Going to try to address a bunch of things, but have to be quick, because I'm at work...
Kara, Kari, Kira, and Kiri (who you've yet to meet). Of course, there's also Kiki and Kayla (no relation).
Calendar issues should definitely be fixed by the patch file, although I appear to have screwed something else up with the MC now showing as "Player" on occasion - looking into that.
I should have explained better about the phonebook... You don't need to call your alternative reception candidates from the previous hiring round - you'll use the phone to contact Kiki or Vanessa if you want to add them to the pool.
Added the option to call up Ashley for a date to test the interplay between phone and calendar, but the content (another date) isn't ready yet, so I should have disabled that option for the moment - my mistake. There will be more Ashley (and Mallory) content soon.
In fact, there'll be more content soon. Period.
As vleder mentioned, there seems to be another issue with a mod interfering with the quick menu. I took the opacity of the text box WAY down for this version and added the text outlines, so I feel like that's been more than adequately addressed. Again, if you choose to mod, you're on your own as far as I'm concerned.
Disappearing receptionists? Will check on a further report of Aria (and now Jennie) going AWOL, thought that was sorted, but will double check.
Early on there's discussion of possibly hiring Kari or Mallory as receptionists. That was really done just to add flavour, for want of a better term. Lois thinks it's a bad idea. Kari and Mallory think it's a bad idea. If you go ahead and try to hire one of them anyway, they'll decline and Lois will offer the job to someone else.
What I didn't anticipate was people being stubborn enough to try and hire BOTH of them - and that's what's breaking. I'll fix it in the next build, so... DON'T PERSIST IN TRYING TO HIRE KARI AND MALLORY AS RECEPTIONISTS.
Once again, this is my first VN and it is a work in progress, so please bear with me and we'll get through the (non-patch related) issues!