Corporate Casual
Marley Quinn
Corporate Casual
by Marley Quinn
Copyright Notice
Corporate Casual
by Marley Quinn
© 2025 Marley Quinn
All rights reserved.
Author: Marley Quinn
Contact details: marleyquinn.reformist760@passinbox.com
Book cover, illustration: Marley Quinn
Editing, proofreading: Marley Quinn
This e-book, including its portions, is protected by copyright and may not be reproduced, resold, or redistributed without the permission of the author.
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Table of Contents
Copyright Notice
Table of Contents
Deliverables
Protocols
Warning
Watch
Emergency
Shelter
Survival
Aftermath
Office Grab-Bag Raffle
Deliverables
Greg Hammond tightened his tie as he waited for Ethan to get the projector switched on and running.
"Settle down, people," said Greg, deliberately not looking at the window where, even viewed through the polarized glass, the sky had already taken on a dark, ominous hue. "Come on, we need to get through this."
"I don't understand why we even need to be here," said Vanessa Reed. "Everyone else already got dismissed early."
"Yes, and I already forwarded the email I got from corporate," said Greg, inwardly cursing Ethan for taking so long to get the presentation going.
"Relax, folks, we'll all be out of here in a jiff," said Noah Blake, flashing his trademark smile as he leaned back in his chair.
Zoe Carter, the intern, kept darting her gaze between the other four people in the room. Inwardly, every fiber of her being was screaming for her to get out of there, get in her car, and drive home. But she'd only just begun her internship at Global Synergy Solutions, and her fear of jeopardizing her position kept her from saying anything.
"Ethan, how are we coming along?" said Greg, doing his best to hide the irritation he felt.
"It should be working. There must be a connection loose somewhere. Just give me a minute," said Ethan Patel, cursing inwardly at the stodgy system that GSS forced them to use. If the team in procurement had half a brain, they would've long since upgraded to the newest firmware updates, but instead, they bogged everyone down with security permissions for peripherals that had to be adjusted manually.
"But they've upgraded the county to a major storm warning," said Vanessa. "Company policy says that we should get released to go home or else shelter in place, and since this building doesn't have a shelter..."
"Vanessa, thank you," said Greg, cutting her off, seething at yet another unnecessary delay to his presentation. "Perhaps why we wait for Ethan to get everything going, I can read from the email corporate sent because it addresses this very matter."
Zoe closed her eyes and concentrated on taking deep breaths as Greg began to drone on about how the presentation was tied to a compliance audit required for a lucrative government contract and something about how failing to complete it by EOD would jeopardize GSS's QR stakeholder deliverables. She'd been warned that taking a job at GSS would involve using and understanding all kinds of buzzwords and corporate speak, but a lot of it still sounded like meaningless gobbledygook to her.
Vanessa winced as Greg stumbled his way through what was obviously a carefully crafted email, his poor literacy skills on display as he fumbled phrases like "cross-functional workflow integration." It had long been obvious that he was an empty suit, the kind of middle manager that plagued companies everywhere, a know-nothing, do-nothing busybody who only had a job because he looked the part of a businessman. And yet now here he was, stopping them from all getting the hell out of the building ahead of the tornado just because he got an email instead of exercising his tiny bit of authority and letting them go home.
Noah tried to follow along as Greg read through the email, but his mind kept wandering to the sales idea he wanted to pitch at the end of the meeting. The idea had come to him in the shower earlier that morning, a new way to sort documents using colors and emojis instead of just words. There was only so much reading a person could do in a day, so having a visually appealing label would make it a lot easier to find documents. He'd tried to approach Greg in the hall about the idea, but Greg had been late for a Zoom meeting, so Noah had only been able to extract a promise he could bring up new ideas at the end of the presentation.
"Okay, folks, that's why we're here on a Friday afternoon while everyone else is gone," concluded Greg, relieved to not have to read from his phone any longer. He was only 48 years old, but his eyesight wasn't as sharp as it used to be, and his wife had been nagging him for months about getting glasses. Sure, and then the brass would overlook him the next time a promotion came up, preferring someone hale and hearty whom they could visualize sharing a lovely afternoon on a golf course with, not some decrepit old man with reading glasses.
