Ballantyne showed Moran out, went back to his desk, sat for a moment and scrawled a dozen names on a jotter, and turned his attention to what he had been about to start when the phone rang.
He paused from time to time to add a word or two to the jotter as he worked through the regular Saturday afternoon task list, then, around the time he would be skimming through the latest medical updates, turned his attention to the jotter.
By the time he called his wife just after five his To Do software had a list of tasks spread over the next seven days that wouldn't have been there without Moran's phone call.
But there were some obvious tasks that weren't on that list.
The first of them took about twenty seconds to tick off after Lynette collected him from the front of the GSMC premises.
He hadn't expected any difficulty.
If he'd heard Don't just sit there talking about it. Do something once, he'd heard it a thousand times from her.
And about the same number of times from members of her extended family.
There were times when he'd thought it was the family motto and amused himself trying to envision an appropriate coat of arms for one of the Territory's most prominent indigenous clans.
So that was cool, and even though he didn't need to, he'd followed the news that Moran had approached him to run for the Senate with the standard statement the two of them used to win over unconvinced family members.
And if that happens, it means that (insert useful/profitable/socially just outcome here), and that'd be good usually worked wonders, though it had taken a bit of effort to apply it successfully in the quest to get Belinda to eat broccoli.