"Ha! I like his new name. We'll keep it. Okay, so light and fluffy then on the movie choices?"
Claire pressed her lips together. "No, I've changed my mind. I need the power woman thumbs her nose at dudes in charge vibe tonight."
"Atta girl! All right. Let's do this."
Noah scrubbed his face with two hands as he listened to the latest voicemail Claire Broussard left on his phone. So many questions from this one. To be fair, they were intelligent questions, and she never asked the same one twice. The problem was he couldn't discern if they were aimed at learning what she needed to know to do her job or if they were digging into what the team was up to, so she could report back to management.
The rest of the core team was back in Houston and they'd been able to spend time with the new developer. Noah wanted to get Rick's take before scheduling a call with her, but hadn't gotten the chance to reach out to his mate. Balancing two jobs at once was sucking up all his time.
In the meantime, he'd adopted the approach his accounting buddies used when dealing with auditors: answering as minimally as possible to give the information she needed without expanding into details beyond her initial question. He figured that way, he'd be doing his job without giving anyone ammunition to fire at the team. He sighed and sent Claire an email to let her know he received her voicemail and her assumptions were correct.
Noah stretched his arms, then twisted his torso from left to right. Last night's workout had helped, but he was sore this morning. Obviously, he'd been skipping too many gym nights. He reread Claire's latest email. If she wasn't a spy for upper management, he was probably handling this situation completely wrong and doing her a disservice.
He hoped the dev team figured out how to make it work soon. He didn't enjoy being put into this position and it made him irritable. During yesterday's coding session, Del's whining had Noah wondering if they'd notice if he hung up. Rick did an admirable job of letting them vent while staying neutral. But man, all that negativity was getting to him and he wanted to tell them all to shut it.
He shook off his irritation and pulled up the list of action items for his upcoming trip to Houston. Most were project-related, but a few pertained to his career track. The company operated around the world and he wasn't against relocating. If other advancement opportunities were available, he wanted to know about them regardless of where in the world it might take him.
At the bottom of the list, he added a note to ask Jackie outright if VIG's relationship was in jeopardy and if she'd heard anything threatening Rick's position. He was tired of sitting around waiting for the hammer to fall, and his friend didn't need the additional worry of not knowing. Putting himself in the line of fire is probably what his mother meant when she'd lectured him about being fiercely loyal to his detriment. He smiled at an image of her standing with one hand on her hip and the other waggling a finger in his face.
Openly confronting management on gray areas wasn't a new move for him, so he wasn't concerned about any fallout for him personally. And in fact, doing so might move the target—if one existed—from Rick to him, which would work fine. He had a reputation for speaking up and saying what others wouldn't, so no one would blink if he raised a stink. And voicing the concern might actually clarify the new girl's role.
Yep, time to get everything out in the open, so I can stop stressing over every damn little thing.
In fact, he was going to shoot the opening shot right now. Why wait another two weeks for more knots to show up in his neck? He drafted a new email and addressed it to Simon. Perhaps the de facto project manager was unaware of exactly how unproductive the dev team was with the new bottleneck he'd implemented. He typed up a summation of the complaints he'd caught during yesterday's coding session and fired off the email before he could second-guess himself.
Chapter 5
Frustrations
Claire read the email response from Noah Raines a second time. The man was proving to be infuriating! This was exactly what she'd been complaining to Lucinda about. She'd spent the last week chasing answers from the elusive production manager.
In her original email, she'd asked questions about how the data was structured. And she'd organized them neatly into a numbered list to make it easy for him to answer. Instead, she'd gotten a chopped-up response.
* * *
From: Noah Raines
To: Claire Broussard
Subject: RE: MADS Data Nomenclature
* * *
1) Yes
2) Yes
3) No
4) Sometimes
5) I have no idea what you're on about
* * *
Noah Raines
Production Manager
