Morning all, ready for Friday’s prompt? With the Monday holiday I have felt off balance all week so it will be nice to sort of recalibrate back to standard. So timers set and off we go.
I like the idea of the accounts giving her gossip insights and I kind of want her to find some deep dark secret while looking for a way to get everyone to focus. The affair is nice, but I kind of want to lean towards a deep family secret, especially as she has been kept out of it for so long.
Friday, September 5th: The jet engines left a trail of white across the cloudless sky.
The jet engine left a trail of white across the cloudless sky. Emma looked up and longed to follow it. She envisioned the plane heading off to distant destinations with exciting vistas and amusing adventures. She sighed and tore her eyes away, looking from the window back to her paperwork.
‘How did the accounts get so messed up?’ she thought. She shook her head. She knew how they got so messed up. The company accountant wouldn’t let her family use the company as their personal piggy bank and instituted budgets and systems. The family got fed up with having to play by the rules and fired him. They went off budget and in Emma’s eyes completely off the rails.
She had two piles of paper on the desk in front of her. One featured operating expenses for the business and the other everything else. Some of the everything else she was willing to concede could be described as business expenses. Most of those were padded. Some couldn’t even remotely be stretched to fit the category.
‘Not that they didn’t try,’ Emma thought looking at the pages. The top one was a hotel bill. While she knew there had been a business meeting in the hotel’s restaurant, it was a two hour meeting and in no way required three nights, multiple room service meals and several long sessions in the attached spa.
‘For two,’ she thought. She doubted Douglas took Mr. Fairchild to the spa or dined with him in his suite.
‘Although maybe he did,’ Emma corrected she had no Idea what Douglas and Mr. Fairchild’s relationship entailed outside the board room. ‘But it still isn’t business.’
She also doubted Douglas’ wife would appreciate it. ‘Although she had a shopping trip spa and her own room service dining charged to the company.’ That invoice was below it and its justification seemed to be that people expected those in the family to look prosperous. If they didn’t it might look like the business was in trouble.
‘Emma was willing to concede part of that but thought the entirely new wardrobe along with the other additions was pushing it as far as the company went.
The problem was everyone of the family members was pushing it. ‘Including Mike.’
Emma had been married to Mike for ten years. She was never a part of his family business, and he was never a part of her family business. Things were always kept separate. However, her family was doing well, stable and prosperous. His family was, mostly due to familial pilfering, not.
It was causing some tension between them and truthfully there was no reason Mike’s family company shouldn’t be doing well. They were poised to corner the market and thrive in the current economic conditions. Yet they were floundering. Thinking she might have some insight Mike practically begged her to look over things. He had been ashamed of needing to ask, but desperate.
‘Not hard to see why,’ she thought.
The problem was that she didn’t know what to do about it. There was an easy fix. The accountant they hadn’t wanted to listen to gave it to them. They didn’t like the advice, fired him and made it so much worse in their relief of banishing him. She knew her advice would require an even tighter control over the budget and that they were less likely to listen to her than they were the accountant they fired.
Ten til Midnight 