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Okay … But I’m too busy dealing with a guy in a black ’Vette riding my butt at 65 mph the whole way. Fuckhead. Like he’s in a bigger hurry than I am.
    Morse Techtonics is a snappy, new steel-and-reflective-glass building with enough bevels and angles and shrubs to make it look like an oversized high-tech greenhouse, pristine and green and gorgeous, but it smells as bad as in Minoa. I’ve got to find out what that smell is.
    I’ll admit I’m a bit nervous about running into the guy himself and blowing it all too soon, but I’m banking on my knowledge of Morse’s character, and I figure the Personnel Office is probably pretty far from the Executive Suite. Besides, he’s only seen me dressed for battle. I’m fighting a whole different way this time.
    I win the first hand, and breathe a lot easier after I sign the Visitor’s Log, pass under the handheld metal detector and am directed to a quiet suite of rooms down a long hall in the opposite direction from the front offices. Two other applicants are ahead of me, hot-waxed legs crossed, seams straight, flipping through supermarket magazines that promise Better Sex in Three Days, and How to Get Him to Commit, but absolutely nothing about How to Murder a Bloodsucking SOB. And they say it’s got “Everything today’s woman needs to know.” For shame.
    I check in with the receptionist, who says she needs “another” copy of my résumé (she won’t admit she can’t find it), so I hand her one from my genuine leatherette business case. Much of it is actually true.
    My sister interviewees do not look at me. Okay, I don’t particularly want to be seen, anyway. I’m taking the place in—large parking lot outside (more than a thousand cars), six loading docks, and a pretty large office staff, or so it seems. Nice water cooler, too. This receptionist is only screening calls for the Personnel Director. A one-to-one boss-secretary ratio is getting pretty rare these days. But my immediate use for this info is if this place is big enough, maybe I can get lost in this system. I hope so.
    The door opens and the first woman ahead of me is told to go in. She’s a good ten years younger than me, blond, svelte, and looks like she gets plenty of dates but might need a few lessons in Getting Him to Commit. The other woman is even younger, looks like she’ll be graduating high school in about three weeks. I shift in my chair and flip open the company newsletter. Shipments are steady, which is about as rosy as a report gets these days. And the execs have sacrificed a ten-foot walk to the building for a twenty-foot walk so the row flush against the plant can be designated for “Handicapped Parking Only.”
    A loud burst of confident male laughter explodes on the other side of a flimsy partition, the door adjacent to the room where the interviews are being conducted opens, and out steps a man in a light-gray summer suit. He’s young, in his early thirties, but already going soft around the belly and jowls, and his dirty blond hair is getting pretty thin, too. Must be the fumes. Even with three air conditioners running, the place still smells of the stuff. The guy plants his briefcase on the receptionist’s desk like he’s Pizarro conquering terra incognita for the Spanish Crown and starts putting the moves on her. He’s crude, obvious, but careful enough to tread that fine gray line between flirting and sexual harassment.
    When he asks to see the “Winston file” and she has to bend way forward in that loose-fitting dress to open the “W” drawer I lose interest and start checking out the back issues of the newsletter. A tiny paragraph on the inside back page of the February issue suggests that some new air-handling ducts for the molding room may be arriving before the workers keel over from the fumes. It does note that the first requests for new ducts were made six years ago.
    “Here’s a long-stemmed wineglass,” I hear from over my shoulder. I look up and he’s