"Wait, are you saying that we're required to be here?" said Vanessa, raising her hand. "Because I think that I want that in writing. If this gets escalated to HR, I'll need proof that you ordered us to stay here despite the government upgrading the tornado watch to a tornado warning."
"Vanessa, let me just cut through all the lingo," said Greg, fiddling with the cuffs of his shirt as his exasperation grew. "Legal needs us to get this presentation done by the end of today, all right? I don't know why, but that's just how it is. So once Ethan gets the projector running, we'll get through it as quickly as we can. And then before you know it, we'll all be home."
"Fine," said Vanessa, clicking her pen and then writing down a note about how the manager had refused to issue a written order on her pad.
"Ah, I think that should do it," said Ethan, pressing a button and then craning his head to look over at the whiteboard. Thankfully, the lamp activated, and he could read the words "Optimizing Q3 Workflow Efficiencies through Revised Document Retention Policies" crisp and clear.
"Thank you, Ethan," said Greg, taking a deep breath as he centered himself. Giving a presentation, even one as inconsequential as this one, always made him a little nervous for some reason, and with everyone on his back about the stupid storm warning, he wasn't feeling his best.
As Greg launched into his presentation, Vanessa tried her best to take notes in her usual diligent fashion, but she kept getting distracted by Ethan's hands as he sat back in his chair and scrolled through his phone. His fingers were unusually long and graceful, and something about their light cinnamon color fascinated her. It was as if he had the hands of a master musician or something, strong yet nimble, and a tiny part of her wondered what it would be like if they were touching her instead of his phone screen.
Zoe saw Vanessa taking notes, so she tried to do the same, but it wasn't long at all before she got way behind trying to jot down phrases like "enterprise optimization" and "cross-functional workflow integration." Instead, she looked around the room, not surprised in the least to see Noah looking over at her, a cocky smile on his face. Noah was certainly a good-looking guy in a conventional sense, but she disliked how arrogant he was, always acting like he was the center of attention.
Utterly bored out of his skull, Ethan tuned out Greg's voice and instead concentrated on the sports betting app on his phone. He'd installed it on a lark after one of his cousins had told him that you could make easy money betting on cricket matches, but it had soon bloomed into an obsession. The app went way beyond just choosing who would win or lose a match but had an elaborate series of parley and combo bets, allowing you to wager on who would score the first run or even which part of the field the first out would be caught in.
Noah had no idea what Greg was going on about in his presentation, but he didn't care. He was too excited about his color-coded and emoji file labeling scheme, which he was sure would get the big boss's attention and speed his career run up the ladder. His professors at prep school had always said he had big, bold ideas, and he was sure this one would be a home run. Meanwhile, as he waited impatiently for Greg to wrap up, Noah cast his eye over at Zoe, the cute new intern. He'd tried chatting her up a few times in the break room or at her desk, but she was one of those standoff, uppity girls who thought playing hard to get was still a viable dating strategy.
Greg paused between slides and took a sip of water, taking a moment to look around the room. The crotchety, uptight Vanessa was taking notes, but everyone else seemed to be distracted and not really paying attention. Their loss, really, as he had put in a lot of effort to get that 45-slide PowerPoint presentation together, even trying out a few new fonts that he thought really sizzled. The dipshit Ethan in particular was openly scrolling through his phone, so Greg made a mental note to be sure to nominate his name the next time the subject of layoffs came up. GSS might be an old warhorse of a company, but everyone was on the clock here, and such disrespectful behavior shouldn't be tolerated.
Tired of Noah grinning at her like a loon, Zoe instead turned her gaze over to Greg. It was weird, she thought, how he kind of resembled her dad in some ways. Not in terms of looks, certainly, as her dad was several inches taller and was in extremely good shape, doing pushups in the basement every morning, a carryover from his 20 years in the military, whereas Greg had a bit of a paunch going on. Maybe it was just the way his slightly rumpled shirt and tousled hair reminded her of her dad on the rare occasions when he slept in and was too groggy to be stern and so would accept her cuddles without resistance.