The Sexpert

So I set my purse down, find a hair tie in my desk drawer and tame my blonde mane, then fish out my tablet and go into her office, ready to deal with today’s social media nightmare.

“Good morning, Gretchen! Happy Monday!”

She glares at me. I know she hates it when I say that every week, but I say it anyway. Not to piss her off, either. It’s because Mondays already suck, right? So why not make them better? Sometimes, when there’s not a cow giving birth on the freeway, making me late, I bring her donuts from the donut truck parked outside in the Towne Centre on Mondays. She always complains I’m trying to sabotage her diet, but when I brought her grapefruit to show her I was considerate of her struggle, she didn’t eat it.

She always eats the donuts.

And she’s not even a little bit chubby, so… really? Come on, Gretch. Live a little.

“We have a crisis on our hands.”

“Did someone hack our Facebook again?”

“No,” Gretchen says. “Worse.”

“Jesus. What’s going on?”

“Pierce”—he’s the big boss upstairs on fifty-one—“is raging about some little twat who stole Le Man’s intellectual property.”

“No shit?” I say. “Well, that totally sucks. Did he call the lawyers?”

“Oh, you betcha.”

“Phew,” I say, wiping sweat off my brow. “Well, what can I do to help? Just tell me what you guys need and I’m there. Should I make a post on Facebook and start a trending hashtag on Twitter? Oh, I know! I can call it #StopTheStealing!”

That’s my job. I’m the social media expert here. I even have an assistant. Well, I share an intern with the advertising department and they monopolize him most of the time, but still. He’s one-tenth mine.

Gretchen chews her lip for a second like she’s nervous. It’s not something she normally does. In fact, she’s not normally nervous. She’s a little bit overconfident at all times. Zoey says it’s just a show to make up for her inferiority complex, but I actually think Gretchen is quite competent, even if she is a little bit mean.

“No,” she finally says. “No, you see… the problem is… we don’t have much of a claim to this IP.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, it was in the planning stages, so it hasn’t been published yet.”

“Oh. So… what do we do, then?”

She sighs. “Here’s the main problem, Eden. We don’t know who she is.”

“Oh.” I’m confused. “Then how do you know she stole something from us?”

“She has faceless videos on YouTube.”

I open my mouth to say, No way! So do I! but stop myself just in time because that’s my secret life.

“So Pierce wants to soft-launch this new content today. Like immediately.”

“OK,” I say, tapping notes on my tablet. “Cool. Just point me to the articles and I will blast that stuff all over the place.”

“No, see, we haven’t… written anything yet. We don’t have it yet.”

I stop tapping and look up at her. “O-kay. So what should I blast?”

She chews her lip again. “Eden.”

“Gretchen?”

“Eden, I need an idea. I need an idea of how to do this soft launch when we don’t have content. Help me. I need you to come up with something by lunchtime and—”

“Why don’t we just pull together all related articles from the past… oh, two years? And I can blast those?”

She goes still for a moment. I’m almost afraid she’s having a seizure or something. “Gretchen?”

She blinks at me. Three times real fast. “You’re a genius.”

I beam a smile at her. Gretchen isn’t one to hand out compliments, so my lucky day just keeps going. I might get a raise out of this. “Oh, I have a million more where that came from. This is just my off-the-top-of-the-head idea.”

“Mmmm-hmmm,” Gretchen says, pressing her lips together. “Perfect. Then I want twenty articles, ready to go. We’ll feature one a day. And Eden—”

“Yes?” I say. And for some reason my lucky feeling fades as I stare at her sour face staring intently back at me.

“Give them all the same hashtag so we can collate them later. Maybe rebrand them. Yes, that’s what we’ll do. We should do that first. Take all those old articles and rebrand them with new graphics.”

I’m tapping on my tablet again. “New graphics, got it. But I’ll have to take this up to the art department. I don’t know how quick—”

“I’ll run my idea past Pierce and get his approval. He’ll want to make this first priority, so just go pull the articles and tell them to get started.”

She does this little wave thing with her hand. It’s one of those you’re-dismissed gestures. So I nod, gather myself by straightening my back and turn to leave.

“Oh, and Eden?”

“Yes?” I say, turning back again.

“#StopTheStealing is stupid. Don’t use it.”

“Sure,” I say. “OK. I’ll brainstorm with my intern and we’ll come up with something—”

But she’s already pressing text buttons on her phone. “I have to tell Pierce I have an idea how to save this.”