Friend Me by John Faubion

Author:John Faubion
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Howard Books

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Trouble with Solar Charge

The Financial Times video feed was bad news again. Yesterday’s news had paralyzed him. Now it was worse.

Government officials and auditors charged that the preliminary loan approval for Solar Charge had been granted before officials had completed the legally mandated evaluations of the company. As a result of these revelations, further loan guarantees to the troubled company were in jeopardy. That included the most recent loan, still in the pipeline, for $300 million. Solar Charge CEO Nelson Garnet, having just received an $11 million bonus, announced he would be stepping down.

Scott looked at the ticker. Solar Charge had dropped to $114 and was falling. Disaster, and there was nothing he could do about it now. With the stock at this point the options he had purchased were worthless. The stock would have to climb above the $120 mark again. Could he just get to a break-even point? The video feed showed FBI agents carrying boxes of documents out of the company’s headquarters in California. A bankruptcy announcement was imminent.

All around him coworkers went about their normal business. As if there were two worlds: one completely normal, and the not-so-normal one he lived in. Everything looked normal on the outside, but nothing inside was the same.

He remembered hearing his uncle talk like that when his aunt died. The normal world had gone on, but he was off on a detour that might never rejoin the main road. Was his world going that way? He’d begun to feel more like a spectator than a participant in the real world.

How in the world had he gotten into this kind of a predicament? He had known better, but he had gambled on . . . what? That he would be lucky?

No, not lucky. He had gambled on his own view of himself as being smart and savvy. He had convinced himself that because of Solar Charge’s position in the ultratrendy environmental industry he would be safe. He’d arrogantly gambled his career on a hunch.

He looked at the walls of his cubicle. There were all the pictures of Rachel, the two children, and their home. He looked at the most recent, a picture of Scotty, Angela, and Ruff. He would soon be taking down the pictures of his family, packing them into a cardboard box, and carting them out to the parking lot, where he would stow them in the trunk of his car. His family would disappear.

Was this how people wound up on the street, jobless? How many times had he looked at jobless people and wondered why they just didn’t go to work? Maybe they wanted to work, had worked hard in the past, and things had gone wrong for them. Gone wrong, just like they were going wrong for him now.

And his car? That might be the next thing to go. No way could he make the payments without a job. And the thought of the disappointment he’d see in Rachel’s eyes. No, he couldn’t face that.

The Solar Charge CEO was going to walk away with $11 million in last-minute bonus money.

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