As Rosie approached the office on Monday morning, she felt her spirits wilt. Cover 4 U was based on a purpose-built business park made up of austere, warehouse-like buildings. Even without taking the firm’s worst clients and staff into consideration, it was a grim place to work. The desks and chairs were cheap and insubstantial, the lighting harsh and the heating unreliable. Even the break room felt unwelcoming, with its ancient, limescale-clogged kettle and pinboard full of ‘important notices’, most of which were edicts issued by Martin.
In several spots around the claims handlers’ area were potted cacti, presumably put there by some well-meaning, naively optimistic HR consultant. Any long-term member of staff would have understood that even succulents seemed unable to thrive in this environment, drooping and yellowing as though death might be preferable to living here.
Rosie arrived at her workstation and waved hello to Ellie, silently nodding in acknowledgement that her friend was already engaged on a call. Ellie threw her a sarcastic thumbs up, but smiled in greeting as she listened to whoever she was dealing with.
‘Hey up,’ Ellie said a moment later as she removed her headset, pleased her call had ended. ‘You all right? You look a bit peaky.’
‘I’m fine,’ Rosie assured her, glowering at her computer. It was yet to boot up successfully, despite having been switched on several minutes ago.
‘Well, you won’t be when you check your emails,’ Ellie groaned. ‘Martin’s booking in one-to-ones with the whole team. He wants to discuss efficient use of company time. I’ve got an appointment first thing tomorrow.’
‘Ugh,’ Rosie sighed. ‘What does that even mean? It’s not as if we’re sat here reading celebrity gossip or scrolling social media all day – half the websites on the internet are blocked. I couldn’t even check the weather forecast the other night … Who thinks MetOffice.gov.uk represents a major distraction, for god’s sake?’
‘Martin,’ Ellie said, grimacing. ‘He’s relentless. I think he was an evil Victorian in a former life – one of those blokes who sent terrified children up chimneys for profit. He stopped me one day last week and demanded to know how many times I’d been to the toilet.’
‘No way,’ Rosie said, trying not to laugh, all thoughts of her own problems receding as she imagined this tableau.
‘Yes, way,’ Ellie insisted with a smirk. ‘He regretted it, though. I asked him how many times he thought it was acceptable for me to change my tampon during an eight-hour shift.’
Rosie hooted.
‘Then I innocently suggested we might want to seek HR advice,’ Ellie went on. ‘See if there was any kind of official guidance on loo breaks for menstruating women. At which point his face went a bit purple and he buggered off upstairs.’
‘Amazing,’ Rosie said. ‘Top-quality work.’
‘Wasn’t it just?’ Ellie smiled. ‘I’ll make us a brew,’ she told Rosie, standing up with a yawn. ‘At super high speed, obviously, for maximum, Martin-standard efficiency.’
As Rosie’s computer came slowly to life, she switched her mobile to silent and then absent-mindedly checked her social media feeds. Twitter, or whatever she was supposed to call it these days, was typically full of political screeds. She clicked away, on the basis that she was already angry enough.
Instagram offered her nothing of note – just several acquaintances’ weekend snaps, plus a reel of a cute kitten chasing a catnip toy. Facebook, it turned out, was the network she should have avoided – and if it hadn’t been for her ancient laptop’s struggle to load the CRM database, she would have.
Just moments ago, James had been tagged in a photograph at some outdoor sporting event. Based on the greyish sky and the mud spatter on his trainers, legs and shorts, Rosie thought it must have been held yesterday.
He was at what looked like a finish line, with his arm slung around a slender, dark-haired woman. Her taut, toned arms were tanned, exposed in a sleeveless, skintight running vest. Rosie recognised her as a member of James’s gym. She had one of those ‘hot girl’ names that Rosie had always admired, but which she felt too plain and ordinary for herself. Was it Dara? Delilah? No. Dylan.
With a jolt, Rosie remembered James had told her this. The woman in the photo had been named after Bob Dylan, her parents’ favourite singer-songwriter. Rosie recalled that James had said he thought it was cool – he’d explained that this woman somehow pulled off having a name that sounded as though it should belong to a man. Rosie had smiled at the time, nodding as she thought how nice it was that James had some new, like-minded friends to chat with about his health and fitness.
She felt the breakfast cereal she’d eaten earlier curdle in her stomach. No, no, no, she told herself. Calm down. You cannot throw up all over your own desk.
But the siren that had begun wailing inside her head wouldn’t shut up: he lied, he lied, he lied, it sang. Rosie couldn’t work out whether she felt devastated, livid or like the world’s biggest idiot for taking James at his word – for believing there was nobody else involved in their break-up.
Common sense told her this single image wasn’t absolute proof he’d cheated – but the adoring expression on his face, which was tilted in Dylan’s direction, said otherwise.
