This would be the last opportunity for Margaret to witness any of Pierre’s dysfunctional dining. Two weeks later she was talking with a few people at the typing pool, and heard Pierre saying, “Alene’s made me take a 12 o’clock lunch from now on, so I’m always on hand to answer the phones here during everyone else’s lunch break from one pm until two.”

“Everyone else seems satisfied,” said Margaret coldly, and turned around to head back to her own department.

“Because everyone else got a choice and the chance to have lunch together,” she heard him mumbling.

Perhaps her comment had been irrational and unfair, she reflected, but his constant self-involvement had by then conditioned her to see nothing reasonable in anything Pierre said. Her knee-jerk reaction had been to tell him off. By then it was known that he was the youngest person in the firm, having finished school 11 months younger than the average age of a school leaver. Still he should have been able to modify his working habits to suit an interactive secretarial position by now.

“He always annoys me,” she told Alene Sirley over lunch one day, somewhat relieved that Pierre was obliviously manning the telephones downstairs at the time.

When she attended the staff variety show, replete with comedic skits and other material performed by various employees, it hardly took her by surprise to hear Pierre singing an old blues number with the words rewritten to poke fun at every aspect of his own job, including a verse devoted to the template letters he was supposed to have done for her.

Two months later, it was another staff member’s chance to step under the musical spotlight. Allen Timms invited a few of his colleagues to his band concert, which was held in a night club just next door to Town Bank. Margaret Black went along and saw that Pierre was there too. She decided to take the opportunity to address his workplace shortcomings with a different approach.

“Are you nervous at work?” she asked.

“I guess so,” said Pierre.

“Just imagine we’re all in our underpants,” said Margaret.

“With or without umbrellas?” he asked.

“Ohhhh!!!” she thought.

He would never change, it seemed.

Her life improved somewhat, with compensations for her painful daily career of coping with Pierre’s office behaviour. She met a guy named Dan socially, and he asked her out. Soon they were dating frequently, and she felt she needed to move out of her parents’ home and into an apartment which was closer to both Dan and Regal Umbrella Health Fund head office. St Clements was close to the beach and less than an hour by train from the office.

She moved in and invited everyone on her floor in the Regal Umbrella building to a house warming party.
Pierre showed his appreciation by lying on the carpet by himself most of the time, and then leaving early. Dan wasn’t there, and not many people from the office had come, but she made the most of the night and cleaned up and went to bed.

Christmas drew near and Pierre made the rounds of the office, giving everyone a card, Margaret included.