It was pleasant. For four years, at about forty dinners, listening to a man tell the Osaka story while I held a glass.
As long as I was the only one who knew, nobody ever got to price me. I had a number in my head about what I was worth to that company and nobody was ever going to test it against a room.
Being secretly essential is the safest possible position in any room.
It cannot be argued with, because nobody knows it is there to argue with.
Nobody says you’re overvaluing your contribution, because nobody is aware of your contribution. Nobody puts a lower number on you, because nobody is doing a valuation at all.
Four years of a position that cannot lose, because it never enters the market.
And the cost of keeping that for four years is this.
I taught an entire organisation that I had nothing.
Eleven people on that aircraft. His mother. A twenty-nine-year-old who had been there eleven months.
The understanding was unanimous.
And it was correct, based on every single piece of evidence any of them had ever been given, over four years, by me.
I cannot be angry with that cabin. I briefed it.
So on the day I needed somebody in that cabin to know, there was no evidence anywhere in it.
Except a gold emblem on a uniform that had been eleven feet behind me the whole time.
It has been nine months since that morning.
I did not cancel that flight. I want that said plainly, because about four people have told me it was the obvious move and that I was weak not to take it.
It was not weakness.
It would have been the most expensive four seconds of my life, and I knew it standing on those steps, which is the one moment in this whole account where being who I am was actually useful.
Cancelling that flight makes me a woman who grounded a jet over a chair.
Eleven senior people, stranded on a tarmac, missing a board meeting — and every single one of them tells that story for fifteen years, and in every version of it I am unstable.
A very short shelf life and a very long memory. That is what a scene buys you and it is why I have never once had one.
What I did instead was charter a different aircraft.
