Forget it.
Better to go to Mr. Gray himself.
After all, this dinner had been approved by him personally.
As long as the boss was willing to sign off on a special exception, then no matter how much Stella objected, there'd be nothing she could do.
I didn't waste a second. I took the reimbursement form back and turned to walk straight toward Tyler Gray's office.
Tyler was at his desk going over documents. When he saw me knock and come in, he looked up and gave me a smile.
"Ian, you're here? You did a fine job closing that contract. You've done the company a real service!"
Hearing Tyler acknowledge what I'd accomplished, I let out a small breath of relief.
I stepped forward and held the reimbursement form out to him.
"Mr. Gray, this dinner came to fifty thousand dollars. Accounting says it's over the limit, so I'd appreciate it if you could sign off and approve a special exception."
Tyler took the form and looked it over twice, turning it back and forth before he finally raised his eyes to me again.
"Ian, you're right that I signed off on you setting up that dinner. But the meal your group put away was awfully expensive. Fifty thousand dollars."
My heart sank.
I kept my patience and explained to him gently.
"Mr. Gray, every dish on that table was ordered by the seven executives themselves. I could hardly tell them our company caps it at five hundred a head and ask them to pick the cheap stuff."
"And last month our competitor wined and dined them too, at a level at least as high as mine, if not higher."
"Those seven heads agreeing to show up was them doing us a favor. If I'd been stingy over a single meal, wouldn't that have cost the company its standing?"
"And if a few dollars over dinner had offended them, soured them on us, made them walk away from the partnership, wouldn't that have been a terrible trade?"
I kept my tone as level as I could, laying out the gains and the losses plainly.
I assumed that as the head of the company, Tyler would understand.
Instead he gave a disdainful little smile and said, unhurried,
"Ian, I understand everything you're saying."
"But company policy is five hundred a head, no exceptions. The board set that. I may be the boss, but I can't just go trampling company policy whenever I feel like it, can I?"
Watching Tyler hide behind the rulebook too, I couldn't help frowning.
"But Mr. Gray, you approved this dinner with your own mouth. You even made a point of telling me to do whatever it took to keep them, that this meal would be reimbursed in full, no ceiling."
Tyler picked up the teacup on his desk, took a sip, and said leisurely,
"What I said was 'whatever it takes.' That's an attitude. It was about showing how much we value our clients."
"But when it comes to actually carrying it out, you've got to use some judgment."
"Think about it. Fifty thousand dollars for one meal. If I grant you that privilege today and approve this bill, then tomorrow everyone in sales entertains clients on a fifty-thousand-dollar standard. Is the company still going to stay in business?"
That speech of his lit a slow fire in my chest.
Judgment?
When he was telling me to do whatever it took to keep the clients, where was the talk of judgment then?
Now that I'd gone to all that trouble to land the contract, to bring the company major orders from seven partners, he turned around and pretended he'd never said a word, and blamed me for having no judgment?
I drew in a deep breath, looked Tyler dead in the eye, and asked again,
"Mr. Gray, are you telling me the company won't reimburse this fifty thousand?"
He set down his teacup and looked at me with a face full of regret.
"Ian, it's not that I won't reimburse you. It's that you have to do it by company policy."
"The rule is five hundred a head. Eight people at your table, so four thousand at most. The other forty-six thousand, you figure out yourself."
Figure it out myself?
Meaning he wanted me to cover that forty-six thousand out of my own pocket.
