Steemit Challenge S26-w4 : The Unlikely Friendship

_{Edited By PhotoFilter}

September heat shimmered over Lac de Tunis as Teena pushed through the glass doors of Marketing. She’d been “seconded”, the word fit to comb through every number, hotel invoices, crumpled TGM tickets rattling between Tunis and La Marsa. She disliked winks and shadows numbers, at least, never pretended.

Dev greeted her with a half-smile and a jacket too light for the office AC.

“Teena, welcome to the workshop of persuasion,” he said. “We speak to markets here, not spreadsheets.”

“Spreadsheets speak to markets when you listen,” she answered, eyes still on her files.

Week one, nothing alarming, minor gaps, forgotten receipts. Week two, the anomalies sketched a silhouette. The same taxi ride reimbursed twice at hours impossible given the TGM schedule, a “sold-out” hotel charged at low-season rate, per diems rounded with suspicious consistency. Teena called Dev in.

“Your salespeople like shortcuts,” she said, dropping a stack of receipts. “And you look away.”

“I ask for results, not psalms,” Dev replied. “They have targets. You’ll teach them to sell with a rulebook?”

“I’ll teach them not to confuse boldness with a shell game,” she said.

Every Monday the conflict returned, sharp as a blade. Slack jabs, glass-box meetings where their gestures felt too big for the space they gave each other. Dev accused Teena of choking momentum, Teena accused Dev of playing poker with other people’s money. The department learned to breathe on a timer.

Everything pivoted one late night. In “Travel_Q3.xlsx,” comments blinked on and off like fireflies. A red note “Ride X02 can’t exist if the TGM left at 18:07.” Signed H. She checked the logs: no user connected, but cells corrected themselves, fencing expenses with plausible limits, matching trips to public timetables. Dev popped his head into the empty floor.

“Talking to ghosts?” he asked.

“To someone who knows our data better than both of us,” she said, pointing at the screen.

They traced the trail which an ancient macro, VBA comments in darija, a network address to an old server in a forgotten ground-floor room, behind boxes of retired campaign roll-ups. On one, a faded sticker: Henda — Finance. Dev squinted.

“Henda… the company’s first CFO. Legend says she built a digital bogeyman that slapped unjustified spend.”

“It’s not a slap, it’s a guardrail,” Teena said. “And it still works.”

They sat at the dusty monitor. Henda’s macro didn’t punish, it compared official timetables, plausible distances, average prices. It drew halos of likelihood around each expense and blinked red when a claim stepped out. Dev was quiet, then sighed.

“I wasn’t blind, Teena. I was testing something. If I pull too tight, they cheat to breathe. So I watch where and why they cheat, and at what real cost. I want rules that serve us, not walls we split our heads on.”

“What if we could breathe without lying?” Teena said. “Keep freedom on what matters by moving fast but make the constraints intelligent. Henda laid a base. Let’s make it modern.”

It was their first true agreement. They named the project Zerda the quick desert fennec and gave themselves three weeks to rebuild policy, tool, and practice. They folded Henda’s macro into a living dashboard, Dev added field variables (seasonality, local fares), Teena set transparent guardrails (dynamic caps, simple photo justifications). Together they wrote a crisp charter: “We finance impact, not theatrics.”

Resistance arrived on cue. At the coffee stand, a senior scoffed, “Another app to clock us.”

“It will mostly keep you from expensing sea-view rooms when the client’s in El Menzah,” Dev said evenly.

Teena ran a workshop, real TGM maps, median fare grids, hotel lists near client zones. “Fiction supported by facts,” she chalked on the board. The sales team laughed despite themselves when she mimed the “mutant receipt” that duplicates and the “chameleon invoice” that changes season on cue.

Audit week loomed. On Tuesday, fresh red comments flared in “Travel_Q3.” “Heads-up: Hotel X shows an outdated city tax.” — H. Dev went a shade paler.

“Henda still talks,” he said.

“Or the macro sees better than we do,” Teena replied. “Let’s use it.”

They corrected, consolidated, owned the history. On the big day, they presented in duet. Dev gave the ground truth, budgets that breathe without evaporating. Teena brought facts, since Zerda’s launch, out-of-halo expenses fell 32% without cutting travel, reimbursements shrank from twelve days to four, quarterly sales ticked up 7%. No miracle just readable rules and tools that respect people’s intelligence.

“And if your system kills appetite?” someone on the committee asked.

Dev looked to Teena.

“Then it will tell us,” she said. “Numbers talk. We listen.”

The silence that followed wasn’t empty, just dense. Approval. Applause. A request for documentation.

That evening, for the first time, they rode the TGM together to Sidi Bou. At Café des Délices, the sea looked like a perfectly aligned spreadsheet, and the brik burned their fingers as much as the weeks of bias had burned their patience.

“You know,” Dev said, “I always thought you wanted to prove me wrong.”

“I wanted to prove that facts could make us better,” Teena answered. “Not the same thing.”

A notification pinged on her phone. One last red comment, like a benediction: “Good. Never let numbers lie.” — H.

“So you believe in ghosts now?” Dev grinned.

“I believe in inheritances,” Teena said. “And in unlikely friendships.”

They sat for a while, watching light tumble across blue roofs. The company had a new policy, a learning tool, and two leads who no longer needed to win against each other. They’d chosen to win together. And that was, beyond doubt, the finest line on their shared balance sheet.

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Thank you very much for reading, it's time to invite my friends @sualeha, @drhira, @shiftitamanna to participate in this contest.

Best Regards,
@kouba01