Cheese Rice Got Me FiredChapter 1
I worked three sleepless nights straight, fixing a critical bug that had nearly pushed our company off a cliff.
At the all-hands meeting, my boss looked me in the eye and said,
“Sophie Miller, you really ought to learn a thing or two from Vivian Lee.”
Seeing the confusion on my face, he made himself clearer.
“Isn’t it true?”
“You’re the only one in this whole company who just buries her head in work, with zero sense of teamwork.”
“Look at Vivian—she knows how to boost morale. A box of baked mac and cheese was all it took to lift everyone’s spirits.”
“Build relationships first, then do the work. She gets it better than you do.”
I got the message.
So you’d rather have someone who buys $5 mac and cheese than someone who saves the company’s lifeline?
Fine.
Right there in front of him, I calmly opened my email and typed one sentence:
“Michael Chen, does the CTO position you offered last month still stand?”
“I can bring a fully self-developed solution and start anytime.”
At four in the morning, the last redundancy test finally passed.
The “system crash” alarm that had lasted for three days and nights was finally cleared.
I practically collapsed into my chair, the stabbing pain at my temples making my vision go dark.
I had barely closed my eyes for five minutes when the smell of cheese and cream filled the room.
Vivian, the management trainee, walked over with a bright step, carrying an elegant lunchbox.
“Sophie, you’ve worked so hard. Everyone’s been worried about you.”
She set a steaming box of baked mac and cheese on my desk.
“Eat something! I specially ordered this—everyone loved it!”
I had no appetite and just waved her off wearily.
For three days, I hadn’t slept, surviving on coffee and adrenaline.
Our client called every hour, their tone shifting from “concern” to “anger” to “threatening legal action.”
It was me—together with a few core team members—who locked ourselves at our desks, working 72 straight hours, going through over a million lines of code line by line.
In the end, I tracked down a deeply hidden conflict caused by a third-party plugin update.
That discovery saved a multi-million-dollar client and kept the company’s cash flow from breaking apart.
And yet here was Vivian, with her fragrant mac and cheese, filling the office with a cheerful atmosphere that clashed sharply with my exhaustion.