The Year I Met You. Cecelia Ahern

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      I was terminated from employment, I was fired, six weeks before Christmas – which in my opinion is a highly undignified time to let somebody go. They’d hired a woman to fire me for them, one of these outside agencies trained in letting unwanted employees go properly, to avoid a scene, a lawsuit or their own embarrassment. She’d taken me out for lunch, somewhere quiet, let me order a Caesar salad and then just had a black coffee herself, and sat there watching me practically choke on my crouton while she informed me of my new employment situation. I suppose Larry knew that I wouldn’t take the news from him or anyone else, that I’d try to convince him to change his mind, that I’d slap him with a lawsuit or simply slap him. He’d tried to let me die with honour, only I didn’t feel much honour when I left. Being fired is public, I would have to tell people. And if I didn’t have to tell people it’s because they already knew. I felt embarrassed. I feel embarrassed.

      I began my working life as an accountant. From the ripe young age of twenty-four I worked at Trent & Bogle, a large corporation where I stayed for a year, then had a sudden shift to Start It Up, where I provided financial advice and guidance to individuals wishing to start their own businesses. I’ve learned with most that there are always two stories to one event: the public story and the truth. The story I tell is that after eighteen months I left to start up my own business after becoming so inspired by those passing through my office I was overcome with the desire to turn my own ideas into a reality. The truth is that I became irritated by seeing people not doing it properly, my quest for efficiency always my driver, and so started my own business. It became so successful someone offered to buy it. So I sold it. Then I set up another business and again, I sold it. I quickly developed the next idea. The third time I didn’t even have long enough to develop the idea because somebody loved the concept, or hated that it would be a strong rival to theirs, and bought it straight away. This led me to a working relationship with Larry, the most recent start-up and the only job that I have ever been fired from. The business concept was not my initial idea but Larry’s, we developed the idea together, I was a co-founder and nurtured that baby like it had come from my own womb. I helped it grow. I watched it mature, develop beyond our wildest dreams, and then prepared for the moment when we would sell it. That didn’t happen. I got fired.

      The business was called the Idea Factory; we helped organisations with their own big ideas. We were not a consultancy firm. We’d either take their ideas and make them better or create our own, develop them, implement them, see them through completely. The big idea might go from being Daily Fix, a newspaper for a local coffee shop with local stories, a publication that would support local businesses, writers, artists; or it might be a sex shop’s decision to sell ice cream – which, as my idea, was an enormous success, both personally and professionally. We didn’t struggle during the recession, we soared. Because if there was one thing that companies needed in order to keep going in the current climate, it was imagination. We sold our imagination, and I loved it.

      As I analyse it now in my idle days I can see that my relationship with Larry had begun to break down some time ago. I was heading, perhaps blindly, towards the ‘sell the company’ route, as I had done three times already, while he was still planning on keeping it. A big problem, with hindsight. I think I pushed it too much, finding interested parties when I knew deep down that he wasn’t interested, and that put him under too much pressure. He believed ‘seeing it through’ meant continuing to grow it, whereas I believed seeing something through meant selling it and starting again with something else. I nurtured with a view to eventually saying goodbye, he nurtured to hold on. If you see the way he is with his teenage daughter and his wife, you’d know it’s his philosophy for pretty much everything. Hold on, don’t let go, it’s mine. Control must not be relinquished. Anyway.

      I’m thirty-three years old and worked there for four years. I never had a sick day, a complaint, an accusation, never received a warning, never an inappropriate affair – at least none that resulted in a negative outcome for the company. I gave my job everything, notably all for my own benefit because I СКАЧАТЬ