Ace of Hearts - All We Are Series [NaNoWriMo 2014] [#JustWriteIt]

Chapter Four [Edited]

The month passed quickly in a whirlwind of activity. I was getting pretty exhausted from all the constant testing, paper writing, and editing. On top of that, I had to go into HR once more to answer some questions about my log. The latest I had heard, Flannigan was getting charged with many cases of sexual harassment and one case of sexual assault. It was that one girl who originally brought the case up because she was assaulted, though thankfully he didn’t get all that far with her. All the other harassment cases just solidified everything. I heard that he had been accused by about ten different girls, including his secretary. It was disgusting. I was relieved that all of it would be put behind me.

On the bright side of things, I was now the acting manager for the department. Under my supervision, things were running very smoothly, if I do say so myself. The engineers had gotten used to me running the department. Thankfully, except for a few isolated incidents, there wasn’t too much sexism and people seemed to accept me as the leader. I guess I was a better leader than Flannigan because the other managers of the subdivisions of the natural oils shampoos seemed to spend more time with me than they did with him.

Our team had a few meetings together, where I was able to meet all the employees with whom I hadn’t previously worked. There was an older employee who seemed a bit bitter that I had been given the position, but he seemed to respect it, so I just left him alone. The employees were all pretty nice. A few were a bit rambunctious, but their teammates helped me keep them in line.

‘That’s something I’m going to have to work on,’ I thought to myself. I wasn’t used to leading large groups of people nor people older than myself.

We were starting a new line of shampoo based on some plant in Africa. I wasn’t completely aware of all the details behind the plant, but the MatSci engineers seemed to know what they were doing, and for once the Chemists agreed with them, so I just let them do their thing. I pulled some people from other, older teams and put them on the new one once we had worked out a budget and plan. Their research and data supported everything, and for once the department was running smoothly. There were no loud screaming matches like there had been under Flannigan’s supervision. Heading the team was a lot more difficult than I had thought, though. Previously, I thought I did a lot of reports. Now, I had double the reports along with the duty of making sure everyone cooperated and actually talked to each other while they designed and altered aspects of the product. It was exhausting.

There was, however, one project I had to pay close attention to: we as a department were expanding to a new office building. Because I was the department head, I was working with the manager of the natural conditioners line to coordinate everything in the new building. I had to fine-tune all the details and help Dave figure out all the lab details. Finally, the company had decided to organize us in a better way. Currently, we were organized where our department was next to some bath soaps line, with a conditioner up a floor or two. The natural oil conditioner department, which we worked with a lot as we used the same materials, was in a separate building. However, they still had Antony as the supervisor of all the shampoo lines and did not choose to make him supervisor of natural oil products, though I predicted that would happen eventually as it just made more sense.

Because the company was doing well, they decided to add a few more lines of soaps, and decided to reorganize so all the bath soaps were in one building, the non-natural conditioners and shampoos in another, and the natural shampoos and conditioners in the third, new building. The company as a whole, Better Bathroom Business, was doing well, and upper management wasn’t micromanaging for once.

However, I had heard some from Margaret about how the advertising department wasn’t doing so great. Because of all the new lines, the department was working overtime to get out ads for everything. There were lots of things to be done: making new 30 second commercials, conducting photo shoots for posters in magazines, and updating the website. The tech department was also working overtime. Because of all the advertisements, the site traffic had gone way up, and all the new staff members trying to access the database meant everything ran pretty slowly. I was thankful we didn’t have new people in my department. It was already difficult enough to figure out who was on what team as I hadn’t interacted with many previously. Management didn’t really give me any formal training as Flannigan was just terminated, so I felt way out of my league some days.