Page 18 of The Play

“You hate them,” Darcy said frankly. “They make you crazy. Crazier, actually.”

“Cute,” Grant said as the elevator doors opened at the top floor.

He’d had two choices when he’d bought the Condors—he could take over the prior owner’s suite, which was completely removed from the coaches’ offices and almost impossible for any players to access, or he could make the general manager’s office his own.

In the end, that had been the easiest choice he’d made since buying the team.

He’d taken over the general manager’s office, and symbolically, he’d removed the door.

His office, he told the staff and the coaches and the players, was always open to them.

“I’m just saying,” Darcy said, “how would they ever know if you didn’t tell them?”

It wasn’t like he hadn’t considered this once or twice or a thousand times.

Grant sat down at his desk. He knew there was an unreal amount of work to get through today—not just the running of this team, but InTech, too. He didn’t have time to argue with Darcy about Deacon.

“Even if it was mutual, which there’s no guarantee it is, I’m not going to disrespect Deacon that way by making him creep around.” He made his tone as final as he could. The same tone that convinced everyone else he was dead serious.

Darcy still shot him a skeptical glance as she took her favorite chair across from his. Tucked her knees under her.

“You clearly do not see the way he looks at you,” Darcy muttered under her breath.

Grant set his elbows on the desk. “What’s first on the agenda?”

Message received, Darcy clicked on her tablet, bringing up one of her many lists.

“We need to approve the season ticket design and some of the early marketing pieces for the season that the in-house graphic designer’s put together. There’s an email.” Darcy paused. “Scratch that. There’s three emails.”

Grant did not roll his eyes, but he opened his laptop, and after typing in his password, he barely noted the little green checkmark that popped up in the bottom right corner of the screen. The indication that InTech was working—monitoring every keystroke, using the unique way he typed and used the built-in mouse pad to verify that he was in fact Grant Green, owner of this laptop.

It was the technology he’d pioneered. Everyone typed slightly differently. Used their mouse in their own unique way. Sometimes the differences were so miniscule they couldn’t be detected by a human mind, but the system Grant had designed wasn’t human. It could generate hundreds of thousands of calculations in a second. It knew exactly how each person typed and used their computer and the second it detected an anomaly, it would shut down immediately.

“Is the designer someone we hired or was this someone who already worked for the Condors?”

Darcy clicked something on her tablet. “He was here last year. And um . . .the year before.” She glanced up at him. “I think the three emails speaks for itself.”

“It does.” One of their early programs at InTech had been implementing efficiency training. An employee at InTech would know to never send three emails when one would do.

“Who’d we put on the season ticket?” Grant asked while he searched for the right folder. Another program he’d designed, three years in at InTech, automatically sorted email using subject line and content to determine which folder it belonged to. Grant had designed it to learn and adapt with time and additional data, until the longer it was used, the more foolproof it became.

After they’d introduced this program to the market, Grant had gone from pretty rich to very, very rich.

“You told the designer to make a ‘reasoned choice’,” Darcy said.

Grant wasn’t surprised by that. He wasn’t a micro-manager, believing instead in hiring smart people and letting them prove their worth by making good choices. It was also one of his favorite ways to test his employees.

In this case, he knew who he’d probably have picked to be on the season ticket, and the test was if the designer agreed with him. If he didn’t, Grant would listen to the reasoning, and was willing to be wrong—but also willing to cut bait when it became clear through a number of these tests that an employee was the wrong fit for Grant’s vision.

He finally found the folder and pulled up the first email. There was the draft of the design, and right in the middle, blond hair to his shoulders and holding one of the Condors’ signature red and silver helmets, was Landry Banks.

“It’s got flair,” Darcy said. “And even though you wouldn’t tell him your choice, I knew you wanted to put Landry on the tickets. He’s the perfect pick. New to the team, your big signing in the offseason, and let’s face it, he’s got the looks too.”

When she’d first started working for him, she’d held back voicing her opinion until Grant had said his own. But he’d trained her out of that quickly. He wanted to know what the exceptionally talented people around him thought.

Grant sat back in the chair, rested his hands behind his head. Took in the overall feel of the design.

Darcy was right; it had flair.

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