Chapter 1

Can this bed be any lumpier if they tried? Damn that was one weird as hell dream. I have no idea how I am not stuck to the sheets. I guess places like this just have super semen sucker sheets, I thought to myself as I tried to find my phone to shut off the annoying alarm. I am going to kill that little smartass in tech support for pushing that damn klaxon alert to my phone as my alarm sound with no way to disable the damn thing or turn it off.

My name is Joe Johnson and I work for a tech firm selling our various software products. Sales hates me because I outsell them three to one. They screwed the boss over with an airtight contract that gives them most of the commission I earned, by myself, to the regional sales team. The only thing I get out of it is a well-funded toy budget to use however I like. Nothing makes my fellow in the pits geeks drool like way ahead of bleeding edge toys they can actually play on instead of just canned marketroid Power Point slides.

I am still figuring out what all that has happened to me since I left to fly up for the presentation today.

Right on queue "the airline" screwed me out of my first class seat, banishing me to some shithole in the back of the plane. There I was joined by a four belter man and two, three-belter women, one of which lost it and had a major panic attack that caused us to divert to get her off the plane. Now this is all par for the Joe Johnson flying adventures.

From there is got fuzzy. It is just not possible that I hooked up with a group of teenage girls that wanted me to knock them up to screw over one of their dads. I am lucky if I can manage to out logic a two bagger, flabby geek chick once every couple months. Sure sometimes fate will give me an early twenties female, trim, big breasted programming nymphomaniac intern candidate looking to fuck me to try to get one of the few slots. We only found a few that passed muster. Once they got into their work their sex drive decreased in direct proportion to their weight gain.

Well I have no time to try to clear anything up right now; I need a shower and get down with my gear so I can get Uber on the way. If I don't I will never get to the sales meeting on time. Hopefully the water here is not too damn cold.

Damn it! Just what I needed today.

Either no water or scalding hot water dripping slowly out of two tiny holes on a clogged shower head. I knew better! There is no excuse for me not having had it soaking overnight in vinegar.

What did they slip in my water at the office? I want more for those long holiday weekends I spend all alone. Oh well, looks like it is wet wipes for me today.

So after cleaning myself up the best I could, shuffling everything down to the lobby, and Uber on the way, I found a real surprise. The hotel has a semi-real "breakfast" here! Sure it is all vending machine fare from a warehouse club and ice cream cups of juice, but nothing is expired and the juice is not even room temp yet.

"Man you want to put a bet on that fight," the smelly kid in the dirty wife beater shirt asked from behind the desk as I dropped bits of stale crusty biscuit for the mice and cockroaches to fight over. "I never tried that on day shift."

After Uber had three drivers cancel out the fare, after accepting it and two more called me to say they could not find the hotel; I went ahead to risk hoofing it the five blocks to the customer's office. I must have done something right, even the most desperate of the criminals decided I needed their money more than them. I did have one homeless guy offer me a hit off his bottle saying I looked to need a drink. He made sure I knew where the shelter was so I could get a hot meal and take a nap. He wouldn't even take the twenty I tried to give him.

When you have luck as bad as mine, you just have to accept that groups of thugs are going to rob you no matter what. I accepted that a long time ago. What I can't get over is when they insist I take my stuff back, try to give me a gun and give me advice on where someone looking like me can make a quick buck. Like with the bums I have had a few even offer to give me a little something-something on the house to help me out, I looked like I could really use it.

So after the trek I still got to the building early enough to actually get a cup of overpriced coffee and first pick of the pastries. Most of the people working there are usually still asleep enough that they don't mess with me, much. Today was one of the days where the youngish high school dropouts behind the counter took the bait to give me some good service. I put a twenty on the counter as I told them if they got my order right, and I got a receipt for my credit card, they could have the cash. It rarely works, but today I really needed that little boost to get me in the right mood.

Two hours later I was headed up for the presentation.

Normally our company does not rate company officers on the initial or follow-up sales presentations. They only make time when we are getting down to the final negotiations over lunch at five star restaurants, playing a day of golf or hitting up box seats at a game, if the local team is in town. Today I had the CEO, CTO, and CIO there along with the senior VPs and their tech staff. I saw why they were there once we got to the big auditorium where I was doing the presentation. Someone had gotten in some locally famous catering service that took orders and came to each person's seat with coffee, juice, and individually prepared breakfast. Since I was going to have no chance at all to have anything but water, I expect it was the sales team thumbing their noses at me.

