A Long Hot Christmas. Barbara Daly

      “The kittens have been assigned to caring homes.” He removed a zip disk from the drive, slapped it into a case and shoved it at her. “Person treats a computer like you do shouldn’t be trusted with a cat.”

      Thoroughly humiliated, Hope slunk back to her office to engage in the subclerical task of copying files from the zip disk onto the loaner.

      The words of her favorite professor in the MBA program came back to her verbatim: Turn each challenge into an opportunity.

      Not a day went by that she wasn’t grateful to Professor Kavesh. Those words alone had pressured her through more than one elbow joint and whooshed her up to her present level in the company. So instead of griping about her broken computer, she’d take this opportunity to look at her old files and delete the ones that were just using up space.

      A directory titled “Magnolia Heights” caught her eye and she opened it first. The file in front of her now was her part of a presentation to the City of New York, the general contracting firm and a major plumbing contractor—Palmer’s bid to supply the pipe to plumb the Magnolia Heights Project.

      Magnolia Heights was a middle-income housing project in the Bronx. Palmer had examined the situation in the thorough, plodding way Benton favored and had come to the conclusion that lowering their bid in order to win it would bring the company enough public relations points to offset the reduction in profits.