Laura was absent-mindedly coloring in the margin of her notepad with her pen as the discussion continued on in the department meeting. Once in a while, she jotted something important down to remind herself later of what Roxanne was telling them about overtime and such. She had long since finished her coffee and was secretly kind of itching for a second cup, though she felt like it would be weird to get up in the middle of a meeting between three people.

Oh, make that four people. Another woman had just walked in. Laura looked up at the latecomer. Clearly, she knew she was late and had made an effort to get here faster. Well, at least she hadn't just waltzed in like she had nothing to worry about. However, Laura recognized her as one of the new employees Roxanne had mentioned on the bulletin board. If she wasn't mistaken, the woman who had just arrived was director of the Environmental Rangers, so Laura would leave it up to Roxanne to comment on the woman's punctuality, if she wanted to.

Instead, Laura turned to the woman and said, "Hi, you must be Ms. Geenwall. I'm Laura Miller, director of the Environmental Permitting Office." She glanced at her notepad to recall everything. "We were just talking about a few department technicalities. Basically, Roxanne was just telling us that the Ministry is pretty low on employees in general and that our department is suffering, too." Laura gestured to her boss when she mentioned her name before continuing.

"So the remainder of us will have to pick up the slack for the lack of employees. Oh, and don't worry. We'll be working more hours, but we'll be having overtime pay proportional to how much extra time we put in compared to our colleagues," she said. "When you came in, we were throwing around the idea of keeping track of this all on a board and making it into a friendly office competition of sorts." Then, Laura put her notepad back down on the desk in front of her and looked up at Roxanne to see if she had missed anything.