  - 22   .  B1
 


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22 Business Evenings in English          ,     ,        : ,    ,       , ,  ,         .

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  - 22   .  B1








22 Business Evenings in English

Bilingual Business Stories  B1 Level

     B1




How to Use This Book /    


This is a collection of twenty-two short stories, one for each working day of a month, written for English learners at a B1 level who want their English to work for them at their job, not just on holiday. Every story is told twice: once in English, and once in a natural, literary Russian translation.

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The book is laid out in short alternating blocks: a paragraph in English, followed immediately by the same paragraph in Russian, set in italics. This means you never have to flip to another page or scroll through a separate section to check something  both languages are always right next to each other.

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There is no single correct way to read it, but here is one approach that works well for most learners. Read the English paragraph first, all the way through, even if a word or a sentence structure is unclear  try to guess the meaning from context before looking down. Then read the Russian paragraph underneath, not to translate word by word, but simply to confirm what you understood, or to fill in the one or two things that got away from you.

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At the end of every story, you will find a short box called Key Business Phrases five to seven expressions that appeared in the text, with their Russian equivalents, so the useful vocabulary stays with you after the story ends. This is not a textbook and there are no exercises  just a quick place to glance back at the phrases worth keeping.

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Twenty-two stories, twenty-two working days  read one on your way home, or in the quiet ten minutes before bed, and by the end of the month, business English will feel less like a wall and more like a language you already half-know.

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DAY 1





The First Monday


Zoe had rehearsed the walk from the tube station to the office three times over the weekend, just to be sure she wouldn't be late, and now, on the actual Monday, she was eleven minutes early and standing outside a glass building with no idea how to get in.

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There was a turnstile, a little grey pad that clearly wanted a card, and a security guard reading something on his phone. Zoe didn't have a card yet. Nobody had mentioned a card.

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"Um  hi," she said, to the guard. "I'm starting here today. First day. I don't have a pass yet."

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He looked up, unbothered, like this happened every Monday, which it probably did. "Who's your manager?"

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"Priya. Priya Shah. I'm joining the client services team."

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He picked up a phone on the desk and said something Zoe couldn't quite hear, then nodded at her. "Take a seat. Someone'll come get you."

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Nobody came for fourteen minutes.

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Zoe sat on a low leather sofa in the lobby, watching people walk in with their cards already out, tapping through the turnstile without even slowing down, like they'd been doing it for years  which, she reminded herself, most of them probably had. She checked her phone. No messages. She checked it again a minute later, just in case.

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Finally, a woman in a green jumper came down in the lift, looked around the lobby, and walked straight over. "Zoe? So sorry  it's genuinely chaos up there this morning. I'm Nadia, I sit near you. Well, near where you'll sit. Come on up."

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The lift doors opened onto an open-plan office that looked, to Zoe, exactly like the photos on the company website, except louder and slightly more chaotic, with someone's dog asleep under a desk and a whiteboard covered in half-erased numbers. Nadia walked fast, talking as she went.

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"So, normally HR does a proper induction, welcome pack, the whole thing, but Sandra's off sick, so it's a bit  improvised, today. Priya knows you're starting, she's just stuck in a call that overran. This is your desk. This is your laptop, which does not yet have a password, which is deeply annoying, IT are aware."

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Zoe sat down at the desk, which had nothing on it except a monitor, a keyboard, and a small plant that looked like it belonged to someone else and had simply been left behind. She wasn't sure if she should touch it.

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"That's Gary's," Nadia said, following her eyes. "The plant. Gary left in March. Nobody's brave enough to move it."

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"Should I"

  

"Leave it. It's basically part of the team now."

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By ten o'clock, Zoe had met eleven people whose names she had already, quietly, begun to lose. There was Nadia, who she was fairly confident about. There was a tall man called James from the design team, and a shorter, equally friendly man called Alex from  accounts? Finance? She genuinely couldn't remember, and it was now too late to ask without it being awkward.

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At 10:15, someone put their head round a meeting room door and said, "Standup's starting, are you coming?" and Zoe, assuming this meant her, since it was said in her general direction, got up and followed.

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It was not, it turned out, the team standup. It was the internal pitch review for a client presentation going out that afternoon, and six people were already sitting around a table with laptops open and slides on the screen, mid-discussion about a logo.

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Zoe realised her mistake roughly two seconds after sitting down, when a woman at the head of the table  who she would later learn was Priya, her actual manager  looked at her with polite confusion and said, "Sorry, and you are...?"

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"I'm  sorry  I'm Zoe, I just started, someone said 'standup' and I thought" She was already standing back up. "I'll just  sorry."

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There was a short pause, and then the whole table laughed, not unkindly. "That's on me," said the man who'd put his head round the door. "I said 'the meeting' to five different people this morning, it's a wonder more of you didn't turn up."

