Eleanor, a princess by birth, was selected by the new king’s mother as his perfect match, and yes, in this principality and the other arranged marriages for their children were still done.
Marriage for love was frowned upon, but our new King was by virtue of the fact he had moved away because fourth sons were not going to be crowned king any time soon, was allowed to annul the arrangement.
The truth of the matter was that although they were good together, temperament-wise, they would have ended up killing each other.
Too young and too silly, that first attraction died away before they reached an age to know what love meant, and for our prince, what responsibility was.
Now, she was Richard’s choice, again not in line for the throne, and she found him a far more suitable and placid person to be with.
The truth was she had fallen in love with the country, and the lifestyle that she freely confessed was far better than her home.
When our new king meets up with his old paramour, whom he has not seen for many years, there are feelings there, but not enough to make an impression.
Now that Richard is gone, it’s a question of what she is going to do with the rest of her life, and it seems she wants to stay.
OK, I know some of you do, and lock yourself away until the next bestseller is written, but that’s only an option if you saved up a million dollars so you could take the year off.
And if you are like me, I’d probably be out partying every day rather than put words on paper. Sometimes it is easier to just party.
However, for the more serious of us, our day job could work in our favour in several ways. Firstly, it gives us time away from the project so that we can dwell on how the story might progress the moment we get back in the door at home.
Besides that, the job may be so utterly stultifying that you can have the time to work through plotting and planning during the day, and writing by night.
There again you might have exactly the job that provides the inspiration for writing the story, and it is very useful.
That aspect worked for me because I was in the exact place that was a company like the one I was writing about, in a remote location, on an island with isolation and native people. And I had photos of the operations running since 1898.
All the more reason to seriously consider whether or not to give up your day job.
Oh, and there is one other thing. If you’re not living with your parents, you still need to pay the bills.
U is for — Underground bunkers. The end of the world is nigh
…
Chester first alerted me to the situation. Animals seemed to have that sixth sense.
It was the usual Tuesday. I got up late after he jumped on the bed and started patting my head with his paw and using his loudest meow right near my ear.
He usually did that when he was hungry, but this was an hour earlier than usual.
Going from the bedroom to the kitchen, I noticed that it was darker than usual for this time of year, and Chester was following me, making strange sounds.
When I reached the kitchen, I went over to the floor-to-ceiling windows that lined the wall that overlooked the ocean, opened the blinds, and was met by a sight I’d never seen before.
Dark clouds stretched all the way to the horizon, and rain fell, a huge stream of whitish blue slowly coming towards us.
Below the cloud, hundreds, thousands of birds were heading away from the clouds, the storm that was coming.
I turned on the radio and searched the stations until I found one that was broadcasting a weather report.
I had tried to get the television to work, but it was showing a notice that there was no signal.
That had never happened before.
Then I heard the announcer say, “People are advised to stay indoors and find a safe place. It is expected that in the next one and two hours, the coastal areas will be hit by hurricane-force winds and high seas. All those below 250 feet above sea level are requested to move to higher ground. There will be a list of alternative accommodation locations available.”
I didn’t believe what I was hearing. Chester meowed loudly, that same tortured sound he made when I was taking him to the vet for a check-up.
“I know,” I said. “We don’t have hurricanes. We’ve never had hurricanes ever.”
I heard a sudden buffeting, the wind picking up and blowing loose debris against the windows. Those windows were not going to withstand a hurricane.
“I think we’re going to have to leave.”
That statement was accompanied by a pounding on the door. Chester shrank back. Was that an omen?
I went to the door and opened it. A fireman. “We’re directly in line with the incoming storm. This place will be a death trap. You have fifteen minutes to get anything you want to keep and get out. There’s a bus at the end of the street.”
I was going to ask a question, but he put his hand up. “Fourteen minutes. Don’t make me come back.” A severe look, then he was gone.
I looked at Chester. He wasn’t happy, and neither was I. I had just taken possession of my new home three days ago, and now it looked like it might be my last.
“We have to go.”
Another guttural sound from him told me he was all of a sudden terrified, so terrified he came straight to me and almost jumped into my arms.
A second later, there was an explosion, and something hit the end window as it literally just exploded.
Time to go.
We made it to the bus, that exploding window impetus to forget about getting anything but the cat and what I had with me, and get out.
