7927/Starr Struck

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Starr Struck
Date of Scene: 22 September 2021
Location: Starr Industries HQ
Synopsis: Against all odds, Terry manages to land a position he is not exactly qualified for at Karen's company. Will this end in disaster? The end of the world? And, more importantly, how can he get his parking validated when he still doesn't own a car? Confused? You won't be, after this episode of The Young And The Reckless!
Cast of Characters: Terry O'Neil, Karen Starr




Terry O'Neil has posed:
Titans have to eat- especially those who aren't the heirs to enormous fortunes. Or Queendoms. Although he was paid better than your standard intern at the Planet, he was /still/ an intern until the end of the year... whereupon it would be evaluated whether he would be offered a job or told to have the best of luck in his future endeavors.

But, let's face it, junior reporters (and that is what he would be) don't get paid significantly better. Terry had expenses to meet, a new car to get, and too much pride to count on Gar's munificence.

The add had been a godsend, and he has shown up at the appointed time, dressed as well as he can afford- no suit, per se, since he's not applying for /that/ kind of a job, but sensible tie/shirt/slacks combo.

And no fur.

He glances at his folder, which contains physical copies of the porfolio he had sent in -just in case- and then glances around. He's making sure to display patience. He can be very patient... when needed. While waiting to be called. He's prepared to meet with company recruiters, even HR personnel who might have concerns about his public identity. He's gone through the mental workout of answering difficult questions.

The question now was whether or not he was ready.

"You got this!" he mutters to himself.

Karen Starr has posed:
    Admittedly, most reporters- if not all of them, let's be serious- don't get paid the same kind of money that a ludicrous enterprise such as Starrware can. Karen Starr is the kind of rich that more or less can't even manage to spend all of the money she has, despite doing her best to try.

    Suffice to say, even should Terry get hired, it's likely that a career at Starrware would be more lucrative than the planet, if almost certainly less fulfilling.

    It's a small wonder why anyone responded to his application at all: The truth of it is, Terry's resume is not exactly wonderful. He's no slouch at all: And his writing reflects that. In the practical sense, the man has talent. Genuine, honest, talent. However, if we're talking about the strength of one's CV alone, an outfit such as Starrware certainly has longstanding, years-in-field applicants that, by all logic, ought to have literally pulled Terry's application out of the pile and kicked it around like it was an unpopular child at an 80s or 90s Movie High School.

    Despite this, not only was he called for an interview, the man seems to be the only person here. Whether that's a matter of candidate availability or some manner of luck, it probably isn't going to do anything for Terry's nerves. He's left to sit outside of a /very/ large office, with the knowledge that he is not going to interview with some middle-manager and HR representative.

    The name on the door of the office that he is waiting to be called into is Karen Starr.

    Worse still, there is no shortage of time that he has to wait: He's in that lobby for a full half-hour. Enough time indeed for nerves to wind themselves into knots, with one's stomach serving as a form of impossible yoga instructor that seems to believe that its entire class is composed of contortionists, and despite that it is wrong, its students are doing their damn level best to comply.

    Eventually, a noise comes from a small intercom next to a brunette woman who hasn't introduced herself, and doesn't seem interested in doing so, a calm voice coming over it to say: "Send 'im in!"

    The brunette then calls out to Terry. "Ms. Starr will see you now. Good luck." Then, she gestures to the door.

Terry O'Neil has posed:
Terry takes a slow, deep breath. The kind of breathing that Leonardo has been drilling into him. It usually seems to work, but here it doesn't do much to take off the edge. One final glance at his folder, and he stands up.

"Thank you, ma'am," he says to the receptionist. Up to this point, he has been telling himself that this is just a stopping point. Soon, he would be shuffled off to HR, or somewhere else. Probably because the actual interview room is full of applicants- that's why nobody is here, he's the overrun.

Not that it makes sense to send overrun candidates to wait /here/, right outside of /her/ office. But panic can make rational people think irrational things in order to abate nerves.

That's over with. The redhead walks towards the door, which seems to stretch into infinity, like those stretching corridors in fun houses.

Why is he this nervous? He's ridden in Bruce Wayne's car. He's faced the end of the world several times over.

The answer was simple: neither Bruce, nor Brainiac, nor King Ixion had the pwoer to fire or hire him directly. Here, the Catholic School triggers all get flipped. This was a Potential Rejection- nay, an Almost Certain Rejection. That struck chords throughout his school years.

He pauses, and suddenly his mother -who is all the way in New York- suddenly seems to be speaking over his shoulder:

'Remember your manners!'

He gives a polite knock, to confirm his permission to come in, and then he opens the door. "Miss Starr?..."

Karen Starr has posed:
    It's true: The difference this time is that Terry is engaging Karen Starr in a business matter. You can ride in Bruce's car, and you spend your time there with Brucey Wayne and he's all fun and cordial and you joke and laugh, and it's easy to let down the defenses because nothing is formally on the line: Bruce Wayne could hire you on the spot, but he's not /there/ to do or not do that explicitly. Sure, it /could/ happen, but it's not the matter at hand.

