Penelope couldn't believe Roman actually backed up her lie. She had a very bad feeling about this.
The conference ran from Thursday-Tuesday but she would have to fly out there on Wednesday, meaning she would be dealing with the fallout of her actions for the next two days. She wasn't looking forward to it at all.
He seemed like a very easy-going guy and certainly doted on her but she may have crossed the line here. She hadn't expected to get caught! She never would have said what she did if she knew Darren would actually call him!
Rocking the boat with Roman was exactly what she was trying to avoid. She was supposed to play the role of his wife while keeping her distance until she figured something else out. Starting a fight would not be in her best interest.
Or would it? Roman was so deeply in love with his wife that he couldn't possibly consider divorce if he hadn't already based on the fights that had been happening before Penelope arrived here.
If he didn't plan on divorcing her no matter what, a fight that caused more distance between them might work in her favor. The thought made her feel sick. How could she even consider hurting him on purpose to further her own aims?
Riddled with guilt, Penelope headed back to her desk and tried to push all of this out of her head so she could help Marianne finish up at least one of those projects. The problem was that she didn't know the password to this computer either.
That wouldn't do. She had to think of a way to fix this rather significant problem.
Inspiration struck suddenly. She could pretend this was an IT problem and they might let her reset her password! Penelope typed in something random more than six times before the system locked her out.
"Julie, I've typed my password in a bunch of times and my computer locked me out," Penelope said innocently. "What should I do?"
Julie popped her head up from the desk divider and frowned. "That's weird. Go find somebody in IT; they ought to be able to fix it."
She headed toward the elevator feeling oddly triumphant. She couldn't believe that actually worked! The IT department was one floor down and she very humbly asked the first person she saw for help.
Thankfully he didn't seem to know her name either and accepted what Penelope said at face value. He was baffled by why the computer shut her out since she supposedly typed in the right password over and over but ended up helping her reset it anyway.
Feeling a sense of irony, she made the new password 'Parallelpenny1'. She thanked the IT worker and he shrugged it off by saying "just doing my job" before heading back downstairs.
To be nice in case she ever did manage to switch back with the other Penelope, she wrote the new password on a sticky note and stuck it inside a locked drawer in the desk. It was fairly visible so there wouldn't be any problems finding it.
With that problem out of the way, Penelope was able to start looking for those reference materials Marianne asked for. She had no idea which projects she was supposed to be looking for and fervently hoped they were the most recently opened files.
Thinking logically, it would also be anything that wasn't completed, wouldn't it? That would help her too.
In the end, she emailed everything she thought was correct to Marianne and there didn't seem to be any further problems. Thank goodness. She had relied entirely on guessing.
Working here without knowing anything would be more stressful than Penelope originally thought. She really hoped she wouldn't end up in trouble, or worse, fired.
Her other self was a highly competent career woman. She couldn't ruin that image.
Hopefully the conference would help her learn more about this industry so she would have a better idea of what she was doing when she came back. It was a real stroke of luck Darren still let her go because if she had to jump right back into projects immediately, she might make a fatal mistake.
It wasn't even lunchtime yet. Penelope had no idea what she was supposed to do the rest of the day.
She supposed she could look through old projects the other Penelope had done and maybe try to familiarize herself with some of this software. A few basic applications were familiar from her two years of college but there were more specialized ones that were not.
She took note of all the names of these applications and decided to watch tutorial videos of some basic tasks until Marianne called her over. The only thing Darren wanted her to do until the conference was help out with those projects but right now her coworker was in the middle of something else.
Penelope plugged some earphones into the computer and watched tutorial videos for the next two hours, soaking everything up like a sponge. Marianne still hadn't summoned her when it was time to break for lunch so she grabbed the food she had packed and headed to the break room.
Ada waved her over to a table filled with other people she recognized from Facebook and Mypix so she ended up joining them. She had a vague idea of the roles these people played in Penelope's life from the journals.
Richard Dawkins was a nerdy-looking copywriter who had a wicked sense of humor and made pitch meetings fun. California Adams was a web designer who hated the name her hippie parents had given her and went by Cici. She was a single mom to a daughter with the very plain name of Sarah.
Alison Hastings and her cousin Max made up the rest of the table. She had worked here first as a graphic designer and got him a job. Now he was an assistant creative director and she was still bitter he got promoted first but hadn't let it hurt her relationship with him since neither of them had siblings.
These were all people Penelope tended to hang out with both inside and outside of work. Cici was currently dating one of Roman's friends so they went out on double dates fairly often and they had attended Sarah's fifth birthday party a few months ago.