Criminal Masterminds

A foolish challenge

Business, you know, may bring you money, but friendship hardly ever does.
Source

In an attempt to improve the quality of this blog; I have taken Max up on his challenge and have written Page 162 of my memoir. This is also partly because this is kind of like writing a short story snippet for a college essay.


skeptical that claim will come to fruition.”

He sat across the table, self possessed and smiling at what he saw as my eminent defeat. After all, what did I know about his company? I was just the cocky up start kid, who through a series of accidents had landed in his lap. No proof existed I could deliver what I promised.

It was the smug grin on his California-tanned face that riled me into proclaiming, “Give me three weeks and I’ll figure out your distribution problem and have a way to fix it.” It was most likely the stupidest thing I could have said at the time, what with the woman who hired me sitting next to my new employer. She had promised I wouldn’t do or say anything that would reflect negatively on his company, and here I was risking it all because his insufferable grin had gotten under my skin.

The strangest look registered in his eyes for a brief moment before he raised his glass of chardonnay, from the finest vineyard in Napa Valley valued around two hundred dollars a bottle, his wine. “To the success of your plan,” he toasted, only a trace of mockery threading its way through his voice.

I raised my glass in response before taking a slight sip of the sand paper dry wine; unfamiliar in the ways of fine wines, I nearly choked over the dusty wine in my throat. I recovered only after I drank a significant portion of my water. When my eyes returned to his, the slight crinkling around his eyes confirmed my fears: I was simply figurehead he could places on all his stationary.

Whether the decision was conscious or not, I will never know, but I do know that it was over dinner that night the nature of our relationship and my relationship with the company changed. No longer would I stand for the quiet ridicule; I would work to prove how I earned my position. Even if I had no life as a result.

Thoughts of my fledging plan must have spilled across my face for he inquired with calm indifference what I had been thinking about. In another foolish display of bravado, I said I had been mulling over the ways to fix his delivery issues before deflecting attention away from me and onto the latest political scandal.

Apparently the young president had made a grievous misstep at the previous Wednesday’s summit

posted by Kara @ 11:38 PM