Now I have to say their CTO and CIO looked like moron jocks, but to date they are the first corporate execs to both notice all I setup was my bleeding edge, full HD laser pico projector at the back of the room. Both of them watched on closely as I set it in the base, hooked up the external power, and then hit the power button. Sliding on the special tracking rings, as I walked back to the stage, I saw their eyes widen as I held up my right hand at the right side of the screen and then my left at the left side. The custom code I had written used those two reference points to do a quick infrared scan for projection screen reflections to best calculate the sharpest screen settings. Walking to the provided podium I set down my remote I used for a backup in case the projector could not track the special rings. Seeing that some techies also noticed the CTO's and CIO's interest, I put my hands on the edges of the podium. It was a signal to the software to make a big dog and pony show of going through screen size settings, even though it was ready to go as soon as I had marked the sides of the screen. Mostly I only did this for when I was waiting for someone important to arrive or to delay things a bit so that someone could get a quick refill.

Once it looked like the CEO was in his chosen seat and flanked by the CTO and CIO, I went into the presentation. I watched the three of them very closely through the whole presentation. I realized after ten minutes the CTO and CIO did not give a shit about our software. Both were mesmerized by the projector, and how I managed to do the whole spiel without having to use a remote. I am not sure about the CEO. He was more watching me than anything else. It was a bit creepy, like pervert creepy. When you get to be a CEO of a long standing family run company, you are sure to have your kinks and quirks. As long as he bought my software at 125% of list price, I don't care if he was fantasizing about my ass.

So after the presentation, I got to enjoy watching the CTO and CIO's eyes glaze over as I took my clear cased cloud server up to connect it to the projector for then live run through of the software as I answered their questions. I can't blame them, I saw more than half the techies start to drool as they caught a glimpse of the hidden treasures inside the clear acrylic.

The server was one of the perks of having a cost center where I had complete control. It was funded from the commissions the sales team's contract denied me. My boss funded it to keep me on board after I made my first few big sales. At it is, I have 32 cores on Intel NUC boards, with 128 GB of RAM and just over 7 TB of Kingston V310 980 GB SSD drives. I wanted to build it bigger, but then it would not fit so nicely in the acrylic case a bit bigger than a ream of copy paper.

Turning on the cluster kicked in the automatic Wi-Fi link from the projector to the monitor output of the server. The projection screen flipped from the demo to the post screens for the 8 NUC boards. By the time I was back at the podium, all eight had booted, joined the cloud, and then switched to a single large screen showing the fully maximized, live application. Ok, the data was canned, but the app was fully functional. They did not know it, but it also automatically tethered to my phone to do any feature requests or open a chat back to the home office for questions I could not answer. I chose to wow them with the integrated speech to text interface they could purchase as a bonus feature for faster order entry. It was not part of this product by default and something we purchased from an outside company. I never even hinted at my office that I was the silent partner that owned ninety-five percent of that same third party company and I had written the app in my copious free time.

Hey I had to get back some of those commissions they were not paying me for doing their jobs and the boss knows exactly who owns the LLC he pays license fees to annually.

Now I got to really have fun. This was when those still awake started asking questions about something they needed the app to do. I never lied and gave them vaporware promises. When the app could not do something, I moved my hands to trigger the pop-up parking lot and had them repeat what they wanted have the app do. A geek chick I had hooked up with last year worked on converting most major first and second world speech to text translation algorithms. I loved watching an Indian or Chinese tech ask the question in a heavy accent or in one of their countries native tongues. It not only showed it correctly in that language, but converted correctly to English 95% of the time. I found this was always a sneaky way to distract from a major short coming of any of our products.

By the time we were done, I had no problems convincing the tech staff to join me for a sushi lunch. No matter how high end of a sushi restaurant they had locally, the senior management always seemed to have other matters that prohibited them from wasting time at lunch with the underlings. At least that is one area I always have good luck. Most techies I run into love sushi. There is always a top notch sushi place around and with a cooked menu, hibachi, or buffet attached to it for those that don't eat sushi. Having no limit on how much I can spend, and no one to rat them out for getting some Saki with lunch, means I will have at least one good meal on each trip. The best sushi places can pick out a sales lunch with the biggest group of sushi eaters and I have never had any of my bad luck on sales lunch.

Two hours later when we are back in the office, I have them grab their laptops and spun up copies of the app in a Docker container for each techie that wanted to really evaluate the app. I was surprised when the CEO asked if it was possible to set him up with his own copy to test out.

I was surprised that the CEO here came up with a dozen more suggestions than anyone else. We actually worked well past their normal quitting time submitting the feature requests so we could have pricing for them first thing in the morning. Amazingly he was still at it well after the others had left for the night. Once he was finally done and I was packing things up, he came over to talk to me.