The bus didn’t wait the full fifteen minutes, but left as the last stragglers in sight ran to get on board, the last person, a teenage girl, running to jump on the running board and get on before the door closed.
The wind had already reached us, and the fireman on board said the storm was moving faster than anyone anticipated.
For the last ten minutes, we sat in a traffic jam of buses heading to the underground bus station, the safest place for us to stay. People in cars were also trying to escape, but the winds had created obstacles on the road, and confusion and tempers were causing serious problems for those trying to run an orderly evacuation.
The last thing I saw before we went under was torrential rain and high winds buffeting a sign that just collapsed on a dozen cars.
For the next fourteen days, we lived in what I thought was a huge underground space, but when twenty-three thousand terrified individuals were thrown together, it was a living nightmare.
We were told that not one but a dozen storms started from the same confluence in the Atlantic Ocean, but nobody could explain why.
After the first night and the total disorganisation that came from having a calamity thrust on totally unprepared people with very little notice, and the sound of the endless e
What sounded like explosions, howling winds, and rain, combined with the relative calm of the next morning, made it no surprise that people wanted to leave.
They were told that was only the first. No one believed them, and at the behest of one man who whipped everyone into a rebellion, led a group back out into the open. We didn’t know what was out there, well, we did, but we didn’t.
Most stayed. Several hours later, the wind and rain returned. Those who left never came back.
Others left at various intervals, particularly when it was calm. Some came back, and the rest didn’t. Those who came back didn’t speak. All of them were asked and were speechless.
We asked the people running the shelter. They said they had no other communications except with the weather people. That’s how they knew more storms were coming.
And, after fourteen days, it was over. We woke to silence. The original twenty-three thousand had been reduced to fourteen.
Three things were clear.
The first, which might have started as a storm, didn’t end as a storm. Something else had happened, and those stultified people who’d left and returned almost empty shells of themselves had seen something they couldn’t explain or comprehend.
The second, starting from a few days ago. People were getting sick, really sick, and the hushed whispers said it was Ebola, but it was worse than that. It killed all the animals without exception.
Chester hadn’t stood a chance.
The third, while it was good to escape the confines of that underground labyrinth and away from the sick people, what was outside was far more unimaginable, even incomprehensible. Whatever the city had been before, it was no longer. It had been levelled, and all that remained were ashes, smoke, and death.
And something else. Several very large objects looked to me like spaceships. What those who went out and came back were trying to tell us was that we had been invaded by aliens from outer space.
Writing exercise with the starting line – “What are you doing?” he asked, while the water rose.
…
“What are you doing?” he asked, while the water rose.
“Considering all the ways I’m going to kill you when we get out of this mess.”
“It’s not my fault. It had to be someone you’ve annoyed. I don’t have an enemy in the world.”
That might have been the case the last time I saw or spoke to him fifteen years ago, but I was not so sure that was the case now.
“Are you sure about that?”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. He had come to the airport to pick me up and take me back to the far, a place I had tried to get as far away from as possible, but luck, as it tends to do, ran out and ended my term in Washington. I’d backed the wrong horse.
I thought after so long away, the place would have changed, but it hadn’t.
Archie McKenzie was there, and made it quite plain that the bad blood between him and my brother was still running hot, had been for the past fifteen years, and now it extended to his ‘failure of a brother’.
We were lucky to get out of the terminal without a fight. That was not the worst of it, Archie had followed his father into the police, and he was now a Deputy, a Deputy driven by revenge, with a gun and a badge.
“And what would you call Archie McKenzie?”
“Misguided.”
“All these years, and he’s still mad at you.”
“I didn’t steal her away from him. She walked away, and he couldn’t take it.”
There were four different stories to that one incident, and not one of them explained his pathological hatred of my brother, and by proxy, my family.
“And now we’re here. We don’t get out of here, you know what that means.”
“How do you know he put us here?”
There were three reasons. First, he was hopeless at disguising his voice. Second, he still used the same aftershave, like he bathed in it, and third, one of his mates, Lou, said the same stupid stuff he did back when we went to school.
