AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Anna Sherwood
I am – sounds good! Thank you so much.
No worries. See you at the twelfth-floor break-out area in five?
It’s only after agreeing that I think I should double-check with my boss, Michaela, if she minds, so I walk over to her desk, nervousness gnawing at me. It feels like being in school and asking the teacher if I can go use the toilet in the middle of a lesson, which only makes me feel younger and more out of place than I already am.
But she nods aggressively in a way that makes me think I’ve done something right. ‘Of course! Excellent stuff, Anna – Molly was one of the best in her cohort of interns, and she’s made some great strides here. I think you’ll really learn a lot from her. It’s so good to see you taking initiative! Before you go though – did you get the chance to go through that spreadsheet I sent you this morning?’
‘Yes! I made all those updates you asked for, so it’s ready for your meeting this afternoon.’ It was a hard few hours battling through spreadsheets, but I got there in the end.
‘Great. Thanks, Anna – I know it’s a bit of lackey work, but it’ssoannoying to have to update it every week, especially with the formatting issues …’
‘Can’t you automate it? Have the data pull through from the master file and set the calculations to run each time you refresh it, rather than having to plug it all in manually every time?’
Michaela’s eyes light up. ‘Brilliant! That would besohelpful. You can sort that out, can’t you? Shouldn’t be too tricky, I’m sure.’
Shit.Did I volunteer? I definitely didn’t. I limped through my extra computing module at uni, and it didn’t even cover Excel formulae. My abilities there begin and end at summing up some cells. The work Michaela asked me to do today, mainly filtering out values based on dates and calculating how much they’ve changed compared to a budget, took theentiremorning. I wouldn’t even know where to begin to automate that.
But for some reason, I tell her, ‘Absolutely! I’ll have it finished by this time next week.’
‘Excellent. Thanks, Anna. Enjoy your meeting with Molly!’
I hurry off before I sign myself up to something else I don’t actually know how to do.
Upstairs, I find Molly at one of the tall, small, circular tables in the little break-out area near the kitchenette. There are a couple of sofas and a few other tall tables with seats, and while there’s a TV screen and a bowl of free snacks (including KitKats), there’s no pool table or anything. I’m kind of relieved. I’d almost had visions of trying to ask questions over ping-pong serves.
Molly, dressed in a chic pair of beige trousers and plain black top, waves me over with a broad smile. She’s wearing a full face of makeup and her hair is in a pretty, effortless updo, with an orange marker pen sticking out of it. I wonder if she knows it’s there.
She sets her phone screen-down on the table as I take a seat opposite her. ‘Hi! Lucky you messaged when you did, I wasjustabout to deal with some admin stuff.’
‘Oh, God, I’m sorry. Please don’t feel like you have to – I mean, it’s … we can do this some other time.’
‘Nah, it’s just some expense claims and stuff. It’ll keep. So! One week down, eleven to go! How’s life in PD treating you so far?’
I don’t bore her with the novel-length report I offered Dad on Saturday afternoon, but as I go through what are probably pretty rote responses, I’m busy reminding myself of the things I want to ask her.
After a little small talk, Molly dives right in. ‘You wanted to do a little Q&A about how I got this role and how I found my internship and stuff, right? Well, weirdly, even though my degree was in Marketing, I got put into the B2B team – you know, business-to-business, client-facing – with Nadja. Obviously, you’ve met Nadja already, yeah? Great, well …’
I already looked Molly up on LinkedIn, so I know most of the back story she gives me. She got a first inher degree from Leeds (it’s nice to have some common ground in attending the same uni) then went on to do the Arrowmile internship before getting her master’s at St Andrew’s – where she graduated with distinction. She speaks three languages, and worked freelance doing graphic design, copy writing, and as an SEO specialist alongside her studies. Her CV must be bursting at the seams. She’s got more endorsements on LinkedIn than anybody I’ve ever seen.
And she made head of department (sorry, ‘Senior Partner’) by twenty-five.
And, as I discovered on a quick stalk of her Instagram, she’s just bought a house with her partner and has two cats. Her life looks like a dream. It’s picture-perfect, completely intimidating … and exactly the kind of thing I want for myself when I’m her age.
I need to know all her secrets.
‘I need to know all your secrets,’ I blurt out at one point, interrupting her mid-sentence, so in awe that I can’t contain myself. I’m even a bit jealous, which is ridiculous. There’s no reason Icouldn’thave her kind of life one day.
Molly laughs, looking flattered but also like that isn’t the first time she’s heard that.
‘I wish I could give you some kind of how-to handbook, but I don’t know what to tell you. Some ofit is sheer dumb luck. Some of it’s just that I’m good at what I do. I have a flair for this, and some things, you just can’t teach,’ she tells me – not arrogant, only self-assured. She gives a small shrug. ‘I can tell you how the sausage gets made, but after that, it’s up to you. No guarantees, you know?’
‘I know,’ I say, trying to hide my disappointment. It was naïve of me to think there reallywassome kind of secret.
‘I will say that one of the best things I did on this internship was push myself outside of my comfort zone.Wayoutside of it. Working in Nadja’s team gave me such a good view of what the customer is seeing that it ultimately helped me sort of reverse-engineer my way through stuff in Marketing. But you know when I was on the internship, Iactuallyasked HR if I could move teams in my first week. I think I asked every week for the first month, actually.’ Molly laughs again, this time punctuating it with a self-deprecating eyeroll. ‘I thought I knew everything, but – that’s rule number one, Anna. You might have a super-crazy-awesome-cool CV and be a whizz-kid at uni, but here, you don’t know jack shit.’
Molly stares at me so hard that I lean back in my chair.
