She Gave a Single Dad the Worst Office in the Building — He Turned It Into the Busiest Room
Chapter 7
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Graham had four hours' notice. He used it to call the account manager for Northbridge, the regional engineering lead, and a contract control analyst named Phil Sutter who had been avoiding the entire account for a month. And he told each of them the same thing: bring the 17 open requests; bring whatever you know; and do not bring anything you would be unwilling to say in front of the client.Then he borrowed two more chairs.The session ran two hours and ten minutes, and Graham spoke for perhaps 12 of them. He did not negotiate: he had no authority to negotiate, and he said so at the start, which Keen would mention later as the first thing that made him believe anything else he heard. He asked the engineering lead to walk through what had actually happened on each of the 17 requests, and then he asked Phil Sutter the question nobody had asked in five months: which was why 11 of those requests had never appeared in the routing queue at all.It took Phil most of an hour to find it, with his laptop open on the long table and the whiteboard filling up behind him: Northbridge had been onboarded under a master services agreement in 2019, and then added 43 properties in 2022 under a site-level amendment. The work order system identified properties by the master contract number; the vendor dispatch system, which had been bought from a different company and bolted on during the integration, identified them by site code. Requests entered at the property level under the amendment carried a site code with no master number, and the routing rules dropped them into an exceptions bucket that one person had been clearing manually until that person left in August and was not replaced.Keen listened to all of it without changing expression. Then he said, "Five months, and nobody in this building knew.""Somebody knew," Graham said. "They just didn't know anyone to tell."They built a plan on the whiteboard with 11 line items, each one carrying a name and a date, and Keen took a photograph of it with his phone. He did not sign a renewal: he said he would hold the termination process for 30 days and judge the company by whether the dates on that board turned out to be real.And on his way to the elevator, he asked Graham what the sign on the door was about."It's a long story," Graham said."It usually is."Blair was in Victoria's office before lunch. She did not accuse Graham of anything: she described a situation, which was her particular talent. A strategic account with a termination letter on file had been handled in an unapproved space by an employee two levels below the executive team, without the chief executive present. And if that account was lost, the narrative would be very difficult to control. She used the word "narrative" twice.Victoria called Graham up at 4:00 to the executive conference room, with the door open and three people within earshot in the corridor.