    This is different. Terry is walking into what is easily regarded as a spider's web, or a shark's tank, or whatever Predator-Prey metaphor you want to attribute to it. That's the reality of it: This is not a friendly or casual encounter. Instead of getting to meet someone who could buy and sell entire lives, Terry is going to actively try and appeal to the business side enough to land a job.

    Theoretically, this should be a matter of entreating an entirely different person than Karen Starr, the strange addition of the title, CEO Karen Starr, makes her an entirely different person, perhaps one with more malicious ideals, worrying about bottom lines, experience, and acceptable losses, like confronting a personification of math that if Terry doesn't manage to do it right he could end up walking out of here with somehow /less/ than he walked in, despite that the worst she can do is say no.

    Job interviews are like that. You don't especially lose anything by going into them and not getting a job, except it /feels/ like you did. It /feels/ like if that rejection hits, somehow you're less of a person than you thought you were, that the sheer audacity and hubris were what fueled you to reach for the stars and put in an application that /of course/ you weren't going to get.

    If anyone ever says that the interviewer doesn't hold an immense amount of power over the applicant, that person hasn't applied for jobs recently.

    "Come Iiiiin~!" comes the voice from behind the door, called just loud enough to be audible, a mildly sing-song invitation if ever there was one.

    The office itself is a marvel of expensive and yet moderately tasteless decor. It isn't flush with color or expressly intricate: it lacks the hard wood of what one would expect of a CEO's office, every mental image seemingly coming from the 50s era of everything being made of stained oak. It's bright, and shiny, but all the same drab and colorless- everything is made of glass and white marble, including Karen's desk.

    The woman herself somehow has chosen to inject the worst colors in the human visual vocabulary, of course: Her suit is pinstriped, composed of two distinctly different but still altogether unacceptable shades of salmon pink. Her hair, which reaches down to her hips, is bleach-blonde- the sort of dime-a-dozen shade that is as popular as it is uninventive. Far from the natural gold of someone like, say, Power Girl.

    "Go ahead and have a seat!" the woman states, holding up a stack of papers that almost certainly isn't about to do anything good for Terry's nerves, because in order to get that many papers relevant to the interview, it'd have to be not just Terry's resume, or his selected works, but /everything he's ever publically written/ and, when combined with the fact that this is a software company, it's not hard to imagine that perhaps some of the things that /weren't/ public are in there too. That's wrong of course, but it's not hard to /imagine./

    "So, Terrence- Terry- O'Neil. How did you hear about our company?"

Terry O'Neil has posed:
It is strange, almost surreal. He knows Harley worked for this woman, and he almost is tempted to ask her if they went out shopping for clothes together. But the lack of short shorts and fishnets is a dead giveaway that this is not so.

Clearing his throat at the question.

"Well, Miss Starr, I was aware of your company before working at the Planet. It's impossible not to know of it- but if you are asking how I found out about the position, I received a notice of it under my search criteria when the job posted..." It was hard to be even semi-literate as a tech user and not know about Starr. You had to have been in hiberation to not know about the company.

He is aware enough to know that every part of an interview is a test. No matter how friendly or casual someone might seem, you had to read the room, read your position, and act accordingly.

Karen Starr has posed:
    One floor above, there is a tanktop two sizes too small to properly cover the woman sitting in front of Terry, with the words 'Objects In Shirt May Be Larger Than They Appear' that may or may not have been purchased by one Harleen Quinzel. The world can never know.

    "Well of course you were! But nobody thinks about a company like this in the context that matters. What made you apply, how did you hear of the-" A pause, and a nod, "Yeah, that. Was it just the ad?"

    You see, much of this is a trap: Terry is not sitting down with some cold, calculating CEO who is going to test him, poke and prod at his every answer. He's sitting at the desk of an incorrigible, inexplicable nerd who stumbled into fortune just by Doing Computers Good.

    To put it mildly, Terry is here ready for a kind of verbal judo, a combat of attack and defense of one's skillset, when in reality it's more of an episode of the Marx Brothers.

    "I've been doing some light reading, and you really have put out a few bangers in your time. I've got kind of a soft spot for the Planet, myself, I think they hire good people."

Terry O'Neil has posed:
"Well, the ad was a sign that some positions were open. Yours wasn't the only company that came up, but it was the one I was interested in- despite the fact that I know I don't have the training you need to get the fangs to cut it." He spreads his hands, "But the other companies weren't run by you. There's your public profile, of course, but I also know someone who used to work for you when she was first starting to get back on her feet... and she had nothing but glowing things to say about it."

He feels how cold his palms are, and he decides to rest them on his knees to warm them up. Air conditioning. yes. That must be it. Breathe. "Having a good head says a lot about a company. The kind of company where the boss is likely to want to fix problems instead of sweeping them under the rug or pass the blame onto others."

