 50s who had spent 22 years in facilities before he ever saw an executive floor. There was a presentation ready for him on 28: 41 slides, catering from the place on Wacker. He stood in the lobby with his coat over his arm and said he would rather see the people doing the work. And then he said it again more pleasantly when Blair tried to walk him toward the elevator bank.