Go to Work

You have a part-time job, to go along with your part-time community college career. You aren't sure if it's actually optimal to do things this way, but in the past you've had a bad habit of trying to do both things halfway when you couldn't make up your mind. You're getting better about it.

You show up at the nondescript building in the isolated office park where you and a couple hundred other people do QA and testing for electronics and software. Your company is hired by other companies that don't want to keep their own QA staff - you're barely more than a temp. If you just stopped showing up one day, no one would miss you. It's just that if you weren't clocking in and generating work reports via your team lead, they'd stop paying you. They barely pay you anyway. On the plus side, all of the projects the company is under contract for run basically 24 hours a day, and you can show up for whatever shift you want. After wandering aimlessly around the city and trying to think your way through recent events, it's nearly dark when you get there.

You know the reason that they run things this way, with three shifts working in sequence, is that they pay more leasing the building than they bother to pay you and the rest of the staff. You think your team lead makes a dollar an hour more than you do, the floor managers make two or three more than that, and the executives all drive expensive cars made within the last three years. The CEO comes by a few times a week in a foreign sports car, a Maserati. He loves that car - he has a reserved parking space three cars wide so he doesn't have to risk anyone dinging the door. You don't know how much he's paid, but it's a lot, and he doesn't seem to actually work much.

Must be nice.

You don't really understand why you've come here, except that you're supposed to, and you don't know what else to do. Shouldn't there be more, now that you're some of warlock?

You use your ID badge to enter the building, and are ensconced in an environment of acoustic paneling and cheap gray institutional carpet. The smell of prefabricated furniture pervades the building.