Chapter 8: Small Miracles
Boredom.
Even a person as accomplished and successful as Derek Haven suffered from it. It did not matter that Haven Group was a huge global company, at some point, most of its day to day running got so routine that if Derek slept, he would be doing it in his sleep.
Sign here, sign there. Authorize this project, cancel that one. Meet person A regarding a project, golf with so and so while secretly scoping them out to see if they posed a threat.
That was pretty much the gist of Derek's day to day. The only occasional spanner in the works being whenever his uncle came up with a hair-brained scheme and Derek had to thwart it.
But in between those schemes, there was routine, predictability, and worst of all...paperwork.
Derek was buried up to neck high in paperwork. Something he believed would have been physically true as well, were it not for the wonder that was modern technology making all of his work easy to store in his pc. The outside world only saw a small rectangle, with only Derek knowing of the mountain of work that lay within it.
But even so, the mountain, as tiring and unending as it was, provided a distraction most of the time. Derek could bury himself in it for hours and no one would ask why he was not at home, sleeping.
They would simply see him busy on his pc and assume that he was working on something that was due soon, which was why he was not getting any sleep. But in truth, Derek was working on things that were weeks, if not months away.
Chipping away at distant projects so that he at least had a reason to stay at the office late and not go home and sleep. He did it most nights, but ever since he had realized that Emily Molson was not like all the others. That despite her love for flat shoes in a world where Derek was only used to heels, and her tendency to talk back, and to call him by his first name instead of boss, Mr Haven, or sir, she was very good at her job. And he was reluctant to loose her.