‘Are you sure you’re OK?’ Ellie asked, back from the kitchen and now gazing down at Rosie with an anxious expression on her face. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
She placed a large mug of steaming tea on the desk beside her friend, clearly awaiting a response.
‘I’m all right, I promise,’ Rosie said, managing a shrug. ‘Just a bad case of the Mondays.’
Ellie didn’t look convinced. The claims line began to ring, and she pointed a finger at Rosie before she could pick up the call.
‘I’ll get this,’ Ellie said. ‘You look like you need some caffeine – or maybe a couple of uppers – before you’re expected to deal with members of the Great British public this morning.’
‘Thanks,’ Rosie said sincerely, trying and failing to resist having one last look at the picture of James and Dylan.
She swiped to unlock her phone, only to see a ‘sorry, that content no longer exists’ message in place of the offending image. Someone had untagged or deleted it within two minutes of it going online. Rosie felt sure she knew why.
Later that day, Rosie made her way upstairs to the first floor of Cover 4 U’s two-storey building. She’d been allotted an afternoon slot for her talk with Martin, which she’d accepted in lieu of having any reasonable excuse to avoid it.
The decor up here was no plusher than at ground level, but instead of a series of open-plan workspaces, it boasted several meeting rooms and a clutch of tiny offices. These belonged to team leaders and high-level administrative staff, with one set aside for the firm’s rarely seen managing director.
One of the doors bore a shiny nameplate with ‘Martin Bell’ written on it. Resisting the reflexive eye roll this inspired – Martin had surely bought and attached the thing himself, since none of the other offices had them – Rosie knocked and waited.
A moment later, his voice reached her from inside. ‘Enter.’
She shook her head in distaste, twisted the doorknob and went in.
Martin’s office was orderly and stark. The blandness of it surprised Rosie, even though she’d been in here several times before. There was precious little of anything personal to be seen, despite the fact he’d occupied the space for as long as they’d worked together. Even Rosie’s tiny desk, which she sat at only in shifts, had her favourite pens, a pretty coaster and a half-eaten packet of Hobnobs on it.
Martin’s clothes were similarly nondescript: grey slacks, black shoes and a white shirt that, unfortunately, was a little more transparent than Rosie would have liked. She cringed at the realisation that she could see his chest hair through it.
Martin also wore a charcoal-coloured tie – the sort a provincial bank manager might have sported in the 1980s, but which was completely unnecessary in the here and now. He was quite short – only a little taller than Rosie, who was five feet five – and for the last two years had sported what Niamh would have called ‘seriously ill-advised facial hair’. This took the form of a wispy goatee that did nothing to strengthen his weak chin.
‘Miss Butler,’ Martin said, breathing stale coffee fumes in Rosie’s direction. ‘Please sit.’ He gave the statement the same gravity that a High Court judge might employ when instructing a clerk to bring out the defendant.
She sank onto the stiff, unyielding couch on the other side of his desk, but said nothing. Martin’s affected formality grated on her, making her feel defensive even though, as far as she knew, she’d done nothing she needed to worry about.
If anything, Rosie felt quietly confident that she was good at customer service – charming, even, compared with some of her colleagues, and by no means a shirker. Nevertheless, she braced herself.
‘I’m speaking with all team members about the need to ensure time-wastage is minimised,’ Martin began, steepling his fingers and bringing them to rest on what Rosie couldn’t avoid thinking of as his surprisingly hirsute chest.
‘I’m sure you can appreciate that every minute lost to unproductive activity represents a cost to the company,’ Martin went on. ‘These are costs we can ill afford in this economy. This issue is of significant interest to senior management, and I’ve been tasked with creating a strategy that will tackle our budgetary “black hole”, shall we say.’
Rosie felt her eyes start to glaze over.
‘I see,’ she said, not seeing at all.
‘Very good,’ Martin answered. ‘Then you’ll also understand, Miss Butler, why I took the decision to review all claims handlers’ recent recorded calls. My aim was, of course, to assess them for efficiency.’
‘Right,’ Rosie nodded, wondering why Martin’s speech was modelled after a member of Downton Abbey’s landed gentry. If Ellie’s intel was correct, he’d been born and brought up in Edmonton.
‘I have some concerns about several of your recent calls,’ Martin pressed on, frowning. ‘No doubt you’re aware of what I’m referring to.’
Rosie felt her breath catch in her throat. Was this about Mr Bathurst and his unsuccessful claim? She had sort of hung up on him, she supposed – though only after asking if she could help him any further and receiving an emphatic no in response.
‘I … er—’ Rosie mumbled. ‘Sorry. No.’
‘Indeed? Allow me to explain,’ Martin said, shaking his head at her in apparent disappointment. ‘First of all: last week you spoke with Mrs Edith Green – a customer based in Coleshill, Buckinghamshire. Your conversation lasted twenty-two minutes, eight of which consisted solely of the lady wittering on about her husband’s cataracts.’
