"Show me the spreadsheet."
Joan looked at her for a second longer than was comfortable, the way people look at a delivery driver who says the package is definitely in the van. Then she said, "Dev. Show her the sheet."
Dev was a dispatcher in his fifties with reading glasses pushed up into grey hair and a headset hooked around his neck. He pulled a chair over from the next desk without being asked and Nadia sat in it, and for the next hour and forty minutes she did not get up.
The spreadsheet was a thing of terrible beauty. It had been built in June by three people over a weekend and had since been touched by eleven more. It had tabs named REAL ETAs and DO NOT TRUST and carrier moods. It pulled tracking numbers from the new platform by hand, because the export broke whenever a load had more than six stops, and it coloured cells red when a shipment was more than ninety minutes behind its appointment window, which was the one thing the new system was supposed to do and didn't.
"Where do the tender rejections go?" Nadia asked.
Dev pointed to a tab. "Here. When a carrier rejects a load, the platform marks it 'pending' instead of 'rejected,' so it just sits. We check every half hour by calling."
"Calling the carrier."
"Calling the carrier."
"How many calls a day?"
He thought about it. "Floor-wide? Couple hundred."
Nadia nodded and wrote something on the back of a printed rate sheet. She asked how long the dock appointments at the Brenmoor distribution centre in the east yards ran. She asked whether they double-booked the six a.m. slot to cover no-shows and Dev looked at her strangely and said yes, and she said, "Everyone does, the trick is knowing which carriers no-show on Mondays," and Dev said, "Ridgeline," and she said, "Ridgeline," at the same time, and after that the conversation changed.
She did not tell anyone what she had done before Ardent. She didn't need to. It came out in the questions. She knew what a yard jockey was paid and why they quit. She knew that the hour between two and three in the afternoon was when dispatchers made the worst decisions because the morning loads were done and the evening loads hadn't firmed up and everybody was hungry. She knew that a detention charge on a reefer trailer cost more than the margin on most dry loads. When a call came in on Dev's line from a driver stuck at a gate in the rail yard, she listened to Dev's half of it and said, quietly, "Ask him if they're making him wait for a seal check," and it turned out they were, and Dev got the driver through in nine minutes instead of forty.
By ten the horseshoe had reformed around Dev's desk without anybody calling a huddle. People came by with coffee and stayed. A young dispatcher named Kim showed Nadia the way she'd rigged the platform's search field to find loads by trailer number because the trailer-number field itself didn't search. Joan stood behind them with her arms still folded for a while, and then at some point unfolded them and pulled up a chair of her own.
"The vendor told Gerald it'd be fixed in Q3," Joan said.
"It's Q4."
"I'm aware."
"Who's the vendor's account lead?"
Joan told her. Nadia wrote that down too.
"Here's what I'm not going to do," Nadia said. "I'm not going to stand up at a meeting and announce a transformation. I'm going to take this spreadsheet, with your permission, and walk it into a room with the vendor and our IT people and show them every column, and I'm going to ask them which of these things the platform does that it was paid to do. And the things it doesn't do, we either get them fixed by a date that's written down, or we stop paying for them. In the meantime nobody on this floor gets told to stop using this sheet. It's the only thing keeping the lights on."
Dev took off his reading glasses and rubbed his eyes. "You want the version with carrier moods in it?"
"I especially want the version with carrier moods in it."
When she finally stood up and stretched her back, there was a ring of empty cups around Dev's monitor and the purple column on the wall screen was still empty and nothing at all had been fixed. But Kim had her direct line written on a sticky note, and Joan walked her to the elevator, which Joan did not do for people.
"Yesterday," Joan said at the doors, low. "Vanessa's been sharp with my people for years. On the phone. In the corridor. Treats dispatch like the help." She looked at the floor numbers lighting up above the doors. "I'm not saying she deserved anything. I'm saying nobody up here's surprised."
"I appreciate you telling me," Nadia said. "I'm going to keep it out of the review, though. The review's about what happened on Monday."
Joan studied her. "Fair," she said finally, in the tone of someone filing it.
Marcus Bell found her in the lobby at a quarter to eight on Tuesday night, though it was more accurate to say she found the lobby and he found her in it. He had come down from his office on fourteen with a printout of the turnstile logs from Monday, intending to walk the gates one more time before the night contractor came on, and she was there already, sitting at the far end of the grey modular sofa with one ankle on her knee, looking at the speed gates the way she'd looked at them twelve hours and a lifetime earlier.
The building had gone into its evening mode. Half the ceiling panels were dimmed. The street through the long glass wall was black and wet and full of headlights going one way and tail lights going the other, and the reflections of the lobby lights lay on the window in two pale rows, so that the room seemed to go on outside into the rain. At reception, the night guard, a young man named Tobias, was reading something on his phone with the sound off. The red EXIT sign over the doors hummed faintly. Marcus had never noticed that it hummed.
"Ms. Kerr."
"Nadia," she said. "Please. You've seen me put a director on a couch. We're past Ms."
He didn't laugh, but something in his shoulders let go. He stood a moment, then sat on the section of sofa next to hers, leaving one empty cushion between them, the cushion where, as far as he could tell, Vanessa had landed. He noticed that he'd done that and decided not to examine it.
"I came to look at the gates," he said, and held up the printout.
"Me too."
"Your temp card read four times between eight thirty-eight and eight fifty," he said. "Garage door, fine. Speed gate two, rejected. Speed gate two again, rejected. Then nothing until Priya badged you through at nine-oh-four on hers." He turned the page around so she could see the lines of timestamps. "It wasn't broken. It wasn't activated. Temp cards get printed in the morning and activated in a batch when HR's system syncs with the building's system. The sync runs at nine."