Catching up with my friend P

I hadn't seen my friend P for a few months so it was good to hear from him when he phoned me last Friday lunchtime.

"Hi GB," says the voice on the other end of my phone.

"Who's this?" I ask, not recognising his voice.

"It's P here, you bozo!" says P, offended that I couldn't tell who he was. "What are you doing at the moment? I've just moved into my new office and it's just round the corner from yours! Wanna meet for a coffee or something?"

"Really? Just round the corner?" I say, "Where are you exactly?"

P gives me the address and it is indeed very close to the bank that I work in. I'd originally been planning to visit boyfriend number 3 over lunch, but he'd called a couple of hours earlier to postpone for a few days. So as a wholesome alternative, meeting P for a coffee seems like a nice idea :-).

"You're lucky," I tell P, "because there's a small window in my diary round about now! Shall we meet in, say, 30 minutes?"

It turns out that P needs to be back in his new office around that time in case his new boss calls, so we end up agreeing that I'll visit him there.

"Can you pick up some coffees and cakes for us on your way round to visit me then GB?" asks P, looking for a small favour.

"OK sure," I reply, "but you'll never keep your cute lean figure if you get your friends to feed you cake all the time!"

Half an hour later and I'm seated opposite P in a small office on the eighth floor of an impressive new building that seems to be built almost entirely of glass.

"Good view from here isn't it," says P looking lecherously out at the guys in some of the other offices across the internal atrium, "Look at all those horny young blokes I can see from here ..."

"But what on earth is this new job you've got?" I ask feeling a bit confused, because P doesn't seem to have any colleagues to share his smart new office with him.

"Well, I'm the first UK employee," says P mysteriously. "I was in Moscow recently meeting the other employees. My boss now wants to expand the business into the UK, and it's up to me to build up the UK client list. If I get a few big accounts signed up over here, I should do very well if they go ahead with the IPO next year :-)."

"And you're going to do all this on your own?"

"I'll probably hire a pretty young twink to sit over there early next year," says P pointing behind me to the only other desk in the room. "After all, I can't rely on you to look cute and bring me coffee all the time!"

Asking a bit more about the firm that P's just joined, it turns out to be an Internet/telecoms oriented company. It all sounds very plausible, apart from the fact that the company is based in Russia!

"Yeah, the reason they've managed to get this far is that their cost base is so low over there. They pay their local employees virtually nothing!"

"Anyway, my boss has just asked me to book him a hotel in Dubai," he continues, "because he's having to stop off there on his way back from Jakarta and he doesn't trust any of his Moscow employees to sort it out for him at such short notice! What do you think of this one?"

He beckons me round to look at the hotel web site that he's got up on his computer screen. But when I look at the web site, I spot the icon of another web site minimised along the bottom of the screen.

"Errr, should you be cruising on gaydar during office hours?" I laugh, "you're not going to be find many UK clients for them like that!"

"But there's not much else for me to do at the moment!" says P defensively. "They've got to get their own web site sorted out before I can start selling. I told them what I wanted when I was over there recently meeting them all, but they haven't done it yet."

"Hang on, I just want to check something," he says suddenly, pressing a button on his phone to make a call.

"Good afternoon," says an efficient sounding female voice over P's speakerphone, before giving the name of P's new company, "Who can I put you through to today?"

"Oh sorry," replies P with a satisfied tone in his voice, "wrong number!"

"She's one of the receptionists downstairs that let you up here to see me," explains P, "and she got it right too, she said exactly what I told her to say. Even though she knows it's just me here!!"

I get the impression that P is trying to impress me for some reason, but in any case, this shady new job seems to suit him. It was interesting to see him in his new office on his first day, making excuses for being logged into gaydar, and seeming to spend more time gazing at the other male occupants of the building instead of working on finding clients for this new company. None the less, I hope he does well. I know from recent conversations with him that he's got huge debts, so he needs to succeed at something like this to keep all his creditors at bay!