He Recognised the Slides Because He Had Made Them

Ade was not supposed to be in the quarterly review.

He was in it because Preeti from finance had a dentist appointment at half two and had asked him, at 9:40 that morning, to sit in and take the numbers. So he was at the back, at the end of the second row of chairs against the wall, with a laptop and a notebook, when Karen stood up and said, “So. The retention work.”

And there were his slides.

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Not similar slides. Not slides based on his. His.

The same eleven, in the same order. The same cohort chart he had spent a Saturday afternoon fighting with, including the axis label he had never managed to get to sit properly and had eventually left slightly low. The same wrong shade of grey in the header band, which he had copied from an old deck in his second week and had been meaning to fix for four months.

And on slide nine, in the third bullet, where he had written recurring and meant recurrent, the typo was still there.

He sat completely still for nineteen minutes.

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She presented it well. That was almost the worst part.

Karen is good in a room. She has a way of slowing down at the point where a graph is complicated that makes everybody feel clever rather than lost, and she did it at exactly the right moment, on slide six, which is where Ade would have done it.

She knew the material. She should have known the material; she had been forwarded every draft, sometimes twice.

And when the director asked a question about how the cohort was defined — the one genuinely difficult question in the whole thing — she answered it correctly, using a sentence Ade recognised. He recognised it because he had written it, in an email, to her, in June, on a Tuesday, at 4:51 in the afternoon.

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There is a particular physical sensation that goes with this and Ade had never had it before.

It is not rage. Rage would have been simpler and he would have known what to do with it. It was closer to vertigo: the floor of the room being quietly moved about eight inches to the left while everybody else carries on drinking coffee.

He remembers thinking, with great clarity: if I say something now, I am the man who interrupted the quarterly review.

He remembers thinking: if I don’t say something now, I never can.

Both of those were true. He has thought about them a great deal since and he still does not know which way he would tell somebody else to go.

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He did not say anything.

He looked at the screen. He looked at the back of the head of the woman from operations in front of him. He looked at his own laptop, where he had a spreadsheet of Preeti’s numbers open, and he found that he could not read any of them.

At one point Karen said “we” — “so what we found here” — and Ade felt his jaw go, and then she said it twice more, and by the third time it had stopped meaning anything.

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At the end the director sat back and said: “This is exactly what I’ve been asking for.”

There was a small murmur of the kind that passes for applause in that building.

And Karen said: “Thank you. It’s been a big piece of work.”

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Ade wrote that sentence down.

Word for word, in the margin of his notebook, next to Preeti’s figures, in handwriting he can barely read now because of the angle he was holding the pen at.

“Thank you. It’s been a big piece of work.”

He did not know, at that moment, what he was going to do with it. He knew only — and he says this is the single most useful instinct he has ever had at work — that in about a fortnight somebody was going to ask him a question, and that when they did, he was going to want to be able to say exactly what was said, rather than approximately what was said.

The meeting broke up. People stood and did the thing with the chairs.

Karen passed him on the way out, at a distance of about a metre, and said, “All right, Ade?”

“All right,” said Ade.

He got back to his desk at twenty to four and sat down and did not open anything for eleven minutes.