The Experiment © [Completed]

Chapter 1 - The Assignment

HER

Dei clicked her mouse on the scroll bar lazily as she went through the rest of her Twitter feed. She had her chin propped on the palm of her left hand and she was pretty sure she had yawned five times already in the last ten minutes.

How? How did her dream job become so boring and stagnant after just three months?

For the past four weeks, she had been assigned to nothing more than finding the most "news-worthy" Twitter post on Twitterverse. News-worthy, in their company sense, didn't necessarily mean something that had been extraordinary or life changing. Actually, any tweet that had gathered huge attention from the Twitter peeps would do. There were actually a lot, but being the perfectionist that she was, she wanted to find something that actually made sense.

Dei Mendoza was a 25-year old mass communications graduate who majored in journalism from one of the most prestigious schools in the country. She had worked for a small time fashion magazine before landing a job at this internet media company just three months ago.

The company - TrendBuzz - was actually based in New York city and described itself as a social news and entertainment company. It had become so popular internationally that in just three years after it made its debut in the internet media, it had already managed to establish branches in different parts of the world, including the Philippines.

For three years, since TrendBuzz opened locally, Dei had dreamt of becoming part of its talented and creative pool of writers, researchers, videographers and social media experts. She had tried to apply several times but it proved to be very difficult without back-up... until she won a contest that the company opened for writers four months ago. The contest became her ticket to making herself known by the company and she did make a very good impression through her feature piece. Less than a month after she had won, one of the editors called her and offered her a job.

Dei had been ecstatic! She'd always admired how laid back and creative the company and its staffs were. She loved that they could write about, do almost anything, and could be totally crazy with their ideas, and their works would still be considered genius and would be adored by millions of its social media fans.

Her first month had been great. It was spent mostly helping out with the researching part, but on her second month, she realized that the job wasn't actually as exciting as she thought it would be.

Most of the interesting assignments were being given to more tenured staffs. They got to try out products or regimens used by popular celebrities locally and internationally, they got to live like those celebrities for a day, and from time to time they take part in social experiments that were always a huge hit. They usually made hilarious videos too. Newbies like her, however, were stuck in searching for "news-worthy" feeds in social networking sites.

Probably the most exciting thing that had happened to her in the last two months was the little science project she had volunteered in, and was held at their town hall area in the cafeteria two weeks ago.

TrendBuzz, being the crazily creative entity that it was, decided to use the live feed feature of Facebook yet again and had a few of its staffers do a crazy experiment for all of its Facebook followers to see: "How Long Does It Take For a Balloon Filled With Talcum Powder to Explode?"

A group of six staffers banded together to find out just how long, exactly, it would take to blow up a giant balloon filled with talcum powder. The question, in fact, was so important that more than 100,000 people stopped what they were doing Thursday afternoon to watch the answer unfold.