The seven month contract (part 5)

As easy as my job was, I came to understand that my labor was demanded much more than my skill set. I talked to a few of my colleagues and was surprised to find out that some of them majored in non business related fields. Henry mentioned that he was a criminal justice major. Later, as the project continued, a big part of our task was to check the work that our colleagues did. One case that was stacked and reviewed would be checked by two or three other people to see if documents were missing or the wrong value was used.

There were a few potholes that we ran into along the way. Around June or July of the project, the auditing company created a program that would store all the files. This tool had a few bugs that had to be resolved during the first week. The program would time out frequently and sometimes, it would take up to a full minute or two just to upload one document. Considering that each mortgage had at least 20 documents to review, this made the job incredibly cumbersome. During implementation, our internet would go out every so often. The worst part about having the internet going out was that we had no idea how long it would go out for. It could be as short as 5 minutes or as long as 45 minutes. I even recall work being canceled one day because of technical difficulties. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize it until I showed up to the office and no one arrived for half an hour.

Sometime during June, I set up a date with Julia again. I had one very clear and simple objective. Kiss Julia. How to set that up, I didn’t know. I just knew it had to be done. We met each other at the same mall and then went to a local park just to stall for some time. There was a restaurant I was going to take her to. The biggest appeal of it was that it served hot pots and chocolate fondue. At this point in time, we had been to a number of restaurants before. I just wanted to get chocolate fondue because I hardly ever have it. However, there was something else to it. Fondue requires skewers to dip food into the chocolate. I wanted to do the gesture of feeding chocolate covered strawberries to Julia and vice versa.

The pot was in front of us and the waiter set down a plate of fruits, marshmallows, candies, and  pretzels. We each ate a few pieces then I took one of the strawberries, dipped it in the chocolate, and fed it to her. She was apprehensive at first to bite it but then did the same with a banana slice and fed it to me. It was a little awkward at first because we had to make sure not to miss each other’s mouth or hurt each other with the skewer. To play with her a little bit, I made sure to dip my pieces of fruit in the white chocolate before feeding them to her. Eventually, we were able to feed each other pieces of fruit at the same time. She bit a dipped strawberry on my end while I bit a dipped pineapple on her end. I picked up the bill and the total cost came out to be less than $17. I didn’t mind paying. After all, it was less than one hour of work for me.