On Monday mornings, I send out a story via email: ultra-brief tales of 1,000 words or more, usually in genres including horror, science fiction, and the supernatural. Those stories collectively are called Once Upon A Time. I’ve also published several ebooks and compendium volumes of those stories so far.

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Here's story 151, of 240 so far.

Role Model

Ruth was in the same meeting she attended at least ten times per week.

It wasn’t exactly the same, in terms of the attendees, or the topics under discussion, or the meeting room, or the time of day, or the duration — but it was still effectively the latest of a stream of duplicates.

The things that were the same each time were the the things that were most counterproductive. The lack of preparation by others. The lack of social graces from certain repeat offenders. The lack of a progress-first mindset, instead looping into endless cycles of confirmation and reassessment and goalpost-shifting. The lack of a sense of purpose, or of consistency, or of engagement in what was being done. The acronyms, and the taking things offline, and instructions by fiat from on high.

Then there was the lack of institutional memory, as the same paths were walked again and again. Ideas that had been deemed unnecessary or unwise even a handful of years earlier were resurrected, debated again, and flagged for follow-up, without anyone being aware that it had all been done before.

Anyone except Ruth.

She’d been with the company for more than twenty years, and had seen CEOs come and go, as well as those in every role beneath that level. She’d acquired a well-deserved reputation for vision, pragmatism, and the rare ability to synthesise technical, financial, and marketing factors to produce viable strategies again and again. Everyone knew her by name, as someone they occasionally saw in the corridors or participated in a meeting with, and everyone knew that she was very busy.

The thing is, she really wasn’t busy at all.

As organisational changes had gone from unprecedented to intermittent, and from intermittent to infrequent, and from infrequent to periodic, and then from periodic to constant, the likelihood that any one person in the company truly knew what another person outside of their immediate team was working on, or which groups they were involved with, diminished towards zero. As change-fatigue and economic unrest combined to force a certain inwards focus, and a blindness to whatever lay outside of personal and contemporary relevance, only someone with a historic — and continuous — overview of how the company worked would have any notion of the current organisational structure and priorities. Someone like Ruth, and indeed only Ruth.

It had taken some boldness, certainly.

When her own VP-level superior had announced his retirement, followed within six months by two of the directors who had reported to him, temporary changes to the management chain became semi-permanent, but still fluid. Reactivity, rather than proactivity, became the only reasonable survival tactic. And so one day, Ruth decided that she would inform everyone on her own organisational sub-group’s all-hands meeting that she would be taking over the responsibilities of the just-departed director. She said she would try to ease the transitions as much as possible, and she was looking forward to coordinating with everyone and finding the best ways to move forward.

No-one had actually given her this role, but no-one questioned it either. Because it was Ruth, after all. Surely she was the logical choice, and surely this move was long overdue.

Things had continued in that vein for another eighteen months, by which point Ruth had managed to gently pester both HR and Legal enough to make her self-selected new title and position legitimate in the company’s records. From there, it was a matter of simply being above reproach, and beyond question, which was an easy matter when you knew the company better than most people knew their own families.

Ruth was seen as the in-house contract killer for thorny project-management problems, or big-picture problems, or product-direction problems, or even issues around the perennial question of whether to handle underperforming employees by showing them the way, or showing them the door. Whatever the business area, as long as it was of interest at a sufficient level of seniority, she was front and centre.

Every director knew her coffee order, and she was a regular fixture as an interviewee in industry magazines and websites, as well as a coveted keynote speaker at conferences. She did it all — even though, in truth, she did almost nothing at all.

Ruth’s approach was to be fully present at maximum visibility: in meetings, listening and asking questions, and then delegating tasks. And then she would go to her office for the rest of that part of the day, and read books in digital form on tablet devices, holding a stylus at all times. Or she would write a shopping list or a home redecoration plan, piece by piece in individual emails, all on her personal accounts via the web. Or she would make personal phone calls with the door closed, having perfected the art of speaking quietly while walking around her dramatically windowed corner office, wearing a deep frown which bore no relationship to her emotional state. And then she’d repeat the whole production in the afternoon.

She tracked her actual working time, including meeting prep and any unavoidable follow-up, and her weekly average total was about three hours. It was the kind of efficiency of deception that was only possible when you were already a seasoned professional at doing the actual job you were now pretending to do.

She didn’t feel guilty; not at all. Ruth had served her time, and her presence absolutely helped people to focus on what mattered, and to get things done. She was probably still doing more good for the company than most of the other people there. She thought of herself as a kind of productivity mascot, or a role model.

Her role was just unofficial, and almost entirely inferred.

JINX

KESTREL face a new and terrifying enemy: an all-seeing mastermind who already knows exactly who they are, and many of their deepest secrets. Nothing stays hidden forever, and the line between privacy and liberty is razor-thin…

Book 3 in the KESTREL action-thriller series.

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