Mnevermind 3: Life is Awesome by Price Jordan Castillo

Author:Price, Jordan Castillo [Price, Jordan Castillo]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: JCP Books LLC
Published: 2015-02-24T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

Tomorrow is another day, I told myself. It was a pretty simple plan. Go to bed before midnight and grab a solid six-seven hours of sleep, then show up fresh as a daisy at Adventuretech, where Elijah would handle the mnemography, Big Dan would do the admin, and Larry would take care of the customers. Show up to a big chunk of uninterrupted time where I’d crack open Life is Awesome and figure out what was what. Yeah, tomorrow was definitely gonna be my day. Just as soon as I soldiered through a four-hour shift at Recollections.

The thing about Recollections was that I didn’t actually mind maintaining their fleet of NeuroStars. In a weird way, I enjoyed it. But working a job entails so much more than performing the job itself. There’s all the attendant bullshit, like the stupid name placards on the client rooms. Like the New Age music loop I was horrified to find myself humming along with. Like the ridiculous lab coats they made us wear, as if it took a PhD in molecular biology to change the sheets.

And, like my manager—half my age, twice my pay, and way too eager to see me. So eager that he accosted me in the hallway before I could join my buddy Larry and slip into my lab coat. “Dan! C’mon into my office real quick.”

What I wanted to do was smack him upside the head “real quick.” But I bit my tongue and followed him in, hoping to get my refusals over with cleanly enough that the conversation didn’t derail my whole evening. Chuck planted himself behind his desk and gestured to the chairs in front. I considered not-sitting just to demonstrate how little I wanted to take part in the conversation, but in the interest of wrapping it up as soon as possible, I relented.

“So.” Chuck seemed nervous. And eager. Nervously eager. “I talked directly to Mr. Delmonico’s assistant, and between the two of us, we came up with a solution.”

“I wasn’t aware we had a problem.”

Chuck flipped through a few papers. “And here’s the new offer. Same hours you have now, Monday through Friday, half a day, second shift. And no more than three meetings per calendar year in Chicago.”

“Look, I appreciate you going to bat for me—but I wasn’t playing hard to get.”

“But it’s the same exact hours,” Chuck repeated. “And you’d actually be doing less, way less. Looking at some R&D reports and making some recommendations, that’s all. Sitting down. In your own office.”

“I’ll try to explain, but I need you to listen. I really do want the job I have, something cut and dried where I perform a technical task, and that’s that. Test the machines, clock out and go home.”

He slid a piece of paper across the desk, face down. Poor kid looked like he might actually cry. “At least look at the offer.”

Fine. I looked. And then I did a double-take.

Mel Delmonico was willing to pay me over two hundred dollars an hour—supposedly to read reports.

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