Hard Feelings Read Free

was only about six-twenty now. I figured she was getting an early start to make a good impression.
    Paula had worked very hard to get ahead—going to school at night for three years to finish her MBA, then kissing ass and working long hours to climb the corporate ladder. I knew how much the promotion to VP meant to Paula and tonight I was planning to give her the celebration she deserved.
    I left the apartment at about seven-fifteen. I usually walked to work along the same route—down Third Avenue to Forty-eighth Street, then across town to Sixth Avenue. Once in a while—usually during bad weather or on cold winter days—I took cabs, but I never took public transportation.
    After using my swipe card to unlock the front door, I entered my office at a little before eight o’clock. I picked up my interoffice cell phone at the desk, then went down the long corridor, by the secretaries’ cubicles, to my office in the sales department.
    At my old job at Network Strategies, where my title had been merely salesman, I’d had a big corner office with a spectacular view of the East River. Now, as a senior salesman at Midtown Consulting, I was crammed into a narrow, stuffy office with a single window facing the back of a building. I missed the prestige of a corner office. When you have one of the biggest, most luxurious offices at a company, you get special treatment. In the hallways or at the water cooler, people smile at you and ask you how your weekend was or whether you’ve seen any good movies lately. Or they might offer to help you at the copy machine, or ask you if they can pick up anything when they’re on their way to the deli. But now people barely paid attention to me. Sometimes when I was walking in the hallway I would smile at someone and they would look back at me with a blank face, as if I were invisible.
    Lately, I’d been regretting the decision I’d made seven months ago to leave my old job. When the offer came from the headhunter I had been at Network Strategies for nearly six years and I’d had no intention of quitting. Then I was offered this incredible package at Midtown, with a sixty-a-year base salary and better benefits. Usually, I hung up on headhunters, but that day I listened.
    At the time, there was no way of knowing that coming to Midtown Consulting would probably be the worst decision of my career.
    I followed my typical morning routine—turning on my PC, checking my e-mail and voice mail—then I went to the coffee machine to get a cup of black coffee with three sugars. Back at my desk, I logged on to a Lotus Notes scheduling program. I had no out-of-office appointments today, but there were a number of important callbacks I needed to make this morning, including to Tom Carlson, the CFO I had met with yesterday afternoon.
    I dialed Carlson’s number, expecting to reach his secretary, but on the second ring he answered.
    “Good morning, Tom,” I said, trying to sound as upbeat as possible.
    “Who’s this?”
    “Richard Segal—Midtown Consulting. How are you today?”
    After a long pause he said, “Ah ha.”
    “Great, thanks for asking,” I said. “The reason I’m calling, Tom, is yesterday I didn’t get a chance to tell you—we can knock an additional two percent off that quote, which should save your company an additional twenty or thirty thousand dollars over the course of the contract and—”
    “Yeah, I didn’t really get a chance to look that over yet,” he interrupted. “I’ll call you when I’m ready, okay?”
    “If there’s anything you don’t understand, Tom, or need clarification on I’d be delighted—”
    “Didn’t I tell you yesterday that I’d call you when I was ready to make a decision?”
    “Yes, but I thought you’d want to know—”
    “You know, I feel like you’re trying to talk me into doing something I don’t want to do,” he said, “and I don’t like having that feeling.”
    “I’m sorry if I gave you that impression, Tom,” I said.