Archie was one of the three musketeers, or that was what they called themselves. When school was over, it took three months before I enlisted in the National Guard, and spent the next few years in places I’d rather forget. On the last tour, I sustained a few injuries and was discharged. Another guy caught in the same IED explosion asked me to come work for him in Washington as an advocate for soldiers’ care. He got elected to Congress, and I stayed on as his Chief of Staff until he lost the last election.
I thought I’d go home and work out what I was going to do next. Dying wasn’t supposed to be one of those options.
“Does it matter? We have to get out of here.”
I was working on the knots that held my hands together behind my back. Whoever tied them wasn’t very good at knots.
“What are you doing?” he asked again.
“Getting free.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Nothing is truly impossible. There’s just varying degrees of impossible.”
I managed to loosen the rope just enough to get one hand out and then untie the other. It was only a matter of a minute or so to get my feet free.
I stood up. The water had reached my ankles.
“Did you…”
“Yes.” I undid his bindings and dragged him to his feet.
I had a smaller phone tucked in the bottom of my trouser leg in a special pouch and pulled it out. It had a light and I switched it on. I would have to use it sparingly.
“Aren’t you full of surprises?”
I didn’t answer that. Instead, I looked at the floor, and the water coming in from what looked like a garden hose dangling down the side of the well, not far from us. It came from above, where there was a cover over the well. It was about ten feet wide, too wide, too smooth to climb up, but that hose presented a possibility.
To top was about twenty feet up. Putting myself in Archie’s boots, he obviously thought we would not escape the bindings and, thinking the sedative would keep us under long enough for us to drown before we realised what happened, it was a fait accompli.
Archie had never been one to consider the consequences of his actions. He always had a small-town sheriff for a father to get him out of trouble. We were not going to be able to simply go back to town. He had wanted us to disappear.
For a moment, I wondered how many other victims he had disposed of were in here?
“I assume we’re going now?”
“Not yet. I think we need to be closer to the top. I don’t think that hose will be anchored enough, and if we pull it down now, we might never get out. It will at least give us something to hold onto as we go up, so we don’t have to try too hard to tread water.
“It’s going to be cold and wet, and a long time at this rate.”
He wasn’t wrong. We’d been in the well for about half an hour, and it was only six inches deep. It was going to take about twenty hours.
“If you’ve got a better idea, please tell me.”
His silence told me that it was going to be a long wait.
…
Two hours and a foot deep, we heard a truck coming. Was Archie coming back to check on his handiwork? I tried hard to listen and see if it made the same engine noise as the one that had brought us to our watery grave.
Too hard to tell. It was a little after eleven at night. It was dark by the time we were taken off the truck and put down the well. They had removed the blindfolds, but they had their faces covered, so it was not possible to recognise them. Nor had they spoken unless it was necessary.
As for the surroundings, the night was overcast and no moon, so everything was cloaked in darkness. I thought I had seen a farmhouse or a shack, but I couldn’t be sure. I had thought it might be one of the disused farms. Several had folded after a drought struck twenty years ago, the latest disaster to befall the county and the straw that broke most of the farmers.
“You hear that?”
“It might be the people who own the place.”
“This is Dead Man’s Folly. I’m sure of it.”
I knew of it. Six farms in a small group, all suffering from the drought. This well, if it was Dead Man’s Folly, had been dry for years. The farmer spent the last of his savings digging the well, only for it to come up dry. Shot the well digger, his men, his family and then himself.
Where were the ghosts?
We hear the scrunching of tires on the gravel, a skid to a stop, then the engine running for a minute and then silence. A door opened and then closed.
There were no footsteps, or none that I could hear.
A few minutes later, the hose moved as if someone was pulling on it. Then it went limp. Someone had turned off the water flow.
Five or perhaps six minutes after that, there was a crashing sound of a sledgehammer on wood. It was the wooden cover, suddenly splintering and shards raining down on us. A dozen or so more blows and there was a hole, big enough to see the moon-lit sky.
And then the outline of a person.
“That you, Sam, down there?” A girl’s voice.
“Who are you?”
“Beth McKenzie.”
I just barely heard Jack mutter, “Jesus Christ, we’re dead.”
Yes, I know you were waiting for me to inject the spectre of espionage.
After all the new joking is an avid reader of thrillers and spy novels, so there had to be a hint of something going on.
It’s not as if he’s suspicious of his father’s death, not that it should be a big deal, considering the way his father had treated him and his brothers and sisters.
