Distracted July 28, 2012

  

The owner ran out so fast, people in the office almost didn’t see him go.

Meanwhile, she was scheduled to come in late, but apparently decided not to come in at all – a mortal sin on a Friday when everybody is supposed to be in at 8 a.m., our company’s perverted idea of summer hours.

And having both of them out of the office at the same time started the gossip mill running.

How real any of this is, who can say? The two main gossips invent as much as they repeat, and it takes a master code breaker to tell fact from fiction.

But the owner is acting strange which feeds into the rumor mill.

He’s out of the office almost as much as he’s in it, and when he’s around, he clutches his cell phone as if his life depended upon it.

He still makes me uncomfortable whenever he and I occupy the same space. I keep thinking he’ll find an excuse to fire me.

When he called me Wednesday, I panicked, only to hear him rant and rave about the lack of quality of the office phones – which were installed earlier this year but haven’t quite lived up to expectations.

After he ran out this morning, I had to reach him because his number had appeared on my missed calls on the office phone, so called his cell phone. He sounded out of breath when he answered, and out of doors, also strange, since reportedly, he was supposed to be driving to some rather distant meeting and so should have been answering from his car.

I asked him why he had called; he seemed distracted, and told me not to worry about it, he had taken care of the matter, whatever that matter was. He sounded confused, not hostile, but seemed a little startled by my calling him.

Where he was, I could only guess, somewhere on a busy street from the sound of traffic in the background.

 

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