“Um. I...thought that’s...what you wanted? You did say the bricks should be bound. And I found it in one of the store rooms.” I gulped. She had said that. Hadn’t she? I’d written it down! I glanced at Jack, who was no help. “Was that not what you wanted?”
“I did say they should be bound, Declan. I clearly should have been more specific.”
Oh shit. I’d fucked up. Massively, if the way she was staring in bemusement at the pile of rejected prototype bricks was anything to go by.
I tried to apologize, but my throat was too dry to speak.
“I figured you’d have them bound at the printer’s.” She picked up one of the spiral-bound booklets. “You did this with that old machine? It looks like it’s from the bronze age. Or the fifties.”
It wasn’t that old. I’d googled it because we couldn’t find a manual or anything. It did look clunky. It definitely hadn’t been designed to sell based on sexiness; no one would stay all night in line at the Apple store for this baby. (Look, Ronnie and I only did that once, and I haven’t bought an iPhone since, I swear. It’s like a rite of passage or something, spending way too much money on an iPhone the second it’s released. I had to get it out of my system and now I’ve moved on.)
“So you’re saying...” Jack paused delicately. “That we could have simply paid someone else to do this?” He didn’t look at me. I couldn’t help looking at him.
“In theory. This is very nice, though.” She flipped through. “I almost can’t believe you got that thing to produce something this decent.”
At least there was...that? “Sorry. I didn’t know. I went poking around and found this and just...assumed it’s how we were supposed to do it.”
“Maybe we could still give the job to someone else.” Now Jack sounded hopeful, the traitor.
“We’ve got almost half of them done,” I countered. As long as you used a loose definition for “almost” and “done.” To my surprise, Jack didn’t even correct me.
“Oh, I like these. What would you say the total cost was for the supplies you had to buy in order to bind them?”
I knew down to the cent. The facts and figures were all meticulously recorded in a spreadsheet. “Thirty dollars. Ish.”
She turned toward me. “Thirty dollars.”
I gulped again. “Um. Yes?”
“For how many?”
“A hundred.”
“In theory,” Jack added.
“Well, yeah. But we didn’t need all one hundred, so it’s okay that we had a few...practice runs.”
A smile took over Deb’s face. “We usually pay twelve dollars per copy. You two have just saved us a great deal of money on this project.”
I sank down into my chair, which I’d forgotten existed during the period of abject dread following Deb’s arrival. “Oh.”
“To be fair,” Jack said, as if the words were causing him pain, “it was all Declan’s doing. I would have hired out the binding job in a second if I’d known that was a possibility.”
Deb looked at me again.
I shrugged. “We worked together. There’s no way I’d have gotten as many done if Jack hadn’t been working on it during his shifts.” Even though he’d whined at first. It wasn’t necessary to mention that. Probably.
“I didn’t expect you to have started on the bricks in earnest yet. We have a few final edits for the annual report.”
A thump as Jack also sat down. “The report we’ve already had printed.”
“The very same.” Her smile widened. “The good news is it’s just a few changes on just a few pages. No need to have the whole thing reprinted.”
Both of us surveyed our conference table of piles in various stages of punching and binding. “What...does that mean?” I asked faintly.
“I think all you’ll need to do is have these five or so pages reprinted, and then swap them out for the current version.” Now the smile resembled that of an alligator toying with its prey. (I didn’t know if that was something alligators did, but it seemed in character for them.) “No big deal for a couple of guys who can bind things by themselves, right?” She held up the report she’d grabbed and kind of shook it before placing it carefully back on the pile it had been in. “Good work. I’m very pleased with the results. I’ll check in tomorrow.”
In the silence after she left the room I tried to decide if Jack was pissed at me, or in general, or something else entirely.
Then, abruptly, a sound I’d never heard before emerged from his mouth. It took me a few seconds to work it out. He was laughing.
“I can’t even believe we did this. Not only did we make a ridiculous amount of work for ourselves, we now have to do it all over again.”
“I’m sorry.” I meant it too. Deb had seemed happy about the money, but she’d also seemed sort of dumbstruck by the whole fiasco. Which didn’t exactly bode well for either of us. “I honestly had no idea we could just...order them printed and bound. I mean, obviously I knew that was a thing, but I figured it was expensive and frowned upon. Once I found the bookbinding machine I thought that’s how they must do it.”
He waved a hand. “I probably would have thought the same thing. If I’d really considered it, I would have realized that a place like this wouldn’t do their own report binding. Hell, Declan.”
“Yeah. Sorry.”
“It’s funny. Honestly. And Deb loves to save money, she meant that.”
“Oh. Good, then. I guess?”
“Twelve dollars per book. We’re in the wrong line of work.”
“Seriously.” I sipped some water, trying to soothe the stress-ache in my throat. “What’s the over-under on me being fired by end of business?” I tried to make it a joke, but it felt a little too real, the screw-up a little too fresh.
“Not a chance.” He paused. “They’d wait until after the event.”
I almost forgot he was a coworker and threw something at him.
He laughed again. “Sorry. Look, it was an honest mistake, it resulted in a money savings for the company—”
“Not necessarily. They’re paying our labor where they wouldn’t have had to otherwise.”
“Yeah, but this time was budgeted for the Fling already, and we’ve used it in a way that maximized savings in other areas. I swear, it’s fine.”
I slumped. “I’m such a tool.”