It’s like everyone is glad that he is dead, but trying not to let that show through because it just wouldn’t be right. But it is like a heavy load had been lifted, and no one is talking about it.
As if that isn’t another conspiracy theory!
So, the autopsy reports are in, and it might be construed that the doctor made sure that evil didn’t rise again. In anyone else’s book, that might be murder, but what were the circumstances?
This is not a matter for him to investigate, and he has been advised not to do it himself but to allow his head of security to carry out discreet enquiries.
This is not something that will raise its head until the next book in the series.
As for the spy, he believes he needs to look no further than his mother and her fellow countryman, who is currently in the city and who also covers his movements by being one of several investors.
Writing exercise with the starting line – “What are you doing?” he asked, while the water rose.
…
“What are you doing?” he asked, while the water rose.
“Considering all the ways I’m going to kill you when we get out of this mess.”
“It’s not my fault. It had to be someone you’ve annoyed. I don’t have an enemy in the world.”
That might have been the case the last time I saw or spoke to him fifteen years ago, but I was not so sure that was the case now.
“Are you sure about that?”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. He had come to the airport to pick me up and take me back to the far, a place I had tried to get as far away from as possible, but luck, as it tends to do, ran out and ended my term in Washington. I’d backed the wrong horse.
I thought after so long away, the place would have changed, but it hadn’t.
Archie McKenzie was there, and made it quite plain that the bad blood between him and my brother was still running hot, had been for the past fifteen years, and now it extended to his ‘failure of a brother’.
We were lucky to get out of the terminal without a fight. That was not the worst of it, Archie had followed his father into the police, and he was now a Deputy, a Deputy driven by revenge, with a gun and a badge.
“And what would you call Archie McKenzie?”
“Misguided.”
“All these years, and he’s still mad at you.”
“I didn’t steal her away from him. She walked away, and he couldn’t take it.”
There were four different stories to that one incident, and not one of them explained his pathological hatred of my brother, and by proxy, my family.
“And now we’re here. We don’t get out of here, you know what that means.”
“How do you know he put us here?”
There were three reasons. First, he was hopeless at disguising his voice. Second, he still used the same aftershave, like he bathed in it, and third, one of his mates, Lou, said the same stupid stuff he did back when we went to school.
Archie was one of the three musketeers, or that was what they called themselves. When school was over, it took three months before I enlisted in the National Guard, and spent the next few years in places I’d rather forget. On the last tour, I sustained a few injuries and was discharged. Another guy caught in the same IED explosion asked me to come work for him in Washington as an advocate for soldiers’ care. He got elected to Congress, and I stayed on as his Chief of Staff until he lost the last election.
I thought I’d go home and work out what I was going to do next. Dying wasn’t supposed to be one of those options.
“Does it matter? We have to get out of here.”
I was working on the knots that held my hands together behind my back. Whoever tied them wasn’t very good at knots.
“What are you doing?” he asked again.
“Getting free.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Nothing is truly impossible. There’s just varying degrees of impossible.”
I managed to loosen the rope just enough to get one hand out and then untie the other. It was only a matter of a minute or so to get my feet free.
I stood up. The water had reached my ankles.
“Did you…”
“Yes.” I undid his bindings and dragged him to his feet.
I had a smaller phone tucked in the bottom of my trouser leg in a special pouch and pulled it out. It had a light and I switched it on. I would have to use it sparingly.
“Aren’t you full of surprises?”
I didn’t answer that. Instead, I looked at the floor, and the water coming in from what looked like a garden hose dangling down the side of the well, not far from us. It came from above, where there was a cover over the well. It was about ten feet wide, too wide, too smooth to climb up, but that hose presented a possibility.
To top was about twenty feet up. Putting myself in Archie’s boots, he obviously thought we would not escape the bindings and, thinking the sedative would keep us under long enough for us to drown before we realised what happened, it was a fait accompli.
Archie had never been one to consider the consequences of his actions. He always had a small-town sheriff for a father to get him out of trouble. We were not going to be able to simply go back to town. He had wanted us to disappear.
For a moment, I wondered how many other victims he had disposed of were in here?
“I assume we’re going now?”
