I’m sitting at the Alaska Airlines Boardroom Lounge in Terminal 6 at LAX. It’s a neat little lounge with plush chairs, a bar, some crudite, fruits, and coffee. I’m sitting at a table by the window, and there is a woman behind me on the phone with her company team.

In the last 5 minutes I have heard the word “strategy” more than 10 times, amongst other meaningless corporate lingo. She’s prepping for a large meeting with a bunch of RMs, DMs, PMs, and sales reps, and clearly on eggshells. I can hear the nervous tension in her voice. They’re calling outside consultants in. They’re new deals, old deals, and hoping the underwriters are in place to get the job done fast. This woman appears to be in an upper management function, perhaps a director or above. She has the air and awkward but deliberate pauses in her speech patterns that hint at their corporate echelon. Oh, and she’s getting another call she needs to take. This woman actually sounds in real life like the robotic VC Laurie Bream on Silicon Valley.

Ohhhh, I remember those days. I remember the nonsense of the corporate hustle. Jumping through multiple hoops, under the tension of timelines and deadlines, all while never forgetting the optics that affect a performance review. I remember the dirty politicking I’d try to stay out of until it was clear that I had to engage in it to get up the ladder. I remember just how much sweat I had put in to pull projects off, and all for a highly taxed pittance of a paycheck (that I thought I should be truly thankful for at the time, which I was). Nowadays, being on the outside looking in, whenever I encounter these kinds of Laurie Breams of the world, I have a hearty little laugh inside. I wonder at the status this woman thinks she has. I wonder how her interactions and conversations are.

And then I wonder how it was that I was that I was able to endure what I did for a whole decade of my life. Took me long enough, but damn.