Page 77 of Corrupt Game

When no one said anything, I continued.

“You made these as a one size fits all, but what if that’s part of the problem. They need to have a way to be individualized. Thesewon’t work on both a five foot woman and a six five man. The differences are too great. Sure, they can try, but making it work and being comfortable are two different things.”

All five men in the room just stared at me. I fought the urge to bite my lip. I should’ve kept my mouth shut.

“Ian, I think you need to give her a raise,” Mr. Acosta from the government purchasing department commented. “She just put her finger on the problem in less than an hour. All of your researchers weren’t able to figure this out and they’ve had over a year.”

He stood. “Run this through with the new specs needing to be adjustable. If that means more sizes, then that’s what we’ll want. Some more than others, but make it happen.”

“Oh,” he stopped at the door, “make sure that she approves it before you send us the new prototypes for trial.”

“Yes, sir.” Ian stood and waited until the door clicked behind Mr. Acosta.

“Can we do this and how long will it take us?” He looked at the researchers. “Well?”

The three of them simply sputtered, unsure of how to get an answer.

“Mr. Holdt, it will take us an extra week to make the modifications. According to my projections it will allow more use and protection of the wearer. If you’ll give me half an hour, I’ll be able to get you the details on cost versus profit.” I offered, after the other men didn’t say anything, and I could see Ian was getting irritated.

“Thank you, Collette.” He smiled at me, and I breathed a sigh of relief. If he was publicly thanking me, then he couldn’t be too mad at me.

“Return to your work, gentlemen, and let’s see if we can get this thing fixed and into production within just a few days or week at most.”

When they’d left the room, he turned to me.

“I’m not sure what to say. That was quite a brilliant save. It might have taken us months to figure out why we weren’t getting as many orders as we’d projected.” He tapped the table as I couldn’t hold back my smile from his praise. “That brings me to something I’ve been meaning to do, but haven’t had the opportunity yet.”

Rossi knocked and entered.

“Here you are, sir.” He placed a tablet in front of me with a sheet of paper.

“Those are the different login passwords that you’ll need to access the financial and detailed specification on the project. The tablet is only able to work within our network. Everything that you do will be traceable, so trying to contact anyone will only bring trouble to you.” Ian smiled, “You saved me a lot of time and money today, so don’t misuse the trust that I’m giving you.”

“No, sir.” I shook my head. “This is part of what you brought me here to do for you. I’m just glad I could be of service.”

“Good girl.” He stood and they both left the room.

Why did I just feel like he’d patted me on the head for good behavior?

***

The doubts I’d had before the weekend about his personality continued to grow as I followed him around for the next two days.

Jotting down different things he’d done for his company and others. Things that literally made no sense when combined with the idea that he was a killer.

When he thought no one was looking, he’d stopped in the company break room and put a couple of hundred dollar bills into the collection jar for one of the workers whose house had burned down.

One of my jobs as a personal assistant was to process the receipts for the week. It was then I discovered that he personally catered a high end lunch for all the employees every Friday.

There were hundreds of employees in his company. He had it brought in and then everyone was able to eat during their lunch breaks.

I knew there were perks to having billions, but that act in and of itself was something that a nice guy would do. Granted he had tons of money. I’d seen a few of the profit columns and it was impressive.

Each year he would have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars just providing lunch for the employees.

He began giving me more and more leeway as the week went on to be around some of the employees. I started to ask them questions about him.

I would use the starting sentence, “I’m new here. Can you tell me more about the company?” Then would follow with the other questions.

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