Arielle trotted through the front door and into work at Match Play, heading for her desk in the human resources department and hitching her oversized purse farther up over her shoulder.
Her heavy satchel was stuffed with pens, notepads, snacks, feminine hygiene products, and whatever else somebody might need.
Her wallet and cell phone were in there, too, somewhere.
She hadn’t planned on being the office’s junk drawer. It had just kind of happened.
She was also carrying two grocery bags stuffed full of supplies.
As she pushed the front door open, it played happy chimes, so forty-eight people sitting at desks between the cubicles glanced up to see who was two hours late getting to work.
Yeah, just the owner’s daughter. But she’d brought snacks.
As Arielle walked five steps in the front door, Joanne called out, “Hey, Arielle!”
“Hey!” she called back over the chatter of the office cubicle farm. “How’s Rory?”
Rory was Joanne’s son, whose cystic fibrosis took up a majority of her time outside of work. He’d ended up in the hospital the week before, so Joann had called Arielle at the HR office to explain why she wouldn’t be in for a while. Arielle had shuffled other people’s duties so she wouldn’t have to worry and had been checking in with her ever since.
“Better! It always astonishes me how he comes through these things and doesn’t even seem worse for the wear.”
“Great! I’m glad he’s better.”
Arielle took three more steps.
“Hey, Arielle,” Lola said, popping her head up over the padded gray-blue walls that divided the cubicles. “I need to book my vacation time for July.”
Yep, it was the first day of March and thus the first official day that people could start reserving time for summer vacations. “Sure! Shoot me an email, and I’ll get it on the schedule,” Ariel said as she walked backward toward the break room, doing her best not to trip over the trash cans on the floor outside of the cubicles.
Computer keyboards clicked as half the office was reminded that March first was the official opening day of the vacation reservation free-for-all, and Arielle could practically hear two dozen emails thud in her inbox.
Well, that was her job. It wouldn’t take more than a few hours to sort out. She trained all year for this, like it was her Superbowl.
With just a few more shout-outs as she was crossing the office, Arielle reached the coffee break room. With a few deft movements, she assembled the hopper of the espresso machine—an honest-to-God Italian model that brewed the best coffee ever—and pulled an espresso shot into warm frothed milk in one of the pretty ceramic mugs she’d bought for the office last year.
People joked that the free coffee perks were the main reason they worked at Match Play. The company’s only product was a mobile phone app that helped golfers book tee times at golf courses in their neighborhoods and around the world. Their app, Match Play, had been innovative when it had come out five years before because it had a golf course-matching questionnaire that helped golfers find appropriate courses for them, but the app had been getting stale lately.
For the last few months, though, some of the golf courses they worked with had been getting stingy with the tee times they offered Match Play. A global golf business conglomerate had created a competing app three months before, offering a higher kickback to the golf courses.
But that wasn’t Ariel’s problem. She was just a human resources admin who took care of the people who worked at Match Play.
The employees who joked about the free coffee perks were just kidding, of course. Match Play’s benefits package was a lot better than just the free coffee.
As she sipped, Arielle had to admit the coffee was excellent.
Now that she had her caffeine for the morning, Arielle unpacked the grocery bags she’d brought and restocked the refrigerator with skim milk, whole milk, and cream. She filled the snack drawers and shelves with chips and cookies, and then she put a couple of fresh bottles of salad dressing and condiments in the fridge. It wasn’t exactly HR’s job to refill everything, but her dad liked it when she did it because Arielle knew not to nickel and dime the snack room.
When Arielle’s father had opened Match Play five years before, he’d insisted that employee retention should be at the top of HR’s agenda. Hiring and training new employees always cost more than keeping trained people happy.
That had been Arielle’s job since she’d graduated from high school and taken a few business classes at the local community college. She kept Match Play’s employees happy.
When someone had a problem with their health insurance, when they were going to take a vacation, or when they needed a go-between to help with a vendor, Arielle was the person who could get them the accurate information and take care of the problem. As the HR admin, she’d taken on a lot of responsibilities.
The director of human resources, Arielle’s aunt Molly Carter, got anxious about a lot of things. The unspoken rule in the office was that Molly took care of the paperwork while Arielle took care of the humans.
That wasn’t a slam. Dealing with the insurance companies and the IRS generated a lot of paperwork. Aunt Molly had plenty to do.
Holding her coffee and lugging her oversized purse, Arielle meandered toward her cubicle, stopping every few steps and talking with half the people in the room because Match Play was a chatty place to work. She checked on Marguerite’s sick cat, listened to Frances complain about her kid’s high school physics teacher, and wrote herself a note to double-check Joanne’s medical savings account to see if they needed to top it up because Rory had been in the hospital again.
It didn’t always take Arielle forty-five minutes to get from the front door to her desk in the morning.
Sometimes, it took an hour.
Arielle didn’t think of herself as popular because that wasn’t really the case. It was more like she was useful. She did the other stuff so that the other employees could do their jobs.
Just as Arielle dropped her purse on her desk, Carlyn, who sat in the cubicle next to her, prairie-dogged up to look over the cubicle divider. “What’s up with your dad?”
Arielle fished her cell phone out of her purse from where it was hiding under the Advil bottle and a bag of butterscotch candy, and she looked up at Carlyn. “I don’t know. He was fine last night. Is something wrong with him?”
