SHE DREW THE LINE

‘Can you keep a secret?’

She posed the question to me as she toned down her voice. My boss never seemed like the type who would lower her voice for anything or anyone not even herself. Many of us on the plant were of the sentiment that she was just a rich monster. No matter how much we tried to understand her there was always still something missing about her life to help explain her loudness. I must say though that she was quite a genius with her company.

Rumor had it that she had started the plant from nothing and had built it up all the way to become a multimillion dollar company. I didn’t quite believe that story, I still felt that she must have gotten a handout from someone already at the top. I believed she had been masking the truth about her success with her loudness or perhaps she was using it to scare everyone away from asking her the truth about it.

“A secret Madam?” I repeated part of her question a bit confused as I tried to make sense of it.

Perhaps this was going to be a confession about her crookedness I thought to myself. Or maybe she was just about to reveal the feelings she had for me - I wished, after all she was still young, in her late twenties, not married, she had never been married before. But again who would have been crazy enough to marry such a mysterious loud lady let alone gather courage to ask her out, I reasoned in my mind as I waited for her to proceed with telling the secret.

In all that, one part in me was telling me to perhaps excuse myself and leave her office but the deeper urge in me told me just the opposite to sit-put and get the answers I had been seeking for long. Did I mention that she was also very beautiful that it was so amusing to sit back and watch her? Her beauty could not be ignored it was so loud too in a sense, I admired her just as much as the others on the plant did.

‘Tell me Amos, what exactly do you know about lines?’ she asked again before she could continue with telling the secret.

I froze for a moment while I gazed at her as though she had just asked me out.

‘Hello! I’m talking to you Amos!’ she shouted but with a cute smile attached to it.

“Yes Madam, lines, I know that they are mostly straight, like in a drawing of a line, they're…” She interjected in a low tone voice.

‘Yes correct, they are straight drawings in one direction but most importantly they have a starting point and an end point. I'm sure you know that Amos.’

I smiled as I nodded in an effort to please her. She continued to speak.

‘One afternoon when I was just a little girl about 10 years old my family and I took a train during one holiday trip, we didn’t have a lot of money so we would always board on the economy class on every trip. On this particular trip I happened to sit next to an elderly woman who appeared to be so rich, even though I was 10 I could tell she was rich because everybody’s eyes in that train were fixed on her and she smelled really good too. I asked her where she was going and she said she wasn’t going anywhere but that she was just spending time on that end of the moving train with the rest of us.’

She paused for a moment to look at her wrist watch and then continued to speak.

‘I never really got it at that time but as I grew up I kept wondering why a rich elderly woman would board a train on economy class going nowhere. But later on when I was much older I eventually got it, she simply was drawing the line. Do you see it Amos?’

I looked at her like something was seriously wrong with her talk and I bet she could tell it too. She chuckled, opened her desk drawer, pulled out a pencil and piece of paper and handed them to me.

‘Draw a line Amos! Any line!’ She spoke with new energy.

Somehow I felt this energy although I was still in a confused state, it was optimism. It gave me a glimpse of light that perhaps our new found friendship was going somewhere now that we were drawing lines together or at least I was going to be drawing lines for her. Yes I proceeded to draw a line on that piece of paper, the line was about 2 inches long.

‘There you go, lovely, that’s the line any sensible man would draw’ she said.

She was smiling. At that moment I felt special to be regarded as a sensible man by such a rich beautiful lady. Though I was still eager to know where she was going with this line I drew, for me just that sort of compliment alone had already made my day. It was perhaps really that glimpse of light I needed from her.

‘There are two groups of people Amos, those who are on the starting point of this line and those who are on the end point of the line. But unfortunately most people don’t even know it, I know exactly at which point of the line I’m on, do you know which point of the line you are on?’ She asked.

“Uhm…I’m not sure I am following well but I guess I would say somewhere in between the starting point and the end point.” I responded.

I looked at her with a fright as if I had just said something terribly wrong.

‘Relax Amos, I will tell you, even though you don’t know it yet but you are on the end point of this line. Do you know that you can tell the beginning of anybody’s success journey from the end point which is the point where they are now? This also means that you can also start your success journey from where you are right now. The line you just drew tells it all.’

