C4 antho - Chamber Four

~298~ The Chamber Four Fiction Anthology
With the door open Joseph had a view into the room, but
Herr Halsa was looking down at the things on his desk, reordering
them according to some new, afternoon
priority―name plate, lamp, telephone, pen stand. And
Joseph could not see as far as Herr Halsa could along the
hallway formed by the cubicle walls. Maybe someone was
standing there: a petitioner. What’s more, the boss was
speaking not in German but in English. “This is something
you need to finish for the end of the day, so we must sit together.
Quickly I think. Joe!”
Joseph hurried into the office with a notebook, two pens
and some papers he’d finished the day before but not yet presented
to Herr Halsa. “Excuse me, I―”
“We’re ready to send out a letter just now and offer this
very good job. Inventory manager for the new production
area,” Herr Halsa added, as if he’d forgotten that Joseph had
sat in on every one of the interviews. The new “production
area” was an assembly room where this new employee would
take robotic cranes out of their boxes, count the screws, assemble
everything, test the completed system, then transfer
it to a flatbed truck for shipment to the customer’s plant.
Joseph’s attempt at a job description had muddled everything,
though―no one asked if he’d ever written one before―so
that several applicants showed up expecting to run
an automated inventory system and a couple of others
wanted a division reporting to them. But no matter. His influence
held. After each interview, Herr Halsa would ask
Joseph what the man (he couldn’t help it that no women had
been included) had meant by this and that, and very often
what Herr Halsa wanted to know had nothing to do with the
delta between languages at all.
The American salesmen liked to say that Peter Halsa
was aptly named. He had risen beyond his competence and
didn’t know what to do with his time: the Peter Principle.