Cancelling that flight makes me a woman who grounded a jet over a chair.
Eleven senior people, stranded on a tarmac, missing a board meeting — and every single one of them tells that story for fifteen years, and in every version of it I am unstable.
A very short shelf life and a very long memory. That is what a scene buys you and it is why I have never once had one.
What I did instead was charter a different aircraft.
Eleven thousand dollars, out of my own account, from a company with no connection to my family, booked from a terminal seat on a phone in about nine minutes.
It is the least dramatic eleven thousand dollars I have ever spent and it is the only money in this entire story that did any work.
I landed eleven hours before they did.
I slept four of them in a hotel near the airport, badly, with the phone face down.
Nobody on that aircraft knew I was in the city. Daxon knew. Nobody else.
And I sat in that board meeting the following morning at nine, with coffee, forty minutes before anybody else arrived.
I watched them come in. Eleven people, in ones and twos, and every single one of them stopped for about half a second in that doorway.
Aurelio came in seventh. He did not stop. He is better at rooms than any of them.
Somebody asked me, because I had taken a chair at the far end rather than my usual one near the head, whether I wanted to move up.
And I said: I’m fine here. I just need to be in the room today.
That sentence went round that building by lunchtime.
I did not intend it to. I was not being clever; I had been awake for twenty-six hours and I wanted a chair near a window.
But I have since been told that it reached three separate departments before two o’clock, and that somebody in legal repeated it in a meeting, and that is the entire mechanism of reputation in a company and it has nothing to do with merit.
