He looked at her for a long moment. "That's the question I've been trying to answer for six years," he said. "Let me know what they ask next time."
He left. She sat at the now-empty cubicle on her right and looked at the monitor, dark now, the screen showing only her reflection — a woman in a headset, in a building that was longer at night than during the day, receiving calls from entities that wanted to know the dimensions of the floor she was working on.
She went to the canteen and got chai and sat alone and made notes. She wrote down the exact words of the question, the exact time, the account number the call had come in on. She would cross-reference it with the call log. She would find out whether that account had called before and what those previous calls had asked.
She was, she told herself, approaching this as a data problem. Data problems had solutions. She would find the data and she would find the solution. This was what MBAs were for.
She believed this with approximately sixty percent conviction, which was down from her normal ninety-five, and she made a note of that too.