‘What?’ Rosie asked, nonplussed. Even if Martin’s close analysis of the timings was correct, she didn’t see how they reflected on her.
‘Cataracts!’ Martin barked loudly, as if Rosie were hard of hearing rather than baffled by the turn this discussion had taken. ‘In what way does allowing the woman to drone on about her other half’s eyesight advance us towards our CHIM target? How does it contribute to the growth of our business? More to the point, how does it relate to her claim for a storm-damaged greenhouse?’
Rosie racked her brains, unable to remember what on earth the CHIM target was. She hated these stupid acronyms … Then, in a flash, it came to her: Claims Handled In the Month. ‘Well … it doesn’t,’ she said, finally. ‘Not directly, anyway. But isn’t Cover 4 U known for its excellent customer service? The strapline on all our ads is “low prices, high standards and a human touch”.’
Rosie stifled an embarrassed shudder as she quoted this, wondering under what circumstances anyone would ever let Martin offer them a ‘human touch’. ‘The poor woman had just been told that her husband needed surgery and was worried sick,’ she pressed on. ‘She was overwhelmed – dealing with a load of different problems at once. She needed to talk, and telling her to zip it didn’t seem like the best way to proceed.’
‘There’s good customer service, then there’s letting a customer talk at you relentlessly while you coo in sympathy,’ Martin said triumphantly. ‘There’s also the matter of your directing the customer to the NHS website for reassurance,’ he continued. ‘Hardly your job, Miss Butler.’
Rosie took a deep breath and tried to quell her rising annoyance. ‘I felt it was the best way to calm her down and get the conversation back on track,’ she said. ‘I was very aware of the lady’s old age. If I’d upset her, it would hardly have reflected well on the company, would it?’
‘This meeting is about inefficiency, not Cover 4 U’s brand health,’ Martin ranted. ‘That call, in my judgement, was highly inefficient.’
Rosie swallowed and said nothing, furious as well as mildly nauseated by the phrase ‘brand health’.
Martin took her silence as humble acceptance of his ‘judgement’ and continued: ‘Next – your conversation with a Miss Shivani Sharma regarding her car insurance claim.’
Rosie listened as he outlined all the ways in which he believed she’d mishandled the call. Again, she’d supposedly given the customer’s worries ‘too much airtime’. She’d also been ‘overly reassuring’ and ‘too quick to imply we’d pay out’ when she explained that millions of people had bumps and scrapes in their cars – that such incidents were the reason why insurance policies existed.
Rosie remembered this conversation: a panicked call from a twenty-year-old girl who’d grazed the side of her mother’s car against a wall in a badly designed multistorey car park. Shivani Sharma had cried as Rosie asked her to explain the incident, struggling to articulate what had happened through her sobs. Only someone with a heart of stone could have stopped themselves offering her a little comfort.
And so it went on. Martin listed four more conversations that he felt Rosie had allowed to ‘drift off topic’, or during which she’d ‘wasted time being unnecessarily pleasant’.
Unnecessarily pleasant? Her mind boggled.
While Martin was capable of separating the speed at which Cover 4 U handled claims from the impression its staff left on customers, Rosie knew this to be a wilfully stupid feat of doublethink. Yes, conversations would move more quickly if she, Ellie and the rest of the team were prepared to be rude, pushy and unsympathetic. However, it was absurd to pretend such briskness wouldn’t have consequences for the firm further down the line – especially with the older generation, who were high-value, brand-loyal customers, as Martin might have put it.
How, Rosie asked herself, had she ended up here? Spending the majority of her time in this dreary building, mostly surrounded by dreary people. She was brighter than this, better than this, as Niamh so frequently tried to tell her – but she’d believed none of that mattered as long as her home life was happy.
Unnecessarily pleasant. She considered the words again and wondered whether it was possible that hell had frozen over, because – possibly for the first time ever – Martin had said something that resonated with her.
As he ranted on, Rosie thought again about James, and the woman she now suspected he was sleeping with. Perhaps had been sleeping with for a while. He’d talked about her at home – had even seemed a little starry-eyed about her – and his ever-supportive girlfriend hadn’t suspected a thing.
The betrayal had hidden in plain sight. Rosie’s sheer niceness had made it easy for James to do whatever he wanted, from taking motorcycle lessons to setting up a home-brew kit in their garden; from spending all hours exercising to eating his own body weight in chickpeas. Apparently he hadn’t drawn the line at consuming colossal amounts of soluble fibre just lately; the aphrodisiac effect of so much roughage had led to him boffing another woman.
‘Altogether, Miss Butler,’ Martin now said, his tone so swollen with self-importance that it made Rosie feel ill, ‘I think you need to be more focused in your dealings with customers, as it were.’
