Page 17 of The Billionaire's Wake-up-call Girl

“Hmm.” Sasha folds her arms.

“And then a third direction—a rationale on why Instagram is a waste of money for Vossameer.”

“Heaskedfor Instagram.”

“I think he’d appreciate it if we evaluated it critically instead of just saying yes. ‘Why Instagram is wrong for Vossameer.’I bet he’d love it.”

She frowns. Why do I care? But I do. I have this sense that it’s exactly what Mr. Drummond would want.

Sasha sighs. “Work it all up, and I’ll decide how I feel about it. End of next week. Can you do it?”

I grin. I can put my head down and work like a dog all next week, and that’s how I run out the clock. Then I pass go. I collect my sign-on bonus. I do not go to loan-shark-beat-down jail. “I will make this Instagram proposal amazing,” I say.

She gives me a skeptical look. “See that you do. Oh, and this.” She hands me a business card. The front says, simply,Theo Drummond. CEO. Vossameer Inc.The other side is a scribbled phone number. Pencil. Deep, severe lines. “You’re to arrange a wake-up-call service for Mr. Drummond for 4:30 in the morning, every weekday morning. Don’t screw it up. He’s very particular about managing his sleep patterns.”

“Is there a recommended company resource for wake-up calls?”

“If there were, I wouldn’t be tasking you with it. Find a service on Craigslist or something.”

“Okay.”

“Arrange the first one for 4:30 Monday morning. Can you handle that?”

“Got it.” I give her my most pleasant smile, even channeling a bit of the gummy bear goodness.Can I handle it?It’s a phone call to order a service. How hard can it be?

Three hours later, after I’ve called every wake-up service in the state, and then the region, and finally the nation, I discover exactly how hard it can be.

Fun fact: thanks to the invention of alarms and things that slowly turn on your lights, there are not that many wake-up services out there. And the ones that do exist already know of Mr. Drummond, and they won’t touch this account with a ten-foot pole, because apparently Mr. Drummond is more of a jerk in the morning than he is normally. And really hard to wake up.

At one point, I actually go down to main reception and beg the woman at the desk to give me Mr. Drummond’s receptionist’s cell. I put in a frantic call to her and reach her in the hospital waiting room. I tell her the situation and ask her whether she had any contingency plans for when this wake-up-call service quit.

She sounds surprised and unhappy—she thought that service would hold up, and it was the last of the options she knows of. She was thinking of trying services out of Canada or the UK.

I thank her and hang up. It’s 5:30. I’m going to end up on the most crowded subways possible because of this. But the Canada idea is good. I go back to my cubicle, and I finally find one that will do it. I make sure they understand the time difference, and that the call is to be placed Monday at 4:30. The woman on the other end assures me they’ll place the call, assuming the boss is good with taking international payment.

“What do you mean? We’re good for the money,” I say. “We’ll send cash if it comes to it. We’ll send Canadian dollars through the mail if you want.”

“I just have to clear it,” she says. “I’m sure it’s fine.”

“When will I know it’s cleared?”

“I’m sure it’s fine as is,” she says. “You’re on the docket.”

The docket is not inspiring faith in me.

Don’t screw it up. Sasha’s warning keeps buzzing through my mind. Just for the heck of it, I arrange for an additional wake-up call to be placed to my phone for twenty minutes before his. Just to make sure.

It’ll suck to be woken up at 4:10, but I’m sure I’ll be lying awake anyway, freaking out at what happens if I lose my job and my bonus.

Six

Lizzie

They saya watched pot doesn’t boil. And unfortunately, sometimes a watched phone doesn’t ring at 4:10 in the morning. Or 4:15. Or 4:20.

It’s Monday morning, and I’m standing in the corner of our kitchen, which is actually the corner of our living room, sucking down coffee, and freaking out.

All because Mr. Drummond apparently can’t operate any of the thousands of technological innovations designed to wake people up. Mr. Drummond has to have an old-fashioned phone call. And then he’s a jerk about it, or he goes back to sleep.

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