Page 35 of The Show

I shrugged to myself. “Nothing! I was trying to upload some logos like you’d showed me, and it disappeared. It’s gone. I’m staring at a bunch of code in the corner of my screen.”

I heard the honking of traffic followed by yelling, before the background noise muffled slightly.

“Are you in your office?”

“Yep.”

“Okay, sit tight, I can be there in thirty minutes. I just need to grab my bike.”

I sighed, embarrassed yet relieved that once again, Josh was about to save my ass. “Thank you.”

Momentarily forgetting I was sitting on a large cardboard box instead of a chair, I leaned back and sunk straight through the tape and onto the contents below, deep enough that it took me a minute to unwedge myself. I moved to the more solid and safer option – the floor – and looked around.

My office. Huh.

Sometimes I really didn’t know what I’d been thinking when I’d given my two-weeks’ notice at Frolick and Blue. I’d had a great job there. I’d finished college and entered its graduate program, busting my ass enough to move quickly through the ranks, and for the last year I’d run my own division within the company, managing accounts close to five million dollars a year in revenue. I wasn’t saving lives, but I was proud of it. I was changing the world in my own way, by helping brands make better choices for their customers. Making them happier.

Urgh, I sounded like a billboard.

Yet six months ago, something began niggling at me. The Sunday blues had begun to make an appearance and I enjoyed going to work less. I’d felt unsettled. Less satisfied. Unfulfilled.

Too safe. Bored, even.

I was on a hamster wheel that didn’t have an exit sign.

I’d mentioned it once to my parents during brunch when they’d asked me how work was, but my mom’s solution was to find a boyfriend and get married. If I was planning a wedding, I wouldn’t be bored. I never brought it up with her again.

My dad was more supportive.

He’d said he’d felt like that once. He’d studied medicine at Johns Hopkins, but didn’t love it. By his third year of residency, he was so burned out he didn’t know what to do with himself, so he put his studies on hold for a year to recuperate and ‘figure his shit out’ as he put it.

He never went back. Instead, once he’d caught up on sleep, he’d noticed a gap in the market for reasonably priced, well-made medical equipment, and that was how he came to build his company - Meditech.

It wasn’t glamorous, but Meditech had grown into the biggest manufacturer and exporter of medical equipment in the United States. His company literally saves lives. Meditech is the preferred supplier to all of Shepherd Holdings health divisions, along with hundreds of other companies, large and small, across the States. Meditech also supplies the US Armed Forces for all its work overseas. And just like Shepherd Holdings, Meditech is a family run and owned company. My brothers work there, several of my cousins work there, yet while I admired everything they did, the sales of medical supply equipment wasn’t really the life for me.

Not my calling.

Instead, I’d majored in marketing and communications at Brown, and then studied for an MBA while Lauren was finishing her medical degree. And I’d loved it, every second. I loved communications. I loved learning about the history of brands, the evolution, the creativity of building a brand from scratch, making people take notice, pay attention and listen.

And it was during the conversation with my dad that he suggested maybe I should give it a go myself.

Build my own brand from scratch.

One late night dinner with Lauren later, where I’d relayed everything he’d said and she agreed wholeheartedly, I’d handed my notice in.

And now here I was. Sitting on the floor in an office I’d rented in a shared workspace building, with a broken website and no clients, and a thousand business cards.

Definitely not the success of the movie girls.

My phone buzzed across the room and I managed to get there on my hands and knees before it stopped ringing.

“Hey,”

“Hey, how’s it going? Website fixed yet?” Lauren’s voice echoed slightly over the loudspeaker.

“No,” I sighed. “Josh is on his way over again. The guy must think I’m either a moron, or I want to date him so I’m coming up with excuses to see him. Laurie, I’m not sure I’m cut out for this.”

I started picking at the tape hanging off the side of the box, this one filled with my work that I’d technically stolen from Frolick and Blue, but I’d wanted something as a reminder of what I was capable of.

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