Hita - Anita Claire Page 0,56

over and kiss him on the cheek as I head to my room to go to sleep. I’m not sure what he is going to do next. I figure if he comes to bed, then we have a lot of work ahead of ourselves. If he leaves, I guess we’ve broken up. As I sit down on my bed wondering what he will do next, I feel numb. As I hear my front door close, I feel relieved.

Lying back on my bed, I stare at the designs in the popcorn ceiling. My entire body is wrapped in a layer of sadness. I feel tears leak out of my eyes and pool in my ears. My chest starts to feel so heavy I’m surprised I still can breathe. I hope Kristi doesn’t feel any need to check up on me. I want to wallow in my sadness, disappointment, and grief. David’s such a sweet guy; I hoped our relationship would have worked, but I have no desire to chase after him. I want him to want us enough that he’s willing to try.

Chapter 41 – Isabelle’s On Board

In the morning I stare at myself in my bathroom mirror. I wonder how my face can look the same while my soul feels shriveled and defeated. I force myself to shake off my lethargy and head to work.

Before stopping at my desk, I decide to stop at Sid’s office—luckily he’s in. Handing him a print out of Isabelle’s résumé, I tell him, “I understand Terri resigned. This is the résumé of another friend from college. She’s really smart, easy to work with, and has a great attitude. She’s been doing a similar job as Terri, but she’s much more geeked out on analysis. She’s used her position to uncover a lot of different possible efficiencies in her current company’s processes.”

He quickly looks over her résumé, “Why is she interested in leaving her current company?”

“It’s really old school; they’re not open to analysis from a junior person. She’d rather work someplace younger and more vibrant.”

He nods his head slowly. I then walk over to the new director of marketing, giving her Isabelle’s résumé, and the same line. I talk to our recruiter in HR, and hand her the résumé.

She tells me, “Can you send it to me via e-mail?” Then she says with a chuckle, “I see you’re on the fast track for finder’s fees.”

At my company you get a finder’s fee if they hire someone you recommend. I split Juliette’s finder’s fee with her. If they hire Isabelle, it will be a three way split.

***

It only takes a couple of days for my company to call Isabelle and ask her to come in for an interview. Beforehand, the three of us meet up at Juliette’s place.

The first thing out of Isabelle’s mouth is, “I don’t even know what your company does.”

Juliette and I give each other the eye, as we smirk, “Big data solutions for companies and governments.”

“What does that even mean?” Isabelle asks in confusion.

Juliette answers, “Companies and governments are storing all this information on users. Not really on people, just on their movement through their website, where they go on the website, and what other sites they visit. It’s lots and lots of information that means nothing. Managers can’t make decisions from it, and marketing organizations can’t sell any more from it. They’re saving all this data hoping that someday it will make sense.”

I continue with, “Our founder developed some algorithms that can be used to look at site data and figure out where people are on a site, how long they spend on a page, and where they go next. He created an API and a user interface, so it’s real easy for someone in IT to hook these algorithms up to their data. Our company also created visual reports that make it easy for managers to identify trends, so they can see what’s happening and to be able to make decisions from the data.”

“Oh, like the data I gathered on our non-revenue cost of engineering related to sales at my company, and then all the charts and venn diagrams I created to visually highlight to my management what the actual cost and profit was by product?” Isabelle says as she processes what we’ve been telling her.

Juliette nods as she answers, “Same identical thing, your data sets have about a thousand variables, while the data sets we’re dealing with have a terabyte, or even a petabyte of data. It’s too