Isoken", the name reached her from the conspicuous apparition. "Let your eyes see me when I talk"
Isoken's ears processed these words but her mouth and eyes appeared to have been struck with inactivity. She had her shortfalls as a Christian but there was still a part of her, imbued by nature, that thought a woman's privates should be in and not out. The appearance of her boss that day had been dipped in the honeyed waters of vanity.
"Well, if you have decided to keep staring at my shoes like an hypnotic", Jacqueline hollered again, "Then, I will just tell you why I sent for you. You have a complaint from a client", the hirer announced matter-of-factly.
Isoken already knew this when she came in that morning and was called even before she could settle at her table in the marketing department. No one gets summoned from the stairs, while carrying an handbag and a lunch box, into the manager's office to hear the gospel.
"A complaint?", Isoken muttered momentarily, eyes still glamoured to the huge pins, "From who if I may ask?"
"Engineer Yahaya", her hirer answered indignantly.
Isoken had to look up then, forgetting her irritation for Jacqueline's indecency. She had gone home the previous day with that name repeatedly coursing through her brain. Engineer Yahaya was the client she had been assigned to close.
"He described your conduct as unprecedentedly ugly, which is unbecoming of any of our employees"
Surely, he will want to describe her in that light. After he had risen from his end of the office table during negotiation and pranced delightedly to her side, staring down at what he thought will be her bare bosom and finding it buried beneath a strata of sweatshirt and blazer. Isoken recalled the disappointment in his eyes at this discovery, then the gradual recovery as he began to gear his palm towards her bosom and the horror that took over his eyes when his hand was slapped away aggressively.
"That man almost sexually molested me in his office", Isoken expressed irritatedly. "He didn't even care to read our pitch"
"Miss Azagba, do you know what we do in this organisation?", Jacqueline inquired, clearly brushing off what her employee had said.
"We are marketers, middlemen for other companies", Isoken retorted, seething.
"And how does your salary get paid?"
"By selling other corporation's ideas..."
"There you are wrong", Jacqueline jumped in sharply, her voice, pitching the ceiling. "That monthly payment you get materialises when you make people buy the ideas of other corporations. By any means worth exploring"
"Even...if the means tilt towards perversion?", Isoken said, her words going through loops.
"That is what you call it. I, a unique fish farmer in the corporate sphere will call it 'bait'".
"You mean using myself as bait for people to buy into our proposals?"
"You are smart, Miss Azagba", Jacqueline expressed, grinning, displaying an armoury of plastic dentition.
Isoken wasn't surprised by this revelation. For three months that she had been working at the firm, she knew the other girls employed more than brilliant oratory to land clients. She had just hoped her time in the line of fire would have been pushed farther.
"Well, let me tell you", Isoken began, "With all due respect, Ma", She quickly added. "You might see me as your fisherman's bait for this company, but the greatest fisherman that ever stomped this earth declared this body as a temple which should not be..."
"What is the colour of your faith, Miss Azagba?", Jacqueline interposed.
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