“Who’s going to write those programs?”
“You’re the manager. Tell someone to do it. You keep saying that it’s your job to tell us what to do and it’s our job to do what we’re told.”
“Then I’m telling you to get back in here and do it yourself. You still work for me. I didn’t fire you.”
“I’m on vacation for another five weeks. Maybe another thirteen weeks if I don’t hear a lot of contrition from you. Until then, you’re going to have to tell someone else to do it.”
“You listen to me! You’re going to–“
The asshole had the nerve to hang up on her.
* * *
“You look terrible.” Eli was grinning broadly but he still couldn’t meet Keri’s eyes.
“I’ve had some stress recently,” she replied. “I’m dealing with some unexpected staff turnover.” She was too savvy to tell him how desperate she really was. William had given her an ultimatum. The next Board meeting was scheduled for the end of the month. Either she deliver the User Analysis Reports before the SMC meeting next week or hand in her resignation and he’d hire someone who could deliver them. She didn’t dare let Eli know that she was about to be fired. “Sudeep isn’t working out there any longer.”
“I don’t know much about management, but I know that when you lose your best people, you lose corporate knowledge.” He grinned out her window. “Precious stuff, that corporate knowledge. The good stuff isn’t written down anywhere. It’s all in people’s heads.” That wasn’t entirely true. A surprising amount was embedded in people’s emails. The systems administrators had access to those emails and he had been given the administration passwords over the years for one reason or another. Nobody knew that he kept an eye on all the senior manager’s emails.
“The bottom line is that you need to come back to work now. We can’t wait for another four weeks.”
He shrugged. “I can wait. You can’t but I can. I have to stick around for the good of the company. Your replacement is going to need me.”
There was something in his tone that grabbed her attention. “What do you mean?”
“I got a phone call from William Cox last week. He finally took a good look at my logic chart and realized that I’m the guy that actually delivers the User Analysis Reports. He isn’t going to let you fire me.”
Keri’s blood ran cold. If the VP was talking directly to a geek, then he was desperate and she was in deep, deep trouble. “So he told you to come back and get to work?”
“Not quite. He asked me if I’d like to take over as acting manager of ASD. Just temporarily, you know. Manage the group until he could hire someone else.”
She was listening to her own corporate obituary. “So you came here to tell me that you’re taking my job.”
“Oh, no. Not at all. Why would I want to be a manager? I’m better than that. Way better. You think that I’d be willing to spend my mornings bending over so that senior management can fuck me in the ass and then spend my afternoons begging my staff to kiss my puckered little hole and make if feel better? So that I can do it all over again the next day? Only a bleeding masochist would want to be in your position.”
“So you came by to gloat?”
“Nope. I’m not into gloating. I came by to make a deal. That’s what managers do, right? Make deals?”
“Sure.”
“You’re a manager so come on down and let’s make a deal.”
“How soon can you deliver the reports?”
“Ten minutes.”
“Ten minutes?”
“Sure. My programs are still sitting on my server. I just have to set up the commands and push the button. They’ll be emailed forthwith.”
“I can give you a twenty percent raise, effective immediately.” She could taste her victory already. That was just her initial bargaining position. She’d have to keep Eli around for a while but not forever. Even if she had to double his salary for the next six months, she could still balance her budget by fiscal year end.
“I don’t want more money. You’re already paying me well. I can’t spend all the salary that you give me now.”
“What do you want? An apology? No problem. I’m sorry. I’m not just saying that. I am truly sorry. I should have paid more attention to what you were doing. Your work is critical to the company and I made a mistake when I underestimated your value. I’ll do better in the future. You’re welcome in my office any time. I’ll be happy to listen to your detailed explanations of exactly what you’re doing. I’ll give you more support. I’ll take on Corporate Security and get you servers or firewalls or whatever you need.” She waited to hear that he accepted her apology.
“Thanks,” he said. “I believe that you’re sincere. I accept your apology. I think that we’ll be able to work together a lot better now.”
“I think so.” She felt relief flowing through her veins,
“There’s something else, though.”
“Yes?” She was puzzled. He had her apology and her promise for more support in the future. He said that he didn’t want more money. What else could she give him? A new title? A better cubicle? No problem. He could have both for the asking.
“You said that I never had a date in my life.”
“I’m sorry about that, too. I had no right to get personal. I’m ashamed that I stooped to that.”
“No. That was understandable. As you can see, I’m not a handsome fellow. I’m no athlete. Unlike some other geeks, I do take care to maintain good personal hygiene, but that’s hardly enough. I know that I don’t have any social skills. All I can talk about is computers. I can’t sweet-talk anyone, especially not a woman. All I can do is be blunt and direct and that never gets me anywhere.”
Keri didn’t like where this was going. Not at all. “Do you want me to set you up on a blind date?” She began trying desperately to think of some woman who might be willing to spend an evening with Eli.