"Joe I apologize for not introducing myself earlier. My given name is Arnold Paul Stephens, but I never liked being called Arnold or Arnie, so just call me Paul," he told me. "I am inundated by sales calls so frequently I rarely have a free moment to do more than take a cursory glance. Unlike my father, I attend at least a few minutes of each presentation to see if they are worthy of my time. If they aren't I just stop it and give everyone back the time so they can continue to do something productive for my company. Getting a lead on where to source those projectors alone was worth my time today. I did my homework on your product and company. I expected this to be another waste of my time, even with the catered gourmet breakfast. This is the only sales presentation I have seen where there was live feedback on desired features and then a hands-on session to put the real product through the paces. So do you think your development team will be able to provide the pricing for the requested enhancements by the end of the month?"

Taking a break from the packing I replied, "Paul, if we had not run so late today, I would have expected them before end of business. As it is, I should have them by the time I return tomorrow, providing you wish to continue to product pricing and negotiations."

"Right to the point Joe, what is the catch," Paul asked.

Smiling I explained all about why I was sent out to sell the product. If they did not want to have me poached off by someone paying higher salaries and commissions, then they had to agree to my terms. One of which was that the development staff and sales teams were all waiting on all live input from the sales call to give me near immediate turnaround times. No one benefitted from long, drawn out negotiations, empty promises, vaporware or loss of excitement caused taking too long to seal the deal.

He was deep in thought as I packed my gear up.

"So where are you staying," he asked.

When I told him I thought he was going to cough up a lung.

Once he settled down I joked about it saying that I was sure it was someone on the sales team that was jealous of how I was able to sell more of our software than them.

"If you pick up the tab for the best steaks you will have while you are here, I will give a friend a call to get you better accommodations," Paul told me.

I told him he had a deal. For some reason I expected him to be a total dick, yet he seemed to be very friendly. We had not talked about price at all, so he was not trying to sweet talk me or win me over to get a better deal. Plus I let the regular sales weasels do the hard sell, if it came to that.

Not surprisingly, Paul had a limo to take him around. I did not even know they made stretch Mercedes limos. As we rode, he bragged on the extremely rare and expensive Snake Wood used throughout the limo along with the mixture of rare stingray and crocodile leathers. Then he went into how much it cost to redo the old school office layouts of his great grandfather into something more modern and relevant like the auditorium we used today. Paul was starting to tell me about all his idea of how to modernize the business to his way of thinking, instead of the ways of his father, as we pulled up to this enormous estate.

Ok I showed him my high tech toys and wares, so he is showing me his. Arrogant, yes, but not unusual when making the appearances of befriending a possible important business contact.

When we went inside this huge mansion, I found it was one of those exclusive elite businessmen's clubs. Unlike the gentlemen's clubs of old, this one catered to the top one percent of Philly CEOs, male or female. It was where they came to network and make billion dollar deals. I felt I should be wearing an Italian Suit, not my Men's Warehouse "buy one get two free" suit. Well that was until I saw some of the younger elite were also just plain arrogant. At least one group was wearing ratty thousand dollar jeans and hundred dollar t-shirts with flip-flops.

"Relax Joe. This is not the stuffy old codger club my father frequented. Everyone here is younger, tech savvy and forward thinking. I can ensure you there are many here with a much higher IQ than yourself," Joe said with a bit of a snide tone at the end.

What the fuck does that mean?

Before I could consider it, I was giving a glass of Scotch and we were led to a private booth. The menu was one that had no prices, but I was not concerned. I had no cap on meals. If I could not land the sale, then it came out of my toy budget. So far I never had a lost sale as long as the Sales team did not try to screw me over. I always told my customers to be sure my name was on the invoice. When it wasn't I could not allow them to make the deal, my company was behaving dishonestly and that is never a good way to start out a business relationship.

Hell that is not a good way to start any relationship you want to last more than a night.

Paul smiles as he said, "I got this Joe. Best damn steaks I have ever had. No idea what type of beef it is, where is comes from or even how it is cooked."

It had been a long day and I just sat back to enjoy the very good Scotch as he went on to tell me all about his business, how he clawed his way up to the top and then pushed his father out into retirement. Seems Paul and his dad Robert never really saw eye to eye on anything. All Paul's siblings were favored over him. No matter how hard he worked it was never good enough. He was really proud of how he waited in the wings biding his time until he was able to get the Board of Directors to finally see his way. They were all set to reap the rewards of his insight and new way of doing things.

Chapter 2 »