I was tired. The sun was heading for the horizon, but I still had a few items to clean up before I could call it a day. As a manager, I rated an office, but as a small company, it meant that I had to share it with another manager, so they had subdivided it by putting a modular desk in that went floor to ceiling. My roomie had taken the side closest to the door, I got stuck in the corner. There was almost no circulation, which meant I had a fan going full most days to keep the air moving. This only saved me from overheating. I was surrounded with many workstations in various states of functioning, and most of them were on at any given point in time. With all the noise, heat, and miscellaneous parts that my roomie had, it was hard even to tell when I was in the office and when I was not.

It was the quiet time between Christmas and New Years. We were running a skeleton crew, and I was one of the few people in the office. My roomie was out until at least the second week of the new year. It gave me time to focus without constant interruptions. The floor had emptied out early. As far as I knew, there was only the receptionist in the building and me, and she had sent a note saying the phones would go into night mode around four o’clock, which translated to her departure for the day. I was staring at the latest error message from my code without much luck in decoding what it was trying to tell me. Something about a stray semicolon, but whether it was ahead of where I was looking, or behind where I was looking, I could not immediately deduce. It was a common enough error, but never easy to fix. I sat a looked at the code a bit longer, my gaze going more out of focus. A knock at the door startled me back to reality.

“Yeah?” I said as I moved the cursor another couple of lines up.

“Oh, you are here!”

I looked up into the soft brown eyes of Valerie, one of our supply chain experts. Valerie is the type of woman that most men appreciate. You can drown in her eyes. She always seems to have a smile on her face, and it always seems to be mischievous. She has lovely curves on a compact frame. Generally, she tends to wear skirts and blouses, but today she wore a sweater and jeans. Her hair falls in curls just below her shoulder, and today it was tied back away from her face showing little gold hoops in her ears.

“Yes, I am here,” I said after a moment. “What miracle can I perform for you?”

She laughed a little as she leaned against our low bookshelf. This had the benefit of making her lovely chest look all that more pronounced.

“I need your help with that last invoice?”

“Which one? The Dalye?”

“That’s the one.”

“One sec. Sorry, I don’t have another chair. I am not sure I could make one fit. You will have to look over my shoulder.”

“It’s OK.”

Valerie moved to stand behind me while I dug up the invoice in question from the email system, then opened it in a full page on my second monitor for her.

“OK, what about it?”

“Totals are wrong.”

“Eh?” I looked at it quickly.

“The totals, here and here, are wrong,” she said.

To point at the lines she meant, she braced her hand on my shoulder, which only pressed the side of her lovely body against me. I took a brief, but deep breath, enjoying her smell before I focused on what she was trying to tell me. It did not help. So I got out my calculator.

“That’s not right,” I said as the values, in fact, did not add up.

I pushed a couple of keys and brought up the original quote and put them side-by-side.

“Well suck me,” I said under my breath.

“Will that help?”

“Eh? Oh, sorry. Look. They quoted the same end price, but the unit price on the invoice is a couple of cents above the unit price they quoted in the bid.”