“Not yet. I think we need to be closer to the top. I don’t think that hose will be anchored enough, and if we pull it down now, we might never get out. It will at least give us something to hold onto as we go up, so we don’t have to try too hard to tread water.
“It’s going to be cold and wet, and a long time at this rate.”
He wasn’t wrong. We’d been in the well for about half an hour, and it was only six inches deep. It was going to take about twenty hours.
“If you’ve got a better idea, please tell me.”
His silence told me that it was going to be a long wait.
…
Two hours and a foot deep, we heard a truck coming. Was Archie coming back to check on his handiwork? I tried hard to listen and see if it made the same engine noise as the one that had brought us to our watery grave.
Too hard to tell. It was a little after eleven at night. It was dark by the time we were taken off the truck and put down the well. They had removed the blindfolds, but they had their faces covered, so it was not possible to recognise them. Nor had they spoken unless it was necessary.
As for the surroundings, the night was overcast and no moon, so everything was cloaked in darkness. I thought I had seen a farmhouse or a shack, but I couldn’t be sure. I had thought it might be one of the disused farms. Several had folded after a drought struck twenty years ago, the latest disaster to befall the county and the straw that broke most of the farmers.
“You hear that?”
“It might be the people who own the place.”
“This is Dead Man’s Folly. I’m sure of it.”
I knew of it. Six farms in a small group, all suffering from the drought. This well, if it was Dead Man’s Folly, had been dry for years. The farmer spent the last of his savings digging the well, only for it to come up dry. Shot the well digger, his men, his family and then himself.
Where were the ghosts?
We hear the scrunching of tires on the gravel, a skid to a stop, then the engine running for a minute and then silence. A door opened and then closed.
There were no footsteps, or none that I could hear.
A few minutes later, the hose moved as if someone was pulling on it. Then it went limp. Someone had turned off the water flow.
Five or perhaps six minutes after that, there was a crashing sound of a sledgehammer on wood. It was the wooden cover, suddenly splintering and shards raining down on us. A dozen or so more blows and there was a hole, big enough to see the moon-lit sky.
And then the outline of a person.
“That you, Sam, down there?” A girl’s voice.
“Who are you?”
“Beth McKenzie.”
I just barely heard Jack mutter, “Jesus Christ, we’re dead.”
T is for — This is not what I ordered. There’s a reason for everything
…
I knew the moment I opened my eyes that this day was going to be different.
My life had begun to sink into a rut where everyone, everything, was the same. In fact, it was so predictable that I could recite every word spoken to me and in response for the first half hour.
So monotonous, I didn’t want to go to work today, any day, any more, ever. Except I had to pay the rent, I had to pay the bills, I had to eat.
How would life have been so much easier if I were a robot?
Except…
When I turned over, ready to close my eyes and forget the alarm had gone off, I saw the one thing that changed my mind in an instant.
Beth, short for Elizabeth, not Liz or Lizzy or Bethany.
The girl I had seen at work asked about, told she was unavailable or looking for friends like me, and gave up any hope of even saying hello.
Until last night when I was holding open the door as the masses exited, and she was last in the queue. She thanked me, the only one, and I blushed. Yes, the introvert got tongue-tied.
She asked me if I was going her way, which I was, and we walked.
And talked, and talked, then went for a drink, had dinner, and no, I had no idea how she finished up next to me.
She, it appeared, was in the same group I was in, the assistant to the assistant, the gopher, doing odd jobs and worse for people who didn’t appreciate us, a stepping stone to something better, the bottom rung of the ladder to a career.
We had a lot in common.
We both had ambitions, and these were slowly being eroded by unhelpful, demeaning, and unappreciative superiors.
Now, in the cold, hard light of day, all those plans, everything we said we would do, all those strategies to put our superiors in their place, seemed a million miles away.
Except she was still there.
And I will be honest, I had no idea how or why she was. We did have a little too much to drink, something I never did on a work day, and something she said she didn’t do ever.
And I hoped nothing happened, anything that would ruin a fledgling relationship that had possibilities.
When I tried to edge myself out of the bed, she woke, surprised, but with a smile.
“Sorry.”
“For what?”
“Anything I might have said or done that I can’t remember.”
