Enough

Tom looked at his watch.
9.14am.
In precisely one minute, his telephone would ring and Geraldine would speak at him. He would answer all of her questions accurately and without a sniff of resentment.
Resentment.
How he despised Geraldine, with her profoundly soulless biz-speak and abhorrently subtle rudeness.
There would be the silence she painfully initiated when he stuttered in searching for an even response to one of her more ridiculous requests. There would be the audibly sighs of lazy disgust that wheezed through her nasal passage when he needed to collect his thoughts.
Most of all, there would be sly animosity and a need to feign misunderstanding whenever possible.
Geraldine, a big old bag of flab charged with the half-million pound budget for the company expenditure, had a knack of belittling Tom, and she loved nothing more than to do him down at every opportunity.
During the weeks when he had let his resentment become visible, she had made him feel utterly inadequate.
One outburst would see him replaced in a flutter of false lashes, and Tom knew there were plenty of people sniffing at his door, bursting for him to explode.
The phone rang and Tom went to hold the receiver, breathing deeply before picking up.
Picking up; that bloody phrase they kept banging on about at meetings.
He hadn’t gambled for four months and his mind was beginning to clear but the obsession hadn’t cleared. He still tinkered with the idea that he could win.
Just a few days ago, Virgin had sent an email to remind him that he still had funds in his gaming account. They didn’t say how much. Just that he had money in there.
He’d thought about taking a peek but when he was about to do it, he called a man he’d met at the meetings who said exactly what he needed to hear.
‘You’re either walking towards a gamble or you’re walking away. Which way are you going if you take a peek, Tom?’
‘I’d be walking towards a gamble,’ said Tom like a good little boy.
The upshot was that he agreed to ask his wife to take out whatever funds were in the account and then close the damn thing down for good.
‘Morning, Tom. How are we today?’ said Geraldine.
‘Very well, thank you Geraldine. And yourself?’
‘You just said we were very well,’ said Geraldine, expecting a laugh. Tom said nothing. ‘Yes, well, down to business. I’ve been having a look at overall costs and they seem to have started to creep up again so I wanted to run a few instances past you.’
‘Right you are.’
Geraldine did this from time to time.
Once, she managed to collate records on the amount of Rich Tea biscuits that were being consumed by the company’s thirty-five employees over a period of five years and had found that there had been a 10% rise in consumption alongside a 6% rise in orders for PG Tips during the same period.
Tom had tried to reason with her over the matter, that two rather large ladies had replaced two previous staff-members who brought in their own brand of biscuit, and that Ron had taken to drinking more tea since the death of his wife, but Geraldine would not be moved.
The McVities Rich Tea biscuits were replaced with an inferior brand, and sure enough consumption went down. In fact, it plummeted. Tom managed to keep the PG Tips by shopping around for deals, eventually buying in bulk from a local Costcutter that had them on offer.
Then there was the matter of paper usage.
According to Geraldine, the company had failed to fulfil a requirement in their wholesaler’s contract to use 12,000 sheets of A4 during each consecutive month and that a penalty would be payable unless something was done to satisfy the wholesaler.
Geraldine requested that the unused paper be put up for auction under an alias, but Tom persuaded her against the idea as it may backfire if somehow it came to light that a prominent faith organisation was selling blank paper on Ebay.
When Tom suggested that a more suitable arrangement be made with the wholesaler to run in line with their five-star carbon footprint contract with the council, which had generously rewarded the company with some lucrative contracts in the general maintenance and appliance-schemes for local churches outside their denomination, and which was under review, albeit internally so, Geraldine barked back to him that it was quantitively more cost-effective (why couldn’t she just say far cheaper?) to buy at the current level of stock and that something needed to be done in order to keep the existing contract intact.
In the end, it was decided that all excess paper would be given to charitable foundations that were linked to the company in one way or another.
‘According to my estimations, there’s been a disproportionate increase in toilet-roll usage over the last quarter. Do you have any idea why this might be, Tom?’
He wanted to tell her to stick the excess bog-roll up her arse and to wait for all the fluid to be sucked dry inside her so he could watch her shrivel. Then he’d break every bone in her body, strip her of flesh and make her papier-mache form a contender for the Turner Prize.
‘Well, I can’t think of any reason why that would be the case, Geraldine, although..’
He’d done it again; speaking without thinking.
