‘And have you been, you know… grubbing around looking for it?’ Melissa asked, wiping the tears from her eyes. Her face had gone an odd shade of purple.
Daisy didn’t think the story was that funny, but Melissa had laughed so hard she’d snorted coffee through her nose and had nearly gotten them thrown out of the café.
‘Yes,’ Daisy replied, stiffly.
‘I’ve never heard of anyone shitting silver before,’ Melissa chortled.
‘Don’t be so crude,’ Daisy said. ‘Anyway, it hasn’t made an appearance yet.’
‘How long has it been?’
‘Three days.’ Three long, rather disgusting days. ‘It was so embarrassing,’ Daisy said.
‘I bet they see that sort of thing every day,’ Melissa said, stirring the coffee dregs in her cup.
‘Yeah, but I was still mortified.’ Daisy grimaced. ‘Dr Hartley said—’
‘Dr Hartley?’ Melissa interrupted.
‘The guy who examined me.’
‘Is that really his name? I bet he wished he was a heart doctor,’ she chortled.
‘He could have my heart any day,’ Daisy muttered. ‘And any other part of me, for that matter.’
‘Oh, he was cute, was he? No wonder you were embarrassed.’
‘I suppose, but he was more interested in my bowels than my face.’
‘So he should be – he’s a doctor!’
‘That’s not what I meant, and you know it. Doctors are men, too.’
‘Yes, but you were also his patient and I don’t think that kind of thing is allowed.’
Daisy sighed. ‘I expect you’re right. Besides, Freddie has put me off men for life.’
‘Don’t give up on love just because of one bad experience,’ Melissa protested. ‘Go on, tell me what this doctor of yours looked like.’
‘You know the guy out of Grimm?’
‘The one who turns into a kind of wolf-thing?’
‘No, not him, the other one, the Grimm himself, David Giuntoli. Think of him with a beard. Dark hair, blue eyes, all intense and… doctory.’
‘Dr Hartley,’ Melissa crooned. ‘Dr Loveheart, instead of Burkhardt.’
‘Doctor-rummage-around-in-your-own-poo, you mean.’
‘The fact that you fancy him proves you’ve not lost your mojo,’ Melissa pointed out.
‘Just because I look, doesn’t mean I want to touch,’ Daisy said.
‘Oh, but you do, my lovely. I can see it in your eyes. They’ve gone all gooey.’
‘It’s not goo, it’s realising what the time is. We’d better get a move on or we’ll be late back and the Grumpmeister will have a good reason to be grumpy.’
‘Do we have to? I’m still in Christmas mode.’
It was that dead time (work-wise) between Christmas and New Year, when people were still recovering from the last round of festivities while gearing up for the next lot. She had no idea why the company insisted on opening the offices. Surely the management could tell they’d get little or no work out of their employees until January. But needs must, as they say, and if she wanted to keep her job then she had to return from lunch. Anyway, look what happened the last time she’d had a half day – Freddiegate.
‘Yes.’ Daisy was firm. ‘I want to be paid at the end of the month, and I’ve now got a deposit on a house to save for.’
‘Okay, since you put it like that…’
The two women were back at work in record time, though Daisy thought her calf muscles might take a while to recover from the mad dash. Even so, Grumpmeister, a.k.a. Simon, their manager, was staring fixedly at the clock.
He pointed at Daisy and jerked a thumb at his office.
‘Great, a meeting with the most miserable man on the planet. Just what I need,’ Daisy muttered, throwing her bag under her desk and stomping in the direction her boss had indicated.
She hated these meetings, especially when it was only him and her. He usually picked one of these little tête-à-têtes to lay some new task on her, like the musical card fiasco which he expected her to magic out of thin air. She wrote poems and little verses, not music, for goodness’ sake!
She slunk in through the door and took a seat. Grumpy was already perched on his chair on the other side of his desk. Perched was an unusual position for him – he normally slouched back, his arms folded, with a scowl on his face. Today, he looked nervous. He was leaning forward, fiddling with a pad and pen, and the skin under his left eye kept twitching. Daisy stared at the little tick in fascination.
‘I know what you’re going to say,’ she said, before Grumpy had a chance to open his mouth. ‘And no, I haven’t come up with much yet. But I will. I just need some time to get to grips with it. This is a whole new thing for me.’
‘It’s shelved,’ Simon said.
‘Shelved? That’s um… er…’ If she said “great”, he’d know she hadn’t wanted to do it in the first place. If she said, “that’s a shame”, or appeared too disappointed, he might decide to unshelve it and give the project back to her.
‘Yes, shelved,’ he repeated. ‘You’ll go back to doing what you did before.’
Not that she’d actually stopped doing what she was doing before, because she hadn’t had much of a go at the musical cards. ‘Oh, good,’ she replied.
‘For the time being.’
‘The time being?’ What was that supposed to mean? Did they have something else in mind for her?
It appeared they did. The powers-that-be on the floor upstairs where the accounts and senior managers had their offices, had something quite radical in mind for Daisy Jones.
‘We are going to have to let you go,’ Simon said, steeling his hands under his chin (or should she say “chins”?), and looking solemn.
‘Go where?’ A trip would be nice, even if it was only for a day. Any old excuse to get out of the office, eh?
‘Go, as in, made redundant,’ Simon clarified.
Daisy sat in stunned silence. Surely she couldn’t have heard him correctly?
Simon began rabbiting on about severance pay, redundancy packages, and proposed end dates, but Daisy wasn’t really listening.
‘There’s been a considerable downturn in the sales of traditional cards since the rise of the ecards.’ He said the last four words as if they were a title of a sci-fi film – “The Rise of the Ecards, coming soon to a cinema near you.”
