And now this
It had all started out with a perfectly innocent email.
A popular employee, Sid from sales, was retiring after a lifetime in the company, and it was falling to someone from HR to organise the present and the leaving do.
‘Ally, would you mind doing it, just ’cause I’ve to leave early to get home for the kids?
’ wheedled Crystal, who had been using the same excuse since Ally joined the company.
By her reckoning, Crystal’s kids must be due to move out of home any day now.
But it bugged her – just because Ally didn’t happen to have kids didn’t mean she was any fonder of crap jobs, and today really wasn’t the day for it.
Soon her phone began pinging away busily with incoming Revolut contributions.
So far, so good. She took a sneaky peek and couldn’t help noticing what people were donating: mostly tenners, and the odd twenty.
But then, to her disbelief, in the middle of the page, in black and white, appeared the name Conal O’Callaghan, the CEO. A fiver.
A sudden wave of indignation surged through her, or maybe it had been brewing all day – a hypersensitivity towards small, overlooked people.
People without much power. People who had to take what they were given.
Impulsively, she took a screenshot of the page and stuck it on an email to Rosemarie with the message:
Poor Sid has been a friendly face in this company for forty years, met every request with a smile and guess who (Conal) donates a FIVER . . . wow . . . maybe he needs a raise??? ??
Adding William to the recipients so he could share in the joke was a bad idea, she acknowledged afterwards. It was just that she’d recently read an article warning that after a date there was a limited window to foster intimacy, and you shouldn’t play too cool and miss it.
Unfortunately, her finger was already in mid-click before she noticed that ‘Folder: All’ was still up.
But it was too late, the message from her hungover brain was already flashing along the neurons in her arm, and nothing on heaven or earth could stop it.
In that moment, she watched helplessly as the message went to every single person in the company and her career imploded.
And that was the start of everything.