Nanny Piggins and the Daring Rescue 7 (14 page)

Nanny Piggins looked about the office. The surroundings were drab, but when she went through the desk she was delighted to discover in the bottom drawer a tin full of chocolate-chip biscuits. They smelled delicious. She made a mental note to send Mrs Applebaum a thank-you cake in return. She was just putting her hind trotters up on the desk as she leant back in her chair to stuff the first half dozen biscuits in her mouth when the phone rang. Nanny Piggins groaned. She considered letting it ring while she ate the biscuits.

‘Answer it before the third ring!' bellowed Mr Green from inside his office.

Nanny Piggins glowered at his closed door as she took her trotters off the desk, leaned forward and picked up the handset.

‘Hello,' she said.

‘This is Harris from Maritime Law. I need Green to –' Nanny Piggins hung up and put the biscuits in her mouth, reasoning that Mr Green had told her to answer the phone but he didn't tell her she had to speak to the person on the other end. Nanny Piggins sat back, closed her eyes and enjoyed the chocolatey sugary buttery bliss of the delicious biscuit.

The phone rang again. Nanny Piggins opened one eye and glared at it.

‘Answer it!' barked Mr Green from inside his office.

‘Hmmpf,' said Nanny Piggins to herself. She did not like it when a person told her to do something without saying ‘please' (or offering her a slice of cake). She leaned forward and picked up the handset.

‘I think we were cut off before. I'm Harris from Maritime –' said the voice. But Nanny Piggins cut him off again, this time by ripping the cord out of the wall socket, then taking the telephone and putting it in the bottom desk drawer, replacing it with the biscuit tin, which now had pride of place on her desk.

‘What did they want?' barked Mr Green rudely from inside his office.

Nanny Piggins got up, walked over to Mr Green's office door and opened it. Mr Green was startled. Mrs Applebaum had never done that (she preferred to eat her biscuits and not confront him).

‘I think we need to make one thing clear,' said Nanny Piggins in a menacingly quiet voice. ‘I do not yell. It is beneath my dignity as a pig. If you want to speak to me you can open this door and converse with me at a normal volume.'

‘I haven't got time for that!' exclaimed Mr Green. ‘I'll call you on your telephone.'

‘Even better,' agreed Nanny Piggins. She returned to her desk where she could hear the faint sound of Mr Green dialling her number, then leaving a message on her voicemail.

Nanny Piggins sighed contentedly, putting her trotters up as she popped another biscuit in her mouth. Just then a harried-looking middle-aged woman burst in.

‘Where's Mrs Applebaum?' she asked.

‘Quit this morning,' said Nanny Piggins. ‘Would you like a biscuit?'

‘Yes please,' said the harried woman. ‘My boss, Mr Thorp, wants me to find the Pattison amendments to the Crickleston estate and he says that Mr Green has them.'

‘Really,' said Nanny Piggins. ‘Where would they be?'

‘In the archive boxes, I suppose,' said the harried woman.

‘Hmm,' said Nanny Piggins. ‘Have another biscuit. Seeing as how this is a law firm, I assume there must be a room somewhere where they shred documents.'

‘Yes, there's a massive machine up on the sixth floor,' said the harried woman.

‘Why don't we just take all the boxes up there and throw them in,' suggested Nanny Piggins.

‘But what would we say when we were asked how it happened?' asked the harried woman.

‘We tripped?' suggested Nanny Piggins.

The harried woman looked at the boxes as she bit her biscuit. ‘All right, let's do it. Going through boxes is always very rough on my cuticles and I never get a thank-you or a jar of hand cream for doing it.'

Five minutes later all twenty boxes had been shredded and Nanny Piggins and her new friend were sitting with their feet up, eating their biscuits.

‘I like what you've done with the office,' complimented Eleanor, which was the harried woman's name.

‘Yes, getting rid of the paperwork has really brightened it up,' agreed Nanny Piggins. ‘After lunch I'm going to get one of those fit young boys from the mail room to take the filing cabinets up to the street so I can arrange to have them run over by a dump truck.'

‘Do you think you could do that with mine too?' asked Eleanor.

‘Of course,' said Nanny Piggins.

During lunch, word spread among the secretaries. So when Nanny Piggins and Eleanor went out into the car park, there was quite a crowd of women with their three-drawer filing cabinets laid out in a row.

‘Here comes my friend, Steve,' called Nanny Piggins happily as a garbage truck pulled into the driveway. Luckily the lawyers did not notice that their secretaries were gone, or that there were cheers of delight coming from the car park, or even the loud beeping of the garbage truck as it went back and forth over all their pointless files.

‘Do you want me to scrape them up and take them to the tip for you?' called out Steve.

‘That would be lovely,' said Nanny Piggins. ‘I owe you a chocolate cake.'

‘You know how to wrap a man around your little finger, Nanny Piggins,' laughed Steve.

‘I'm starting to feel a little peckish,' said Nanny Piggins to one of the other secretaries. ‘Where do they keep the cake?'

‘There isn't any cake,' said another secretary. ‘If you want cake you have to provide your own.'

‘Oh,' said Nanny Piggins. ‘So where is their oven for baking cakes?'

‘There isn't an oven,' said the secretary from the intellectual property department.

Nanny Piggins gasped. ‘But what do they do if there is an emergency and one of the lawyers urgently needs a sticky toffee pudding.'

‘They don't do that,' said a secretary from corporate law. ‘When they're hungry they eat a stale cheese sandwich from the vending machine.'

