To Kiss An Idol

219 The Vanishing File

Dae kept his head lowered and took every single word coming out of Chung-Ho’s mouth. He knew everyone outside could listen to what Chung-Ho was saying but he had no escape. He was too busy with taking revenge on Nivritti and forgot to complete his work.

Not only Chung-Ho rebuked him, but he also praised the two girls, his subordinates for their good job. The last straw was when Chung-Ho asked them to check his server and look for the plagiarised scripts. Chung-Ho kept treating him like an imbecile, but Dae could not speak a single word or protest.

He kept his eyes on his screen with stealing glances in between to look at Nivritti. Both the girls ran a lot of scripts through the plagiarism app and found a lot of scripts. They both gave him the number and finally, Dae’s list was done.

But Chung-Ho was still angry at him. He ordered the girls to go have lunch and told Dae to again check his list. The moment everyone left him alone in the room, Dae stood up and kicked the chair on which Chung-Ho was sitting with all the force he could muster. The chair flew and hit the wall behind it.

He wanted to scream and curse at Chung-Ho, but he knew everyone would be able to hear him. He bottled his anger and let out a silent scream. He kept his fists clenched and his whole body kept shaking violently while he looked at the ceiling with his mouth open and screamed silently.

“Everything is that Bitch’s fault. Choi-ssi never scolded me. He never raised his voice with me. He never called me names. All this is happening because of that whore. They are out enjoying and gossiping about me. And here I am stuck with this stupid task. How many times do I have to complete it? How many times do I have to check it? I am not some stupid moron, I know how to do my job.

“I am her senior, I must tell her how to do her job but here everything is the opposite. She is telling me how to do my job, she is telling Seong Dae how to do his job. Oh! She did such a great job with the template, she added a few questions on her own, bloody kissass.

“Just look at her, she left her laptop open to mock me. To show me that she is better at my job. Oh, how I wish I could throw the laptop and break it into smithereens. Ahhhh…” he let out another silent scream.

He closed his eyes and kept clenching and unclenching his fists to calm himself down. He had to prepare himself to talk before the CEO. The same CEO who never remembers him. He had to make an impression before him. He exhaled loudly and opened his eyes.

.....

A literal bulb lit over his head. He knew how to show everyone that Nivritti was not a hard worker, she was just lucky. And her luck was about to run out. A devilish smirk appeared on his face. He moved towards Nivritti’s laptop. The word file was open on the screen.

He closed the file and then without thinking twice shift+deleted the file. He didn’t stop there. He deleted the folder that was named ‘summary’. He then moved to her other folders and deleted ‘Nam Kyung-Soo’, ‘Bad Grammar’, and her two subfolders according to her continents. Her system was now empty. All she had were the scripts she received on the server as deleting them was not an option.

Dae tilted his head left and right and stared at her screen. His smirk changed into a wide smile. He entwined his fingers and cracked his knuckles. He then moved her laptop back into its position. He then rubbed his palms together and when he was satisfied with his mischief, he left the room.

Finally, he was happy. Finally, he forgot about his humiliation as it was going to be Nivritti’s humiliation. He went to the cafeteria but could not see Nivritti or Jae-Hwa. He ate something light and ran to the department.

When he reached, he saw everyone standing near the door. He looked at Jae-Hwa and Nivritti, they were dressed for the occasion. They were dazzling from top to bottom. He then looked at himself. He was dressed shabby, his tie was still undone, and his shoes were the highlight of his complete attire, in a negative sense.

He looked at his reflection in the glass door and straightened his tie. He buttoned his jacket to hide his shirt and tamed his hair with his fingers. He had no option but to walk in with the shoes that he was wearing.

When he entered the department, Bong looked at him and teased him for being late. He felt as if he conquered the world. Finally, the CEO remembered him and now he was joking with him. But the next second he became sceptical. “He remembers my name and is joking with me. Does he know what I did and is trying to be over-friendly so that if he fires me, I won’t feel bad? Why is he not angry about yesterday’s news? The company had to tighten security. Everyone had to face a lot of trouble due to the sea of crowd that appeared in front of the building, so why is he not angry? He is actually smiling, what the hell?”

But Bong didn’t waste any time. He asked everyone to start the meeting. He moved first and everyone followed him. While all were walking Young-Chul moved near Nivritti and simply asked, “how is your leg?”

“I am fine, MY,” she replied.

“Good!” he said without looking at her and moved away from her. He acted as if he didn’t know her and moved close to Bong. Nivritti tilted her head and thought for a minute about his bizarre behaviour.

“What was that?” asked Jae-Hwa.

“My question exactly!” replied Nivritti.

But both the girls had no time to think about that. They followed everyone and entered the room. Chung-Ho ordered them to sit next to each other. Chung-Ho took the first seat on the right side of the table and Dae sat next to him. The girls grabbed their laptops and sat next to Dae. As Jae-Hwa didn’t want to sit next to Dae, Nivritti took that seat.

As usual, ASD sat next to Bong on the left side of the table and the CEO, as usual, took the seat meant for the head of the family. Other people occupied the seats left vacant. Nivritti looked around wanting to know who all were sitting in the meeting.

Chung-Ho spoke first as usual. He introduced everyone. He said that other people were from the production department, location department, finance department and Art department. All were present in the meeting as they needed a ballpark of what they were about to work on in the coming months.

After the introduction, he looked at Bong for the signal and Bong nodded at him. He then glanced ta Nivritti and ordered, “why don’t you start the summary, Ritti? Mind you Sir, the template we fixed on, she made some changes in it.”

“Every change is welcome. We all know how her brain works. So, I know she must have done a great job,” replied Bong.

Nivritti tried to hide her happiness, but she was beaming with happiness after hearing her praise. On the other hand, Dae wanted to stab himself with anything he could get his hands on.

Nivritti opened the flap of her laptop and her screen lit up. She could see the ‘My computer’ window on her screen was open and her both drives ‘C’ and ‘D’ were visible. She found that bizarre. She could swear that her Word file was open on the screen.

She smiled at Chung-Ho and shook off the bad feeling she was feeling in her bones. She opened the ‘D’ drive and her eyes widened with shock. Her subfolders for both continents were not there. She refreshed the page twice but still, her folders were not there.

“I am sorry, just a minute,” she apologised to everyone. Her breath started shuddering. She searched her whole computer for the Word file but could not find it. Again and again, she kept gulping and licking her lips.

Kyung-Soo understood that something had happened. She was shocked, she was nervous. “Is everything alright?”

“What?” Nivritti looked at him and again licked her lips.

“Ritti!” Chung-Ho said and grabbed her laptop. He too could sense something was wrong. He looked at her system and it was empty. Except for the Windows drive, there was nothing on the laptop. “What the hell, where is everything?” he shouted.

“What? What happened?” shouted Kyung-Soo.

“Her computer is blank. I just saw the file she prepared for the meeting. Nothing is here,” yelled Chung-Ho.

“What?” shouted Bong. “How is that possible?”

“I… I… don’t know. We just came back from lunch. No one went in and out of the conference room. No one was allowed to. How can everything vanish at once?” shouted Chung-Ho.