Chloe sensed a presence behind her. It felt menacing. She imagined it was what the heroine in a horror movie felt when she was being watched through a window.
She turned around. Unsurprisingly, Pippa stood behind her. Arms folded and looking irritated.
“I want to speak to you about some issues with the digital edition,” Pippa announced. She turned to Natasha. “Do I speak to you about them, or her?”
Chloe bristled at being referred to as “her.” And being spoken about as if she wasn’t right there. She hoped Natasha would deal with Pippa and tell her to learn some manners while she was at it. She looked at Natasha, begging with her eyes to be rescued.
“You can speak to Chloe about that,” Natasha said before returning her attention to her work.
Traitor, Chloe thought.
“Right, well, the page flip on the digital edition is broken,” Pippa said. “It needs to be fixed.”
“What’s wrong with it?” Chloe asked.
“If you look at it, you’ll find out,” Pippa said unhelpfully. “Also, there’s an issue with the header fonts. We do have a style guide, it has been provided to you. And yet, still, after six months of talking myself hoarse about the importance of continuity between our digital and print editions—nothing.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Chloe said. She didn’t know why she was apologising. It certainly wasn’t her fault. “I’ll look into it.”
“Well, while you’re there, maybe you can figure out why the contact form boxes need to be so small. They are like a speck. I know we expect all of our readers to be young and perfectly abled but some of them need these.” She pulled her glasses from the top of her head and waved them in Chloe’s face.
If you need them, why are they on your head instead of your face? Chloe thought. But she wouldn’t dare say anything. She was beginning to understand why she had been repeatedly warned by multiple people about Pippa.
“I’ll… look into that as well.”
“There are a lot of issues with the digital edition. But I think I’ll wait and see your response on these before I waste my breath giving you the next batch of fixes.” She turned on her heel and left.
Chloe let out a deep sigh and slowly turned back to her desk.
“The page flip is out of the box and can’t be changed, the header is the same but displays slightly differently on the iPad, and the contact form is completely standard size,” Natasha said.
Chloe frowned. “Then, why—”
“I have explained it all to her. Multiple times.” Natasha looked up and met Chloe’s eyes. “She doesn’t like the page flip. Doesn’t understand the difference in print and digital fonts. And doesn’t wear her glasses.”
“So, she thinks they are all fixes, but really they’re…”
“Personal preferences,” Natasha finished. “Exactly.”
Chloe sagged into her chair. Dealing with Pippa wasn’t going to be easy. In fact, it was going to be a lot more difficult than she thought. How did you fix things that weren’t broken? She could already see her future: endlessly hearing complaints from Pippa about things that couldn’t be fixed. Things that didn’t need to be fixed.
So much for her sweeping into Honey and making everyone think she was amazing. She could just picture her probation meeting in three months. Pippa would be complaining that she approached her on her second day to fix a handful of issues and they were still not fixed. Helen would think about the times Chloe sat in meetings with nothing to say. Natasha wouldn’t defend her. And then she’d have to pack her belongings into a cardboard box and leave the office.
She decided not to bring anything in to decorate her desk. Might as well make the box as light as possible.
She pulled her MacBook closer and stared blankly at the screen. If she wanted to keep this job, she needed to pull something out of the bag. She just didn’t know what. Increasing the size of the contact form fields to something that could be seen from space might appease Pippa, temporarily, but it wasn’t going to make much of a difference in the long run.
Her dad’s face appeared in her mind. She smiled to herself. He’d just tell her to save the company, make a load of money, be voted Woman of the Year. Maybe run for prime minister, if the money was any good. No guidance on how to do any of that, just dogged assurance that she could.
She couldn’t disappoint him. Not that he’d ever truly be disappointed in her, but she would feel like she let him down. She’d been talking for years about how amazing Honey was, and now she feared Honey wouldn’t feel the same way about her.
An email came in from LinkedIn. Apparently twenty-eight of her connections were celebrating work anniversaries. The second she was told she got the job at Honey, she had updated her profile to show off her new place of employment. Now she wondered if that had been premature. LinkedIn was a great platform for telling the world how well you were doing by posting where you worked and what your job title was. It was also an easy way for people to see when you had failed.
She mainly used LinkedIn to connect with people who hadn’t quite made the grade to be Facebook friends. They were people from school, university, and old work colleagues with whom she didn’t want to lose touch. But they were also people who didn’t need to see pictures of her drunk on her birthday or share their questionable political views.
Realisation started to dawn on her. She had a lot of LinkedIn contacts. Over two thousand. Every time she met someone in a business environment, she sent them a connection request. People usually said yes. LinkedIn was like a club where collecting contacts was the primary goal. Likewise, she never said no to a new connection request.
Surely one of her contacts might be able to help her. Business was all about connecting people. The right people, working together, could achieve magnificent things. Her marketing professor had said that repeatedly.
She opened LinkedIn and started to scroll through her newsfeed. She looked over birthdays, work anniversaries, news stories, internet memes. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe LinkedIn was a load of people who were bored at work and posting junk. It was like a work-acceptable Facebook.
She continued to scroll, wondering who half of the people even were.
Then she saw something of interest: a lesbian culture podcast. She’d vaguely heard of it, but she’d never really been one for podcasts. The person who had posted it was Donna Hayward, an old friend from university. She’d always suspected that Donna was gay, but she’d been too shy to ask. It seemed that Donna was the host of the show, Girls About Town.
The number of comments and likes were huge, well into the high tens of thousands.
Why have I never heard of this? Chloe wondered. Because you uninstalled your podcast app to make room for that language app that you never use.
She clicked on the podcast website and started to look around. A new show was put out every evening, and it was clear that the listenership was enormous.
This was it, this was what Honey needed. An opportunity to talk to their audience. She wondered if the podcast ran advertising slots. That would be the perfect way to get the Honey name out there.
She grabbed the contact email address from the website and went to her Honey inbox. She opened a new email. It was time to get back in touch with Donna Hayward.