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Priya smiled properly now. "Zoe  welcome. I am so sorry about this morning, genuinely. Come find me at eleven, I promise I have actual time for you then, and we'll get you set up properly. For now, go with Nadia, she'll show you where the coffee is, which is the only truly essential induction."

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Zoe left the room feeling her face go warm, but by the time she reached the kitchen, Nadia was already laughing about it. "Honestly, best possible first-day story. In six months you'll be telling new starters about the time you crashed the pitch review, and it'll be the funniest thing that's ever happened here. Which, low bar, but still."

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Eleven o'clock arrived, and with it, a proper conversation with Priya  a calendar invite explained (blue meant internal, orange meant client, and Zoe was expected to check it every morning), a login that finally worked, and a short, clear explanation of what client services actually did day to day, which turned out to be less mysterious than Zoe had feared: answering client questions, keeping projects on track, translating between what the client wanted and what the design and strategy teams could realistically deliver.

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"It sounds a bit like being a translator," Zoe said.

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"That's exactly what it is," Priya said. "Except instead of two languages, it's 'what the client emailed at 11pm' and 'what's humanly possible by Friday.'"

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By lunchtime, Zoe had her own login, her own desk, a rough idea of what her job actually involved, and  she noticed with some relief  she had stopped mixing up James and Alex, mostly because Alex had a coffee mug with his name on it, which she suspected he knew everyone used to tell him apart from James, and had simply decided to make peace with it.

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Nadia found her at her desk around one. "Coming for lunch? Fair warning, we mostly talk about the show everyone's watching at the moment, and you will be expected to have an opinion by Wednesday."

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"I haven't watched it," Zoe admitted.

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"Nobody has, on day one. Come anyway."

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They ate lunch at a long table with four other people, and Zoe mostly listened, which felt like the right thing to do, and laughed at a story about a client call that had gone wrong in a genuinely spectacular way the previous month, involving a screen share of the wrong browser tab. Nobody asked her anything difficult. Nobody expected her to already know things. It was, she thought, a surprisingly gentle kind of hard day.

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At half past two, Priya called her over to look at something on her screen. "Right. First actual task. A client's asked us to move a deadline, and I need a short reply confirming it  nothing complicated, but I want you to have a go, and I'll check it before it goes anywhere near their inbox."

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Zoe opened a blank email and stared at it for a moment, then typed: Hi, yeah, that's fine, we can do the new date, let me know if you need anything else!

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Priya read it over her shoulder and made a small sound that wasn't quite a laugh. "Okay  good instinct, wrong register. This client's lovely, but they're used to a slightly more formal tone from us, especially in writing. Try something more like: 'Thank you for letting us know  the new deadline works well on our end. Please let me know if there's anything you need from us in the meantime.' Same message. Different coat."

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"So it's not about being fake," Zoe said, half asking, half checking she'd understood.

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"Not at all. It's about matching the room you're in. You wouldn't talk to your gran the way you talk to your mates, and you wouldn't talk to this client the way you'd text me asking where the good coffee is. Same honesty, different volume."

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Zoe rewrote it, Priya nodded at the second version without changing a word, and hit send herself, just to be safe. "There," she said. "Officially, that's your first client email. Frame it or something."

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By six, most of the office had emptied out, but Nadia stopped by Zoe's desk with her coat already on. "We're going for one drink round the corner  nothing mad, just a Monday thing when someone new starts. You don't have to, obviously, if you'd rather just get home."

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Zoe thought about the long tube ride and the quiet flat waiting for her, and then thought that she could, in theory, sit in a quiet flat any evening she liked, and today was not most days. "Go on then. One."

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The pub was loud and half-full of people from other offices nearby, and Zoe ended up wedged between Nadia and James, half-listening to an argument about whether the office coffee machine was "genuinely broken or just badly loved." Alex arrived last, still holding his name mug, which turned out to be a running joke she hadn't been let in on yet  apparently he'd once left it on a client's desk by accident and had never quite lived it down.

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"To Zoe," Nadia said, raising her glass, "who survived a pitch meeting she wasn't invited to, adopted a dead man's plant, and still came for a drink on day one. Strong start."

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"To Gary's plant," James added.

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"To Gary's plant," everyone repeated, and Zoe laughed and drank to a plant she still hadn't named, thinking that this was a strange and slightly wonderful way to end a day that had started with her standing outside a locked door, not knowing how to get in.

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At the end of the day, walking back to the tube, Zoe texted her mum. Survived day one. Accidentally walked into the wrong meeting, everyone was actually really nice about it, my desk came with a dead man's plant that I'm apparently responsible for now. Think I might like it here.

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Her mum replied a minute later. Named the plant yet?

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Zoe smiled at her phone, standing on the escalator going down, and typed back: Working on it.

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Key Business Phrases /   

induction   ,     



client services team     

calendar invite    ( )

standup (meeting)  , 

pitch review   /   

to keep a project on track    ,      

to overrun ,     ( , )

register / tone ,   ( / )

on our end   

in the meantime  , 




DAY 2





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