I wasn’t too far off the mark. Combining phone messages and e-mails, I had seven hundred seventy-five messages. How many employees were there? Somebody had to have left multiple messages.
I went through the voice mail first so I could clear out the mailbox for future calls. Most of the so-called tips were useless, just repeating information I already knew. I didn’t need a tipster to tell me to check out the people who worked inside R&D, for example.
“You should look into Melisande Rogers from Corporate Sales,” said a typical message. “She’s been taking a lot of business lunches that no one else in the department knows about.” The tip was anonymous, but it came from an extension registered to Outside Sales.
The next message said, “Dagmar Holloway in Outside Sales has been acting suspicious lately. I hear her sales numbers are dropping, too.” The tipster had called from a Corporate Sales extension. This was starting to sound like the girls’ bathroom at lunchtime in a junior high school.
The e-mails were even worse:
Hi, i’m writing this from my home account because i don’t want you to no who i am but your should chek on kim in verification she’s always taking notes and that makes me suspishus. She’s also a stuck-up bitch and you can tell her i said so. She’s also been staying late at teh office and i think she’s up to something.
And that was one of the more literate ones. I felt like I had to read each one all the way through in case there really was worthwhile information buried in all the venom. While some of the intrigue was fascinating, in many cases I’d read economics textbooks that were more gripping. I didn’t need a log of anyone’s daily activities, including bathroom visits.
And the work kept piling up. While I listened to a message, at least one more came in. I had to turn my computer’s sound off so the constant ding of incoming e-mail notifications didn’t drive me bonkers. As I finished charting the tip from an e-mail, my phone would ring. Finally, I got caught up, but I didn’t feel like I’d made any real progress on the investigation.
With a groan, I got up and staggered to the outer office. “Trix, coffee, please!” I begged. “This company may be too much for even Dr. Phil to help. We might want to go straight to beating each other over the head with chairs like on Jerry Springer.” Then I noticed the person standing at Trix’s desk. It was my date from Saturday night, the date I hadn’t heard from since then, come to think of it.