Chapter 11: Prepared for Pain
The day Emily got her job at Haven Group, was also the day that she got herself ready to leave the company.
It was not her being ungrateful, or a pessimist. She had simply been working based on what had been true for her up to that point.
Normally her employment story went something like this:
She applied. She got called in for an interview, aced It, and then within a few weeks, the very same people who had welcomed her into the company were regrettably informing her that they needed to part ways.
The reasons were usually because she got too little sleep the night before and made a monumental error( She had once deleted all the information in a six month project because she had fallen asleep on the laptop keyboard). Other times she was fired for sleeping on the job, also caused by her getting too little sleep.
Sleep, that was what had gotten her fired in her previous jobs. But at Haven Group, it was what was keeping her employed.
She had once fallen asleep smack dab in the middle of Derek's uncle showing off about how great he was. She had not even noticed that her eyes were closing until she had been woken up by the pain of her forehead hitting the table.
Derek had given her an unimpressed look and ordered her to follow him in cold tone. Once alone in his office, the reprimand that she had been expecting had never come. Instead, Derek had collapsed onto the office couch. His body overcome with laughter. Rather than fire her, he had given her the rest of the day off.
Another time when Emily had thought she would be fired for good, she had fallen asleep at her desk and missed a call. Derek looking tired and haggard, had been the one to wake her up. She had blinked the sleep out of her eyes and gone to apologize but he had brushed it off.