‘No!' exclaimed Nanny Piggins. ‘I knew lawyers were morally bankrupt but I didn't realise their depravity ran so deep. Never mind. We'll still have cake. I just have to whip up an oven before I can whip up a cake.'

And so Nanny Piggins built an oven in the kitchenette.

‘Is this going to be a wood-fired oven?' asked a junior secretary, as Nanny Piggins deftly fashioned the oven out of the stationery cabinet (the one the efficiency experts had emptied that morning) and using an air-conditioning duct as a chimney.

‘No,' said Nanny Piggins. ‘A law-book fired oven. We don't have many logs of wood lying round. But there are lots of law books in this building.'

Nanny Piggins was sitting at her empty desk in her now empty office eating freshly baked cake when three men in grey suits entered. She knew immediately that these were the dreaded efficiency experts because (efficiently enough) they wore name tags clearly labelled, that said: Efficiency Expert.

‘Hello,' said Nanny Piggins. ‘Can I help you?'

‘We're here to evaluate Green,' said the lead efficiency expert. (His name tag efficiently said Efficiency Expert – Team Leader.)

‘The colour or the man?' asked Nanny Piggins.

Just then Mr Green burst out of his office.

‘Gentlemen!' he gushed. ‘It is an honour to have you here in my humble office.' Mr Green bowed as he said this, behaving like a nineteenth-century Russian peasant being paid a visit by the Tsar.

‘We want to start by having a look around,' said the lead efficiency expert.

‘Of course, please do,' said Mr Green, waving them into his office. ‘I'll fetch my files.' But as he turned in the direction of his filing system, Mr Green flinched away in horror. ‘Where are my files?' he hissed.

‘I filed them,' said Nanny Piggins, ‘in the landfill at the tip.'

‘Aaagghh,' whispered Mr Green. (It is hard to yell at someone while keeping your voice down so that the efficiency experts in the next room do not fire you.) ‘Where's the paperwork I left on your desk?'

‘I liberated it,' said Nanny Piggins, ‘by taking it up to the tenth floor and throwing it into the wind.'

‘But they were important papers!' shrieked Mr Green.

‘Well, there were still a few pages blowing round when I was out in the car park arranging for a dump truck to back over all the firm's filing cabinets,' said Nanny Piggins helpfully.

‘Where are the status reports and case logs I asked you to fetch?' asked Mr Green.

‘You didn't ask me to do that,' said Nanny Piggins.

‘Yes, I did,' spluttered Mr Green. ‘I left a message on your phone.'

‘Oh,' said Nanny Piggins. ‘I disconnected that this morning. It was irritating me.'

‘Oh no,' said Mr Green. ‘I'm going to be fired. I'll have to spend more time with the children.'

Now Nanny Piggins was distressed. ‘Surely not. They wouldn't be so cruel. Not to innocent children.'

‘They're lawyers,' wailed Mr Green. ‘Of course they would.'

The efficiency experts emerged from Mr Green's office mumbling among themselves. The team leader spoke. ‘Green, we want you to clear out your desk.'

Mr Green started to weep. ‘But where will I go?' he sobbed. ‘Please don't make me go home.'

‘Yes, don't send him home,' agreed Nanny Piggins. ‘He gives the place that old lawyer smell, which is impossible to get out of the curtains.'

‘We want you to pack up your desk because we're promoting you,' said the efficiency expert.

‘You are?!' exclaimed Nanny Piggins and Mr Green, in a rare note of unison.

‘We love what you have done down here,' raved the efficiency expert. ‘You've cleared up valuable floor space by getting rid of your files.'

‘But all the records of my work are gone,' protested Mr Green.

‘Exactly,' praised the efficiency expert, ‘which means they can't be subpoenaed and used against the firm in court. And we see that you've streamlined the efficiency of your support staff by cutting off her phone.'

‘She only did it so she could spend more time eating cake,' confessed Mr Green.

‘An inspired managerial idea,' complimented the expert. ‘And don't think we didn't notice that you threw your paperwork out the window.'

‘You like that?' asked a bewildered Mr Green.

‘All that A4 has provided a lovely bed of mulch in the firm's ornamental garden,' said the efficiency expert. ‘It will keep down weeds and retain moisture, which has allowed us to sack the gardener.'

‘Really?' said Mr Green. ‘Maybe I am an inspired manager and I didn't even realise it.'

‘But most impressive of all you hired this pig,' praised the expert.

‘You like the pig?' asked Mr Green incredulously.

‘Like her? We love her!' exclaimed the expert. ‘She only charges 11 cents an hour! None of the other lawyers thought to save money by hiring farm animals.'

‘Ahem,' said Nanny Piggins. ‘Circus animals.'

‘Green, you are clearly middle management material,' continued the expert, ‘which is why we are giving you the promotion. You are going to be the new Senior Tax Lawyer. We'll let you know the details as soon as your new location has been finalised.'

‘Don't I get to keep my basement office?' asked Mr Green.

‘Oh no,' said the lead efficiency expert. ‘We've got just the place for a hard-nosed problem solver with limited interpersonal skills such as yourself.'

‘Gosh,' said Mr Green.

The experts turned and left, leaving Mr Green blushing with pleasure. ‘Oh, Nanny Piggins, I don't know how to thank you,' said Mr Green breathlessly.

‘I do,' said Nanny Piggins. ‘You can give me $11.17 to buy some more cake.'

Nanny Piggins was running at full speed towards the school. She did not normally meet the children at the school gate. They caught the bus. But on this occasion something terribly important was happening that meant she desperately needed to be there when the bell rang.