What a day! Fergie McAndrews headed towards the pick-up truck she’d borrowed from her roommate for work that morning.
Of course, the thirty-thousand dollar certified used luxury car she’d splurged on earlier in the year was in the shop. Again.
Just another in a long line of bad decisions. After leaving a perfectly good job for a startup company, she was laid off three weeks ago and had to borrow money from her parents to pay rent. Wasn’t that humiliating?
“This is the last time, Ferg,” her step-monster had said after she’d Venmo’d the money to her.
God forbid the mechanic call and tell her the car was ready. She wouldn’t be able to pick it up for another week. That was when she got her first paycheck from her newest gig at L-Corp. Not a startup, but an older company with new offices in Bayonne, which was only a half-hour commute.
But to commute, you needed a car. Fergie had no choice but to borrow the old pick-up from her best friend and roommate, Jessenia Banks. It wasn’t like she needed the truck. She worked from home these days. Besides, Fergie promised to fill it up and have it washed.
She huffed out a breath. It’d been a really long day. A crappy one too. Fergie wanted to love her new job. Really, she did. But so far, it was the pits. If Fergie wanted to be a librarian, she would’ve been one.
Research was her jam. Well, when it was interesting. She had a knack for sniffing out information and compiling easy-to-read spreadsheets and timelines. It wasn’t the hard work that annoyed her. Her complaint was the content. The actual stuff her new boss had her looking up. It was beyond boring.
Why an enormous conglomerate like L-Corp needed old land surveys, cross-referenced with newspaper reports on accidents, crimes, etcetera. She had no idea. She’d been at it for weeks now. So far, she’d researched six locations given via GPS coordinates across Hudson County. Her new boss wanted everything, every little insignificant piece of information she could dig up.
That was the easy part. It was the hassle of the actual job that really made her want to give up. Every day she had to drive to Bayonne to pick up her work laptop she’d dropped off the night before with all of that day’s findings. Every single night they wiped her computer clean.
Like she was going to run away with the secrets of what happened on 2nd and Washington sixty-years ago. Can you say paranoid? Ugh.
Fergie had always looked forward to working for a huge global company. It was supposed to be her ticket out of the Garden State. Traveling the globe, seeing new things, visiting far-off places was always a secret dream of hers. Well, that, and having her own walk-in closet full of gorgeous designer shoes.
Best secret dream evah! In her opinion, anyway. What woman didn’t love shoes? Fergie hummed as she daydreamed about rows and rows of Blahnik’s, Jimmy Choo’s, Garavani’s, Ferragamo’s, and her personal favorites, Louboutin’s on every shelf!
Don’t judge. Fergie wasn’t shallow, she just liked pretty things. Haters gonna hate. But every time she ran across a thrift or second-chance store, she’d search high and low to see what they had. That was how she’d scored the pumps on her feet.
They made her feel good about herself. Being five-foot two-inches short with more curves than a racetrack, Fergie had had more than her fair share of self-esteem issues growing up. Alright, so she was chubby. She could admit that proudly now.
If everyone looked the same, the world would be one boring as hell place. Fergie liked herself perfectly fine these days, in spite of all the times her step-monster tried to make her diet growing up. So she liked food and shoes. Big deal.
She worked hard to feed and clothe herself, so as far as she was concerned, no one had a right to comment. So what if she wanted some excitement in her life? Fergie was aware she was better off than most, but what was wrong with having goals?
She’d spent a lot of time thinking about how a woman like her could have an adventure. Travelling was the only thing she could think of. Of course, she’d been hoping this job would be the answer to that. Even travelling for work was better than being stuck.
Sigh.
So far, her plans had fallen flat, but hey, at least she was earning a paycheck. Her new boss, Mr. Offner, might be a strange man, but he signed her checks, and that was enough for now. Fergie had never seen more than a glimpse of him. All of her instructions usually came via email.
Most of the time she was able to compile her research quickly, then she’d head back to the office to organize it into neat little spreadsheets, and finally, she’d hand it all in with her laptop. But not today.
Mr. Offner sent her an email detailing everything she could dig up on one of the oldest places on record in the county. Of course, land surveys that old, along with police reports, newspaper articles, deeds, and sales records were nowhere she could easily access them.
After wasting hours at both the court house and municipal building, Fergie had been directed to the second public library. Apparently anything over a hundred years old was filed away in the godforsaken place. She’d been shocked to find an entire room filled with musty old archives. And wouldn’t you know it, there was no cell service and no internet access. Plus, their phone lines were down. She’d had to photograph each page using her cell. When she got home later, she would send those photos like a fax to her boss along with her spreadsheet. If she could manage that before collapsing into bed.