Chapter 4

It was now Tuesday morning, yesterday had been so good to me. As usual my alarm went off at 6:30 am for me to wake up to get ready to go off to work. The rain was pouring down the wind was blowing, a cold wet miserable day it was going to be. My bed was warm and comfortable, I was now a billionaire, so stuff work. A billionaire, billion is a lot of money, so I started to run through a few numbers in my head, after all numbers are a big part of being an engineer. Working in round figures I did a few quick calculations, with $1,000,000,000 available to me, in a rash, mad spending spree I went out and spent one million per day, that is $1,000,000 it would take me one thousand days to spend it all or about two and three quarter years. I would not be able to keep up with that rate of spending for that amount of time. Next I did a few simple calculations of the amount of income that $1,000,000,000 could generate at low risk. Just putting it into a bank account and getting two percent interest in a year I would earn $20,000,000 that is twenty million for just doing what I am now, lying comfortably in my bed on a cold bleak morning. that would be, again in round figures around fifty four thousand, seven hundred and ninety five dollars per day. As this money does not need weekends, public holidays or vacation time it will happily just work away twenty four hours per day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty five days per year. Thinking about it, my money invested in stable low risk investments, will, for sure, be more that enough for all my needs. Why with this money in a simple fixed term deposit bank account would have earned at least five thousand for lying in my for a couple of hours. that's more than I get for being James Fredericks work slave for a month.

This little lay in has helped me get my head around a few things. the first thing I need is to find a good reliable and honest accountant to manage my finances. The best Accountant for my needs would be boring, dry, no sense of humor. I was going for a boring unimaginative, safe investments, as low risk as possible. Too much creativity in Accountants normally means future fraud investigations or a visit from the tax department. I had already worked out conservative, low risk was for me, I don't require the Billionaire lifestyle, the pressure to keep up with that life is not for me. To keep my life as simple as possible, I would need to limit the persons to the absolute minimum, that would know of my new status. I was not even going to let my parents know. If my mother knew, she would spread it around and start marketing me as a rich and very desirable young man needing a good wife and before long there would be long queues of women gold diggers lining for a chance of staking a claim. At this point I rang into work to report in sick and would try to come in tomorrow , or at the latest Thursday. The person who picked up the phone had an unfamiliar voice. Allison must be busy and someone else answered the phone.

It was Thursday before I bothered to turn up for work. These were the first sick days I had ever taken. I know it is an asshole thing to do, take sick days when you are not sick. But it is not, more of an asshole I am trying to be. There was someone new sitting at the reception desk, where Allison would normally be. I greeted this new person " Good morning. I am William Ferris. I have been off sick for a couple of days." and headed out the back to the small space that passed for my office and work area. I the as usual went to the break room for a coffee. The place was buzzing with the latest gossip. After Monday's little display by Allison and James they had both been fired. In the two days I had been away, my work remained the same. I was still doing the job that James had been employed to do, still not at the same rate of pay that James had been paid. I noted the small improvement in the process, by removing the middle man James, I was receiving my instructions directly from the next level up. No longer did I need to decipher incoherent ramblings and battered scraps of paper that James considered to instructions for the projects he had supposedly been working real hard on.

With the much better information, I was now being provided with, I probably could complete much of this work in half the time I had been taking, and I did, but I still took about the same amount of time before I passed it on, and made use of this time for my benefit. I still needed to find someone solid and reliable, completely honest and trustworthy to manage my fiance and legal requirements. As is normal in this modern age, I started my search with google and the internet. I would need legal as well as financial services, there were plenty with shiny metal and glass offices, not many that offered the legal component that goes with the financial services without engaging a second company into the mix. Remaining anonymous and hiding the knowledge of my true wealth was important, the more actual people involved, the more who would know this secret and the more chance of that secret becoming public knowledge. Nothing I had turned up on the internet felt the right fit for me.

This part of the equation I need to solve, I had made no further progress on. I was getting no closer to a solution. I was almost at the stage of writing some names on pieces of paper, placing them in a box, shuffle them around,close my eyes and select one at random. I decided I would shift my desk a bit as it was not quite in the best place. Being low in the food chain around here my desk had seen way better days. I noticed one corner required, what looked like an old telephone yellow pages to hold it up. Just for a bit of nostalgia I dragged it out to have a look. So this is how things were done, in the past, before google and the internet. I took a quick look at the Financial Services listings, just for interest. There was a listing for H & R Freidman Finance and Legal Services Ltd. A husband and wife team, an accountant and Lawyer combination. They looked to be just what I was looking for. Probably long ago retired, but I'll take a chance, it costs nothing to ring. I dialed the number and it rang. It rang for about thirty seconds and I was just about to hang up when, " H & R Freidman Finance and Legal Services Ltd. Hiram Freidman speaking, how can I help."