Chapter 16
by starlightnovelsclubFor approximately forty-eight hours after The Great Product Knowledge Ceasefire, Risa allowed herself a dangerous thought:
Maybe things would calm down now.
Maybe the universe had exhausted its weekly quota of nonsense.
Maybe—
At 11:07 a.m. on Thursday, Brad sent a calendar invite titled:
Team Sync – Important Update
Risa stared at it.
Nothing good in corporate life had ever followed the phrase “Important Update.”
She joined the meeting with mild dread and a half-finished protein bar.
Brad appeared on screen, looking oddly cheerful.
“I’ll keep this short,” he said.
That was already suspicious.
“I’ll be going on paternal leave starting next Wednesday. I’ll be out for about three months.”
The silence lasted approximately half a second before the entire team erupted into congratulations.
“Oh my god, congrats!”
“That’s amazing!”
“Sleep while you can!”
Brad smiled modestly, clearly pleased.
Risa blinked.
Three months.
No director.
No hovering.
No sudden “Have you updated this?” questions that caused her soul to briefly exit her body.
She quickly arranged her face into appropriate congratulatory enthusiasm.
“That’s so exciting! Congratulations!”
Brad thanked everyone and then continued.
“To help out on the Client Relations side, I’ve asked Laura from Sales Admin to step in while I’m out.”
A new face appeared on the call.
Laura.
Mid-50s. Bright lipstick. Statement necklace. The kind of woman whose energy suggested she had both survived and thrived in the sales world for two decades and had zero intention of slowing down.
“Hi everyone!” she said brightly. “I promise I’m not here to ruin your lives.”
Risa liked her immediately.
Brad explained that Laura had done sales for over twenty years before transitioning into Sales Admin—handling all the “boring stuff” salespeople didn’t want to deal with.
“Paperwork queen,” Laura said proudly.
The team laughed.
Brad glanced briefly at Rachel.
“Rachel will continue overseeing Analytics,” he added.
Risa’s brain did quick math.
Rachel managing Analytics meant…
Fred.
And Risa.
Except Fred was a nepo baby whose grandfather’s name was probably etched into the company’s foundation stone somewhere.
Rachel wouldn’t be managing Fred.
Which meant—
Oh.
Oh no.
Risa smiled politely at her camera while internally realizing she was about to become Rachel’s only direct report.
Fantastic.
Truly.
What an honor.
The following Wednesday, Brad logged off.
Just like that.
No dramatic send-off.
No ceremonial transfer of power.
Just an out-of-office message and silence.
And strangely…
Nothing imploded.
The building didn’t collapse.
The dashboards didn’t spontaneously combust.
Everyone remained busy, but the atmosphere felt different.
Lighter.
Like someone had opened a window in a stuffy room.
Laura fit in almost immediately.
She had that rare corporate trait of being competent and fun at the same time.
Meetings under her presence were… human.
Still professional.
Still structured.
But occasionally sprinkled with anecdotes like:
“You know what a distributor asked me once? Why can’t we get our products tomorrow? As if I personally own a teleportation device.”
Or—
“If I had a dollar for every ‘urgent’ email that wasn’t urgent, I’d retire again.”
Risa found herself laughing during meetings.
Actually laughing.
Not the polite, muted corporate chuckle.
And the best part?
Laura didn’t hover.
She trusted people.
If something needed clarification, she asked.
If something went wrong, she discussed it.
No interrogation lighting. No quiz energy.
Just conversation.
Meanwhile, on the Analytics side, things were… calm.
Suspiciously calm.
Rachel seemed preoccupied with other fires.
Risa wasn’t directly involved, but whispers floated through the Sales team like gossip carried on a warm breeze.
Apparently, in May—right when Risa had started—there had been joint presentations with several major distributors.
The decks had been prepared by Rachel and Fred.
And according to Laura?
“They were not good.”
Risa learned this one afternoon while helping Laura review some account adjustments.
Laura leaned over slightly and lowered her voice.