“Good thing then that I do. Did I forget to tell you that alcohol doesn’t really affect me, other than in the moment, but it doesn’t affect my judgment. You were silly, not stupid, and I thought it wise to tuck you in and make sure you were OK. Now, come back and rest for a few more minutes. I gave you my mother’s hangover cure last night, so you will be fine.”
I slid back under the covers.
“Thank you. Normally, after that much wine, I would be a mess.” I had to admit I felt almost normal except for a slight ache behind my eyes, perhaps from not enough sleep.
“You’re welcome. It was interesting to discover you hate the management group as much as I do.”
“Not so much hate as to wonder how they actually made the group. They certainly have no people skills, but at least they treat everyone the same.”
“Which is wrong?”
“Well, at the orientation, they did tell us what to expect.” Not quite, we were told that we needed to learn quickly during the internship, and that sometimes, in high-pressure situations, we might find ourselves in trouble, especially if we had the training and forgot the lessons.
That was the sticking point. Most of those in management failed to complete our training, usually because of time constraints or simply their lack of interest in ‘molly coddling’ as one called it.
“But there are ways of doing it, and ways of not doing it. Perhaps we need to remind them. Subtly.”
“Is there such a thing?”
“You said there was last night. You have so many ideas, and equally no idea how to make them happen. I’ve been thinking about it, and I have a plan.”
That morning transcended any I’d had in a lifetime and taught me one very valuable lesson. I needed to be sober and aware at all times if I wanted to impress any woman.
I knew she was just being kind to me, even though I felt like she might like me as more than just a colleague, but I would have to impress her if I wanted any sort of a chance.
It was odd that I hadn’t thought about her or any of the others in that way; such was the necessity to keep your mind on the job and keep ahead of the game. There were a dozen of us, and we were all competing for three positions, and it was coming to the end of the trial period.
No one had an edge. Trying to grovel didn’t work, trying to be better than the others didn’t work, and they let you make mistakes without telling you, which in front of the group wasn’t exactly the best way of getting any of us to stay.
Perhaps they didn’t. Perhaps those they didn’t harass out of the job were the sort of lackeys they wanted.
And apparently, I had told her that I’d been spending a lot of my spare time studying the whole financial structure of the organisation and found that our managers had been taking the wrong path
Both of us had been working on the background papers that were to be presented to the board members, and because of that, we would be allowed to sit in.
She had a plan, and when she stepped through it, I agreed with her that it might work. It just depended on one particular board member, the lone woman, Sylvia. Beth had worked with her for a week when she requested an intern from HR, one of the girls.
Unlike management, Sylvia was interested in helping the interns and taught them some valuable lessons, and this, along with the corporate knowledge we had, was either going to win us some points or get us fired. Either way, we both agreed it was better than keeping the status quo and would be worth it, one way or the other.
As usual, the two managers we worked for, each in different departments, were charged with conducting the presentation.
But, this morning my manager hadn’t arrived in time for the meeting, and it was handed to Beth. He was annoyed and those last few minutes before it was due, Beth arrived with the morning coffee run, scribbled on a piece of paper, while I distributed the papers, including those I had written that showed the true started of the business and the recommendations to put the company on a more profitable trajectory.
My speciality at uni was rescuing poor-performing companies using alternate strategies, and I had tried to get this across to the current management group, but they had consistently ignored it. It was no secret that the current strategy was not working, and the meeting with the board was to tell them how to overcome this.
What did an intern know?
Before it started, Beth handed out the morning coffee and cakes, which the presenters hoped would put the board members in a better frame of mind.
It did not.
He had got the orders wrong, yet another example of not listening properly, and the unthinkable happened. He told Beth to go and sort the mess out.
Sylvia put her hand up and asked who was responsible for writing down the orders, stating plainly that what she had was not what she ordered, and that the order, and had been taken by the manager.
Therefore, she said the manager should sort it out.
And since he had a perfectly adequate team of interns whom the presenters no doubt had gone through the presentation with as was required as part of the training standards of the organisation, the two interns could make the presentation in his place.
She then told him to leave.
The door closed, Beth made a precise of the manager’s presentation and then said that there was an alternative strategy available, one that was hot off the press and would be delivered by the person she described as a top-of-the-class strategist in reviving poorly performing companies.
She then handed the floor to me, and I went through the basics and then the specifics, closing just as the manager returned.
