His Girl Monday To Friday. Linda Miles

sight.’

      Charles went off for a dinner date at nine. Barbara always knew the names of Charles’s dates—they were scrawled on the pages of his desk diary in his bold, careless hand, and sometimes crossed out, too, with the same careless hand. Tonight was Karina. As always, Barbara had to force herself not to form a mental image of the woman. She’d only end up tormenting herself, picturing the beautiful image in Charles’s arms.

      As soon as Charles was out of the office Barbara whipped out her materials. Her desk was crowded with the word processor, letter trays, stationery drawers, Rolodex and other paraphernalia of secretarial existence—there was really no place to work. Luckily an office with plenty of work space had just been vacated. Charles had his own monumental desk, of course, and he also had a table for smaller meetings.

      The table, in Barbara’s opinion, was just what the doctor ordered for this ailing project. She went into Charles’s office, spread out her files and surveyed them glumly.

      The problem was that she was faced with not just two but three philosophies of business, the world and life.

      The philosophy of the Mallory Corporation was that ten thousand years of human evolution had been heading, with many a false turn and blind alley, for the last, greatest and most glorious monument to the human spirit—the computer. Hardware was lovely and software was lovelier and there was no problem that could not be solved by a combination of the two. The materials for previous bids dazzled the reader with glossy coloured pages, bursting with tables and pie charts and imaginative templates, and apparently they’d been persuasive: Barbara gathered that the bids had been successful.

      The philosophy of Norman Barrett, seventy-two-year-old founder of the Barnett Corporation, was that a manual typewriter and a competent typist were all that any business really required to function efficiently. He was suspicious of gimmicks; he was suspicious of three-colour printing and glossy paper because the bottom line was that at the end of the day he was the one who’d be footing the bill for all that unnecessary folderol.

      The philosophy of the head of services at Barrett was in its way more progressive. The HOS did not want to go back to the Stone Age; up-to-date technology was, in his view, essential to the competitiveness of a business. The HOS, however, believed that a software package should be capable of performing complex tasks, while at the same time removing all scope for initiative from the support staff actually using it.

      Secretaries should be like trains, speeding along predefined tracks of templates and macros and strictly forbidden to venture cross-country, exploring all the ingenious inventions of the Mallory whizkids.

      On the other hand, a bid should make clear that the ingenious inventions would be available to the select small number of personnel who could be trusted with them. It should also be visually appealing as a matter of pure professionalism. A bid was supposed to look impressive—it was the contractor’s chance to show off its stuff, and if it didn’t dazzle it couldn’t be worth much.

      Barbara contemplated this intractable problem. It had been stewing away in her mind all afternoon, but it still looked intractable. Well, maybe she should let it percolate a little more.

      She strolled over to Charles’s chair, sat down and kicked off. Around and around...

      Barbara believed firmly that the harder a problem was the less point there was in trying to force through a solution. You had to give it time to come to you. For two hours she revolved-sometimes clockwise, sometimes counterclockwise—giving a solution the chance to come to her.

      Of course, sometimes before the solution comes to you another problem turns up instead.

      At eleven she heard voices in the corridor outside. ‘Sorry to drag you back,’ said Charles. There are a couple of things I need to look at.’

      ‘That’s all right,’ said a woman’s voice. ‘I’d like to see your office.’

      ‘Well, there’s not much to see,’ said Charles, mildly amused.

      That’s what you think, thought Barbara. She seemed to have been turned to stone.

      ‘Actually, I think I’ll just visit the ladies’ first,’ said the woman.

      ‘It’s just around the corner,’ said Charles. ‘First right, then left, then just across by the service lift—’

      ‘You can’t miss it,’ the woman said, laughing. ‘I might have been able to follow all that if we hadn’t finished the second bottle, Charles, but now I’m not even going to try. At least see me as far as first right.’

      Charles laughed. ‘What’s it worth to you?’

      ‘What did you have in mind?’

      Charles laughed again. ‘That would be telling. Come on, it’s this way.’

      Barbara leapt to her feet. She darted to the table and hastily stacked up her materials. She couldn’t risk leaving the room, but where could she go? The desk was open to the front—she couldn’t hide there. She looked around wildly. There was a closet where Charles kept a spare suit, she remembered, but none of the wall panels had knobs, even when they were actually doors. You were just supposed to know which panel to press.