“Between you and me,” she said conspiratorially, “those presentations were rough.”
“How rough?” Risa asked cautiously.
Laura’s eyes widened.
“One of the distributors counter-presented.”
“…What?”
“They made their own deck correcting our numbers,” Laura said, barely containing her disbelief. “And honestly? They totally blew us out of the water.”
Risa blinked slowly.
Counter-presented?
That was like showing up to a group project and discovering the other team had prepared a full rebuttal to your existence.
“What happened?” Risa asked.
Laura shook her head.
“The filters on the Power BI dashboards weren’t even dynamic,” she said. “I had to manually adjust filters. Screenshot them. One by one. Paste them into PowerPoint.”
She paused dramatically.
“Manually.”
Risa felt a ripple of horror.
“…That sounds painful.”
“It was ugly,” Laura said bluntly. “Like 2008 corporate ugly.”
Risa tried very hard not to imagine Rachel lecturing her about Power BI usage while simultaneously producing screenshot-based dashboard presentations.
That would be hypocritical.
Surely not.
Later that week, Risa found herself doing transcoding again.
For the third time.
As she stared at the 50,000–60,000 rows of account data, something strange occurred.
She didn’t feel panic.
She felt… familiarity.
Like she knew this battlefield.
Like she had memorized the terrain.
Three months ago, this file had nearly destroyed her.
She remembered May vividly.
The first time she opened the raw data, she had stared at it until midnight for several days in a row.
Accounts were linked incorrectly.
Names mismatched.
Entities that should have been identical were split.
“Blessed” and “AA-Blessed” were clearly the same account.
Except one of them had been linked to—
She checked the memory and nearly laughed.
“Wyatt Hotels.”
Why.
Why did ‘W’yatt Hotels have to do with ‘B’lessed? They didn’t even start with the same alphabet.
Who had done this.
Why had they done this.
The first month, she had been terrified to touch anything major.
What if it was meant to be that way?
What if there was some grand, incomprehensible logic only senior employees understood?
By month two, she had realized something liberating.
There was no grand logic.
Rachel and Fred did not, in fact, know everything.
In fact, judging by the presentation disaster, they might not have known very much at all.
So she had done something bold.
She had given the entire dataset a makeover.
All fifty to sixty thousand rows.
Standardized naming conventions.
Merged duplicate accounts.
Corrected mismatches.
Re-linked entities properly.
She remembered sitting at her desk, caffeine in her bloodstream, thinking:
If I break this, at least it will break cleanly.
But it hadn’t broken.
It had worked.
Reports ran smoother.
Discrepancies decreased.
Transcoding that once took days now took hours.
And as she scrolled through the cleaner, neater rows now, she felt something warm and unfamiliar bloom in her chest.
Pride.
She had fixed this.
She had understood the system.
She had improved it.
Even if no one made a big announcement about it.
Even if no one sent a “great job” email.
Even if the only acknowledgment was fewer late nights.
She leaned back slightly, staring at the screen.
Three months.
Only three months.
And yet…
It felt like six.
Like she had aged in corporate years the way presidents aged in office.
But she wasn’t drowning anymore.
She was navigating.
Rachel had given her breathing space recently—likely distracted by whatever post-presentation fallout existed.
And in that breathing space, Risa had grown.
Not into perfection.
Not into whatever impossible standard Rachel claimed to uphold.
But into competence.
Into quiet capability.
Her email pinged.
A distributor question.
She opened it calmly.
Answered it efficiently.
No panic.
No second-guessing.
Just experience.
As she hit send, she realized something important.
For weeks, she had felt like she was constantly being tested.
But somewhere along the way…
She had started passing tests no one was even administering.
And for the first time since she joined Shizz, Risa didn’t just feel like a new hire trying to survive.
She felt like an employee.
A real one.
Corporate hell still existed, of course.
Capitalism had not dissolved overnight.
But maybe—
Just maybe—
She was learning how to survive it without letting it swallow her whole.
