CH2 (524), Prelude To The Practical Year (2)

The 18th month was once again one that had 6 weeks with 2 of them being single-day weeks, and Grouday being the first one. It was on Dialday of week two, that I decided to pay the labor agency I hired another visit.

It was time to see whether I could fill up some more slots on my list or not. So far, I had only filled a fourth of the 24 positions, and the deadline I set for the 1st of 2185 was only half a year away.

Once I made it to the agency, I notified the front desk of my arrival and they informed the agent assigned to me that I had arrived. It seemed that Viola was once again responsible for receiving me since she was the one who came over to welcome me a few minutes after the clerk's call.

She greeted me warmly but looked a bit surprised when she noticed Mothra/Butterfree lounging on my head. Mothra gave her a wave and happy thrill when she saw Viola looking at her, and Viola returned her greeting before asking me to follow her to her office as if that was perfectly normal.

Once we were in her office, she once more brought out the tablet she handed me last time and took a seat beside me while I looked at my file/folder on the tablet. I went to the first occupation folder on the index, hoping that I would be able to fill in at least one of the four slots for cooks.

My requirement for the cooks was that they had actual cooking experience, and I was not talking about fancy cooking, but cooking for a lot of people. Well, the food they cooked had to be proper food as well, so simply working at a burger joint did not count, but I was more interested in volume than reputation.

There were quite a few applicants for the position, which was good since I had been a bit worried that the scattered working hours might be a bit unattractive, but it seemed the payment I promised was enough to balance that out.

The cooks would have to work 6 hours each day, but only 2 hours at a time. 2 hours in the morning from 7 to 9 a.m. to prepare breakfast, two hours in the noon from 12 to 2 p.m. for lunch, and 2 hours in the evening from 5 to 7 p.m. for dinner.

Considering that they had to do this each day of the week, I actually considered whether I should raise the quota of cooks. However, I decided to keep it at 4 until the number of kids at the orphanage exceeded a certain number. Until then, the cooks would be able to work in shifts as long as 2 or 3 of them were able to handle the workload.

Anyway, some of the cooks that applied were rather impressive. Not because of their cooking ability, but due to their work experience. Some applicants had worked in the military canteen, while others worked for the PokeCenter or Hospital.

Honestly, I had a hard time deciding whom to choose since 7 out of the 34 applicants elicited my interest. Still, in the end, I chose to go with the 4 I found the most impressive.

Brian, who used to work at a military canteen for 16 years before leaving the military was the first one whose file was marked. As an ex-soldier, cook or not, he could be considered someone capable, which meant that he could act as added security while he was at the orphanage.

Brian being an ex-soldier was also why I paid attention to the fact that he submitted a clean psychological report. I was admittedly impressed that he thought about adding that to his application.

Aside from Brian, the other cooks I chose were Natasha, who used to work at a hospital canteen for 5 years, and Sarah, who worked at a PokeCenter Canteen for 8 years, along with Matthew, who used to be Sarah's coworker. Furthermore, Brian, Sarah, and Matthew could be considered retired Junior-Class trainers since they had 4 to 6 bronze-stage Pokemon.

After marking the application of all 4 of them, I requested Viola to inform them that there would be a final meeting/job interview on the 1st of 2185 before I officially hired them. Once I had dealt with that, I moved on to the next folder.

I had initially been on the lookout for 4 housekeepers, so that they could work in 2 shifts, with two people per shift. The shifts were from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m., and 1 p.m. to 7 p.m., each day of the week.

However, while I was looking through the applications, I decided to increase the number of housekeepers to 6, so that 2 of them could deal with both shifts during the weekend.

Honestly, the only requirement I had for this job was that they had prior experience in cleaning and that they looked decent enough not to intimidate or agitate the children. I mean, I was sure that shopping was not a problem for any of the applicants.

Still, considering the size of the orphanage building I decided to go with the younger applicants. I choose 4 young ladies in their early 30s, and 2 men of that age group as well. All of them had prior experience as cleaners, and the men would be able to do the heavy lifting if necessary.

Once I had requested Viola to inform them as well, I focused on the actual caretakers. I already had filled 3 out of the 6 positions, but looking at it now, their working hours were even harder than that of the housekeepers, since they had to work 12 hours each day, from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Considering that, it was a wonder that I had received any applications at all, not to mention as many as I did. Still, while working those hours might be okay for a year or so, I was not willing to test if they could keep it up for more. I wanted proper employees, not expandable ones, so I adjusted the working hours and divided them into two 6-hour shifts.

