Ian had made a career out of being unruffled and presenting a detached, even distant front, however testing the circumstances. Since university, he’d worked in the Internal reporting team at Smash-It plc, the well-known, occasionally infamous discount retailer run by its maverick owner James Wallace. In that time, he’d navigated his way through countless missed deadlines for various weekly, periodic, quarterly and even annual reports. He’d seen chicanery and subterfuge employed by almost every other department with something to hide, Director-level arguments that threatened to descend into fist-fights when figures were poor and outright deception to massage the numbers if the truth was deemed to be unsuitable for the City. He’d lost count of the number of all-nighters he’d been asked to participate in, in order to put the figures out on time after yet another late inter-departmental submission and he’d borne the status as the figurehead of the company’s Least Popular Department for most of his twelve-year tenure. In short, Ian was not easily given to losing his cool. Had he been, he wouldn’t have survived there for so long. Now, in his unfamiliar chair he found himself in the unfamiliar position of struggling to contain his mounting anger.
Codename: 'The Gatecrasher' 