2 Executive Retention Page 5

  My best friend insisted that I come in. "I have to write you a check for these. I ought to give you a bonus for the delivery. Jimmy is beyond excited about the grandparents coming. He has been such a handful. There is no way I'll have time to get everything done before they get here!"

  "You can write me a check later," I offered, but she was already yanking the desk drawers open.

  "Do you want some tea? We can open that box you brought me and finish it!"

  It was a very tasty suggestion, but I did have my own box in the car. "That would be bad of us."

  She grinned. "Just one or two."

  I opened the box while she wrote out the check. I glanced at the amount when she handed it to me to make sure she hadn't paid for the box I had gotten her as a gift. The check still had her maiden name, Wilson, on it. "Didn't you get new checks after you got married? You've been married, what, six years now?"

  "Five." She grinned. "I ran out of our usual ones a few months ago, and I had to do bills, so I used my old ones." She shrugged. "Turns out no one ever noticed or complained about the ones with my old name so I decided to use them up. They have the same account number as the new checks. I guess that's all they look at when processing them."

  "Don't they mind that your signature is "Daniels" and the check has "Wilson" typed at the top?"

  She shook her head and grabbed a candy. "I guess not. When we got married I took my marriage license into the bank. They changed my name on the account and added Robert's name. I have two old boxes of checks, and I've been using them for, oh, probably six months now. No one has said boo."

  She waved the candies, tempting me. "Here, have another. I'll just get fat if I eat all these, and you know I'll finish them before Robert gets home at this rate."

  I declined by putting a hand out to ward her off. I had to close my eyes to have enough will power. "No! I have a box in the car!"

  "Let's have tea. Hot cocoa would be too much, don't you think?" She started for the cupboard.

  "No, no, I'll just savor the taste of the chocolate." I grabbed one more, gave her a quick hug and departed.

  I managed to drop off Brenda's box and get all the way home before eating two more of the things from my own box.

  Chapter 9

  My lab duties started early the next morning. I was used to installing software but it would take some time for me to figure out all the nuances. To top off my challenges, Acetel didn't have the exact class of servers for one of the tests, although that hadn't bothered Jacques. I wasn't sure if he intended to tell the customer, but I typed the report and made a special note of the servers I was going to use.

  I hadn't been working more than fifteen minutes when someone behind another row of equipment let out a belch that the very loud machines did nothing to mask. I was a little worried that whoever had burped had blown himself up.

  "Hello?" I called out.

  A furry face poked out from behind a wall of computer racks. "Hey, hey." The man stroked his dark, shaggy beard while he studied me, the new specimen. "I'm Bill. You new?"

  "Sedona O'Hala." I returned his frank gaze. Like most engineers, he hadn't taken any special care with his attire; his denim shirt was wrinkled and not tucked in. Unlike most engineers, his pants looked as though they had been on fire.

  "What in the world happened to your pants?" They weren't smoking, but I breathed deep just to make sure the lab wasn't actively burning.

  He looked down at the spot where the entire lower half of his pant leg was black. There was even a hole in the center of the burn. "Oh that!" He slapped the pant leg as though putting flames out. "Something happened one day in the dryer. Not sure what. Everything was fine until I smelled smoke and darned if these weren't smoldering when I pulled them out."

  My eyes bulged in disbelief. "Your dryer caught on fire?"

  He shrugged. "Don't know, must have been temporary. I've been using it since and rarely smell smoke. It might be the wiring in the house I'm in. Kind of old. Breakers flip now and again. Not sure if that sparked something or what."

  "Oh." I made a mental note not to attend any house parties in his neighborhood.

  "Which ones did you get?" he asked.

  I assumed he meant projects, so I handed him the folders. He looked them over carefully and chuckled a couple of times. "This power supply problem. Can you imagine? They sell the customer two power supplies in case one fails, but if you unplug one, the whole machine shuts off, even with the other one still working. I can't believe Jacques is giving you this. We're not supposed to take any more cases relating to Kronology."

  "We're not? How did I get so lucky?" Jacques couldn't hate me; he didn't even know me yet.

  Bill shrugged. "Oh, Jacques has some sort of hero complex. He thinks he can deliver where other managers failed. He's also friends with one of the guys that works at Kronology."

  "Oh...dear."

  "There really isn't much hope," Bill confided. "We get lots of customers asking us to be the liaison to Kronology because the poor suckers have tried everything and can't get the Kronology junk to work. The problem is, we can't help them because Kronology equipment is so bad. We end up having trouble getting paid because we can't get Kronology to deliver fixes. Arnold, my boss, won't touch a Kronology case. It makes the bottom line look bad. Arnold is a numbers man. He doesn't believe in taking on high odds."

  Having met Arnold with his smudged glasses, I could believe it. He probably carried a calculator inside his pocket protector. "If Jacques has such a good friend there, why can't he get this buddy of his to pressure Kronology to fix the stuff?"

  "Those guys couldn't code "hello world" without screwing it up. Summer interns have better programming skills than most Kronology engineers." Bill shrugged. "That's why I work for Arnold. He tends to assign work that can be fixed and that makes me look good!" He let loose a deep laugh. It echoed worse than Becky's boom. If the two of them ever laughed at the same time, they would either cancel each other out or take down the whole building.

