Not a Reunion

Chapter 8

Mason

The last couple of weeks have been busy. My schedule has been fully packed with interviews upon interviews. Everything was going well at the other location, so there have been a few people sent over to help me. They are temporarily here to assist me with all the things I needed to get sorted out.

The biggest problem now was the fact that I had no clients and no employees. I had no one working with me, and that needed to change. If I were the only one here, how would we get any work done? Which led to me having to put out job offers. I started doing it on the day of the banquet, which was a perfect opening.

There were a lot of people there; some had their own jobs already, but others didn't. Those are the people I had a brief talk with, just letting them know that I was hiring. With it being the official opening day, a lot of people took interest.

But I couldn't just hand out jobs; with our team collaborating through endless meetings, we had to figure it out together. There was a lot of process involved in hiring someone—something I had known with the number of applications I used to send out, but now I was on the other side of the spectrum. I was now on the side of someone who was the one doing the hiring and not the teenagers looking for a job.

There were a lot of good candidates, and so far I have had a few employees. But we were looking for more—for others that were still interviewing.

I'm tired after my fifth interview of the day and look up at the clock. It was still only one o'clock, which meant I wasn't able to head home until a few hours later. It seemed I had been here for longer because of how redundant everything is starting to be. It felt as though my day had been going slower and slower than I would have wanted it to.

After I dismissed the person I interviewed—one who was definitely one of the people I wanted to hire—it really didn't depend on me; it depended on who my employer would choose. I was merely the person who interviewed the people, drafted up a summary, and left the rest in the hands of another person. That is why I find this portion of the job hard, because when I smile at the person I'm interviewing, I know they feel hopeful. I tell them that I hope only for it to not be up to me.

Maybe I needed to stop smiling at the people, but that seemed rude. I didn't want to be respected by one of the boss's people just because they were rude and demeaning. I wanted to be known as someone exactly the opposite of that—someone who had a reputation for being nice. That is how I wanted to earn my respect.

I needed to be the one person my younger self had searched for.

I checked my schedule to see if there were any other meetings for the hour, but the next one is at two o'clock. That meant I had an hour to get done with anything else that I hadn't had the time to catch up on. Which wasn't a lot considering the act of saving something to do later at a rushed time was not of my interest. I needed to be on top of my work. I needed to be on top of everything I needed to do because I couldn't risk losing everything I had.

I couldn't risk going back to the person who had to wait for their next paycheck to find a little contentment in their life.

I start to go over the interview sheets that I have done today, my eyes locked in on the words I'm reading. This person was smart, organized, and driven, from what I can tell from past job experiences. I needed someone like that on my team; I needed someone who would be perfect for the tasks I'd assigned. This person, Glenn Beckel, was the perfect candidate for an open position. I started to work on the interview draft by pulling out all the nice things I could say. What I said played a little bit of a factor in who could get hired, so I'm doing my part well.

While finishing off the task at hand, I hear a shuffling outside my door. I looked ahead, my head turning while I still typed, but found that no one was there. That checked out—my next interview was in twenty minutes, and no one would arrive that early. I ignored the shuffling I heard and got back to business.