The machine was launching balls every few
minutes and Agatha attempted to hit them with her racket in the best way she
could. She had never been very good at sports but, this time, she really needed
to learn how to play something. One of her clients, a man who was very rich and
famous, was very much into the world of tennis and had proposed her to have a
match just before they sat down to negotiate a deal that would mean millions of
dollars for everyone. At first, she didn’t want to accept but she ultimately
did.
She decided to join a huge gym near the office
in order to practice every single day until the date of their meeting. Thanks
to her boss, the man agreed on having the game a month later, giving her a good
amount of time to learn the basics. Her boss insisted that, if she did well
during the game, they would benefit greatly from the client’s good sense of
humor, It was not uncommon in that company to try and make every client feel
like they all understood their hobbies and passions. Rich people could get very
weird and even dangerous.
There was Mrs. Stevenson, for example, who had
a large collection of snakes in her house. As a potential client, they had to
make her feel accepted and nice so one of Agatha’s co workers had to go to her
house several times and feed the snakes. Sometimes, it could be very easy but
other times it would be awfully dangerous. He was bitten a couple of times but,
Thank god, the snakes had no poison in them to do anything, so he never
required going to the doctor or anything like that. The point was, they won
that account and locked millions of dollars.
Agatha herself had gone out with at least five
different potential clients. As any decent woman, she had her limits. So it
wasn’t a surprise that some of the people they assigned to her, never really
got to be proper clients. Men always wanted more than they should get and it
wasn’t once but many times when she felt really weird and uncomfortable,
whether it was because of a weird attitude or an inappropriate way to touch her.
In most cases, she preferred women clients but they normally got assigned one
of her male coworkers.
Anyway, she went to the gym every single day
for the next month. The first days were extremely difficult because the
automated machine that helped her practice had beat her up with several balls
at high speed. The person at the gym said the machine had personality, which
wasn’t really the best excuse or argument to be made for it. But she kept
trying and by the end of the first week, she was able to properly hit the ball,
even if the angles were all a little bit strange. In any case, that was the
first hurdle she had gone over, so she was very happy.
The
bad side of all of it was the sore elbows and shoulders every day after
practice. She walked like a zombie at work and had a new tendency to fall
asleep really early. It wasn’t that strange as the gym hours she could use were
very late so Agatha got home around one in the morning. And then, she had to
wake up at six o’clock in order to be in the office just in time. She couldn’t
wait to end all of it with this new client and go back to boring launches or
just keeping her desk job, which she really didn’t mind about, especially when
she was so sore.
In the office, she actually tried to learn a
little bit more about her client before meeting him. All the information she
had was based out of the report that her boss had given to her. But, of course,
she needed much more than just knowing what the man liked. She really needed to
know him better if the idea was to lure him into their company. She began her
research in the office but, weirdly enough, there were a pretty low amount of
articles about him and there was no picture to be found in any website. Not from a social event or a personal thing. Nothing.
Agatha soon got tired of looking for the guy.
She went to her boss’s office and asked him if they could talk about their
client. But she has apparently chosen a bad moment as he was holding the phone
and a hysterical woman was yelling at him from the other side. The voice was
extremely loud and Agatha knew she wouldn’t get anything right then. So she
then moved to her friend Cynthia’s office, in order to talk a little bit about
how uncomfortable this all was. The fact that she was preparing so much for a
meeting with a person she had never seen.
Cynthia assured her that the client was very
new and maybe that’s why there were no pictures or thorough information on the
person. That night, during practice, she decided to play a little bit more
violent. Not only because she didn’t know the gay but because she was really
pissed off at herself for the job she had and the things she had to do to keep.
As she hit every ball as hard as she could, she remembered the days she had
wanted to become a baker. She had always loved that profession and would have
loved to pursue it but things rarely go exactly as we want them.
She stayed so late that night, than the next
morning she decided to call in sick and just not go. It was a Friday and it was
very well known that they were never really productive on Fridays. So Agatha
could have a long weekend and try to reorder her thoughts and priorities as
well as she could. She had a hearty breakfast and then spent fifteen minutes in
the shower, with hot water forming some kind of sauna all around her. It felt
really good,
By lunch, she already knew what she was going
to do. There was only one week to go to her date with the client and then
everything will be over for her. She was determined to quit her job and use her
savings to live around, until another opportunity showed itself. Of course,
looking for a job that matched her skills was not the easiest thing to do, she
had found out that she was fed up with all the clients and the extra work and
everything she had no idea about. It didn’t matter how much money she won
there. That money could help her survive a few months, if necessary.
She was tired of pleasing everyone else but
herself. She hadn’t taken a proper vacation in a long time and it was really
due because every single day she felt tired and bored. Cynthia, for example,
didn’t have to deal with clients directly like her so she didn’t really care
about it all. It was difficult for anyone to understand why Agatha wanted to
leave a job that paid so well but she was so frustrated with it all. That
client, the tennis client, would be her last one and that tennis match would be
the last thing she did for that company.
When the day finally came, she prepared
herself by buying the best outfit for the occasion. She wanted to look good but
also very professional. It was very difficult to do in the tennis skirt she had
bought, because of the length, but the idea was that she would distract him
into thinking about something else and then he would sign anything and
everything. The game started with a slight advantage on Agatha’s hand but it
soon became a really even game, where they played as if their lives depended on
it. The guy happened to be excellent at the game.
When she finally so his face, she was able to
put a proper image on the large amount of thoughts she had imagined about him
and the game and everything that had to do with that moment. After two sets,
one won by each, they decided to rest and talk a little bit. Agatha decided
that was the perfect time to talk about business. However, he didn’t even have
to: the man grabbed all the papers and signed every single one of them in silence
and with a beautiful pen that he kept on his tennis bag. She never expected
thing to go that way.
The man told her he had decided on working
with them the moment she showed her fierceness, her need to overcome an obstacle that she obviously had. To him, it was clear she had never properly
played tennis. But he admired her obvious dedication to it. Just before the
match began again, he asked her how happy she was working in that place. It was
just as if he knew what she was thinking. So she just blinked her eye and told
him they needed to keep playing.