  "So what customers are you working with?" I prepared to memorize his answer and compare it to Huntington's list.

  He looked up from the file and set it down before rubbing his rather large belly. In a few years when his hair went white, he would make a nice Santa Claus--if he got rid of the burned pants. "Oh, I work with them all, the banks, the local grocery store, whats-it-called, Bag'm Up, whatever. I've been in this industry so long, I'll work on most anything. Twenty years I've been in the computer industry."

  "Wow, that's a long time." Only one specific name; not good enough.

  "Yeah, and I made it through yet another layoff." He shook his bushy head sorrowfully. "I was sure glad they did the bulk of them in San Jose. There aren't too many jobs in Colorado, and I don't want to move."

  I understood completely. The mountains had a way of working themselves into your heart. "When I left Strandfrost, I was surprised that there was even another decent-sized company in Denton."

  Before I could turn the conversation back to his customers, he snapped his fingers. "Hey, I have one of those Kronology servers you need for that power supply testing. I sure don't need it anymore." He shuffled away still talking. "Over here, I think." He disappeared behind his row of equipment. The racks of computer equipment stopped just short of the ceiling and there were rows upon rows of the stuff. He could probably disappear for days before showing back up.

  I kept on working, but sure enough, a few minutes later he lugged back a tower unit on wheels. "Ought to be almost exactly what the doctor ordered. We have it on loan from the Kronology office in Colorado Springs. Most of the companies lend out a bunch of equipment as long as we email them a copy of any test results. That way they can tell their customers their stuff works, but they don't have to test every single configuration."

  "How convenient. Acetel doesn't have to spend as much money on equipment then. Do you have any of these HP or Dell boxes for my other test?" Even though neither of the systems had been on the list
of equipment owned by Acetel, I knew how things got buried and lost in labs.

  He scratched his large belly thoughtfully and wandered away again. I started setting up the power supply test and sent an email to Kronology to let them know about the problem and introduce myself. I had most of the equipment set up before Bill reappeared lugging a storage unit from HP.

  "I don't know if this will really work with the Dell unit."

  Digging in and having to find out if mixed equipment would work was why most computer companies didn't offer any support for competitor products. "Thanks. I appreciate the help."

  I was almost finished with the first setup when my manager, Jacques, came into the lab. He wanted to talk about my career.

  What followed was probably the most ridiculous meeting of my life. The guy had no less than fourteen computer survey forms for me to fill out. He had printed a copy of the directions. The first form involved hobbies, favorite places to eat and my idea of a great reward for work well done. How was I going to explain that a Mercedes was my top item? People in my position didn't command rewards with that kind of price tag.

  "Do you think you can enter the information for these surveys by the end of the day? Each employee needs a performance plan so that I have something to grade against," he explained. "It will help me determine how much you've accomplished so that I can accurately assess the raise you deserve."

  "The end of the day?" There was a huge list of something called, "core competencies" and a lot of other spaghetti words that managers liked to hide behind. If I didn't guess right when filling out responses to, "culture of excellence, being a customer advocate, and performing above the curve," Jacques would probably use it as an excuse to not give me a raise. From the one short example, it appeared that core competencies meant I had to be skilled in everything from fixing the copier to managing the company during flood, tornadoes and debilitating illnesses. "I'll work on it as soon as I get the first test in the lab running."

  Blend, I told myself as I left. Blend.

  So much for my dreams of a nice quiet job with lab work. So much for my dreams of going home on time.

  It took me the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon to get my first test going. I then made good progress on Jacques' survey, but at three o'clock, we had an "all hands on deck," meeting because the CEO, A.J. Chambers, was in town to give an update.

  The meeting room had a long table at the front end with a half podium on top. The room wasn't big enough to need a microphone, but it really wasn't large enough for the forty or so employees either. Several people were standing or crowded in along the walls.

  A.J. wasn't a particularly tall man, but he wore a suit and tie while the rest of us were much more casual. For a CEO, he was soft-spoken and less forceful than I would have expected. Underneath the polish, there might have been a geek hiding; a guy that couldn't wait to see the next new cool gadget.

  He gave a long-winded speech about how things were looking up for the industry and for Acetel in particular. When he was done, the CFO, Pete Saget, spoke. Where A.J. was bald, Pete had a full head of thick blond hair and the brash charm of a college quarterback. He showed us the earnings report and talked about how the next few quarters were going to be terrific. With the ease of a guy used to ignoring big bad defensive linemen, he managed to leave out the words "layoff" and "earnings miss" the entire speech.

  I tried hard to pay attention to every little detail because I wouldn't be working here if the board didn't have some questions about how the company was losing so much money, but as far as I could tell most of the loss seemed to be due to the layoff itself. It looked to me like Acetel was writing off several million dollars. With that large of a deduction, it didn't leave much to steal.

  It didn't seem as though tons of money were being wasted on equipment orders or perks. In fact, Bill had mentioned that the computer from Kronology hadn't even required payment by Acetel; a pretty slick deal if you could get companies to agree to lend equipment in return for shared results.

