At 11:45am Judith met Corinne in Conference Room 3005 for their daily 15 minute abs workout. Judith was 34 years old and still had a sexy figure and long brown hair that was just beginning to show streaks of white. She was a cheerleader and dancer in high school, and had always appreciated a strong flexible body. So she worked on it. Just like she worked on everything in life: with diligence, and focus, and with a competitive edge that kept her working her way quickly up the corporate ladder. Currently, she worked at Amazon, and basically was in charge of all the sporting equipment bought and sold through the biggest commerce retailer in the world. She worked hard, and she looked good. But a girl as busy as she didn’t have much spare time. Hence, the midday abs workout with Corinne in Conference Room 3005.
“How’s your day?” Corinne said, pulling a conference chair from the table and rolling it to the other side of the room with a big push.
“Ah, you know,” Judith said. “Email hell, as always.”
“John giving you guys a lot of work?”
John was Judith’s boss. A short, stout man who seemed to never be decided on whether he did or didn’t want a goatee mustache. He was legendary in the world of corporate marketing, but probably not legendary for his managerial style.
“Yeah,”Judith said, as she started to take off her shoes. “It seems like whenever we are 95% finished with our project, he asks for a thousand other things to be done around the project that are all completely a waste of time, and really serve as corporate bullshit. It’s just adding another scoop of sugar to the Kool-Aid.” Judith loved the Kool-Aid metaphor of corporate jokey-see-monkey-do crap. And she fantasized about sneaking into the staff kitchen on the night before she quit and swapping out all the employee-provided free beverages with Kool-aid cartons. She’d post a big sign on the refrigerator that would read “You’ve been warned.”
The two women squatted down onto the carpet and lied on their backs, parallel to each other.
“Reps of 50?” Corinne asked. Judith nodded. And the women started to pump their heads and heels up and down off the ground in perfect unison.
Judith continued: “Like for instance, we have this report on our Q4 earnings based on marketing spend over the past 2 years. Now that might sound pretty uninteresting.
