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“All right. Here it is.” She takes another gulp, probably for courage. “You don’t acknowledge the things you don’t know. Either you don’t know you don’t know them. Or you’re so full of yourself that you think you can get by without knowing them.”
I think about her words. Is that true? “But…” I search for how to say this. “Isn’t it hard for me to know if you’re right, because I don’t know what I don’t know?”
“Well, now you do.”
“Do what?”
“Know that you don’t know. I gave you the red pill. You ate the apple of the forbidden tree. Go forth and learn!”
I can’t help but grin at her. She seems so frustrated with me, like she used to get in the office. “So, you’re doing me a favor here?”
“Absolutely. But it didn’t help me when the time came.”
That sobers me. I take a long pull of the margarita before I respond to that. “You mean the marketing snafu.” It’s not a question.
“In that particular case,” she says, her eyes on her cup, “neither of us knew what we were doing.”
I lean back against the metal stand holding the ice crusher. “We agreed not to talk about this until we were back on the ship.”
“We did.”
“You think we should do it now?”
She shrugs. “We don’t have any paperwork. I have no corroborating data. I don’t know how I can prove anything to you.”
“I might have that on the ship. Gloria ran the dailies on paper for me so that I could review everything that went down leading up to Viola bringing me the requisitions.”
She turns to me at that. “Why did you do that? You already let me go.”
“Maybe I was trying to figure out what I don’t know.”
“You could’ve done that before you had me escorted out.”
She’s right. “I could have.”
“So that leads us to the second worst thing about you. Your snap decisions suck. I had to go in behind you and clean up several of them.”
I sit up straighter at that. “Like when?”
“Like when you outsourced IT and literally no one’s computers worked for three weeks.”
“We lost too much staff. I couldn’t get people hired and trained in time.”
“I know. You made a snap decision. Let’s hire an IT company to bridge the gap.” Her voice rises in pitch.
“It was a solid decision.”
“But you signed acontract. And then when they couldn’t handle our needs, and when you hired people back in the end, we had to float a huge tech budget that was completely unnecessary.”
“What would you have done?” I ask.
“I would have known to ask for help. To get an expert in. Not to just fill the gap with my limited knowledge. You talk about this half a million in marketing I got fired over, that was half a million you wasted. Nobody firedyouover it. I assume you’re untouchable with Dougherty.”
She’s not wrong.
I’m not sure I want to hear any more. I stand up, draining my cup and setting it on the stand. “I’m going to clear more of this brush so we can walk around.”
“Is that a snap decision?” Her voice has a hard edge.