“No. Nothing like that. I’d be miserable on a date. And so would the poor woman who got stuck with me. I want something a lot easier than that.”
“What?”
“I’ve never seen a woman’s tits. Not in real life. In movies and pictures. But I want to see a real woman’s tits. That’s all. Just see them.”
“You can go to a strip club and see all the women that you want.”
“I don’t think that I’d like to be in a place like that. I want to see your tits.”
“No.”
“Yes. You can do that much for me. I won’t touch them. I’m not going to attack you. I just want to look. Take your top off for ten minutes and then I’ll go spend ten minutes getting your reports out and we’ll be even. Please.”
“This is sexual harassment.”
“So what? If you want to fire me, you have lots of reasons. In fact, I’ll quit if you ask me to. But if you want me to stay, then you need to show me your tits. That’s not negotiable.”
“Why me? If you want, I’ll call an escort service and have them send a woman over to your house and you can look at her in the privacy of your living room for as long as you like. I’ll pay for it myself. Out of my own pocket. I’ll make sure that they send someone who’s younger and better endowed than me.”
“No. It has to be you. I’ve been thinking about you for a long time. Ever since I’ve started working here. I really, really want to see your tits.”
“You’re trying to humiliate me.”
“Yes, I am. You’ve humiliated me often enough. Especially when you said that I couldn’t get a date. And now you’re humiliating me again by making such a big deal about this. Like my wanting to see you topless is the most disgusting thing that you’ve ever heard. It’s not such a big deal. I just want to see you for a few minutes. How you feel about it is up to you. You can feel flattered that I find you so desirable or humiliated that I expect you to do it.” He looked at her chest. “It’s not like I’m the first man who’s ever seen them. I’m going to save your career. That’s worth something. I know that y
ou’ve taken your top off for other men for a lot less payoff than that. And I bet you didn’t argue about it this much.”
He kept staring at her chest for a minute while she screwed up her courage. He was wrong about it being the same as taking her top off for other men. That was part of love-making. This was pure humiliation. But she had to do it. Finally she said, “Okay. Shut the door and make sure that it’s locked.”
She lowered her blinds herself. They were on the twelfth floor and there weren’t any other tall buildings nearby but she was making sure anyway.
She faced him and slipped her jacket off her shoulders.
He watched every movement of her hands with utter fascination.
She pulled the hem of her blouse out of her skirt and undid one button at a time.
He watched every button release, first revealing her cleavage, then the front of her bra, then her midriff.
She didn’t have much cleavage. Her breasts filled a C cup nicely, but this wasn’t a push-up bra. It kept her breasts comfortably separated, not pushed together.
He didn’t seem to mind. He kept staring avidly. He loved the way her tits rose and fell with every breath. She was breathing hard and her bra cups moved apart with every breath.
She was no stripper but, if she was going to do this, then she was going to do it right. She deliberately reached behind her back to unhook the main strap. The motion thrust her tits up and forward, giving her a lovely profile.
When the tension was released, her breasts fell forward into their natural position inside the loose cups.
With slow, coy movements, she pulled the cups from her breasts, one at a time, revealing hard pink nipples surrounded by tight, crinkled aureoles.
Her office was warm. The only reason for her nipples to be erect was sexual excitement. She was appalled. Eli was the least desirable man that she’d ever met. There was no reason on earth for her to feel the slightest bit of sexual excitement in revealing herself to him.
But she couldn’t stop herself from breathing deep and hard. And she could feel a flush spreading across her face and down her neck.
There was something kinky about being forced to strip to the waist for such an unappealing man. She refused to think about that while she waited for him to say that he’d seen enough.
He stood in front of her and stared. He was too shy to step forward for a better look; he stayed standing a good four feet away.
To ease her discomfort, she threw her shoulders back and turned slowly to one side, then the other, showing him both profiles. If he was going to see her tits, he might as well see them from all angles.
At thirty-one years, they were beginning to spread and drop just a bit. No one but her would notice the change but she feared that it was a harbinger of middle age creeping up on her and eroding her attractiveness.
There was a certain perverse reassurance in the look of lust on Eli’s face. She didn’t feel old now. On a whim, she put her hands underneath her breasts and raised them toward him as though offering her nipples to his inspection.
His mouth gaped in response. But he still made no move toward her. He was the perfectly respectful pervert.
After a minute, she dropped her hands to her sides and waited impassively.
“Thank-you,” he said, almost inaudibly, and finally turned away.
She was putting her bra back on when he slipped out the door.
Fifteen minutes later, she received a copy of the User Analysis Report in her email inbox. She recognized it immediately. She’d been receiving them every week for as long as she could remember but she had never read them. She always deleted them like the spam they were.
For the first time, she took the trouble to read it.
* * *
“I can see why people like your reports. They’re interesting.”
“Don’t take this personally, Keri, but you really are a moron.”
