The Consultant Read Online Free PDF Page B

want me to do? Scott told me I have to come in. He wants the consultants to see how dedicated and committed we are.”  
    “Are the consultants even going to be there on the weekend?” she asked.  
    “I don’t know,” he admitted.  
    “But you need to go anyway.”  
    Craig took a deep breath. “He was also talking about coming in earlier and leaving later each day.”  
    “Jesus Christ, Craig!”  
    Dylan poked his head around the corner of the doorway. “Are you guys fighting?”  
    “No, sweetie,” Angie told him. “I’m just mad at Daddy’s work.”  
    “We’re both mad at them.”  
    “Well, I can’t get all my Hot Wheels back in the box,” Dylan said. “Can you help me?”  
    With a nod of her head, Angie gave him permission to leave, and Craig took it. “Of course,” he said. “And after that we’ll read, okay?”  
    “Okay!”  
    He was mad at CompWare. For screwing up that Automated Interface deal and ruining the company’s reputation. For botching the release of OfficeManager, which was a damn good program. And, especially, for wasting who knew how many thousands of dollars hiring consultants who were going to decide the fates of hundreds of good workers who had dedicated their careers to the company. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t right, and Matthews and the rest of upper management should have known better.  
    Of course, they were the same people who’d gotten them into such financial straits that they needed A.I. to bail them out in the first place.  
    He read to Dylan, went over his homework, and after dinner all three of them played the Cookie Game before Angie got Dylan ready for bed. Craig gave him a big hug and a kiss on the forehead. “Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite,” he said, as he always did.  
    Dylan laughed, as he always did.  
    Angie had DVR’d one of last year’s Academy Award-winning movies that they hadn’t yet watched, but he didn’t really want to see it, and he told her to go ahead and watch the movie herself; he had some research to do. Following Phil’s example, he went online and looked up everything he could about BFG Associates.  
    Phil was right. The firm was a force to be reckoned with. Not only were there major corporations on BFG’s client list (including Automated Interface!), but several municipalities had also hired its consultants to streamline their workforces in an effort to do more with less in these downsized times. He checked the websites of several companies for which BFG had consulted, then looked up statistics on earnings, staffing and other specific before-and-after financial information before perusing some of the ratings sites, where individuals could anonymously praise or criticize a business. BFG did indeed recommend serious layoffs for nearly all of the companies that hired them, but the surprise was that there were few corresponding complaints on the ratings sites. He’d expected to read excoriating denunciations, angry castigations, at the very least snarky critiques, but the few grievances he found were off point and off-the-wall, the work of disgruntled employees whose rants sounded so unhinged that they made the consultants seem sympathetic.  
    That was weird.  
    He wondered if BFG had a person assigned to reputation restoration, someone who sorted through websites of criticism, threatening retaliation against anything negative.  
    Or maybe they owned these sites.  
    He had no hard-and-fast evidence of anything, only a feeling that the people whose jobs had been eliminated were not as docile or accepting as the situation made it seem.  
    He told Phil about it the next morning as they walked in from the parking lot together.  
    His friend nodded sagely. “It’s like Quadrophenia and Tommy ,” Phil said. “When I was younger, when I used to read Rolling Stone and all that, when music was the center of the cultural conversation, critics were always saying that Quadrophenia was a