‘We have yet to confirm all the details, and HR will be in touch in due course,’ he carried on, speaking faster, obviously eager for this terrible ordeal to end.
Caring Cards didn’t have a Human Resources Department – they had a woman called Joyce.
‘HR?’ Daisy asked. ‘As in Joyce, from upstairs? Joyce who does the wage slips? That Joyce?’
‘Yes, Joyce.’
‘When…?’ Daisy swallowed, still in shock. Her hands trembled and she shoved them under her thighs, hoping that sitting on them would stop them shaking. ‘When am I supposed to go?’
‘As I said, the date hadn’t been determined yet. It’s TBC,’ Simon replied, almost airily.
‘TBC?’
‘To be confirmed. It’s not official yet, but I wanted to give you a heads-up, so you know where you stand.’
Daisy sat for a moment, trying to get her numb mind working. Something Simon said didn’t make sense. ‘Am I, or am I not, being made redundant?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ he said.
Okay then.
‘And no,’ he added.
Oh? ‘Which is it?’
‘Both. Look, I’m going to be honest with you, here. The situation could go both ways. We’re facing a redundancy situation if the market doesn’t improve. Upstairs has given us three to six months to turn things around. If there’s no improvement in that time, then redundancies will have to take place.’
‘Redundancies?’ Daisy emphasised the plural.
‘It’s not only you who’ll be affected,’ Simon said huffily. ‘Other people’s futures are on the line too.’
‘Will you be speaking to Melissa?’
Simon went red. ‘I expect so.’ He squirmed in his seat.
Daisy narrowed her eyes. If this was a first-in, last-out thing, then by rights Melissa should be the one sitting in the hot seat and having this conversation with Simon, considering both of them did roughly the same job. Daisy was more senior, and was paid a little more than Melissa, so, on the one hand, it would be cheaper to get rid of Daisy in terms of salary, but Daisy had worked at the company for much longer than Melissa, and any redundancy payment would be more. Daisy had far more experience, and even if she did say so herself, she was better at it.
Then the penny dropped. Simon had most likely been told to give Daisy the “heads-up,” as he’d put it, in the hope that she’d jump ship before she was pushed.
Bitterness flashed through her. She’d worked for Caring Cards (or Uncaring Cards, as they should now be called), since she’d left school at eighteen. She’d given them the twelve best years of her life, and look at the thanks she’d got – a vague, undisclosed redundancy package. And that’s why Simon had told her, because they were hoping she’d find another job and leave, so they could save themselves paying her anything. The mean bastards!
She’d show ’em. There was no way she was going to forgo any redundancy pay-out. It probably wouldn’t be much, but it might be enough to give her the deposit she so desperately wanted. Added to the little she had already saved, she could maybe think about a small semi in Warndon Villages, a series of interconnected estates on the outskirts of the city. She would be one step closer to buying her own home.
Then another thought struck her. How was she going to get a mortgage without a job? She wasn’t, was she?
Catch twenty-two.
Not giving Simon a chance to say anything further, Daisy stood, and said, ‘If that’s all, I’ve got work to do,’ and stalked back to her desk with her head held high, trying not to let anyone see how upset she was.
Unlocking her computer, she heard Melissa whisper, ‘Is everything okay?’
‘No, it bloody isn’t,’ Daisy snapped, immediately regretting her outburst. It wasn’t Melissa’s fault; the other girl couldn’t help that the company decided Daisy was the one they wanted to let go.
‘What’s wrong? Has he said something to upset you?’
‘You could say that. He told me I’m about to be made redundant.’ Daisy had a fleeting thought about whether she should share the information with her colleague, but Simon hadn’t told her it was confidential, had he? And besides, Melissa had a right to know, because hadn’t Simon said he would be speaking to Melissa too? Though, why would he, when the company couldn’t do without a verse writer?
‘Oh Daisy, that’s awful. When?’
‘Simon couldn’t give me a date, but he said it’s on the cards.’
‘What are you going to do? Look for another job?’
‘I think that’s exactly what they’re hoping I’ll do, so they can get out of paying me anything.’
Melissa gasped. ‘They wouldn’t!’
‘They would, but I’ll show ’em. I’m not going anywhere until they’ve paid me what I’m owed.’
Melissa glared at Simon’s now-closed office door.
No wonder he hadn’t left it open; he didn’t want to witness any fallout – the coward. Not that Daisy intended to oblige him. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction, so instead of working on the next round of Father’s Day cards as she was supposed to be doing, Daisy Googled job sites instead. It wouldn’t hurt to look, to see what jobs were out there.
After a while, she sat back, despondent. There didn’t appear to be much call for unemployed greeting card verse writers.
‘Daisy?’
She looked up to see Melissa standing behind her, with a strange almost self-satisfied expression on her face. It certainly hadn’t taken her colleague long to work out that with Daisy gone, they had to keep Melissa on. Daisy didn’t blame her for being relieved that her job was safe.
‘Found anything?’ the other girl asked.
‘Not really.’ Daisy wondered how long it would be before the news spread around the office. Melissa, bless her, was a bit of a gossip, but at least it spared Daisy from having to explain things twenty different times to twenty different people. No doubt the office would soon be giggling to the news of Freddie’s sexual preference, and Daisy’s coin-swallowing trick, too.
She sighed and clicked out of Google. ‘Not that I was planning on leaving until they sorted out the redundancy,’ she said, ‘but it looks like even if I wanted to get out of this shitty company, I couldn’t.’
‘Shh,’ Melissa said, shooting a swift glance around the office. ‘Simon will hear you.’
‘Let him,’ Daisy said. ‘After all, what is he going to do – sack me?’