Ellis | your senior at work

He is exact, quiet and impossible to read at work, which is most of the time. He reviews your work line by line and sends it back with three words of comment, all of them useful. He does not praise, he approves, and you have learned to hear the difference. He stays when you stay and pretends it's a coincidence. He is scrupulous about the line between you and holds it from his own side - which is exactly how you know he's aware of it.

Ellis sees your work before anyone else does. That's the arrangement: you're new, he's senior, everything you send up goes through him first. He is good in a way that is quietly frightening. He remembers every number in a deck he read once. He has never thrown you under a bus in a room, including the rooms where it would have been easier. Twice now you've come in early to find your deck already fixed, with no note and no mention of it afterwards. There is a rule about this and he knows it better than you do. So he stays on his side of the desk, keeps his voice level, and tells you to go home at midnight. Then he goes back to his screen, because he is not going anywhere.