Nick-Ack

10 am. Palace Hotel. I'm sitting at the Lenders Meeting while my powerpoint is on the big screen. The CEO of Company Good Eggs is speaking from memory and I hope to God that what's he is saying fits the facts on screen. He makes a joke. Polite laughter creeps across the crowd, dark suits and subdued ties. The horde of creditors flip along, fingering the 100 books that I put together – waited for production to be finished – until 4 am today. The sole woman in the crowd takes a sip of water and writes down some numbers. My numbers. The speaker halts and makes another joke. Except this time, it's about a typo in the graph on screen. My graph. Oh shit. Polite laughter again. I guess it wasn't that serious, but my stomach is squirming at the mistake. It wasn't trepidation that struck – it was annoyance. I don't care if the senior guys are going to make that one small snide comment that stamps their seal of disapproval on the mistake. I cared about the mistake itself. One typo out of 65 pages – multiplied by 100 times and projected onto the screen. The typo stared at me – it was a blight on my entire week's worth of work, throwing a wrench into 20 hour days and rendering 64 pages almost irrelevant. For the next 10 minutes, maddening thoughts crept into my system. What a waste. It didn't matter if all my work was spotless if there was this error. Not error with the numbers or figures mind you, but presentation error. I don't make mistakes, at least not in business; but then again, what's in it for me? Polite laughter.

"I'm not crazy just a little unwell, I know right now, you can't tell. But wait a while and maybe then you'll see, a different side of me." Matchbox 20