The Circle Ch. 51

Rod waved his hand. "Stop."

Bob said, "A review of the criteria, please."

Ellie and Zoey came and stood in front of the table where the reviewers sat.

Rod said, "OK. First off, looks. They must project a professional image. This can be done through clothes, make up, hairstyle, posture, gestures, and eye contact with the camera. It's very subjective."

Rod went on, "Of course, diction is high on the list. Whatever they're saying has to be clearly understood, with good intonation and pronunciation. The pages you were both given contained a grammatical error. You both caught that and fixed it on the fly; that was very good. You did well on the peculiar names we gave too."

He turned to the others. "All the other stuff doesn't matter at this point. They can learn on the job; stuff like copy prep, research, and so on. I can teach them that. Who's the winner? What do you think?"

Willow said, "I would pick Zoey and then Ellie, in that order."

Bob laughed, "I had it the other way around, Ellie and then Zoey. They're really close. It's a tough decision." He turned and winked at Willow.

Rod sighed, "I sort of knew it would come down to this. You two are no help at all." He stood and paced around the news desk, and looked back at the four others in the room.

Eventually, he said, "I choose ... both of you."

"Huh" echoed around the newsroom.

Rod said, "We're going to go live with the two of you. Instead of one anchor we'll have two. I can't pay you both Willow's salary, but I can do better than half. If that's a killer, then that'll solve the problem, otherwise I want both of you. I'll let you figure out how to split up the news territory: local-national, or national-international, or political-non-political ... you two decide and let me know, maybe even on a daily basis until things smooth out."

He turned to Willow, "And YOU! If you ever need a job come back. And don't worry; I won't fire your friends if you do. There are lots of other jobs, and I have a long list of things I'd like to do that you could help me with. Now, my love, get out of here and make us all proud up at the big network in the sky."

* * * * *

Tracy's flight from Chicago got into city airport about one p.m. She drove to the office to complete some of the work she'd started, including signing up several new major clients.

She'd no sooner greeted her staff and sat down, than Ken Harrington, the Visionix CEO, came to her desk and motioned for her to come into an empty conference room with him.

Ken said, "You're a hard person to track down. First off, thank you for being such a sterling executive in our company. You know the impact you've been having on our bottomline, and that's one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you."

Tracy looked worried, "I thought I was doing pretty well. Is there a problem, sir?"

Ken laughed, "To the contrary. I can't imagine anyone, and I mean anyone, doing better than you have for us. Every time I turn around you amaze me, and you amaze the other board members."

Tracy relaxed but still worried about the purpose of the meeting.

Ken continued, "The board met and voted a number of resolutions that might interest you. First is your promotion from vice president to executive vice president. This also means you'll be joining me on the board of the company."

Ken reached into his pocket, "Next, the board elected to vote you a special one-time bonus for the work you've done for us since you assumed your position. Many would have allowed their age to work against them. You leveraged that into more sales, more clients, and more international major clients. Great job!" He passed her a check for a quarter of a million dollars.

Tracy was amazed at the sudden honors flowing to her. She'd been doing her job to the best of her ability, and while she knew she'd had a positive effect, this was wonderful validation about her worth.

More important to her was the many friendships she had throughout the company. She was respected and loved by the hundreds of other people at Visionix. She was the sympathetic ear, the problem solver, the friend, and the person who could make good things happen for them too. Many times she'd said she'd work for free if only she could keep working with the same team of people.