The next day, Jo got the call she’d been waiting for, and spent the rest of the day celebrating her new-found employment. Celebrating in this case meant doing some proper shopping for real groceries; even the return of the rains couldn’t dampen her spirits.
She was to start work the next week, and she wasted no time making sure she was prepared with all the right wardrobe items for her first day. She spent a lot of time badgering Quinn to make sure he was ready as well; he’d been hired for the original position, apparently along with several other new employees. He didn’t really need to be pestered to get ready, she knew, but she couldn’t help herself; it was good for him, she was sure.
Finally, the big day arrived. The leaky gray skies and relatively drab mail room did nothing to lessen her enthusiasm; real food could do a lot for your mood, she realized.
Dunn was her reporting manager, it turned out. He was much more dour than he had been the previous week, but then, it was Monday. There were three other people in her group, and a half dozen in Quinn’s, plus him and two new additions. Quinn’s group was the more traditional ‘mail room’ type staff; her group, in contrast, were the site inspectors.
She found it strange that there were so many site inspectors, but when she asked Mike, the most senior of them, he explained, “We’re actually a bit understaffed. The trading volume the company does is pretty huge, and with only a small handful of us, it can be hard to keep up with everything. We’re glad to have you on board!”
“Thanks, it’s good to be here. What am I going to be doing first?”
“We’ll want to get you out in the field as soon as possible, but it’s important that you get to know things around here for a while. You’ll spend this first week working in our archives, getting a sense for what holdings we have, the sorts of things we look for in our investments, the types of issues we flag and so on and so forth. Next week we get you out in the field.”
“That fast, huh?” She was startled.
“Don’t worry, you’ll be with one of us at first. We move quickly, but we don’t move that quickly with first-timers.”
If you're enjoying this story, you might enjoy Prices, a set of proto-Steampunk tales set in the same world as this story. They're available as a free preview eBook.
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