Over coffee, four board members grilled him over the merits of the two strategies, one of course he knew about and had discounted and now had to admit was the more successful path.
If looks could kill, there would have been two dead interns.
Meeting over, we were dismissed. The manager was kept in the room while the more senior members of management were summoned to explain how interns could possibly come up with a better strategy and why the current management team was still pursuing outdated and frankly incomprehensible methodologies.
Or at least that’s what we were told later. Both Beth and I had decided that we would pack up and leave. Even if we were right about our strategy, it was still the wrong way to go about it. Board members come and go, so currying favour with them was not a successful way to get a position in the company because they couldn’t trust you to do what you were asked to do.
We both knew that. Getting a job was on merit, but when the company’s hiring staff were not appraised, well, perhaps the company was not worth working for.
That inevitable call came from HR. It was from the same man who had conducted our interviews, the same man who basically told us we were worthless until we were forty.
It was a novel way of engendering loyalty and selling the company as a place worth working it. But that year was a difficult one, and jobs were hard to find, especially in one as prestigious to make a splash on our resumes.
We were both in the breakout area because we didn’t have a permanent office. That would have come if we were selected to stay.
I put my phone on speaker.
“You two do realise that what you did, how you did it, was not the right way. There are procedures and a hierarchy, and it should be followed.”
Beth was more blunt than I was, especially in dealing with her manager and purported mentor. She said, “A hierarchy may work in a proper environment, but this isn’t where there is one. The ideas we presented were communicated several times to the appropriate people, and they were ignored.”
“That is regrettable, but our procedures are there for a reason.”
“So the current muddle management can steal the interns’ ideas and pass them off as their own. How are you supposed to get a position here if they deliberately stifle you?”
Good point. I think most of us just accepted that was the way it is in the corporate jungle.
“I will agree that presenting something different can be delicate. But there is always a better way, and the two of you failed. Regrettably, your internships are cancelled, and you will be escorted from the building by security.”
Conversation over.
Beth shrugged. “No surprises there. No surprise either when we read about the company seeking a Chapter 17 bailout in a few weeks.”
That comment coincided with the arrival of two security guards. One would have been sufficient.
Of the two, one was the genial old man who took the time each morning to greet each of the employees by name, a remarkable feature given how many worked there.
What was more remarkable was the disdain and plain rudeness most of the staff treated him. He shook his head.
“If I were to make a bet on you two, it would be that you would be the first to show initiative and then the first to be shown the door.”
He was not wrong in our case. “You could have cleaned up.”
“I did, but not in the manner you would expect.” He didn’t tell us why, but there was a wry grin and an interesting expression on Beth’s face. Perhaps she knew. I’d ask later.”
On the ground floor, we gave back our pass keys. We had to sign an NDA, which was normal. Then, after the formalities were done, I could see Sylvia come out of the elevator lobby and head over towards us.
Beth put her hand on my arm, a sign we should wait.
She saw the old man take off his cap and smiled, “It’s been a while, Miss Sylvia.”
“Too long, Archie. Everyone fine?”
“Fine enough. Yours?”
“Spread all over the country. Can’t tie them down anymore.”
“No. Kids always seem to have a sense of adventure these days. You take care, Archie.”
She turned her attention to us. “You two should know better, but then if you did, you wouldn’t have been here. But, on the other hand, I’m glad you were. As you may or may not know, I am an investor, mostly silent, and sometimes the holdings in shares get me a seat on the board. Until this morning, I was going to sell those shares. That presentation changed my mind. And I heard what happened to both of you. It’s not surprising this company is completely off the rails. Are you two looking for a job? Of course you are. Come and work for me. Both of you. I know a team when I see one. Your first job, clean out the baggage and get this place back on track. When I see my shares for ten times what they’re worth now, you two will get a very handsome bonus. Do you need time to think about it?”
Beth looked at me, and I nodded.
“No. We’re in. When do we start?”
“Now.” Sylvia handed her a card. “That’s the office I keep. Annabel knows you’re coming. The paperwork will be there for your employment and your first assignment. Welcome aboard.”
A handshake each, and she was gone.
I was shocked at how quickly your life could change. My mother always said that in troubled times, when one door closes, another one opens.
How true.
Then I saw Beth’s look of anguish. “You do want to work with me, don’t you?”
