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Before I ever learned how to build executive dashboards, I learned how to make a Nigerian oil executive a double espresso with three tiny plastic half-and-halfs.

Not two.

Not four.

Three.

And not stirred. He liked to swirl them himself while staring thoughtfully out the window of a Houston high-rise as though contemplating either crude oil futures or the collapse of Western civilization.

I was 23 years old, freshly returned from The University of Texas at Austin with a degree, a mountain of student debt, and the vague but deeply American belief that intelligence would naturally sort itself into opportunity.

Adorable.

The year before, I had been in Austin reading literary fiction and drinking iced coffee and imagining myself becoming some elegant hybrid of Joan Didion and a respected businesswoman. Then my then-boyfriend deployed to Saudi Arabia, the economy was still weird and uneven in that post-recession way nobody fully acknowledged out loud, and I moved back into my childhood bedroom in The Woodlands with the exquisite spiritual devastation unique to ambitious young adults returning home with a degree and no trajectory.

Nobody tells you how psychologically disorienting it is to be “the smart one” your whole life and then suddenly become a receptionist.

Not even a glamorous receptionist.

An oil company receptionist.

A deeply international oil company where men from all over the world floated through the lobby wearing expensive suits and speaking in accents that made everyone else unconsciously stand up straighter.

The office itself felt like a performance of wealth. Dark wood. Heavy glass doors. Enormous gemstones. Giant abstract paintings. Bowls of individually wrapped European chocolates nobody ever actually ate. There was always a faint smell of coffee, printer toner, and cologne expensive enough to smell intimidating.

And there I sat at the front desk earning something like $15 an hour while trying to look “corporate” enough to belong there and not accidentally reveal that I still sometimes ate generic cereal for dinner because my student loan payment had just auto-drafted.

But in retrospect, it was one of the greatest educations of my life.

Because when you sit at the front desk of a corporation, people forget you can hear them.

You become part furniture. Decorative infrastructure. A fern with opinions, if you will.

And once people stop performing directly for you, you start seeing how much of corporate life is theater.

Who gets offered sparkling water versus tap.

Who laughs too hard at the CEO’s jokes.

Who suddenly develops an accent while speaking to international executives.

Who says they’re “slammed” while playing Candy Crush in Excel-sized proportions.

Who speaks confidently in meetings despite clearly not understanding a single thing being discussed.

That last category, I would later discover, includes an astonishing percentage of senior leadership across corporate America.

But at 23, I still believed competence and authority were basically the same thing.

I had not yet learned that corporations often function less like meritocracies and more like highly emotional middle schools with expense accounts.

The executives fascinated me most.

Especially the truly wealthy ones.

Not because they were glamorous, exactly. Most of them were actually kind of odd. Wealth has a way of making people both more demanding and more specific. One wanted his coffee at a temperature that could only legally be described as “medical.” Another insisted all meetings begin precisely seven minutes after the hour because he believed it improved productivity. One executive became furious because the receptionist before me had reordered the bottled water incorrectly and “the French sparkling water tasted aggressive.”

Aggressive.

I remember standing there holding a case of imported mineral water thinking: my student loan interest alone is currently accruing faster than my checking account balance.

But slowly, I became less intimidated. Proximity destroys mythology. Never meet your heroes, folks!

And what I began noticing was that the people with the most power were not always the smartest people in the room. Sometimes they were simply the people least afraid to behave as though they belonged there.

That realization changed something in me permanently.

At the time, though, I was mostly trying to survive adulthood with dignity intact. Much harder than it looks, let me tell you!

I drove an aging car with questionable air conditioning. I wore carefully assembled “office outfits” from clearance racks and outlet stores. I learned how to make one sad grilled chicken breast last four meals. I became intimately familiar with the emotional landscape of the TJ Maxx clearance section.

And yet, weirdly, I was happy sometimes.

Or at least alert.

There was a filthy yet effervescent energy in realizing the world was not operating according to the rules I had been taught.

I started studying people the way other women my age studied contour tutorials.

How power moved.

How meetings worked.

How some people could calm an entire room simply by speaking slowly.

How others used jargon like smoke bombs to conceal incompetence.

How administrative staff often quietly ran entire organizations while executives collected credit under flattering lighting.

Then, eventually, the company imploded.

Not metaphorically.

Literally.

International investigations. Fraud allegations. Raids. Headlines. The kind of corporate scandal that makes everyone suddenly avoid eye contact in elevators.

It was surreal watching people who once projected invincibility begin carrying cardboard boxes to their cars.

And I remember thinking, even then: Oh. So none of this was stable.

Not the titles.

Not the money.

Not the performance.

Not even the building itself, probably.

Especially in Texas, oil wealth often carries this aura of permanence and masculinity and inevitability. But underneath it all was the same fragile human machinery that exists everywhere else: ego, insecurity, ambition, luck, image management, fear.

The whole thing felt less like the collapse of a corporation and more like accidentally seeing behind a movie set.

Years later, when I started building dashboards and presenting analytics to executives myself, I realized something strange. Not strange, I guess. More like I experienced an axis tilt.

I was no longer intimidated by conference rooms.

Because I had already spent years quietly observing the people inside them.

And maybe that’s the funny thing about underemployment. Sometimes the jobs that look least impressive on paper are secretly apprenticeships in human nature. You can call it the Johnny Tremain.

I did not leave that oil company with stock options or prestige or some dazzling early career trajectory.

I left with something much harder to teach:

the ability to read a room.

The understanding that competence and confidence are separate skills.

And the sneaking suspicion that most corporations are held together almost entirely by women who know where the passwords are.

I still think that last one may be the real economy.

— Find me where intention meets whatever answers back.