As she was speaking this I kept wondering not only why she was telling me this but more so why she was telling them to me in particular. For a second I debated within me that perhaps she was about to lay me off or something like that but somehow I kept my cool and continued to listen.

‘Motivation Amos, it's the motivation. The point at which you are now is where you get your motivation to succeed, that rich lady I met on the train, her motivation was the economy class. The economy class was her end point that’s the reason she said she wasn’t going anywhere, she had already arrived at her destination with that motivation. Whatever motivates you can become your destination. If you can remain motivated by it you can get to it. What do think motivates me? You motivate me, you all at this plant motivate me to keep growing this company so that someday you can also get a chance to own it too and motivate others to climb as high.’

As I heard this my heart really felt the passion inside her, she was not a loud monster after all, she was just screaming out this deep passion which she carried on the inside and it had to come out in a loud form of course. They said never to judge a book by its cover I knew this all along but I guess I must have been judging her book based on the number of pages it had instead of just giving it a chance to tell its story to the end.

I was now motivated to listen to her story all the way to the end, eager to know her end point on this line she was talking about. I was ready to know all about how she got to be so successful, everything including why she was not married with all that beauty and wealth.

She poured some coffee into her mug and offered me some, I declined the offer, besides, it was just a couple of minutes after eleven in the morning and I wasn’t going to set a bad impression or get too comfortable around my boss. I still wanted to keep my job especially now that I was getting to know her better and beginning to like her. She continued to speak as she sipped on her coffee.

‘I met the rich woman of the train a second time, this time when I was much older and was travelling alone. She was still on the economy class. This was my opportunity to confirm the theory I had about her so I went on to ask her what she meant the first time we had talked. She couldn’t quite remember me since now she was in her early 80s, she owned the train company and her biggest customers were those of the lower class of society. She simply wanted to experience for herself what their journeys felt like, so she boarded the economy class simply to observe and work on making their journeys better. That way her company kept growing from the improved services offered to those biggest customers. She did this countless times throughout her stay at the company. And she confirmed my theory.’

‘From that time Amos I knew exactly what I was to do and I went on with it. From a young age I always wanted to live in a peaceful quiet world. A place without all the unsolicited noises from the different activities but in particular the noise from tires of moving cars irritated me the most. So I found that quietness in my earphones, anytime I wanted some peace and quiet I simply plugged in my phones and I was in a quiet world again. I got attached to my earphones so much that I had them on almost all the time. They had their downside though, when someone talked to me while I had my earphones playing I would raise my voice so loud to match up to volume in my ears and that got me speaking so loud habitually. I guess you might have wondered why I speak so loud, that’s the story behind it.’

She blushed and proceed.

‘Then one day it dawned on me to fix the noise those tires made as they span on the roads and I came up with an idea to make noiseless tires. I went on to develop a prototype tire, it got tested and qualified. With the prototype’s success I managed to secure a loan and started this plant and it has been growing ever since with a rising demand from all over the world.’

‘So you see Amos my motivation was the quieter world I wanted around me so I had to create it for myself by developing noiseless tires, this was where I wanted to be, my end point was to have those tires. I had drawn a line for myself that I would make the tires and I did. But you see I was so invested in achieving it that I put in all of my time just to establish this company even at the cost of my social life and...’

She suddenly stopped speaking then I noticed the tears rolling down her cheeks, I was very confused now. I didn’t understand why she would be troubled by such a beautiful journey. But I now could also sympathize with her, I had just seen that all I had previously heard about her was unfairly false I was even wrong to think that she couldn’t have built the company from scratch.

“Madam, is everything ok?” I asked.

She nodded as she wiped the tears.

‘You can call me Betty’ she said.

‘The secret I want to share with you is that I am your secret admirer. I have feelings for you Amos, I have always had feelings for you. Calling you in here today to tell you all about my journey was no accident, it’s just another line I drew in order to ask you out. The starting point of the line doesn't matter, what matters is the end point. I said you are on the end point of this line, I meant that you are on the end point of my line, I want to be with you. You can continue this journey with me and make it your journey too, right from this moment.’