I smiled. “Of course, I have never been more certain of anything.” I held out my hand, and she took it in hers. “That, and whatever may follow.”
There’s going to be an analogy – starting with jagged and unwieldy rocks, and after chipping away at those rough edges, what remains is a smooth, enjoyable object.
Ah, if only it were that easy….
I’m sure most of us would like to think that the first time we write the pages, it’s perfect. Why would I need to go over it again?
I might have thought that a long time ago, but back in those days when I thought I could walk on water, a friend of mine picked up a few pages of one of my manuscripts and offered to read it.
I didn;t like the idea, but he insisted.
Well, three pages and about 11 mistakes, punctuation, grammatical issues, sentence structure, and spelling. How could it miss spelling when I had the spell checker on? And what grammatical errors, I ran the grammar checker over it?
I think I realised by then that no man-made assistant tool was going to be 100% perfect, and I would have to read and edit it myself properly. Which I did, over 535 pages, and took nearly a year, and at times a wealth of frustration.
I found plot holes, one place where a character’s name had completely changed halfway through the story, and inconsistencies in the factual parts of the story.
Fact checkers? Where are you?
It caused me to make a summary of each chapter with the plot points, a chart that followed the characters and where they were participating, a timeline to make sure things didn’t happen out of order, and a family tree to get the characters in their correct places in the family hierarchy.
In other words, I should have planned it from the start!
Well, maybe.
I think in the end it was easier just to write the story than do all the planning from what I had. I found that I might not have been able to produce the story I had if I’d tried to think of everything in the beginning.
Now, I follow that, after spending a little time getting the story off the a good start, developing where it might go, and with those ideas in mind, let it run its course. And the characters do end up in their trees and timelines, as I go, so that going back and fixing problems is not so hard.
Of course, as always, I’m open to new ideas, extensions or improvements on tried and tested methodology, and any ideas you might have, I’m always open.
A morning visit to the ski fields and the resort to inspect the works and the resort’s reopening.
It hasn’t been a week, but every day has caused pain.
But our new king had an ulterior motive and wanted to go to the top of the mountain to inspect the site where his older brother disappeared.
It would make a more obvious indication of his intentions if he were to go all the way to where his older brother was last seen, but he wanted to know if there was the start of a passage, where he could have escaped.
That would have to wait until he could convince Cherise, his bodyguard, that it was vital to his investigations, something she told him was hardly worth the effort of doing it himself and would recommend someone else to do it for him.
There’s going to be an analogy – starting with jagged and unwieldy rocks, and after chipping away at those rough edges, what remains is a smooth, enjoyable object.
Ah, if only it were that easy….
I’m sure most of us would like to think that the first time we write the pages, it’s perfect. Why would I need to go over it again?
I might have thought that a long time ago, but back in those days when I thought I could walk on water, a friend of mine picked up a few pages of one of my manuscripts and offered to read it.
I didn;t like the idea, but he insisted.
Well, three pages and about 11 mistakes, punctuation, grammatical issues, sentence structure, and spelling. How could it miss spelling when I had the spell checker on? And what grammatical errors, I ran the grammar checker over it?
I think I realised by then that no man-made assistant tool was going to be 100% perfect, and I would have to read and edit it myself properly. Which I did, over 535 pages, and took nearly a year, and at times a wealth of frustration.
I found plot holes, one place where a character’s name had completely changed halfway through the story, and inconsistencies in the factual parts of the story.
Fact checkers? Where are you?
It caused me to make a summary of each chapter with the plot points, a chart that followed the characters and where they were participating, a timeline to make sure things didn’t happen out of order, and a family tree to get the characters in their correct places in the family hierarchy.
In other words, I should have planned it from the start!
Well, maybe.
I think in the end it was easier just to write the story than do all the planning from what I had. I found that I might not have been able to produce the story I had if I’d tried to think of everything in the beginning.
Now, I follow that, after spending a little time getting the story off the a good start, developing where it might go, and with those ideas in mind, let it run its course. And the characters do end up in their trees and timelines, as I go, so that going back and fixing problems is not so hard.
Of course, as always, I’m open to new ideas, extensions or improvements on tried and tested methodology, and any ideas you might have, I’m always open.
Thrills, Spills, and just a dash of Romance 