Page 59 of Enticing the Elf
He holds up his hands. “You asked how I’d feel, so I’m giving you context. That’s all. I’ll email the others and we can schedule a time for a full debrief. Eoin’s making big progress, so we should try to keep up.”
I make an agreeing noise as he turns away, but he’s barely taken three steps before he turns back. “Hey, Dáithí? Don’t forget that you never asked Eoin to do any of this. It was his idea.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Eoin
Saturday night might have beena raving success—I know it was because Dáithí told me—but that hasn’t stopped Dáithí from being a little subdued all week. I’m worried that it’s related to what he said on Saturday about not deserving me, but he’s not receptive to talking about it. The last time I asked, he said he wanted time to work out what his own thoughts were.
Between that, getting a little ahead on my regular work so I can spend today on reception, and Ari’s newfound determination to annoy me until I fire him so he won’t have to work with the Warhammers, it’s been a chaotic week. But I’m ready for this. I’ve looked through the training manual Candice from CSG loaned me, and Dáithí left a cheat sheet for me on his desk. I was a soldier for thousands of years, involved in complex operations to protect and relocate people in the midst of a widespread catastrophic series of events. For part of that time, I was in charge of some of those operations. I’ve been running Raðulfr’s security for the last few hundred years—I deal with his viceroys and other heads of state as a matter of routine. I’m pretty sure I can handle reception for the day.
And Ari’s just going to have to suck it up and quit being a baby. I assigned him to the king yesterday so he could sulk outall his feelings while being useful. Hopefully he’s back to himself today, because it’s up to him to manage the team while I’m preoccupied with this.
“This” being the meeting room schedule. I came in early so I’d have time to read through the cheat sheet and familiarize myself with everything, but I didn’t anticipate the meeting room schedule. Dáithí’s list says to check which rooms have been booked and whether the booking is for an internal meeting or if there will be visitors attending. If there are visitors coming, I need to confirm that they’re already on the visitor list, and if not add their name, who their contact is, and check whether they’ll need to sign in so they can go through the security gate—and if so, there’s a whole list of other things I need to check off. I’m familiar with that list, though, seeing as I helped Steffen Draco write it and talked him down when he wanted to include biometric scanning as a requirement.
It should be fairly simple. After all, the process for booking a meeting room requires staff to include these details, and the process for having a visitor in the office requires them to do the rest. Even if they forget to note visitor names when booking the meeting room, they should already be on the visitor list—or vice versa.
The problem seems to be that we work with people who are incapable of following a basic process.
I click into every single taken slot on the schedule. There are eight rooms, with sixteen potential half-hour meeting slots available for each room. Almost three quarters of them are taken, and only six have all the necessary information.
Sucking an annoyed breath in through my nose, I scroll back to the nine o’clock slot and start noting down who I’ll need to contact. Thankfully, a lot of the bookings span multiple time slots, which cuts the number of meetings I need to chase up even further. But I’m going to havequitea lot to say to these people.
I send a message to everyone whose meetings begin after ten, but I’ll have to call the ones that start at nine. This is such a waste of my time—there are still three things on Dáithí’s list that I need to do before the office is open to visitors in twenty minutes. I stab the digits for the first extension into the keypad.
“What?”
I pull the handset away from my ear and look at it. What the fuck?
“Hanesty?” I check. Usually he answers the phone with his name, but even if he’s trying something new, “what” is not it.
“Who’s this? Is Dáithí not in today?”
My eyes narrow. He thought it was Dáithí, and he answered the phone like that? “It’s Eoin. I’m filling in for Dáithí today.”
There’s a thudding sound that might be Hanesty dropping something, and it gives me dark satisfaction.
“Eoin! You’re… wow. Okay. Couldn’t get a temp at the last minute, hey?”
I don’t bother to reply. I’ve already wasted too much time on him. “You’ve booked Meeting Room 3 at nine o’clock but haven’t followed the process. Update the booking information or I’ll cancel it.”
“The… oh, uh. Really? I didn’t think we actually needed to do that.”
“What was it that made you think that? The fact that a process document was created for it, or the instructions that pop up when you click into the schedule to make a booking?”
He gives a strained, nervous laugh. “No, I mean, visitors check in with Dáithí anyway, right? So it doesn’t need to be in the booking.”
Does he realize he’s talking to the head of the king’s personal security right now, openly stating that he doesn’t follow security practices for the office where the king works?
“Update it in the next two minutes or I’m canceling the booking. And since it sounds like you have external people coming, they’d better be on the visitor list.” I end the call before I have to listen to him say anything else. If you’d asked me ten minutes ago, I would have said Hanesty was decent enough and not the type to make trouble.
I’m currently reassessing that opinion.
Mentioning the visitor list raised another concern, though, and before I make the next call, I bring up that file—and swear. I can’t be certain that people haven’t been populating it, but I do know approximately how much traffic comes through this office every day, and based on that there should be a lot more names on this list.
Is this the kind of bullshit Dáithí deals with before he even needs to switch the external phone lines to active?
Making a snap decision, I stab the buttons on the phone, dialing an extension that’s not on my list. It takes less than a minute to explain the situation to Steffen—I don’t even need to finish before he turns growly and demands I let him deal with it—and then I snap a photo of my list and text it to him.
