//------------------------------// // Grace Manewitz // Story: Como Salsa para los Tacos // by Admiral Biscuit //------------------------------// Como Salsa para los Tacos: Grace Manewitz Admiral Biscuit To humans, a brand headquarters ought to be a glistening tower of glass located in a major city. To ponies, an Antebellum house in Kentucky was a perfectly cromulent headquarters, and as such, Grace Manewitz didn’t find anything unusual about her new place of employment. Yum! brand foods wanted corporate diversity, and hiring a pony as an executive secretary was diversity. In time, perhaps, she could get promoted, theoretically even rising to the top leadership position like David Gibbs had. Grace had no intention of rising through the ranks. She’d gotten her job as a secretary to Jason Skala, Chief Operating Officer, and that was where she intended to stay for her tenure at Yum! foods. She wasn’t familiar with Earth corporate culture, but was well aware that offices generally had a herd-like structure which ran on politics and gossip, and that was a game that she knew how to play. For the most part, it would be less competitive than the Manehattan fashion scene; all she had to do was be good at her job and keep her head down and not kick anybody unless they really deserved it. Most of the rabble didn’t aspire to the job of executive secretary to the COO, which put her a hoof up on her first day, especially as an outside hire. Most of the rabble weren’t smart when it came to clawing up the corporate ladder; in a week she’d have all sorts of insider knowledge. She’d wanted to get in as Julie Masino’s secretary, but there weren't any openings in that office. Not yet, anyway; if she played her cards just right, she might manage to wrangle a lateral promotion. Just the same, she wasn’t a pony who would look a gift horse in the mouth. ••• Humans had keyboards which had over a hundred buttons, humans had programs for spreadsheets and computer letters and such, humans had complicated telephones and she’d studied them and mastered them. In the name of accessibility she got an Orbitouch keyboard and a touchscreen and a stylus, and by the end of the day she’d mastered all three, and learned lots of gossip ‘for her ears only’ about the other staff in the office. For the most part, that wasn’t what she wanted to learn, but she nodded her head at the right times. Keeping a boss happy was an art form. So was keeping a client happy, but for now that wasn’t exactly her job. As the secretary to the COO, there wasn’t much she was barred from knowing. Information was filed away, stored for later. On the outside, she was the very picture of an efficient and thoughtful secretary. She got to know the team who worked in their department and praised their good work when the COO didn’t. On another hoof, she covered for him when his three martini lunch turned into four then five then the rest of the day off. Two weeks in, she had enough of a grasp of the job that she could start to ask questions without it raising an eyebrow, most often when she was entering data into spreadsheets. “Hey, Jason, what’s this Star of the West Milling?” “Oh,” he replied absently, “That’s where we get flour.” “Flour.” She made a mental note—that was a subject to be revisited. “For tortillas?” “Yup.” Discounting his ‘working lunches,’ he had a complicated schedule, and she had to juggle what meetings were mandatory, which were good for climbing the corporate ladder, and which should be ignored. With or without a good excuse; it depended on the situation. Golf games were also ‘meetings,’ and she shut down anybody who thought otherwise. “He’s in a meeting, huh?” “Yes, sir. Mr. Skala is in a meeting at the moment.” “He’s not on the links?” Grace didn’t let her voice change, even though she knew full well he was. He’d even put on his silly golfing clothes before leaving for the day and instructing her to hold his calls. “Mr. Skala is in a private meeting at the moment. Is there something I can help you with?” “Maybe.” She kept her ears perked, even though there was only the quiet hiss of an open line, and a very faint hum of background conversation. “Listen, you’ve got to keep this on the down-low, okay.” “Of course, our conversation is confidential.” That wasn’t entirely true; obviously she’d give Jason highlights. “You’ve heard about the latest cilantro issue?” She hadn’t. “Go on.” “It’s a supplier issue, Riverside County.” Grace scribbled that on a notepad. “Send me an e-mail, and I’ll get it sorted.” “Probably minor, not on the scale of the Kenosha Beef recall. But there could be a contamination issue, and I thought he’d want to know before he had to do damage control.” “Uh-huh.” She scribbled down ‘Kenosha Beef.’ “How many stores do you think it could affect? “Couple dozen, maybe up to a hundred. Do you have access to shipment info?” She did have access to that. It had been very useful already. “Yeah, give me a second. What am I looking for?” He told her, and a few ergonomic keyboard slides later, she had the information he needed. “You ready for a list of store numbers?” “Go ahead.” Grace recited off the list, neatly dumping the problem back on his lap. It was still worth a note to the boss, and another note for herself, two more things for further investigation. Who and what was Kenosha Beef, and where exactly did the cilantros come from? She pushed her glasses up her nose and went to work on her computer—now she had a couple more suppliers’ names to explore and see what she could sniff out. ••• She’d already learned that Taco Bell had its own headquarters in Irvine, California, while the Louisville office she was at housed the higher-ups for the parent company. She didn’t know if there were any other ponies actually working at Taco Bell’s headquarters, but figured that there probably were. Jason hadn’t mentioned it, anyway. If Grace had been in charge of the operation, there would have been a pony in Irvine, ideally in a mid-level position that gave her access to large parts of the building. She hadn’t expected to actually get to visit it, until Jason told her that he had several meetings he needed to attend there and he wanted her to fly out there with him. ••• Yum! had a private jet, so instead of visiting Louisville International Airport again, she’d gotten to ride out to Bowman Field and got first-class treatment and a direct flight to John Wayne Airport, followed by an executive-car ride on Interstate 405 which was hardly enjoyable. She could have trotted along the highway faster than the car was moving. From outside, the headquarters wasn’t that impressive. A low-slung building with lots of glass and neat rows of planters and strange white-trunked trees out front, it wasn’t nearly as appealing as her office in Louisville, except that it was bigger. Inside was a different story. The front entrance was lit up with Taco Bell lavender lights, and inside there were signs that showed the restaurant’s timeline, along with other corporate memorabilia that she would have liked to get a better look at, but had to keep up with Jason. The back conference room where they set up their temporary camp had a view of Interstate 5, which had the same slow-moving traffic as the 405, and the backside of a shopping mall on the other side of a dozen or so lanes of traffic.  “There’s an old airport on the other side of that mall,” Jason said. “They’re turning it into a park and subdivision now . . . I think it was the Marines. And just up the highway is Disneyland.” “Really?” “If you want, you can go—after our meetings, I’m gonna spend a day at Tustin Ranch and Strawberry Farms, and unless you want to go golfing . . . I’m sure we can arrange for a car to take you.” “It’s tempting.” It really was. Keep your mind on the mission, Grace. “I think, though, if you don’t mind, my time might be better spent here. I can learn a lot by walking around and talking to people.” “Keep thinking like that and you’ll have my job someday.” Jason chuckled. “Now, we’re going to be going over financials first, do you have the printouts?” She did have the printouts. Stock prices and dividends and the end-of-quarter bonuses were completely boring, but too much of her job involved them. ••• True to his word, after two days of meetings Jason went off golfing and gave her free rein of the headquarters. She’d already learned where most things were, but hadn’t had a chance to examine them to her satisfaction. She started with the history, learning about Glen Bell and how he went from selling hot dogs to tacos, how he’d franchised the first restaurant in 1964 and only three years later had a hundred stores. Grace snickered when she found out that one of his early restaurant names had been Taco-Tia—that was a bit of information ponies didn’t know. From there, Grace visited the social media room. Hundreds of people working at computers, with a big screen showing who was talking about Taco Bell and what they were saying.  More to her interest was the test kitchen, an auditorium-like space with rows of seating and a turned-around Taco Bell prep station. Chief Innovation Chef Matthews was working on double-stacked taco variations, and let her try one made with black beans and rice. Further on, there was a row of numbered voting booths where people were encouraged to try new menu items. They would be slid through a slot in the wall; unfortunately for her, there weren’t any new items to try. They also had a small gym with treadmills and just for fun she cantered on that for a few minutes, long enough to work out some of the stress but not long enough to start sweating. By the time she’d finished, she’d attracted a small audience. For exercising properly, there was an open area just a short ways down the street with white-trunked trees tied to boxes she could gallop around in, and she could shower off in the hotel afterward. Sometimes she attracted an audience there, too, mostly construction workers. At the end of the day, she took a brief pilgrimage to Taco Bell Numero Uno, which was on a trailer in the parking lot—one of the people in the social media room had told her about it, and how they’d helped save it when it was threatened with being demolished. It didn’t look like much, certainly not what she associated Taco Bell with, but it was the same restaurant in the black-and-white photos on the timeline.