The Fifteen Minute Novel is an attempt to take a single prompt and use the last sentence written each day as a start for the next day. This year I had several prompts circling around a similar story, so I have combined them. However, the story starts the same way each day, with the last line from the day before and a timer set for fifteen minutes. The hope is to end up with a complete, if very rough draft by the end of the year. Some stories are better than others, but I always learn a whole lot about my own writing when I do this so for me it is not only a nice way to work out a story, but it is a tool for helping my writing get better. And so, we continue this story for 2024 with…
Day 64: It wasn’t her biggest concern though.
It wasn’t her biggest concern though. Sophie’s biggest concern was what would happen when she went into her quarterly evaluation. Her supervisor was now listed as Elizabeth Walker and not Donald Evers. ‘My title is now actually the same as Mr. Evers,’ she thought. She somehow doubted that Evers would be doing her evaluation.
As the days slipped past, Sophie began to wonder more and more what would happen. As the time of the evaluations drew near, Sophie received an e-mail from Elizabeth. She clicked it open and read.
‘Well that settles that,’ Sophie thought.
According to the e-mail Sophie had already passed her evaluation. Elizabeth evaluated her work and gave her a good rating. She met and even exceeded all of the bench marks set for her. There was even a copy of her evaluation attached to the e-mail for her to look through.
‘Any questions directed to Elizabeth,’ Sophie read.
However, while this evaluation would stand in her file, she would go through the evaluation with Mr. Evers as the upper echelons wanted to evaluate how he did her evaluation in comparison to Elizabeth’s. In the e-mail it was stated as a comparison since it was two evaluations of the same employee, the same work and the same bench marks. Reading between the lines, Sophie thought it might be a bit more and she wondered if those on the upper floor had some sort of issue with Mr. Evers.
‘Someone has to have heard about his affairs at the very least.’ He had affairs with at least three employees that Sophie knew of and she knew that from just the tail ends of over heard conversational snippets. She suspected if she paid more attention to the gossip, she would have learned far more details than she was comfortable knowing about her supervisor. She couldn’t imagine others not knowing more.
‘Not my concern,’ Sophie told herself. She looked over the evaluation Elizabeth gave her and saw all of the authorization signatures marking it as official and was pleased by some of the comments. ‘Which means it doesn’t matter what Mr. Evers says,’ she told herself. ‘Or what anyone does with his evaluation.’
As she leaned more into her sewing and the designs she was creating, Sophie found that she was less and less concerned with whatever was going on in the office. Aside from the mental questions about her evaluation, she was not even thinking about work once she left the office.
Ten til Midnight 