The sour coffee smell found Rosie’s nostrils again, and she fought to stop her nose wrinkling in distaste. Surely, she thought, nobody so proud of themselves had ever had so little to boast about. Martin was a narrow-minded, patronising arsehole who clearly – and inaccurately – considered himself a cut above his ‘less intelligent’ team. She felt anger coursing through her blood like venom as he stared across his desk at her, expecting contrition.
‘What does “more focused” actually mean? In plain English, if you don’t mind?’ Rosie demanded.
Martin’s brow furrowed. ‘Quicker to press on with the relevant claims processing questionnaires,’ he said. ‘Rather less optimistic that we can help. Much more willing to shut down irrelevant waffle.’
‘Irrelevant waffle like this, you mean?’ Rosie said, the words erupting like lava before she could stop them.
Martin’s eyes grew cartoonishly round. He spluttered, evidently struggling for something to say.
Eventually he managed, ‘There is nothing irrelevant about my new ACE metric: Average Call Efficiency will now be checked weekly and considered at all claims handlers’ quarterly appraisals. I don’t know what has come over you in the past few minutes, Miss Butler, but I’ll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head.’
‘A few minutes ago you were telling me I’m too nice,’ Rosie said hotly, her temper suddenly at snapping point. ‘You were very firm about the need for me to shut people down when they’re droning on or talking at me. Am I to assume you’re exempt from the rule?’
Colour was rising in Martin’s face. His ears were turning pink, as if to signal their outrage at what they’d just heard.
‘I expect you to know your place – to remain polite when speaking in the workplace with any superior,’ Martin spluttered indignantly.
It was the word ‘superior’ that did it. Or maybe the phrase ‘know your place’.
Rosie had spent most of her life pandering to other people’s needs and expectations – and where had it got her? She was single, stuck in a dull, uninspiring job and probably about to lose her home. It was years since she’d fully lost her rag, but now seemed the perfect time.
‘How dare you?’ she demanded, seeing red. Standing up.
She loomed over Martin, emanating the sort of righteous anger usually associated with rousing wartime speeches – ones that started with words like, ‘My fellow Americans’, or ended with ‘we shall never surrender’.
‘You are not my superior in any way,’ she informed him. ‘And for the record, I’m very good at my job – certainly better at it than you’d be. It must be nice, sitting up here in your little office and finding fault with the way other people handle difficult real-life conversations. You wouldn’t last five minutes if you were let loose with a headset and had angry customers in your ear all day.’
Martin pushed his chair back from his desk. His whole head was now a luminous shade of magenta. There were sweat patches beneath his armpits, their moisture now rendering his white shirt almost totally transparent. Rosie refused to look at the abundance of body hair this revealed.
He opened his mouth, then closed it again. He looked as if he was quite literally boiling with rage. He had the appearance of a lobster, turning pinker and pinker in a pan of steadily simmering water. It seemed he was so close to spontaneous combustion he could no longer form sentences.
‘As for knowing my place,’ Rosie went on, ‘I don’t think this is it. I’ve spent six years here, and I’ve just realised that’s probably long enough.’
‘Now see here,’ Martin puffed out, ‘this sort of insubordination is a disciplinary matter. Consider this a formal warning. I’ll have no choice but to terminate your employment here if you cannot show me the respect I’m due.’
‘Respect?’ Rosie scoffed. ‘That works both ways, and you’ve got no respect for me or anyone else below your pay grade. And you can stick your warning where the sun doesn’t shine. You can’t terminate me – I’m leaving.’
With that, she turned and marched out of the office. Martin was vainly bellowing something about notice periods and contract clauses as she stormed down the stairs. She paid him no attention.
When she arrived back at her workstation, Ellie was already staring at her.
‘Did I just hear shouting?’ she asked.
‘You did,’ Rosie confirmed, picking up the few personal possessions that littered her desk and dropping them into her handbag.
‘What’s happened?’ Ellie said. ‘It’s like you’re channelling Boudicca – are you about to lead an uprising and lop the heads off some Romans?’
‘Martin and I had our chat’ – Rosie put air quotes around this word – ‘which culminated in me quitting.’
‘You’re leaving? Right now?’
‘Yep,’ Rosie said, flying high on adrenaline as she scraped up her belongings – feeling almost drunk with the thrill of refusing to eat the bullshit sandwich she’d been served by her boss.
Ellie whistled. ‘I’ve always liked you, Rosie, but now I think you might be my hero. I’m going to miss you, but you go for it. Get out there. Keep in touch though, yeah?’
‘For sure,’ Rosie said, stepping around her own, already empty, desk to give Ellie a tight hug goodbye.
‘I’m off, then. Have a nice life, everyone,’ she said to the room at large. ‘I absolutely intend to.’