Pounding the Pavement Read Online Free PDF Page B

“Ummm … nope”
    “Oh.” He looks utterly bewildered. “Jake usually does all the transfers for us.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “Well, do you know anyone who could do it for me, then?”
    “I don’t know,” I glance inconspicuously at the taped-up list of phone extensions under my elbow. The first name reads Abbott, James.
    “Have you asked James Abbott?”
    The guy blinks at me.
    “I
am
Jim Abbott.”
    “Oh, well, then I’m sorry. I guess I can’t really help out.”
    The phone rings, cutting him off before he can respond. I gladly reach for the receiver on my desk, only to find the lights aren’t flashing. The ringing is coming from my bag under the desk.
    For a split second I consider acting a true professional and ignoring my personal cell phone calls. But what if it’s another job interview? I decide to take my chances.
    “Pardon me,” I say, holding out an obnoxious finger to silence him. With my other hand I reach under my desk to grab my phone. Jim Abbott skulks off reluctantly to try his luck with the next assistant down the line.
    “Hello?” I say into the cell.
    “Hi, it’s Laurie. I just got fired. Wanna do dinner?”
    Laurie can be flippant about getting fired because she is
always
getting fired, even before it was fashionable. Her particular situation, however, is quite rare. She hasn’t lost a string of jobs, or even two jobs for that matter. She just keeps getting fired from the same job, over and over again. For three years now she has worked for a megalomaniacal film producer whose violent temper tantrums have achieved an almost legendary status. During his fits, he is likely to flip over his desk and hurl large objects at his television set. And after his outbursts have subsided, if Laurie can’t get the office back up and running within fifteen minutes, she gets fired. She got fired last week because her boss dealt the fax machine a crushing blow, and by mid-afternoon she still couldn’t get the damn thing to print incoming memos properly. She was kicked out of the office sometime around 4 p.m. By 9 a.m. the following morning, another assistant called to tell her it was safe to come back. So she did. She always does.
    “Yeah, dinner’s fine,” I say. “Dancing Burrito?”
    “Sure. Six p.m. happy hour?”
    “Perfect. See ya then.”
    I hang up the phone. Two seconds later, a sudden, sharp trill on my desk makes the hairs on the back of my neck bristle. A loud, deep voice then crawls through the mesh of the phone deck.
    “Sarah?”
    I freeze. I’ve never mastered the art of speakerphone parlance. It is one thing to deal with a disembodied voice coming from a tangible phone receiver. Quite another when the voice is an eerie, invisible hiss coming from nowhere in particular.
    “Uh, yeah?” I pitch forward and yell.
    “This is Gregory.”
    “Oh!” I yell back. “Oh, nice to meet you!” A positively stupid thing to say to your phone deck.
    “Thanks again for coming in today,” says the full-throated voice. “You’ve been doing an excellent job.”
    “Oh?” I pause. He left large folder of deal memos on my desk this morning. I filed them all within twenty minutes. “Thank you!”
    “Been quite a hectic day, hasn’t it?”
    Rather shamelessly, I find myself agreeing. “Yeah, but I’ve been managing all right.”
    “The good news is you’ll be getting a little bit of extra help this afternoon. Jake might be dropping by later.”
    “Umm …” I stare at my phone curiously. “Jake?”
    “The person you’ve been replacing?”
    “I see,” I say, when in fact I don’t see at all. Did I just get fired halfway into my workday? “He’s coming back?”
    “Well,” The voice sounds more distant this time. Like Gregory has already given up on the conversation and has literally begun to wander away. “I don’t know if he’s coming
back
, per se. I think for today he’s just going to show you around, explain how the officeruns. That sort of thing. He hasn’t