Amanda had never been known for
being kind to anyone, rather the opposite. She was normally vicious to every
single one of the people that worked for her and she would never accept a
negative answer from everyone. Amanda Carvey was the daughter of the owner of
the company, a man that had died only a few years ago in a ski accident in the
Alps. Amanda had to step up and take control, something that most members of
the board were against. That was, until they were able to see who she really
was.
They didn’t care for a woman
commanding the ship. But that was before they saw the kind of woman she was.
Amanda ruled with an iron fist from her first day and wouldn’t let anyone tell
her something different than what she wanted. She didn’t accept advice and, when
addressing her, she would often remind others that she was now the head of the
company and not her father. Maybe they had gotten use to him but that was the
past. Her father was no longer there to captain the ship in such a careless
way.
In her mind, her father had been
an idiot with all the family’s assets. He had not done his job of really taking
care of the wealth of the family. It wasn’t like he had lost too much money or
anything like that. Rather, he had been exceedingly cautious and the company had
run stale, no generating interest of any kind, whether it was with its clients
or with its partners. People saw it as a dinosaur that refused to die and
Amanda had seen that ever since she was a teenager and she had taken an
interest in the family’s business.
She laid off a lot of people
during her first week and forced all the remaining workers to double their
efforts, making lunch hours very restricted and putting up a “points” scale in
which workers of any type would get points for their mistakes in the eye of the
new owner. Too many points would mean that the person could get kicked out at
any moment, so everyone tried their best not to upset Amanda. And they stayed
there because the salaries were still very good and very difficult to earn in
the modern world.
In her first year running the
company, she earned almost double that what her father had earned in his last
full year as chairman. She was so glad about it that she even authorized for
the most loyal and hard working people in the company to receive a substantial
bonus to their usual earnings. People thought, for a second, that it was
because she was getting a bit softer and kinder but that wasn’t it at all. It
was because she was happy to have made a much better job than her father, she
had shut off all the criticism around her and now people trusted her to be the
one to lead them.
However, her abrasive personality
took a really heavy toll on her personal life. Her mother distanced herself
from everything that had to do with the company and would no let her daughter
talk about it when she came in for visits at her countryside home. Beside the
company, there was no real connection between mother and daughter. The first
had sent the second to boarding school from a very young age, so they had no
idea what the other liked or thought about. There was no relation ship or
empathy.
Their weekly dinners would
largely consist of silences, only interrupted by the mother scolding the
daughter when she pulled out her phone in order to check stocks or talk to
someone at work. So those dinners were only about honouring the late father’s
legacy and nothing more. They both wanted to show respect to someone that was
never there, someone who had drifted through life without ever really making a
proper impact.
The father had always preferred
to take the private plane to some far away place where he could use his latest
yacht and enjoy the best foods. He would always invite some people to come with
him, people that enjoyed his millions and his stupid comments about life that
didn’t make any sense, because he had no sense of the real life. He didn’t know
real people, not even his immediate family. And his company was the laughing
stock of the rich society he inhabited in, he just didn’t know it.
But Amanda did know. She had
always known that her father was just a stupid clown to all other people and
that, by extension; her family had been laugh at for a long time. That ended
the day she took control of their assets and made her family even more powerful
and rich, more respectable and a force to be reckoned with. Her mother was just
one reminder of the past, who didn’t even care about anything. She only cared
about her check being on time and that was it. She was practically out of
reality.
And yeah, Amanda had no boyfriend
or girlfriend, and her friendships were non-existent, unless you count business
associated. She knew some men tried to court her because of her success, but
she disarmed them pretty fast, with only words. Sometimes, she did “good”
things because she felt she could lure more people towards her goals, but there
was nothing good or positive about her attitude. She only lived to torture the
memory of her father and to prove to everyone else that they had underestimated
her and her family for far too long. It was her time to rule and she was not
going to leave space for anyone else, no matter what she had to do to achieve
her goals.
