It was the Saturday before Thanksgiving and David Stewart was trying to wrap up a facet of a re-engineering project that had turned out to be anything but typical. He’d gone into the office early to push out a final version of the mechanical plan for the store only to find that Hannah Madison’s detailed markup was corrupted.
He had looked at them on Friday and they had looked good. It was anything but typical for Hannah to make mistakes, and all but unthinkable that she would have gone back in and made changes.
He called her and asked her to come in to fix them so he could get done. She agreed.
He had spent the rest of the day regretting what happened next.
David considered himself a decent, nice guy. He had a shot at becoming a partner in the firm in a few years.
Hannah had been there a little while when he checked on her progress, and she said, “I saved a version, so you can get some of the info you need, but there’s still a lot of things that are changed. And, I feel like I have to look at every number, just in case some of the changes are subtle.”
“Wow… yeah… Didn’t think of that…” Then, David made his mistake. “Look… I really appreciate you coming in on Saturday. Let me make it up to you by treating you to lunch at the cafe…”
Hannah agreed, but there was a “I need to report this to HR” vibe in her reply. David meant nothing, so he hoped he was reading her wrong.
By the time they were done with lunch, he perceived a change. She seemed chill about everything and even suggested they go back to the office and go over everything one more time.
As sensible as that seemed, David’s suspicions went into overdrive. He wondered if she was trying to set him up for something, though that seemed anything but typical for her character.
The consolation in it all was that the mechanical plans got done and he had made some huge gains on a draft of the electrical. Still, knowing how close Hannah was with the department director, David was concerned the day would come back to bite him.
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