Emma’s spirits sank when she read the first email of the day. It was from her superior in the PR department informing the team that Chris was coming in for his annual visit to the office to brainstorm ideas on how the company could be leaner, meaner and greener.
God, that slogan. That had been his big idea last year.
“We’ll get heaps of pamphlets printed up all saying how we are leaner, greener and meaner now,” he’d said, his big expectant face reminding of her a dog her brother had as a child that she’d always disliked.
It was a patently stupid idea but the way things were, what he said had to happen, so, they’d duly printed up 150,000 flyers only to realise Chris wouldn’t be doing any more work as part of his ‘sponsorship’ for the rest of the year. In the end, the flyers had all been pulped.
Emma didn’t know how much the company was paying Chris for his sponsorship committment, but knew it would be a hell of a lot more than she got for doing actual real life work.
Maybe she wondered, now the boss had gone to the great Competition Commission hearing in the sky, the deal would be reviewed.
She could only hope.
Two hours later she was sitting in a meeting room listening to the prematurely-balding moron drone away in that voice of his. She’d studied hard at uni, even done a post-grad. And here she was taking notes like a secretary while a professional bloody footballer lectured her about the environment and climate change.
“I had another idea. I reckon in the off-season, you guys could fly me to every country in the world in alphabetical order so I could give talks on the importance of reducing carbon to schoolkids? It would have to be first-class because of my shoulders though. But the media would lap it up. You know, like me flying to America and then Austria and then Azerbaijan and so on. Be awesome,” he said.
Chris looked at Emma and held her gaze. What the fuck was he staring at she thought? Was he trying it on with her? One of these footballers who thought every woman in the world wanted to screw him just because he was better than most at kicking a bloody ball around? Then it dawned on. He was waiting for her to write down the latest pearl of wisdom he’d just dispensed. For fuck’s sake. She began writing and he continued.
“Then I had a really good idea about how we could spread the message about climate change. You know those parrots that you can train to say stuff? Well, what we do is get like ten thousand of them, and make them all root each other heaps so we get loads of parrots, like a million, and teach them to say stuff like ‘Switch off your lights when you leave the room’ and ‘Don’t leave your plasma screen on standby, unplug it at the wall’
“Then we like release a couple of hundred thousand in all the big cities and towns and that, and they’ll just fly around and spread the message,” he said earnestly.
Emma glanced at her phone and saw there was another hour and forty five minutes of the meeting to go. She felt her very will to live slipping away. Imagine having to spend whole days in his company. No wonder his missus preferred dining at the Y.
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