Ah! What More Could I Do at Work! The Boss Smiles and Pats My Head
“Ah! What more could I possibly do at work!”
The boss smiled brightly and ruffled my hair. “No. You’re not coming in.”
For a second I wondered if we were even having the same conversation. Not coming in? On the day of the broadcast?
“Wait, I prepared everything and now you’re telling me to rest?”
“I’m not giving you weekend work approval, so just stay home and rest, okay? The doctor clearly said you need complete rest this week, didn’t he?”
Now that she mentioned it, the broadcast was on a Saturday. But who cared about that? I worked weekends as a matter of course anyway. The reason Team Leader Jae-kyung had told me to cut my hours—if she didn’t want to see me get dragged away—was because I pretended to work from home, wrote reports like usual, sent them to her for review, and then quietly dropped them into the boss’s inbox. I’d told Seung-yeon about it too, and she had nodded, saying it was only natural. After all, streamers were busier on weekends, so it made sense that the people supporting them would be busy too.
I folded the blanket I’d been using and set it neatly on one side of the sofa, grumbling. “Resting is resting, but I spent a whole week preparing. Doesn’t it feel like a waste? I could at least come in for a day and—”
The boss didn’t answer. She just stared at me. She was in full stubborn mode; there was no getting through to her right now. I threw out one last line and bolted.
“Down with the dictator Momo!”
I thought she’d chase after me and give me a good smack on the head, but the boss didn’t even get up. I was the only one who looked like an idiot, sprinting back to my seat all out of breath. She really was giving off an unusually strong dictator vibe today.
When I returned, panting—whether from running or indignation, I wasn’t sure—Team Leader Kang looked at me and asked, “Jia-bean. Are you okay? You were running around so much. What if you collapse again?”
“I’m really fine now.”
“Still…”
First, I got a quick update from Seung-yeon on how things were going. Even if I left early because I wasn’t feeling well, it was only right to know the current status of the junior who was staying behind in my place. But—
“That’s… all?”
“Yes. The members only did one-hour solo streams for the past few days, so there’s really nothing to report!”
It was astonishing how little had happened. Well, I suppose having nothing to report was normal. Everyone had been nervous about the 3D debut broadcasts, worried something might go wrong. But when I lay on the sofa in the boss’s office and watched the showcase relay, it had been incredibly stable. The roleplay was satisfying, and the kids must have practiced hard—the movement paths and camera work were clean. The reactions on cafes and communities after the streams were decent too. Seung-yeon was just as much of a community addict as I was, so she would have checked everything without me even needing to tell her where to look.
“I’ll come in tomorrow and handle the eve-of-event monitoring myself! I’ve been leaving on time all week, so I have plenty of overtime hours saved up.”
The online concert would be held in the rented large-scale Motion Studio anyway, and the first-generation members were handling the proceedings themselves, so there was nothing for us to touch. In other words, there was genuinely nothing for me to do. Except for tomorrow’s eve-of-event hosting, that is.
What was this strangely bittersweet feeling?
…No. It’s not bittersweet.
After broadcasting for nearly a year, it was about time they could overcome small mistakes or crises on their own. Yeah. The first-generation members had all grown wonderfully. Maybe this 3D showcase was the proof of all that effort. Or maybe not. Whatever.
I gathered my things, packed my bag, and put on my coat. The team leader asked, “Are you heading home now? The boss told me to walk you out today.”
“Ah, thank you. Team Leader, have you eaten dinner? What about Seung-yeon?”
“We all ate already. Why, are you hungry? Should we grab something on the way?”
The team leader had a family, so I felt bad taking up too much of her time. But if I said I’d eat alone, she’d definitely insist on joining me. I’d just grab something simple, then order takeout once I got home.
“Let’s get some fish cakes and rice cakes from the street stall in front of the company.”
We took the elevator down and pushed open the heavy building doors. Whoooosh. It was mid-November, and with so many buildings around, the wind cut like a knife. In that freezing cold, the broth with a hint of cheongyang chili heat and the bouncy fish cakes were nothing short of heavenly. When I bit into a rice cake soaked in the fish cake broth, the wind hitting my neck and legs felt icy, yet this spot was pure paradise. My stomach relaxed. My mind relaxed. The tension melted away.
“No matter how I think about it, preparing all that and then being told not to do it feels really unfair.”
“Ah… you mean the eve-of-event prep?”
So I poured out everything I’d been holding back—something I rarely did.
“Yes. I spent a whole week on it. And it wasn’t even normal preparation. We squeezed it in during the little time we had when the two of us weren’t around. I dropped all the handover work I was doing with Seung-yeon, and you, boss, pushed back every meeting. And now you’re saying we shouldn’t do it? Doesn’t that feel like such a waste? I also don’t understand why you’re suddenly choosing the hard path when there’s such an obvious good one right in front of you.”