His output is mentioned, and he takes another breath, "There are some things in there that I wish I had done better."

Karen Starr has posed:
    Karen nods a couple of times, thumbing through the stack of papers as she listens to make some sort of effort to pretend that she's mulling over his answer. In the end it doesn't matter a whole lot: She'd already made her decision, to be fair, but there was ceremony important to the process. There /had/ to be an interview in the process. It was just how things /went./

    "Well that's good to hear. We have no issues hiring anyone with a trouble past, or helping people get their feet back under them. There's no shortage of people and organizations out there that are more than happy and willing to yank the carpet, and we want to be better than that." Tapping the papers onto the desk in front of her, she offers Terry a friendly smile.

    "So, what about Starrware has your preference over staying with the Planet?"

Terry O'Neil has posed:
"Well, to be frank, I still plan on working with the Planet... but as you know, I have another public life. Since my life as Vorpal co-incides with the reporting I do with the Planet, there's nothing keeping me on the nine to five schedule, since I'm usually active as Vorpal /after/ that time period anyways. Some recent developments..." he clears his throat, clearly struggling with some inner pride, "have made it clear that I need to cement my financial security, so I am in need of finding a day job. While there are many companies I could apply for, I wouldn't feel right working for a lot of them, based on how they treat their employees. I try to keep ethics in mind in what I do, even when I make mistakes. It's the reason I decided to out myself."

"And your company's products are solid. . Even if I am underqualified for the position, there may be some other nooks I can fill in where I can gather enough experience to potentially merit a chance at batting higher. It's always easier when you know you're representing something of quality..."

Karen Starr has posed:
    "You could've just said it was about the money." she states, waving Terry off somewhat. "I don't really mind if you continue to work for the planet. You're a writer, whether that's articles or copywrite work for me, I don't care what schedule you keep as long as the work gets done."

    She leans back somewhat in her chair, and calmly starts to rotate, gesturing to her magnificent, if tasteless, demesne. "Fact is, it's easier to just slap a yearly figure on everyone and judge their work on what it is rather than trying to count the hours they devote to the company. We don't have anyone here who makes an hourly wage. The entire idea is just /exhausting/ even to think about. I've got better things to do."

    With a quick and calm exhale, she rests her hands on the desk, on top of the papers that encompass Terry's life in writing. "So, when can you start?"

Terry O'Neil has posed:
Mark your calendars, because another impossible thing has happened: Terry O'Neil is speechless. This is because his mind is going over the words that have been said, checking them against expectation, and deciding that there must have been an error along the way and that they really needed to watch that instant replay yet again, Janet, to see what actually happened, so back to the studio.

After the third replay, Janet is sure that Terry heard correctly, while Bob and Jason are still going for the sarcastic question angle, and the audience poll is undecided. Nevertheless, they have run out of time and some response is needed, even though his eyes have gon wide in disbelief.

Answer the question!

"Wha-I ... I mea- F-first thing tomorrow morning?"

That was not intended to come out as a question. "First thing tomorrow morning." There. A statement.

Karen Starr has posed:
    Watching Terry's brain flatline just about instantaneously is kind of a wonderful feeling. Sure, Karen knows that what she's doing is mostly helping out a fellow super-person who happens to have some need for employment, so the primary thing of it is that she's got that sense of satisfaction that you get by giving people some modicum of your immense wealth, no matter what that scale is- whether it's just buying a soda, or giving someone a job that you could've given to someone who has more experience.

    "Yeah I can imagine it's a little hard to believe, but the fact is, your background in journalism actually helps here. Any other copywriter with a dozen years of experience is going to write what we tell them to write. They'll spin-doctor whatever the hell we put on the table. Buuuut, a journalist with some backbone, ideally one fresh into the field, is more likely to push back if we've stepped over a line with a product. Not that that's... Ever happened, but it's still important. So."

    She checks a watch that isn't there, and looks back to Terry, who has become a sort of living embodiment of the dial-up noise even as he manages a statement.

    "See you tomorrow morning?"

Terry O'Neil has posed:
Rebooted Terry blinks twice, and sits up straight. "Yes, miss Starr! First thing in the morning!" That reaction would have been familiar to Lois, back when Terry first applied for the job at the Planet. There is one positive side to having been a red-headed stepchild, often overlooked or neglected: red-headed stepkids had something to prove to the people who go out on a limb and take a chance on them. Three bullet wounds and being chased down alleyways hadn't stopped Terry from doing his best to get the story for Lois. He was very well determined to show that same kind of grit for Karen Starr.

"Thank you, ma'am, I'll make sure you won't refret it!" outside of the planet being in danger of ending, he was going to be there in the morning.

And even if the planet /was/ in danger of ending, that usually tended to get solved by lunchtime, anyways. Who knows how many almost-apocalypses happened while they were having the interview?