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Nation of Airports 02.02
From her mining-engineer father Franc, dead when she was nine, Elisabeth inherited a natural technical aptitude and a logical mind. Her mother Aurinha, a great beauty and a greater alcoholic, had lost the rest of Franc's legacy to a series of lying married boyfriends, beginning with his lawyer. Elisabeth inherited her mother's wildness; from Aurinha's example she learned a hatred for weakness and a contempt for hope.
The traits all combined to make her a promising junior product manager at Straightforward Consulting, but gave her a tin ear for corporate politics. Two years before in Philadelphia, she had earned the ire of a senior director by making a case for eliminating one of the director's profit centers. On the advice (smiling insistence, really) of her boss, Elisabeth moved to Washington, joining an internal project to create an online library of best practices and business histories. Her job was to travel to different offices, press the flesh, and figure out who needed to contribute. It was the first time Elisabeth had ever traveled regularly. She loved to learn new regions, new accents and slang, loved to see how humanity clung to so many different terrains. America was great from a window seat. She also made the professional acquaintance of some of the firm's smartest people, and to her pleasant surprise she found she could keep up with them. Over dinners and beers and late nights in offices she had the best conversations of her life.
But Elisabeth's project was a luxury for the firm, and the winter quarter numbers demanded austerity. She had been in Anchorage for four hours in January (a city visibly in need of females; she had looked forward to causing a stir at the local bar that evening) when an e-mail ordered her back to DC for a fiscal review. The review never materialized, and on Valentine's Day the technical staff were transferred to other projects. Elisabeth was seconded to Client Support, supposedly the first in a new army of public-relations specialists. In weekly conferences Marcus ogled her gruesomely over his propped-up feet and spun tales of great profits to come, but Elisabeth knew they weren't coming any faster than that army. At least she got an office with a door and a window.
Elisabeth was stuck. The job market was bad now. The firm was on a hiring freeze, and her very smart friends took longer and longer to send shorter and shorter replies to her e-mails. Client Support was a natural target for a layoff.
It scared Elisabeth and angered her more. They had taken away something she liked and now they were taking away what she needed. Elisabeth had heard about people who quit the corporate world to pursue their dreams. Elisabeth liked the corporate world. Her old job was her dream.
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