Belle called me to her office. We’d gotten some good news: the agency had received an invitation to pitch a global cracker company and the prospective client wanted not only to target moms of young children but the even larger chunk of their business, women over fifty. Belle and I were invited to join the pitch team.
Viewing this opportunity as my hope for salvation, I whole-heartedly launched into developing research and strategy that would make the connection with this critical target market. It was a welcome stroke to my ego that Belle had repeatedly told me that my intelligence, coupled with my credentials, would help provide the competitive edge over our contenders when it came to the Boomer-and-beyond demographic. While only one of us was to be physically in the room for the pitch, Belle was optimistic that if we landed this account, the heat would finally be off.
I brought everything I had to the proposal, daydreaming that when we won this account, the general manager would call me into the corner office and say: “Carol, I’m so sorry the company’s been so hard on you. You’re exactly what this company needs! Please forgive us. Not only are you off the pink slip list—but here’s a bonus!” What a great birthday present that would be! Proof that my life had amounted to something, after all.
But alas, there was no summons, even as I kept my eye on the electronic calendar, knowing that Belle was at that very moment rehearsing the script for the part of the Power Point deck I’d helped write. Now the team would be figuring out who was going to be saying what. Now the calendar informed me she would be deep into the heart of the pitch, itself.
Then I got a fresh email. From Belle, doing housecleaning on some minor billing effluvia relating to one of the speeches I had given last month, making sure I’d not only gotten the receipt from the airline for travel, but proof in the form of my credit card bill, that I’d actually flown.
“Aren’t you in the middle of the pitch?” I emailed back. “I was dis-invited,” she responded. “The pitch team decided to build the proposal around mothers of young children.”
If an email could have shrugged, it would have.
Chapter 11 from The Year I Saved My (downsized) Soul by Carol Orsborn
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