after graduation. They
wanted to place him originally in a division which monitored programs
that allowed people to access their retirement accounts, but soon
realized he was capable of so much more. David put in the minimal
work he could during the day while trying to find some field he could
make decent money in during the evening. The life of a corporate man
who trudged to work every day and was glad to receive his annual
bonus check and be idled every five years was not for him. David
wanted more. He wanted to start a company which would generate enough
cash to allow him to buy whatever he wanted. And date super models.
Jada
realized she still was going to be on the hook for the student loans
she had taken out in a few years if she didn’t get her degree.
Instead of earning a teaching degree at a prestigious Midwestern
university, she opted for one of the state teacher colleges which was
close to where she lived with her mother. Her brothers were well on
their way to careers of their own. She needed to get the degree
finished so she could pay off the loans and take care of her mother.
Her mother had worked at a grocery store all her life and needed
help. Although her father had not made a big income as a church
pastor, he had been able to support his children and see they got a
good education.
Some
days David would look up from his computer and think about the
gorgeous black woman he had seen in college. She had to leave because
of a death in the family. Would he ever see her again? He’d
tried to find out where she had returned so as to send her a letter
or email, but the college was forbidden to divulge personal
information. Even the people at her Go club didn’t know where
she had gone back to. After a few weeks of trying, he gave up and
moved on to his studies. Women would come later, grades and school
first.
Jada
would think about the clumsy white boy with the computer science
background at times. She was too involved with caring for her mother
and trying to finish her teaching degree to think of much else. He
had been charming and his degree could have made him marriage
material. She didn’t know what her mother and father would’ve
thought, but interracial couples were becoming more prominent. How
her father would have handled her bring home a white boy was never
answered as her father had passed on before it ever became an issue.
It was
during the first year after college that David hit on an idea which
would make him some money for the first time. He’d noted the
inability of the food vendors at the place he worked to calculate how
much food was needed for the vending machines. Since spoilage was
always a concern, it would have been nice to compute the daily uses
of the machines. At a huge financial institute such as where he
worked, the amount of food the machines could consume daily was
enormous. David made a casual inquiry to the owner of the company in
the evening and found out how the machines recorded what was being
sold on which day. It was a simple thing to make changes to the
machines’ basic software and have a real time data-dump which
told the company every hour what was being sold. He made enough off
the software to quit his boring job at the financial company and
start his own software company. The financial company was not pleased
to learn David had used them as a spring board to his success, but
there was nothing they could do about it.
Jada
finished school about a year after David due to some problems she had
transferring credits. She was forced to sit out for one term while
trying to straighten out her father’s estate. Her mother was in
no condition to talk to a lawyer, leaving the job to Jada. I took her
two months working with the courts and church to get everything
situated and when it was over her mother owned the house she had
lived in with her husband and raised three children. Jada could feel
a bit of ease now that it was done. Her mother was able to get some
retirement money
Erin Kelly, Chris Chibnall