rich & sad ↣ joshler ✓

12. Stress

Josh and Dallon sat in the conference room, both looking at things on their laptops as they figured out how to address this terrible situation.

Dallon couldn't work with him anymore.

The older man had gotten back from Utah late the night before. It was Wednesday morning and Josh wasn't having a good week. The first half of Sunday was terrible, on Monday the woman he had yelled at quit, and Tuesday the wifi had stopped working in the whole building so Josh had to deal with tech for three hours to fix it. On top of that he had an interview Friday for some girl who was applying in the spot that previously belonged to the girl that quit.

"What are we going to do?" Josh sighed, rubbing his face. "I mean I know this obviously isn't your fault..."

"We don't we just terminate the contract then?" Dallon suggested. "We're both in terms with this decision and there are no hard feelings. I'm just losing money and I'm losing it fast so I want to get this all sorted out without dragging you into it. And hey, maybe once I get back on my feet then we can try this again."

Josh let another sigh escape his lips and he nodded. "Okay," he grabbed the contract that was in front of him. "I'll have my lawyer, Ryan, terminate it and fax it to your lawyer so he can do his part."

"Thank you, Josh," Dallon smiled, shaking his hand. "I know this sucks but I'm not bailing on you. Things just came up. I'll be in touch," he said as Josh walked him out the door of the conference room and to the elevator.

"Bye, Dallon," Josh bid him goodbye and gave a small smile as the other business man walked onto the elevator and the doors shut. He ran a hand through his hair, sitting down in one of the chairs they had out by the elevator for clients who had to wait.

Floor five was reserved for conferences and meetings only and as far as Josh knew none of his many departments had any meetings for that day so he sat there and took a breather for a moment.

The emergency that Dallon had was that his CFO and accountant had been stealing and embezzling money from him slowly over time and it took this long for someone to catch it. A few more months and his company would have completely collapsed.

That's why Josh managed as much as he could. He was not only the CEO of Primgold he was also the CFO and he overlooked as much of the financial portion of Primgold as he could. He trusted very few people. That's why he only had a little over a dozen people working on his floor with him doing major sales he couldn't cover. He tried to do as much as he could but what he couldn't went to the very few amount of people he trusted. That's why he was nervous about this interview for Friday. He would probably just put her in the sales department until she could prove herself.

The blonde sighed before getting back up. He had to get back to his office. He's been gone too long. He had to make sure everyone was doing their job.

He rode the elevator back up to his floor and exited, making his way back to his office.

His eyes caught the empty cubical and he sighed. He would probably have to hire someone with the most sales from that floor to replace who has quit because he didn't think the girl coming in for an interview Friday would do well enough.

"Mr. Dun?"

A voice stopped him and he turned to see Sarah looking at him, a worried look on her face. "Yeah?"

"Are you alright? You seem stressed."

A small chuckle left his lips. "I'm always stressed. It's part of running a business."

She frowned. "If you need to take a day off or something you can. We can take care of things. You could probably take a month off and come back and everything would still be exactly how you left it. You can trust us, Mr. Dun."

His stomach churned at the idea of being gone for a month. He could never do that. The longest he's ever been away was a week and that's when he goes on business trips. However, his employee's kindness meant a lot to him. "Thanks, Sarah. I'll be fine though. I should be worrying about you guys not the other way around," he paused. "Why were you here after I left last week? Do you really have that many sales to do? I can lighten your work load."

She gave him a sad smile. "If I tell you you're not allowed to fire me."

Josh raised an eyebrow and laughed. Of course he could fire her. He wouldn't, because she was one of if not his best employees, but he still could. "Scouts honor. What's up?"

"And you can't fire her either," Sarah added, making Josh start to actually worry.

"Okay...?"

"I asked Hayley to give me some of your sales to take care of so you could take a breather and relax. She forwarded me a few emails instead of sending them to you."

Josh wanted to be upset because that was neither of their places but he couldn't bring himself to. He had already been stressed with a million things and not having to deal with a handful of sales definitely helped even if he didn't know it until now. It was probably only a few anyway. "How many?"

"20."

"20?" His eyes widened. "That's not a few! Jesus, Sarah. How late did you end up staying?"

"That doesn't matter. The amount of sales didn't matter either. If I didn't think I had all the information to take care of them I sent them back to Hayley. That was only two anyway. If you don't want me to do it again I won't but I just wanted to help."

Josh found himself smiling. "Thank you," he told her. "But don't do that again," he said sternly, trying to hide his smile. "That's my job. Not yours. I can't have you doing more workload than you can handle."

"You're making yourself do more than you can handle though," she pointed out. "I can take a night to help out."

Josh sighed. "Just talk to me in advance before doing it next time."

Sarah smiled and hummed. "We both know you won't give me anything to do regardless so I'll just keep stealing them from your assistant."

Josh rolled his eyes but the smile returned. "Don't be surprised when someone steals your job after you're fired then," he joked.

"You love me too much to get rid of me."

"Very true. Don't tell anyone I said that," he chuckled as he walked back to his office.

Maybe he didn't have to do this all by himself.