She stood and peered over the cubicle divider with Carlyn, looking toward her dad’s office.
His door was closed.
That was weird.
“How long has his door been closed?” she asked Carlyn.
Carlyn sucked in her lips like she was thinking hard. “Ever since I got here two and a half hours ago.”
“Are you sure he’s in his office? Maybe he didn’t even come in.”
“Oh, he’s in there. First of all, and not to upset you, but if he didn’t come into work today, we would all assume he died in his sleep last night. But if that were the case, your mom would’ve called and told everybody. And his light is on. Also, we’ve seen him pacing back and forth through the windows.”
Tall windows flanked her dad’s office door.
Now that Arielle was squinting at the windows, she saw the blurred shape that was her father stomp past the glass, holding his cell phone to his ear.
That wasn’t good.
Carlyn said, “He looks really pissed.”
Arielle bit her lip. “I just hope that another one of the big golf courses isn’t dropping us.”
Carlyn nodded. “The advertising has been getting harder to sell the last few months. I think the advertisers are noticing that there aren’t as many golf courses offering tee times and our user base is going down.”
Arielle swallowed hard. She knew that was the case, but talking about it wouldn’t make it any better. “I guess we’re just going to have to hustle harder.”
Her heart was trembling. Her dad, Frank Carter, had been a high school teacher most of his working life, but he’d retired when they’d offered senior teachers an early retirement package because enrollment at the local schools was declining.
And then he’d taken his entire retirement savings package and sunk it into Match Play because he’d always wanted to work in the golf industry.
While Arielle and Carlyn were staring at her dad’s office, the door swung open.
Frank Carter marched out.
Arielle and Carlyn both dropped, hiding so they wouldn’t be caught staring.
Through the partition between their desks, Arielle could hear Carlyn giggling because they’d almost gotten caught.
Her dad was a private kind of guy. He didn’t like people talking about him, let alone staring at his office door.
From across the wide office space, Arielle heard her father shout, “Everybody! I need you to gather around and listen. I have an announcement.”
Everyone’s head whipped around at Frank Carter’s high school-teacher voice, and then everyone stood and walked toward him.
Aunt Molly came out of her office and glanced around. “What’s going on?”
Arielle and Carlyn rose to look over their dividers and stared at her dad. When Arielle sneaked a glance at her friend, her eyes were wide open, scared.
Frank Carter was standing by his office door and waving people toward him. He’d rolled up his sleeves, baring his forearms, which was another weird thing. Her dad wore long sleeves and kept those cuffs buttoned. He considered it part of the office dress code of being the owner-boss after all those years of being a teacher.
His briefcase stood on the floor beside his shined dress shoes.
Arielle threaded between the desks and cubicle walls as the crowd of forty-plus employees flowed toward his office. When everyone was gathered, she wiggled through the crowd until she stood at the front.
The veins on her father’s neck and the side of his face stood out, swollen like bluish vines had wrapped around his forearms, slid up his neck, pulsed over his temples, and bloomed into red tendrils in the whites of his eyes. His jaw bulged like he was chewing the vines invading his mouth. “Listen up? Everybody, listen up!”
The crowd simmered down.
“I have some bad news, and I have some good news,” Frank Carter announced, staring over everyone’s heads at the back wall where the clock was nailed.
The crowd swayed like tall wheat in the wind and muttered.
Arielle watched them as much as she watched her dad because the employees were HR’s concern.
Frank Carter sighed, and then he said, “Let’s start with the bad news to get it over with. Over the last six months, we’ve lost half of the golf courses that were working with us, which means we’ve lost half our referral fee income. Our advertising income is way down through no fault of our advertising department. Advertising spend is purely determined by the number of eyeballs on our app and the number of times the fingers attached to those eyeballs click an ad, and I found out last weekend that our user base has dropped by seventy-five percent over the last two months. There just aren’t enough eyeballs looking and fingers clicking on Match Play anymore. Everybody has started using the new Golf Wow app put out by the Infinite Golf conglomerate because they’ve been able to negotiate steeper discounts than we ever could. They undercut us a lot, and that’s why Match Play has failed. I can’t justify keeping it going any longer. I’ve spent all the money I had trying to save it. That’s why I just sold Match Play to a venture capital firm called Last Chance, Inc.”
Everyone in the crowd had grabbed onto the person or desk or wall nearest to them.
Aunt Molly sank into a chair with her face in her hands.
Arielle did likewise as the gut-punch of those numbers drove the air from her lungs.
Match Play was her dad’s whole retirement.
She swallowed the sick in the back of her throat as she watched her father’s dream and his retirement savings flush down the toilet.
Frank Carter continued, “The good news is that the guy who’s coming into run Match Play will be retaining all employees for the time being. There probably will be some staff cuts at some point, so I highly recommend everybody start looking for a new job. I’ll give you the best referrals I can write. You guys are the best, and you’ve done an amazing job. It was just the business climate. The big conglomerates are taking over and running small mom-and-pop operations like Match Play out of business. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry that I couldn’t make it work.”
Everyone was shocked-still silent as Frank Carter picked up his briefcase and walked toward the front door, but he turned around at the last minute and said, “But those of you who stay will need to be ready for some changes. Match Play isn’t going to be a tee-times app anymore.”
That news got a rumble from the gathered employees.
Arielle waited, her stomach fluttering.
Frank Carter snarled, “He’s turning it into a dating app.”