Damon dreamed of Excel spreadsheets and Word document reports in 11 point Arial. He sat in his office reading reports from Team Eta, endless reports. This one was about the auto-feeding spork, and how it had failed test after test for the last year.
Team Eta, he soon realized, was Team Ninth Circle Of Hell. Nothing they were given to test had gone into production for about a year now. The same six mages were field testing, alpha-testing, beta-testing, and reporting, reporting, reporting. Things seemed to churn in Team Eta for years and years, until they were finally sent back as failures. By then, people forgot about it, and tossed the testing and the magical item away.
He was now in charge of Team Eta, and he was bound and determined to get one thing out the door of his testing facility, even if it was as useless as a spork.
“Burning the midnight oil?” came a voice.
Damon looked up and thought he was dreaming. A tall, handsome man stood in his doorway. He wasn’t dressed in the uniform of the company – flowing red robes. He was dressed in a suit. He had short dark hair, a goatee, and blue eyes. Beyond him, Damon saw, the rest of the offices were dark.
Damon blinked, rubbed his eyes. Yes, the man was still there. He was smiling at him. He was really good looking, and looked somewhat familiar.
“Me?” Damon said. “No, not really.” He pushed himself back from the computer as if to prove to the man he wasn’t overly ambitious. “I’m just finishing up.” He glanced at the computer, wondering if he should take the report home with him and finish it on his laptop.
“Don’t let me stop you, Mr. Emmett. If you were working, you can continue. If you really weren’t working, you can quit.” He grinned. “You can make your own hours here.”
“I know,” he said, “but I still need to be responsible.”
“What’s the project?”
Damon tilted his head. At first, he was going to ask the man who the hell he was. But a sense of trust came over him. He straightened his head and stated, “A spork.”
“The auto-feeding spork? I thought that failed after it put someone’s eye out.”
“They continue to test it. I think I know what’s wrong with it.”
“You do?”
Damon said, “It’s supposed to automatically scoop up just enough, and come up just high enough to get into your mouth. It can scoop fine, but it’s getting to people’s mouths that’s the problem. Everyone is an individual, and has a different distance from the plate to their mouth. And then there’s how much people can open their mouths to take the food. And how long it takes for someone to chew.”
The man sat on the corner of Damon’s desk. He didn’t care much for the familiarity, but the trust sense seemed to fill his mind. He studied the shape of the man, his straight lines and angles, his broad chest and slim waist. The man said, “So what do you suggest?”
“Well, one idea is that we can’t mass-market it; it has to be made on an individual basis. Another idea is to have the spork be ‘trained’ to know the distance between the person’s mouth and the plate. But that means it can only be used with one table, one plate, one chair, and one person. It has to be the same every time.”
“Interesting. Then the onus would be on the end-user to have to work with the item. What if the end-user can’t train it for some reason?”
“Like someone who can’t use their arms? The trainer would have to be a third party. The end-user would have to keep absolutely still and in the same position. Also, I would change it from a spork to a plain old spoon, and market it to the elderly who eat pureed food.”
“It was meant to be a novelty item,” said the man. “Something that the common man could say they owned a functional piece of magic.” He stroked his goatee, the classic stance of someone who was thinking. “I wasn’t thinking of even marketing it to people who had no arms or couldn’t feed themselves. Interesting. Yes, I think it could be done.” He got off the desk. “Do it.”
“I can’t,” said Damon. “I’m only in charge of testing. I can’t change the –”
The man studied him. “I think you should be this project’s manager. Of course, it means an increase in pay, and possibly an increase in hours, but I can see that won’t bother you.”
The sense of trust dissipated as Damon grew confused. “Wait. Who are you, anyway?”
The man laughed and stood up. He held out his hand and introduced himself, “Raynard Johansson, CEO.”
Damon’s jaw dropped. “You’re the owner. And – and you sent me the letter.”
“I knew I was hiring a good employee,” he said. Damon gingerly took Raynard’s, who shook Damon’s hand firmly. “Yes, I think project manager is where you need to be.”
“Th – thank you, sir,” said Damon.
He waved his hand. “Call me Ray.” He looked around the office. “You’ll need a bigger office. With a large whiteboard. You’ve only been here for three weeks? So you shouldn’t have too much stuff to move.”
“Uh, okay. But what about the guy who’s the project manager now?”
“Leave that to me,” said Raynard.