Page 61 of Dating and Other Theories
At least her scrutiny of Yemi’s behavior gave her something to think about other than Jonathan. She’d only seen him once since Saturday. On Wednesday night, he’d stopped by to show her a few more script pages. He hadn’t stayed long, and there’d been no repeat of that weird moment from Saturday night, which was good. Hopefully they’d moved past it and Esther could forget it had ever happened.
Friends didn’t have weird moments like that. And she wanted to be Jonathan’s friend. She liked being his friend. She didn’t want to screw that up.
On Friday morning, something else cropped up to distract Esther from lusting after Jonathan. “Hamburger Helper is at it again,” Yemi told her when she got into work.
She groaned as she sank into her chair. “What did he do now?”
Hamburger Helper was their nickname for Dan, one of the design engineers on the payload team. Esther was on the power team, and Dan’s components were forever getting in the way of hers. They called him Hamburger Helper because he always pretended he was being helpful, when really he was trying to get everyone to do things his way. Also, his face sort of looked like a hamburger: round and flat and slightly bumpy.
“Open your email. He stopped by already to make sure you saw it.”
“Of course he did. I’ll bet he sent it after work last night, to make himself look busier.”
She started up her computer and clicked over to her email inbox. As she’d suspected, Dan had sent the email at seven thirty last night, and copied both team leads to make sure everyone knew he was working late. She groaned again as she scanned the text of the email. “Is he serious with this shit?”
“Isn’t he always?” Yemi said.
It was a request for Esther to make modifications to one of her components in order to accommodate his. Which would be fine, except her power converter had been on the live model for a few weeks already, and this was the first he was bringing it up. Because he hadn’t bothered to tell everyone before now that his antenna pointing mechanism conflicted with the placement of her part.
“No way,” Esther muttered. “No fucking way.”
She got up and walked over to her team lead’s desk. “Hey, Bhavin, did you happen to see this email from Dan?” She tried to keep her voice mild and even-toned. Don’t be too aggressive, she reminded herself bitterly.
Bhavin was a small-framed Indian man who wore a lot of hair product and owned a different pair of Air Jordans for every day of the week. Today’s were navy blue with bright yellow trim. He nodded distractedly without looking up from the spreadsheet on his computer screen. “Yeah. You can do it, right? I already told Dmitri you could.”
“I can,” Esther said to the back of Bhavin’s coiffed head. “But I shouldn’t have to. He’s the one who failed to check the model before diving into a design.”
Bhavin’s thumb tapped a high frequency drumbeat on the desk. He was always tapping his fingers or jiggling his leg, like he’d had too much caffeine. “Okay, but it’s less work for you to make the small change to one part that he’s asking for than for him to redesign the entire sub-assembly.”
“It’s not less work for me.”
He turned around to face her, frowning. “It’s less work for the project. His stuff’s on the critical path right now and yours isn’t. We’re all part of a team, remember?”
She could feel her blood pressure rising as her hands clenched into fists at her sides. “I’m not the one who designed an entire sub-assembly without consulting the other members of the team.”
“Is this going to be a problem? I told Dmitri you’d be happy to do it.” Dmitri was Dan’s team lead, and he and Bhavin were buddies. They were in the same fantasy football league and played Magic: The Gathering on the weekends.
“It’s not a problem,” Esther said, forcing herself to smile. “I’m just pointing out this is an issue that could have easily been avoided. And it’s not like this is the first time he’s done something like this either.”
Bhavin’s head bobbed in a rapid-fire succession of nods. “I’ll bring it up with Dmitri, all right? But in the meantime, I need you to go ahead and make the changes.”
“Okay,” Esther said. “Thank you.”
She went back to her desk, knowing nothing would come of Bhavin’s conversation with Dmitri. The payload team had more clout than the power team, because their system served the mission—even though you couldn’t do the mission without power. And Dan was chummy with his team lead, Dmitri, who in turn was chummy with Bhavin, which meant they’d invariably take Dan’s side. She knew this, because it was what had happened every single time she’d tried to object to something he’d done. Magically, the modifications that Dan wanted were always deemed the simplest solution to a problem that Dan himself had created. The guy was made of Teflon. She’d bet cash money he’d never been called “aggressive” in a performance review either.
“Any luck?” Yemi asked when she got to her desk.
“What do you think?”
“At least you tried.”
“I don’t know why I bother.” They never took her side, and now she was the one who looked like she wasn’t a team player.
It wasn’t even nine a.m. and today already sucked.
Esther was stuck in Friday evening traffic on Overland, still fuming about fucking Dan getting his way that morning, when her brother called. She hit the Bluetooth button on her steering wheel as the car ahead of her lurched to another stop.
“We have a problem,” Eric said.