I chattered on for a while. The team leader, listening quietly, slurped her fish cake broth and smiled gently.
“Don’t take it too much to heart. Honestly, if I were the boss, I probably would’ve stopped you too out of worry. The current estimate is that around eighteen thousand people will be watching the eve-of-event. You don’t have any experience hosting a broadcast, Jia. She’s worried it’ll be too much pressure and that you’ll get nervous. Especially after you collapsed so recently.”
Even after hearing the team leader’s kind words, I still couldn’t accept it. I’d been eating properly, sleeping every chance I got for three whole days—how could I not be recovered yet? My energy was fully recharged. I was in a state where I could handle anything if she’d just let me.
The team leader must have noticed my thoroughly dissatisfied expression. “Should I try talking to the boss for you?”
“Really? You’d do that?”
After a short hum, the team leader said, “But you’ll have to put something on the line too, Jia.”
“Put something on the line…?”
“Well, you know the boss can’t be persuaded by emotion, right?”
“Ah.”
I agreed. I’d said it many times before—she would never let someone who didn’t meet her standards broadcast under the Parallel name. During interviews, tons of people had clung to her, talking about their family situations, their own unfortunate circumstances, or difficult environments. But the boss never budged. She only looked at whether they had talent, whether their mentality was strong, and whether they could sustain broadcasting long-term. In that regard, emotional appeals actually hurt their score with her. In other words, persuasion had to be strictly logical and rational.
What the team leader was asking for was the logical basis needed to convince her. A reason why the boss should allow me to appear on the broadcast even though my body wasn’t in perfect condition.
The eve-of-event has to be done by the two of us together.
The boss had been the one to suggest we broadcast together for the first time. She had rationally judged that it would be more fun that way. It would clearly help Parallel grow even bigger. Giving up after preparing so much would be such a waste.
But… Lee Yu-ra. Nothing came to mind right now.
“Do you have any good ideas, Team Leader? I can’t think of anything at the moment.”
Kang Ji-ho’s eyebrows twitched. “If any method is fair game, would you leave it to me? In exchange, I need one assurance from you.”
“Assurance?”
“Yes. Only then can I pull out every trick I have to persuade the boss.”
The team leader asked me something that should have been obvious. “Jia, do you really want to do the eve-of-event broadcast together with the boss?”
It went without saying.
“Yes.”
About an hour later.
Cheon Do-hee had just finished saving the script she’d reviewed one last time before leaving for the day.
“Boss~.”
When she saw that Kang Ji-ho had returned, Cheon Do-hee looked puzzled. “I thought you went home. Why are you back…”
“I have something to talk to you about.”
Team Leader Kang handed her the iced Americano with an extra shot she had just bought. Do-hee pressed the cold cup against her overheated forehead—hot from too much worrying—and muttered, “What about Jia? Did she get home safely?”
“Yes.”
“And you got persuaded by Jia.”
“Oh my.”
Kang covered her mouth with her hand, eyes widening in mock surprise.
“Why are you so surprised? It was obvious the moment you came back.”
“I really can’t lie to you. Hehe.”
“So? What did she say? She says she absolutely has to broadcast tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
Cheon Do-hee’s response was beyond firm—it was made of steel. “Tell her it’s absolutely not happening. I got greedy and dragged Jia into this without thinking, but I’m already regretting it. I shouldn’t have pulled her in.”
“Hmm.”
“Everyone has their own field they’re good at. The kid’s so capable at everything I asked her to do that I made a mistake without realizing it. Jia should just stay where she is right now.”
Mazia had always been like that. It had started with her suggesting they meet in person because she had something to say. Then the suggestion to become a manager, set standards, and clean up the trash. Then the offer to quit being a manager and join the company she was building. Then, just like when she was a manager, asking her to manage the first-generation group chat. Then assigning her to monitor the first-generation broadcasts and write reports. Then, when the previous team leader quit after causing problems for three months, asking her to handle the broadcasting equipment and setup. Then asking for content recommendations when she found something fun. Then asking her to share industry insights when she was too busy with work and streaming to keep up. She had done it all. She really couldn’t stand saying no. It was like she’d die if she ever refused.
And the problem was that she didn’t just do the things Do-hee asked. If the HR manager needed help with interviews, she helped. If another team was short-handed, she went over to assist. That was how she had collapsed from malnutrition and ended up in the emergency room once before. That had been last year. At the time, Do-hee had gone to each team leader personally and told them not to keep giving the kid extra work—let her focus on her own duties. She had technically been under the operations team and directly under the boss from the beginning, but she had truly become an isolated island after that day last year.
