"Hey, Louise, how was your weekend?"
"Great Joe," bubbles Louise the front desk receptionist/office administrator/regional coordinator. Louise has been with Acme for only 14 months and has been given more responsibilities as other Acme employees have left the company. She sees it as a challenge that may help her later. If nothing else the new activities make the days go by faster, especially now that everyone has cell phones, voice mail and email.

Joe likes her a lot more than all the other support people that have come and gone in this office. He feels that her gung - ho attitude is a little much, but he figures that it was probably due to her being younger than he is. You see, Joe has been around Acme for over eight years and sees himself as the senior salesperson. He has been in the trenches as a named account executive longer than anyone else. He knows he knows more than anyone, but being "Mister Positive" in this environment is not something that he can do. Every day is too much of a challenge! It's getting harder and harder in the field and it never seems to get easier inside of Acme. Now, he doesn't even have his system support engineers to help him with his email.

It is Monday morning and Joe dumps his briefcase at his desk on the way to the coffeepot. Just outside the break room he runs into Bills, Bill Hamilton. Joe calls Bill Hamilton "Bills" because of all of the money he has. It's rumored that he bought a new house in Wercforit Estates. Bills is a couple of years older than Joe and transferred in from another region as the area manager about three years ago. Last year he was reassigned to a named account executive position because of the sales force reduction.

It didn't seem to affect him too much. He's the number two salesperson in the region for the first half, right behind Melissa.