Page 5 of To Feel Like This Again
Matthew shoves the laptop along the smooth wooden table in my direction, far enough for me to reach and grab, but loud enough to disturb everyone in the board room. This of course draws unnecessary attention to me. Terri pauses in the middle of her sentence, further delaying the end of the most boring presentation, while the others turn around and look at me, admonishingly.
“Sorry,” I say, raising my hand.
With time against me, I open Chrome and go to the website.Shit, what’s the password again? Instantly, I click onForget your password?and reset it.
The time on the taskbar changes to 1:00pm and so does my watch, even though I still check to make sure. I am screwed. I’ve missed the deadline to confirm the transfer for my fantasy football team.
Great. Now, I’m going to be unrelentingly ridiculed by my friends and their invitees in the group for another gameweek. And outside of a miracle, it’s looking like I’ll end up losing US$10,000.00 at the end of the season.
I hate gambling, having witnessed my father lose our apartment because of a horse namedShoe-in… but my ego outmuscles any issue I have with betting, or anything, now that I think about it. I like to be in control. So, when the eighteen-member fantasy football group said that the last place finisher should pay US$4,000.00 to the winner, I had proposed that we play for fun. Bragging rights was a good enough incentive for me.
But Gavin, who has an issue with me because he recently found out I had kissed his girlfriend, had responded to my message in the WhatsApp group.
“Bredda…you can’t afford to bet $4,000.00. Is this a joke?”
“$4,000.00 is a waste of my time… tag me when you’re serious.”
“Okay. Let’s make it $4,500.00.”
“Let me know when you’re serious.”
Throwing everything on the line to protect his ego, he reluctantly inched it up. “Alright. Can you afford $5,000.00?”
“We either playing for $10,000.00 or for fun.”
And this is how I ended up in this ten-grand predicament. Also, it would be remiss of me not to share that it was just a kiss at the movies, and it happened three years before he had met her.
Moments later, the CEO, Andre Grant, an ogre-looking dude, invites me to the podium to present the strategic outlook for Q2 2024. On the way back to his seat, he picks up what is his fourth donut from the refreshment area. I had laughed when I heard that he had given a speech during wellness week.
Steadily going through my presentation it takes me twelve minutes using four PowerPoint slides, quite unlike my predecessor, Rachel Evans, our chief marketing officer, who spent a lifetime talking about the cliché commercials we had spent a fortune to produce. And can you believe she actually gloated about increasing the number of Instagram followers from 113k to 119k? And these bums around me had clapped. What a waste of shareholders’ money on sponsored ads.
OK,I alsoclapped, partly because she stops at my office every morning for small talk, but mainly because she’s an MILF. At her recent fiftieth birthday party, she had flirted with me, “I wish you were twenty years older.”
As tempting as that offer was, I don’t shit where I eat. However, I’m curious to know if she had done a boob job, because those tits look bigger… and amazing.Just saying.
To some extent I can understand why my colleagues in their early sixties, people who literally use a Sharpie to mark their retirement date on a calendar, would think that an inorganic increase in Instagram followers is impressive. I completely get the baby boomers. But the handful of millennials in the room can’t be serious.
And is it Rachel or Rachael? I can never remember, and she gets hypersensitive whenever colleagues misspell her name in emails. Without knowing all the facts, it’s easy to see why Rachel or Rachael is a two-time divorcee.
In closing, the ogre takes us on a hiking trail to the Grand Canyon, discussing the impact the tropical storm had on the gloomy financial performance.Really Bro? Even your mamma knows that isn’t the main reason the net profit was down 75% year-over-year. This pussy is going to be destroyed by the group executives, then receive an email advising that the company reassigned portfolios forstrategic reasons. Demotion sucks, especially when your five-day-a-week-gym-going wife married you for your status.
Today, the all-day meeting is even longer than usual as Lisa Davis, the Global CEO, is going to be attending the Jamaican conference for the first time. And surprise, surprise! … she is going to be making a presentation which, I know with unequivocal certainty, will provide recommendations on how to grow the revenue in a country she’s never visited before.
Most of the local executives were going to be meeting Lisa for the first time. Andre Grant and our CFO, Jason Jordan, who had both attended the last three global retreats, although seeing her at conferences had never met her. The company had booked first-class seats for them and reserved rooms at a five-star hotel. God knows what their per diems were. But as sure as the sun rises in the morning, I know they contributed nothing to the event, sitting in some unobtrusive seat, silent. It was ironic to hear them complain about getting nosebleed seats for Super Bowl LVI, while the more senior executives at the group level cheered from a suite or a seat close enough to the field to high five the winning quarterback or Snoop Dogg on their way out of the stadium. These guys didn’t even know the rules of the game but grumbled about their seats.
When I first joined the company in 2014, I had watched a captivating interview with Lisa on CNN. Eager to be working for State Foods — the third largest food company by revenue in the world — I was keen to learn as much as I could about the company.
Thanks to a track and field scholarship, I had attended Yale where I majored in accounts and graduated sum cum laude. Fresh out of college, I had returned to Jamaica and landed the job in little to no time. It was an obvious choice for HR to select an Ivy League graduate for the Business Analyst post. But for optics and to maintain a paper-trail for the auditing firm, they had arranged a second interview and even had me do a test, which I think I passed. I selected C for the last five questions, just because it was a dumb test.
In the CNN interview, she was transparent and refreshingly witty for the CEO of one of the world’s largest publicly listed companies. She had responded to questions objectively, without prettying it up to appease the audience or difficult shareholders. She really impressed me.Not gonna lie.
After that, I watched all her other interviews that were aired on major channels. Amazingly, during the middle of the UEFA Champions League semi-final game, I had switched the channel to catch her live interview on the BBC. I was blown away by the purple dress she wore that night.
The game had gone to penalties, and my phone was heating up with notifications, distracting me from watching her in the interview. So, I had turned off the phone.
To ensure I hadn’t missed anything important, I had rewatched the interview three times. But if you include the number of times I brought it up on YouTube to ‘show’ friends, then I’m guessing it’s more like ten times. To this day, I don’t really remember anything she said in the interview.
Chapter 3