Anyway, after isolating her like that and making her focus on her own work… this time the boss herself—Do-hee—had been the one to make Mazia collapse. All because of her own greed.
That was why Cheon Do-hee could not grant Mazia’s request. If Jia collapsed again, she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to focus on either broadcasting or work.
“Anyway, that’s the end of this discussion. Let’s go home.”
“Just a moment.”
But Team Leader Kang had come here specifically to persuade Cheon Do-hee.
“What does Jia mean to you, boss?”
“The gray-area specialist of the company, and a VTuber alarm clock.”
Team Leader Kang burst out laughing. “Pffft, I think I know exactly what you mean.”
It would be nice if every task in the company was perfectly divided so everyone could work together happily and leave on time. But even fairly large corporations found that difficult. Every company had gray areas. Tasks that piled up because busy people dealing with urgent work overlooked them—things that someone still had to handle. It was lucky if someone noticed early and assigned it, but if not, it often led to major disasters.
Mazia was the person who eliminated those gray areas. When someone suddenly quit, she was the one who temporarily filled the gap. Many of those temporary roles had ended up becoming permanent because they suited her. And that wasn’t all. After the kids debuted, she had started chirping at Do-hee like a living alarm clock.
Are you preparing the kids’ new outifts? Is there a New Year event? Valentine’s Day? April Fool’s? Birthday events and merch? Are the regular-sale goods ready? Big vacation commemorative content? Collabs? Server? Komari’s been doing way too many “I’m going live” posts lately, we should start reducing them…
Of course, about half of those were needless worries. If the planning team missed all of that, they’d deserve to be fired on the spot. But the planning team were only human, and they had so much to handle that they overlooked things sometimes. That was when Mazia’s alarm function proved incredibly useful.
In actual evaluations of Parallel, people said the “broadcast issues happen too often,” but you almost never saw complaints like “the merch is bad,” “the content is weak,” or “their sense is completely off.” Even if everyone was too busy to notice, the Parallel operations team’s monitoring specialist—and perpetually angry viewer—would file a claim several months in advance.
That was the kind of existence Mazia was to Parallel. Her disappearance wouldn’t completely paralyze every operation, but the company’s rapid forward momentum would pause for a while. If they docked the ship in a safe place and didn’t properly check whether any operational gaps had appeared, it wouldn’t be long before the sails broke, the keel snapped, or a hole appeared in the hull.
“But Jia is also a person. And she has desires.”
“…Keep talking.”
“What I mean is, Jia has ambitions too. She may look like she’s satisfied just doing what people ask and supporting from behind, but she clearly has things she wants to do at Parallel.”
“And that thing… is this eve-of-event?”
“Yes. I think Jia really wants to show people what she prepared together with you, boss.”
“That’s true, but…”
The weight on the side of Jia’s rest was so heavy that Do-hee’s scale didn’t seem likely to tip back the other way. But Team Leader Kang had come today intending to break the scale’s fulcrum itself, not just add weight. After all, she was a professional who had survived countless gaslighting incidents at an entertainment agency. Using logical loopholes to persuade someone wasn’t difficult for her at all.
“If Jia told you that you collapsed once, so out of worry she wants you to stop broadcasting entirely, how would that make you feel?”
“…That wouldn’t be Mazia.”
Team Leader Kang smiled. Got her.
“That’s exactly what you’re doing to Jia right now, boss.”
“What?”
“Think about it. You used to let Jia work comfortably, but after she collapsed once, you suddenly stopped giving her work. Wouldn’t Jia feel like you’ve changed?”
“Uh. Um… huh?”
Cheon Do-hee was thrown into confusion!
Having waited for exactly this moment, Team Leader Kang sighed as if troubled and muttered, “And on top of that, canceling a project everyone worked so hard on would leave such a huge sense of loss. Plus, look. You’ve already found a successor. You told her to reduce her working hours. You told her not to even think about participating in the eve-of-event… This really sounds like you’re excluding her from work and then trying to get her to resign voluntarily—”
“No no, wait a second. What are you even saying? I’m only doing this because I’m genuinely worried about Jia’s health? And I just gave her a raise recently—why is this kind of talk even coming up?!”
“Well, it could sound like, ‘You poor thing, I’ll at least give you a bigger severance package before you leave,’ don’t you think? That’s how an average office worker might interpret it.”
“What—?! Oh my god, this is insane.”
After getting home, I washed my face quickly, flopped onto the bed, and watched Kirinuki clips, giggling the whole time. It wasn’t long before my phone started vibrating like crazy. It was the team leader.
Things seemed to have worked out, but the situation looked strangely urgent. What on earth was going on over there?