Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

by Sarah Wynn-Williams

“Sadie’s slept over lots of times and I’m not asking Sadie. I’m asking you.” I don’t want to do this for all the obvious reasons—it wouldn’t be right for a male COO to ask for this and it’s not right for a female one to—but one thing that popped into my head, I’ll confess, is that I’m scared of something that happened on a flight a few weeks before this, from Tokyo to San Francisco. So exhausted by work and pregnancy, I fell asleep before the flight even took off, and woke up with a start. Everything around me was white. I couldn’t get my eyes to focus and I couldn’t see a thing. Just white. It reminded me of what I saw during my father’s leisurely drive to the doctor after the shark attack when I really thought I wasn’t going to make it. I go into a complete panic. Maybe I’d pushed myself to my limit and had a medical emergency, maybe it was a pregnancy side effect, or maybe I was having a breakdown. Maybe I shouldn’t be flying so heavily pregnant. I tear at whatever my white confines are and as they fall and the interior of the aircraft reappears, a flight attendant rushes over. In the most exquisitely polite terms, she explains that I had been snoring so loudly that I was disturbing other passengers, and the enterprising Japanese crew had erected a small white tent around me to try to muffle the sound. I was mortified. I tried to explain to her that I never normally snore, it’s only because I’m so uncomfortably pregnant.