Then she said, "Hvac unit on the roof is the first thing I'm showing you because it's going to be a problem before winter and I've been trying to get someone to pay attention to it for 6 weeks. " Marcus almost smiled. Lead the way. They spent 4 hours going through the building. Patricia talked and Marcus listened and asked questions and took notes in a small notebook he'd brought. Real notes, specific notes, the kind that tell someone you're actually tracking what they're saying.
The HVAC unit was exactly what Marcus had suspected from the photographs. The drainage in the parking structure was worse in person, but there were also things that were in better shape than expected things. Patricia had quietly managed to a standard above what the maintenance budget should have allowed. "How'd you get this done on what they allocated? " Marcus asked, looking at a recently repaired section of the parking structure ceiling," Patricia shrugged one shoulder. "Called in a favor from a contractor I've worked with for 8 years.
He gave me the materials at cost, and I did most of the labor coordination myself on a Saturday. " "On your own time? On my own time? " Marcus made a note. By noon, they were sitting in the small facilities office on the ground floor, just a room with a desk and two chairs and a whiteboard covered in Patricia's neat diagrams. And Marcus sat down his notebook and looked at her. Tell me the three things you need most," he said.
Patricia blinked. "From you specifically, from this situation, from whoever is sitting in the manager's chair. What are the three things that would make your job actually workable instead of just survivable? " She looked at him. Then she said, "Budget authority up to 5,000 without a twoe approval chain. A vendor meeting this month where I'm in the room and not running it from an email summary.
And someone who answers their phone at 7:00 in the morning when something goes wrong instead of me being the one who answers it and then summarizes it upward 3 hours later. " "Done, done. " And yes, Marcus said. Patricia stared at him. "That's it," she said. Those are reasonable things, he said. I'll confirm the budget authority with Mrs.
Bennett today, the vendor meeting I'll set up this week and my phone number. He wrote it on a corner of his notepad and tore it off and handed it to her. That's my personal cell, not an office line. If something goes wrong at 7:00 in the morning, that's who you call. She took the piece of paper, looked at it.
You're not what I expected, she said. What did you expect? Someone who needed to establish dominance in the first 10 minutes. She said, "I've had three managers in this role in two years. That's what all of them did. " "Doesn't work," Marcus said.
"It works until something actually goes wrong. " She said, "Then you find out real fast whether the person knows what they're doing or just knows how to act like they do. " Marcus nodded. When something goes wrong and I don't know what I'm doing, I'm going to tell you that directly and then I'm going to ask you what you think. Patricia looked at him for another long moment. Okay, she said, "Okay, okay, okay. I think this might actually work. " That afternoon, sitting in his car outside the building, Marcus called Viven's office and confirmed the meeting points with Patricia and asked about the budget authority.
Viven's assistant confirmed it would be processed by end of week. He sat in the car for a while after hanging up. I wasn't a man who cried. He hadn't cried at the shop closing. Hadn't cried through the 11 weeks.
Hadn't cried when the second interview at the logistics company fell through. And he'd gone home and sat at his kitchen table in the dark for 45 minutes before he got up and made dinner. He didn't cry now, but he sat with both hands on the steering wheel and took a long slow breath and let himself feel the full weight of what was happening. Not just the job, the whole chain of it, the rainy Friday, the hand on his sleeve, the two hours at the table, the white card, the office on Peach Tree, the 4 hours walking a building with Patricia Okafor, who knew everything and had been given nothing and was going to be different now. All of it running back to one decision.