I'd been doing this for a while.  It was, I am pleased to say, on my advice that we bought into Microsoft on its initial flotation back in the eighties, and into the Internet Server companies at the start of the nineties.  And — while many of the other computer and associated hi-tech companies we've put money into have gone quite spectacularly bust — a few of our investments in the computer and IT industries had produced returns sensational enough to make the whole investment programme one of our most worthwhile.  In recent history, only the portfolios we developed in steel and petroleum during the late eighteen hundreds have yielded greater rewards.

My reputation in the company was, if I may toot my own tuba a tad, at least very secure and possibly — whisper it — even verging on legendary (and, believe me, we have a generous stock of living legends in the Business).  I had achieved Level Three status ten or fifteen years earlier than I might have hoped for, even as a high-flyer, and, while it depended on the goodwill of my co-workers, I was fairly confident that some time in the next few years I would be promoted to Level Two.

A close inspection of my own personal Mammon graph would reveal even to the untrained eye that my remuneration package — including commission multipliers gained as a result of my successful forecasts regarding computers and the Internet — was already more generous than that of many of our Level Two executives.  It had occurred to me a couple of years earlier that I was probably what the average person would consider independently wealthy; in other words that I could have existed comfortably without my job though, of course, as a good Business woman, that was all but unthinkable for me.