GABRIELLA
“Ineed one hundred copies of this.” Antonia, one of the salespeople at my new office, laid a piece of paper on my desk, followed by another. “And one hundred copies of this. Then I’ll need them stapled and left on my desk before the end of the day.”
I looked down at the two pieces of paper. They looked like some sort of sales pitch for the cleaning products we sold via telemarketing, door-to-door sales, and call-ins from outdated TV programs targeting citizens over the age of sixty. The papers had huge font on them with no formatting and basically just showed a breakdown of the product packages from basic to elite.
Antonia probably had a presentation set up somewhere.
“No problem,” I said. “Do you need anything else?”
“If I did, I’d have asked.”
I sighed. “Charming.”
“Pardon?”
I stared up at her. I’d been working this job for the past month. It was the only place hiring professional assistants that didn’t have a three to four week hiring period. I was hired during my first interview and asked to start the following day. After the shit storm Jake had put me through, I’d been desperate for distraction, and a new job fit the bill. It paid an average salary, but nothing close to the kind of money Jake had been paying me. I’d managed to borrow one of my parents’ cars to get to and from the office and was working on saving some money to replace my old car.
Slowly but surely, I was gaining ground and getting my life back to normal.
But this job sucked.
The people who worked here were a bunch of entitled, desperate, unethical salesmen who didn’t care that the products they pushed were terrible for the environment and plenty of demographics like pregnant women, children, seniors, cats and dogs, and people with asthma, to name a few. The chemicals were strong and terrible for the environment but masked by what the sales staff gently referred to as “the refreshing, clean scent of eucalyptus and lime.” Sure, it smelled good, but it was garbage.
Toxic garbage, at that.
I needed to get out of here, and I needed to do it quickly. I had interviews lined up, but nothing was happening fast enough.
“Nothing, Antonia. I’ll have your copies done by the end of the day.”
Antonia gave me a curt nod before turning on her comfort-plus heels and stalking off, her hips swaying with every step. She was a severe-looking woman with an ass the size of her ego and constantly overlined lips that made her look like she was always making a duck face. Rumor around the office had it that she’d slept with almost every man in the building. How that was possible was beyond me, but I supposed some men—or most men—were curious what kind of crazy she brought to the bedroom.
On a scale from one to ten, I was sure she’d be a ten.
Or a forty-seven.
It didn’t matter. Nothing at this place did. It was strictly temporary. I hadn’t bothered trying to make friends or get chummy with any of the managers. I came in, assisted the sales staff, and went home at the end of the day. Simple. Clean. No blurred ethical lines or sexy bosses that tempted me to abandon all my integrity and fuck them in their office.
Thank goodness.
The floor manager here was balding, thin, and had a moustache straight out of the seventies perched on his upper lip that never moved when he talked. It was kind of unnerving. His name was Merl. He was a nice enough guy but hands down the most boring person to get caught in the break room with over a cup of coffee.
He’d talked my ear off last week about pea harvesting. He used to live on a farm in Quebec, Canada, where he and his father and his brothers harvested peas. He knew everything there was to know about weather and agriculture, and even after hours upon hours of him telling me about it, I hadn’t retained a single fact about either.
That washow boring he was.
But boring was better than a bully, so I’d take it.
At four o’clock I made Antonia’s copies for her, stapled them as she requested, and left them neatly stacked on her desk with a sticky note on them with a passive aggressive happy face on it. Then I popped into Merl’s office to ask if I could cut out early tonight to meet a friend for happy hour.
He looked up from his work. I couldn’t see his lips under his moustache, but by the crinkles in the corners of his eyes, I knew he was smiling. “No problem, Gabi. Have a good evening and see you tomorrow morning.”
“Thanks, Merl.”
With that, I left the office, not dillydallying any longer for any of the sales staff to see that I was available to make more copies or calls for them. This job was dryer than pea harvesting.
I drove my dad’s Mercedes across the city to my old stomping grounds, about ten blocks away from Jake’s office tower, and parked in a paid lot near the restaurant where I was meeting Donna. I hadn’t seen her in weeks—actually, I hadn’t seen her in a month, since I quit. Our schedules hadn’t lined up and she’d had her hands full with family visiting her from out of town. Now that she was finally freed up, we were both desperate to sit down together and make up for lost time.
I missed my friend.