Keri felt her face flush in a flash of anger. “How’m I supposed to not take that personally?”
“Because it puts you at the same level as every other help-line manager in the world. Your moronicity is nothing unusual. It’s a standard feature of middle managers.”
That he was being his usual arrogant geek self did little to mollify her. “Why don’t you explain yourself, then.”
“Most people think that the key functions of a company are product development, manufacturing, and sales, right?”
“Aren’t they?”
“Sure. If you don’t develop, make, and sell products then you’ve got no company. And what do those managers need to do their jobs? What is the most critical information that you can give them?”
“Financials? Pricing? Market studies? Competitive intelligence?”
“No. The most important thing that you can tell them is how their products are being used. The whole business depends on the satisfaction of the end users. But what everyone is too stupid to realize is that there’s only one group in the company that actually talks to the end users regularly. Your group. The group that runs the help systems. The complaint lines, the forms on the web sites, the email questions are pure gold. You get the most critical information in the whole company. And it flows to you constantly every single day. Just you. Nobody else in the whole damn company talks to the end users regularly. In fact ninety-nine percent of the employees of most companies have never talked to an end user at all. Not ever.”
“Sure they do. The sales guys, senior managers. Even product development has a human factors division.”
“Nope. The sales guys talk to buyers. They’re the other partner in the sales dance but the buyers don’t actually use the systems that they buy. Same with the senior managers. They schmooze with only with other high-falutin’ mucky-mucks. They’d never stoop to talk to the peons who are using the company’s equipment day in and day out. And they sure don’t use our products themselves. The only thing they know is what we tell them. And we don’t tell them much because we know that they won’t listen.
“We don’t even have a human factors division in this company any more. Product development canned them all during the last reorganization because they were useless. We give development more information in our User Analysis Reports every week than the human factors guys could give them after a year of focus groups, questionnaires, and laboratory product testing. Do you really think that some volunteer who spends an hour in a lab can tell us as much as a real live user who’s been working with our product for eight hours a day for months and has finally become so frustrated that he takes the time to call us and complain?
“Your help systems collect solid gold information about our products twenty-four hours a day, day in and day out. My programs mine that information and extract trends and summaries about how our products fail and, more important, what the users think those products ought to be doing.
“Everyone needs that information and you’re the hero who gives it to them every week like clockwork.”
For the first time, Keri realized how much she was contributing to the bottom line. “And they’re addicted so they call me an incompetent ass when I fail to keep the information flowing.”
“Don’t worry about that. As long as I’m happy, you’ll keep giving everyone their reports. And it doesn’t take much to keep me happy.”
She heard the threat. “Are you happy?”
“I will be if you don’t wear a bra tomorrow. It’s casual Friday and the weekly report will go out on time if you spend the day braless.”
“My figure is a little full for that,” she said. “A B cup might get away with it, but it’ll be too obvious if I do it. I’ll take off my top for you again in private if you want but I’m not doing anything in public. That would be as damaging to my career as failing to deliver a report.”
“No it won’t. You can wear something bulky. Friday’s casual dress day. I don’t care what you wear on top to hide your braless state. No one else has to know. I’ll be happy knowing that you’re doing it.”
* * *
“Show me.”
“You can see how I’m flopping around,” Keri replied.
“Not for sure. That’s the bulkiest sweater that I’ve ever seen.”
It was the bulkiest Fair Isle sweater that she had been able to buy on short notice yesterday evening. It was pure wool and itched like crazy. Her nipples felt like they had been rubbed raw. But it was reassuring to hear that even Eli who had been staring at her chest all day and knew what to look for couldn’t be sure.
Keri looked around. The hallway was empty. Everyone was hard at work, clearing their desks for the weekend.
She snatched the hem of the sweater and dragged it up to her armpits to give Eli a quick flash of her unrestrained tits. She pulled it down again as quickly as possible.
“Beautiful. Thank you,” he said. “Those reports will be out within the quarter hour.”
Apart from her irritated nipples, Keri was surprised at how painless the day had been. That quick flash in the hallway was so brief that she hardly had time to feel humiliated.
Her biggest concern was escalation. So far, Eli’s demands had been easy to satisfy but she wondered what he was going to want next week.
“Eli,” she said as he turned to leave.
“Yes?” he asked, turning back toward her.
“You know that there’s a line that I won’t cross. Not even for the sake of my career.”
He smiled sadly. “I’m not stupid. I know that. You’re going to keep playing my little games because I’m never going to ask you to do anything too horrible. Who knows? Maybe you’ll even have a little bit fun playing with me.”
She sincerely doubted that.
* * *
The following Thursday, a box wrapped in plain brown paper was waiting on Keri’s desk. It had her name written on it with black felt-tip marker. There was no other identification but she didn’t need to see Eli’s name to know who put it there. And she didn’t have to be a genius to know that she should open it in private.
Punish Me, Please Me Page 19
