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      New, interesting, music CDs suddenly appeared in the rack in my office, packages were sent on time, paperwork was up to date, the flickering fluorescent over my desk morphed into a steady source of light, and the PR flacks and ad reps were no longer able to get through to me on the phone to waste my time. At the rate she was going, we’d soon be running as efficiently as a Midwest insurance company. What more could I ask?
      Gratefully, I slipped into a world of coding and working with the crew to keep improving and enhancing the product. I went to my regular soccer games with the guys from Troglodyte Software and found time to begin playing squash once a week with Dave Dante, their head of marketing. As long as I let Annamaria do as she wanted, I could relax. She even managed to make a few sales so that we could test our product on real live customers.
      The one area I tried to keep her out of was the hiring of our new VP Marketing. I bore in mind Machiavelli’s divide and conquer strategy, when I told her that all resumes were to come directly to me. Of course, it was easy enough for Annamaria to get a look at the resumes before she handed them over, because she’d taken to opening all the mail to “save me time”. This made me a bit nervous, but what could I say without offending her?
      Most of the resumes featured a long list of jobs over a relatively few years, which surprised me until I asked Annamaria about it.
      “That’s the way it is with senior marketing people,” she told me, leaning over my shoulder and gazing at the resumes spread across my desk. “Unless they’re big company types, they never stay in one place long. They’re like migrant workers, rushing from orchard to orchard.”

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