The individual shifts were from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m., and 1 p.m. to 7 p.m., and I also expanded the number of job slots to 8, so that there could be at least 4 caretakers during each shift. I used at least because I was going to leave them the option to apply for both shifts if that was what they wanted. The per-hour pay was set anyway, so how much they earned/worked depended on their choice.

I informed Viola of the change and asked her to inform the previously accepted 3 applicants of it as well to see if they still wanted the job or not. The same was naturally also true for the current applicants, which was why I did not accept any of them for now. There were none that I felt I had to hire immediately anyway.

After that, I moved on to the live-in caretaker folder. There were quite a few applicants of which roughly 20% were men, but I only looked at them superficially to see if any truly outstanding ones were among them, which wasn't the case.

There were a few pretty good ones, but they were not worth changing my initial all-female live-in caretaker plan. At least I thought that until I went through all the female applicants. It appeared that the employment of one of the applicants had an interesting condition/request attached to it.

Anna Bell requested that her husband Zach Bell should be employed as a live-in caretaker along with her. I had seen his application while looking at the male ones, and he was definitely qualified for the position.

The reason I was even considering accepting her request despite my prior decision to go with only females for the live-in caretakers was because Anna had the best qualifications among all female applicants and her husband was slightly better than nearly all the other female applicants as well.

Not only did Anna have 24 years of experience as a daycare employee, of the human variety, but she was also a retired Senior-Class trainer, with a full silver stage team along with a gold stage ace Pokemon. Her husband was a retired Senior-Class trainer as well, though his team was a bit weaker since he had no gold-stage Pokemon.

Zach had 17 years of experience as a daycare employee, and that was actually where they met each other. Considering that they were less than 70 years old, and still had multiple centuries ahead of them, they only looked like they were in their mid to late twenties.

I marked the files of the two and requested Viola to inform them of the appointment on the 1st of 2185. With the addition of these two, all 4 live-in caretaker slots were filled, and impressively 3 of them were retired trainers of decentish strength. Counting the others that had decent Pokemon, my potential/future employees actually formed a small but okayish trainer force.

Honestly, I was absolutely sure that they could earn multiple times the amount I was offering if they actually went out into the wild or did trainer errands, but I had no reason to complain if they wanted to work for me instead. They could always do so after a decade or two if they wanted to since they had the lifespan for it.

Moving on, I decided to delay the choosing of the clerk until I had found a live-in matron, and sadly I did not find one of those this time around as well. Though, I did add another lady called Penny to the list of prospective ones in addition to Martha.

Unlike those two positions, I did fill the position of the Janitor and handyman. Robert Bard was the one who got the janitor position, while Samuel Bright and Dean Prince got the positions as handymen. It was honestly surprising how many people had applied for these positions considering that the Janitor had to be on a 24/7 standby with a 2-hour daily check-up from 12 to 2 p.m., while the handymen had to work 6 days a week from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

The main reason I chose these three, in particular, was that they had Machop, Machoke, and/or Poliwhirl as Pokemon, and those Pokemon could help them with their job.

With those positions filled as well, all that was left were the 5 caretaker spots I had yet to fill, along with the clerk and live-in matron spots before I was done with the list of employees. Seeing how there was nothing else I could do, I thanked Viola for her help and left after making another appointment on the 36th of 2184 to check the applications for the last few free positions.

The days following that visit fell back into the previous rhythm with nothing notable happening until Grouday of week four. During the weekly check-up that day, I noticed that Abzu/Milotic had actually started his official limit-breaking phase, and coincidentally, he was not the only one.

Hashirama/Venusaur had apparently managed to reach that point as well sometime during the week since he stood out during the check-up as well. I was naturally happy to see two more of my Pokemon reach that point, and since it had been some time since the last celebration, we threw one that evening.

Though it appeared that if we had waited a few more days, we would have had a significant reason for a celebration because I got some major news on Palkiday of week 5.

It was none other than Horus/Xatu, who came up to me after lunch and quietly asked me to take a look at his status. I naturally knew what this request implied, and happily agreed. I looked at his status sheet, specifically his parameter section, and as he/we had expected Horus had completed his limit-breaking phase.

He was now ready to break through to the dark gold stage as well, which meant that hopefully, Utopia would finally go through the long-awaited upgrade. Me having 3 dark gold stage Pokemon after his breakthrough was no problem since I got the green light from the alliance, so everything was alright on that front.

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