This was when Geraldine pounced.
‘Although?’ Then came the obligatory sigh in silence as she imagined him wriggling in his chair.
Tom’s mind wondered with an angry zing towards his passion of resentment for her, the stuttering started up like an old car.
‘Well, there’s a p.possibility that p.p.p.perhaps…erm.’
No, nothing came.
How could he possibly justify any reasoning as to why there had been a significant increase in the use of toilet roll within the company. People did poos. There had always been thirty-five employees and each was entitled to use their fair share of toilet roll.
‘Anything, Tom?’ Geraldine sighed. ‘Any ideas at all?’
A blank, gaunt expression came over Tom as he imagined telling her exactly what he thought of her projected costing devices and interim concessionary mechanisms, but when he imagined what his face must look like, he snapped out of his hideous reverie with a cough.
‘Do you mind, Tom? A cough can be deafening on the other end of the line, you know.’
‘Sorry, Geraldine.’ How she loved to hear him say that word.
A sigh elapsed. ‘Well? Any ideas as to how to remedy the situation, Tom? Consumption’s up by 20%.’
‘There’s been a marked increase in cleanliness within the company and society in general,’ he said finally. ‘People are a lot more aware of disease these days and perhaps this has compounded on certain staff-members.’
‘What do you mean, Tom?’
‘I mean, maybe people have decided to wipe down the toilet seat before sitting on it…just a thought, you know.’
Geraldine said nothing. It was quite a good comment under the circumstances and this angered her. She wanted Tom to be befuddled, perplexed, as unsure of himself as possible in order that she may elevate her view of herself.
‘Geraldine, I can’t very well ask the team to use less toilet-roll, can I? I mean, they need to go when they need to go. Can you see past this for now and make a decision based on the next quarter’s toilet-roll useage?’
‘Are you suggesting that I do nothing about it?’
‘No, n.n.not at all. If c.c.consumption’s still up n.n.next quarter, we could make it known to staff and ask them to, well..’
‘Well what, Tom? Ask them to what? The plain fact of the matter is that they have used a roll a day, that’s five rolls a week, for the past six years and now they’re using six rolls a week.’
The silence.
What could he say?
The sigh, controlled and lengthy.
Unbearably painful.
Tom writhed in his chair and swivelled to stop his thoughts from exploding.
Did she mean to be so anal? Was her primal mission to make his week a living hell?
Just when he was about to snap, Geraldine coughed and he could hear paperwork being rearranged on her desk.
‘Now, can we move on to something else?’
‘Of course, yes.’
‘Right. I’ve managed to unearth data on overall usage of coffee within the company and it seems that there’s been a sharp increase in consumption over the last quarter. Do you have any ideas as to why this might be?’
Tom shook his head, trying to appease appallingly morose thoughts and replace them with a calm, even sense of rationale.
‘Yes, erm, well we did have that coffee morning last month when the ministers met with staff to discuss strategic target-market analysis to encourage younger members of the community to attend church more often, and I think one of the staff dropped a can of coffee the month before.’
Having surprised himself with this whiter than white lie, Tom almost tittered into the phone.
Geraldine hadn’t liked his tone, though. Far too composed.
Although his riposte had been remarkably well delivered, the fact that he could account for the excess use of coffee made her very suspicious.
Having gone a fair way to solving the mystery, even when he’d lied about the staff member dropping a can, there was nothing more that she could say on the matter to boil his blood.
‘Right, let’s move on,’ she barked, rustling more papers. ‘Parking.’
Oh Christ, thought Tom. Not parking again.
Three years ago, Geraldine had enlisted the questionable talents of a strategic space technician to introduce allocated parking-spaces for staff-members at the company.
Tom had fought against the proposal on the grounds that the car park was adequate as it stood. Being the size of a football pitch, people assumed their preferred places naturally. His main argument was that it was a complete waste of money.
Geraldine argued that it would save time for staff to walk into the building if they were allocated specially designed spaces. She believed this would also offer staff a unique sense of belonging to the company, not that their employment contract was worth the paper it was written on.
‘You can stick your parking up your fat, fuckless arse, Geraldine, and what’s more..’
Tom went on for a good few minutes, during which time the police entered the building and arrested Geraldine.
She was charged with false accounting and taken away.
Tom received an email from head office to say that he'd be in charge from now on.

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