Charlie Foxtrot (Book 2 of Love is War Series)

Chapter 3

Auden crossed her legs once more as she watched the last bit of the most recent orientation video. She knew it was par for the course for any company to have various videos you had to watch when you first started a new job, but she'd seen this one before, and it always seemed to trigger her. Sexual Harassment at the Workplace. While it was necessary, it was always uncomfortable, and the root of the reasons she'd left a couple of her previous jobs in Ft. Lauderdale where she was living until a couple of months ago.

Sighing, she switched legs, bouncing her spikey heel over one knee until she wanted to crawl out of her skin. Five minutes later, the 55-minute cringe scenarios were finally over with. These days they made it pretty open-ended on what could be considered harassment, in her opinion, and some of the milder scenes with compliments didn't really seem to be much of a problem, in her eyes. She even enjoyed a compliment or two herself, so long as it wasn't stepping over the boundaries and wavering on a flirt. She was horrible at flirting, herself. Couldn't have functioned well if her life depended on it. It just wasn't part of her personality.

The room was quiet after the video was over, and soon enough, Jim Lavezzo came into the room to greet her. Clay had set her up with the videos and apologized for their necessity. It was company policy, he said, and the insurance company would have "flipped their shit" if he didn't make all his new hires watch their safety videos, videos on sexual harassment, and incompatible activities. They could lose their coverage unless each was watched, and they even had a short quiz at the end of each section of the safety video, just to make sure you were paying attention. At least she only had to do some of these videos once a year, if she even lasted that long at this job.

"Done with the yearly torture we put our employees through?" he asked her with a smirk. "I guarantee that's the most painful part of the job, having to sit through watching some high school dropouts and Hollywood extras that couldn't get a talking part in some shitty B movie."

Clapping his hands together once, he moved deeper into the room and held out a hand to her. She stood from her seat and shook it a couple of times, her grip semi-firm.

"My name is Jim Lavezzo, and I'm the CEO's personal assistant and, to be completely candid, best friend. I'll be giving you a pretty comprehensive tour of the building right now, though some rooms are not used all that much, and I won't be showing you any offices that are currently in use or closed off for meetings. It would be disruptive to the staff. The basement is off-limits on this tour as well since they have some work going on in some of the rooms. Come with me."

He guided her out of the room and shut the door behind them before looking down at her, a puzzled expression on his face. It seemed like he was much less comfortable with her being this close, and he blinked a few times before turning to the right.

"Like I said, the basement isn't somewhere you will see today, so we'll start right here on the first floor for our tour." He started to slowly walk down the hallway, jabbing a thumb back to a couple of empty rooms that were behind them. "This floor, from what you've seen, is mainly the lobby and some conference rooms. Some of the architects employed by CBC prefer working in the conference rooms if there is a big project, but they do need to give notification or schedule their time in the event that it is already set to be used. We try to keep them open mainly for meetings, but sometimes projects, like the Megamall last year, are so big that there is a need for a larger workspace so we're not cramming people into someone's smaller office. Karen from scheduling usually hands off the duties of retaining conference rooms to her new assistant, Jess. She's pretty new to CBC as well—or, at least, relatively new. She's been with the company since midsummer."

Jim came to a stop at the end of the hallway and hesitated before turning to his right.

"We have some extra rooms down here with the older files that are well over the allotted time we should keep them in physical form. We get them e-recorded once a year, which should actually be happening soon. It's just simpler to have it all recorded year by year, every time at the beginning of the new year. The company who takes the records will come around the middle of the month, so you might see some of the back-office staff coming and going down this hall, just making sure that everything is in order. It's all alphabetized, of course, but sometimes mistakes happen. Once they are all stored on the company servers, they will shred the papers and, in some cases, recycle what they can." He smiled to himself and shook his head like he was admonishing himself. "You've seen the lobby a couple of times at least, so I think we can skip it. Elevator or stairs? The building is only five floors, and much of it is office or storage space. We even have rooms for years the business has been open for the past ten consecutive."