In the beginning....
Today started like any other; with the sun rising in the east, and setting in the west; with people waking up, percolating some coffee and eating breakfast before hurriedly rushing to work. My day on the other hand, began with waking up in the bathtub covered in all sorts of bodily fluids. This has been a much more common event than I would like to admit, but that's the truth of it. I had emptied an entire bottle of whiskey which lay at the side of the bathtub where the mat would be if I cared enough to have one. I have no kids, no wife, heck I don't even have a girlfriend.
You might be asking yourself; how did he end up this way? I know I am. I used to be a straight shooting no nonsense manager for a large warehouse job making six figures a year. And then Todd Remsfield just had to come to tell the CEO lies about me. I worked myself to the bone every single day, then Todd, fresh out of college, comes in and tells the CEO that I have been slacking and that he could improve profits. I won't bore you with the details, but a few weeks later, security escorted me off the premises. It may have had something to do with a Louisville Slugger and Todd's head. I smirked at the police as they put me in the back of the squad car while Todd found his way into the back of an ambulance.
After that, my scathing record sends up a huge red flag to any and all potential employers. That was 6 months ago. Since then I spent a month in jail, hit with a huge fine since the corporation hired the best lawyer and I was stuck with a public defender. I have been using the job searching community online and temp agencies, but the pay from fast food restaurants and mediocre warehouse jobs don't cover the payments I had every month. And to top it all off, my girlfriend of 3 years left me because I have "anger issues". I briefly thought about telling her mom that her trip to Paris was actually a trip to rehab to try and stop using drugs, but I felt like taking the moral high ground and kept her secret…. For now anyways.
That about sums up the last 6 months, debt, hardship, broken relationships and it was all based on a lie told to the CEO by Todd. What lie could have been so bad as to have such repercussions you may ask? He told the CEO that I was having an affair with his wife. Intellicorp is a billion dollar software company pioneering the use of artificial intelligence in everyday items. So naturally his wife is smoking hot and he gets jealous easily. This is where the story begins so rather than talking about why I am staring at three shower heads, I will start with my first day at Intellicorp.
The first day at Intellicorp started with me being issued my badge to access the upper floors, and a brief tour of the facility. It was a 6 story building with floors 2, 3 and 4 dedicated to three different aspect learning groups. What I mean by that is to have 3 artificial intelligence learn in 3 separate ways to make sure our products don't go full Terminator on us in the future. The building had floor 5 dedicated to storage of files the corporation had filed away from the years before cloud computing. And there was the admin floor which was on floor number 6. You may have noticed that I left out the first floor and any basement floors out of my early assessment. That is because all that the first floor had was Human resources and a cafeteria, along with a massive entry and a waterfall that spilled water from the top floor all the way down. It had fake rocks protruding to make it look as if it came straight out of the amazon rainforest. The waterfall had foliage and a nice scent coming from it that made me think of lilacs in full bloom. The entryway was adorned with glass windows and spotlights which were not needed in the early morning sun but would be necessary to grasp the full image on those late nights that were to come.
My tour was administered by the CEO himself. His name is Richard Jackson. He told me that his name was as such but his friends call him Tex. I quirked my eyebrows and asked the obvious question that he's been asked a hundred times. "Why do they call you Tex?.
"When you become good friends with me, you will know" he winked and proceeded to ask me very ordinary things like do you have a wife, kids, family of any kind, etc.. I really can't recall it all because that was five years ago and everything was kinda rushing in all at once.
When I asked about the Basement, I was told it was all plumbing and mechanical stuff that I didn't need to worry about so I took that at face value. What can I say? I was new and I wasn't going to question the CEO who just handed me a job making six figures right out of college. I may have been dumb, but I wasn't stupid.
There was a lot to take in on that first day. I felt honored to meet the CEO right out the gate but also super excited to start making some real cash. My MBA in business from Oxford university was quite expensive after all. My first night after work, I lied down in my bed and wrapped my arms around my girlfriend Natasha. She was beautiful, stunning really. She stood 5 foot nothing with shoulder length red hair and a smile that showed brilliant white teeth. Her Hourglass body cradled me and I could feel her warmth soothing any bit of me that was feeling tense. I was 25 years old, and a tense body was a new concept to me.
I had spent years working towards an MBA in business management working through classes I knew would be useless, or at least so I had thought at the time. I never thought that a manager of a business would use anatomy and physiology, but here I am.