by R L Stephens
Chapter 6
“Mr. Wright?” The vaguely female voice on the other end of the telephone said as Harry answered it.
“Yes,” Harry replied hesitantly as he hadn’t recognized the number and tried not to answer the phone without knowing who was calling as he hated being bothered by cold calling sales people.
“This is Ms. Ellis from GRB Ltd,” the name didn’t really mean much to Harry but it did have a familiar ring to it, even though he wasn’t sure he may have heard it before.
“Ok,” Harry replied just has warily as before trying to be as noncommittal as possible in case he was drawn into agreeing to something.
“We interviewed you a couple of weeks ago for the position of office manager in our international trading section,” she then continued as if this should mean something to Harry. Oh get to the point, Harry thought to himself wishing that she would just come out and say whatever it was she was calling to tell him. “The good news is that we’ve decided to offer you the job,” she then said finally after another couple of minutes of preamble about how difficult he decision had been and how strong all the candidates had been and so on and so forth. She had prattled in so much in fact that Harry had almost lost interest in this conversation and had started to feel his concentration wonder a little.
“Pardon?” Was all that he managed to say as he wondered whether she had said what he thought she had said, or whether he had phased out of this conversation so much that he had imagined the whole thing.
“I said we’d decided to offer you the job,” Ms. Ellis then repeated confirming that Harry had indeed heard her correctly.
“Eh that’s excellent news, when do I start? What was the salary again?” Harry blurted out before the news had even started to sink and he’d had a chance to consider the implications, or even to formally accept the offer. And these were just two of a multitude of different questions that had flown into Harry’s mind in that microsecond after hearing the good news.
“Does that mean you’ll take it?” Ms. Ellis replied his to his questions one of her own.
“Oh, yes of course, yes I’d love to take it,” Harry blurted out again before he had the chance to think through what he was going to say, and was more than a little glad that he hadn’t sworn or said something equally regrettable.
“Good, I will of course confirm the full of employment in writing the next day or so,” Ms. Ellis then continued to say barely giving Harry enough time to finish his sentence. It seemed to Harry almost as if she had a set form of words that she would trot out every time she was in the same position, which didn’t seem to be too much of a bad thing to Harry as he mulled it over in his mind a few hours later.
“This is conditional on you satisfactorily passing out usual pre-employment checks,” she then added while Harry wondered what he should next, if anything.
“Oh yeah, yeah of course,” Harry said mentally swallowing hard as this was one of the moments that he had been half worrying about. Whether or not his recent history would stand up to scrutiny would be revealed in the next few weeks. But Harry though that he had taken sufficient steps to ensure that a superficial check would come back clean, or at least clean enough for him to start work.
“Along with our offer letter I will also send you out our standard pre-employment pack. And the quicker you return to us the required forms then the quicker we can get things moving at this end,” Ms. Ellis then added still sticking to her standard script.
“Oh yeah, yeah of course,” Harry said mentally crossing his fingers that things would work out in his favor.
“YES!!” Harry exclaimed when he was eventually able to out the phone down a few minutes later. Looks like things are starting to go my way; Harry thought it a rather more subdued fashion as he started to text his friend Ken.