  Pete meandered into a pep talk. "I know that times like these can be depressing when your friends are losing their jobs." He leaned forward on the table with the eagerness of a guy that wanted to win and take his team with him. "At times like these, the only way to succeed is to drive harder, to give work your all and not think about anything else. That's what I do. It's how I succeeded."

  His concern was delivered sincerely and would have been overwhelmingly persuasive had he left out the self-serving part about working harder. While silence still reigned, I slanted my eyes around the room, but didn't know anyone well enough to gauge their reactions. No one looked ready to take up a war chant and follow him over a cliff. The general reaction seemed to be eyeballs studying the carpet.

  Pete closed by inviting us to his vacation home at Twin Lakes for a combined Thanksgiving and Christmas party later in the month. "We need to come together as a team, and this is my way of letting you know that you are the team. It's a chance for the company to say thank you."

  Hmm. All in all the meeting was a bit of a disappointment, but I suppose it would be too much to hope that management would blatantly stand up publicly and tell me why money was disappearing. If they knew, they wouldn't have hired Huntington.

  The crowd surged through the doors, but I hung back long enough to hear Bill and a couple of the other lab technicians grumbling. I wandered closer.

  Bill introduced me to Jacob Mohan and Vi Wu, but then continued with his earlier complaint. "Did you notice that neither A.J. nor Pete bothered to mention the management retention rewards?"

  "What retention rewards?" I asked, as I followed them back to the lab.

  Bill pulled on his shaggy beard and waved his arms around. "After the layoffs, A.J. claimed certain individuals might leave because the company situation could be considered 'risky.' He talked the stinking board into sending them a win--management got retention packages to the tune of ten percent of their salary if they agreed to stay at least a year."

  "What? These guys got extra money for having to lay people off? How did they justify giving a bonus to managers that mismanaged themselves into a layoff situation in the first place?"

  "When you're in charge, you don't have to justify anything! And then Pete sits and tries to tell us we're part of the team." Bill snorted. "Not the part that got the bonus!"

  Jacob muttered, "And they voted us right out of a profit sharing check too."

  Bill waved his arms some more and made a kicking motion towards one of the servers. He looked like an out of control Santa Claus that was having trouble getting the elves to make toys properly. "When you lay people off, that eats up all the profits! Why can't they give all of us a reward for doing the exact same work we were doing before the layoffs?"

  I backpedaled out of the lab. It was time to call Huntington and leave him a message with an update. He needed to know about the computers being loaned to Acetel free of charge. Maybe someone was taking money out of the coffers and pretending to pay for the free loaners. I also thought he should know about the managers getting a retention bonus. If Huntington could figure out who was desperate enough to ask for a bonus during layoffs, it might turn out that the same person was slimy enough to bilk the company in other areas.

  I called from behind the closed door of my office. Huntington was at his condo, and while he listened to my theories, he wasn't all that excited.

  "It isn't illegal or even unusual to give out retention bonuses," he said. "It happens all the time."

  "Well, it doesn't make it right, and what if it is part of a master plan to milk the company? Granting yourself a bonus during hard times doesn't seem all that moral."

  "Sedona, you are the only person on this earth that would try to connect those two things," he bellowed in my innocent ear. "We are looking for something illegal here. Ethical or moral decisions made by the company don't enter into this. Even if it turns out that the same guy stealing from the company initiated the retention bonus, the
only activity that is illegal is stealing."

  "I know that! What I'm trying to tell you is that someone unethical in a gray area might not draw the line at flat out stealing."

  "We can't investigate every single greedy person in the company! We'd be working on this case for years."

  He had a point. "All right. But can you check with your accounting buddy on the computer loans to find out if equipment expense reports may have been padded?"

  He grunted. I took that as a yes.

  It was now almost six, and I had more than half of Jacques' survey to complete. I didn't want to think about my one-year, three-year and five-year goals. And why did the man need to know what I wanted said about me at my funeral? What kind of "career goal survey" asked that?

  It only made sense if Jacques knew I worked for Huntington.

  Five questions in, and I was really stumped. "How would you feel if your spouse remarried after your death?"

  "Dead," I said to the wall. "I'd feel dead. Whether I was married or not."

  Grimly determined, I worked at the report for another hour, when, to my blessed relief, the computer connection to the main server hung. "Thank God." I never worked through computer hangs. It provided the perfect excuse for quitting. Jacques could berate me endlessly, but it was too good an excuse to pass up.

  Out of habit, I did reboot the machine, but saw with great happiness that the laptop still couldn't find the server. "Too bad."

  I grabbed my blue backpack without bothering to stuff any work into it. The hall lights had already been dimmed. There wasn't another soul around. So much for motivating the troops. All the pep talks in the world didn't make people want to work their butts off if the reward was going to be a short walk to the door.

  I opened the stairwell door, happy to be headed home. Because the lights were off, I didn't notice the arm until it grabbed mine.

  "Aaa--" Before I could do more than open my mouth to scream, I was dragged forward and enveloped, face-first, in a huge bear hug.