Part Three: What I Asked For

Here is the part of this that I am proudest of and that nobody ever asks about.

I negotiated.

I sat in a chair in a uniform with VENDOR on my badge, across from a woman who ran an eleven-thousand-person company, and I negotiated for about fifty minutes, and I got more than she opened with, and I want to lay out exactly how, because I think there is a version of this story that does a great deal of harm, and it is the one where a rich person appears and rescues a poor one.

She opened by describing the job.