Carl glanced at the graphs again.
He'd been glancing at various graphs off and on while taking care of other miscellaneous tasks for the better part of the morning, which was a very quiet one by Wednesday standards at Fire Entertainment. Well over half of the Engineering department was out of the office, including Roger.
Reminds me of that time a month or so after I started. Not that I knew what it was then, but it was still kinda weird seeing such low activity in the office. Same thing now, but…
Carl sighed and raised his glasses up to rub at his eyes. I can't think about these graphs anymore, or I'm gonna go nuts. Still almost forty five minutes until that lunch meeting, and I'm still not any closer to figuring out how I'm gonna present this.
He sat back in his chair again. Not like I'm gonna lie, obviously, but I don't wanna have to explain to Roger and his PMs why I had to put them on the same network as the porn watchers in Accounting if something crazy happens and we can't cut it off. There's gotta be some way I can make it really clear. I mean, sure, Gab seemed smart enough—not at all like VP Smythe, who Roger somehow manages to handle—but smart people can make mistakes just like everyone else. Just because the departments at her last company were run like this doesn't mean it's the best choice here.
His eyes slid over once more to the black headband hanging off his desk drawer. I really shouldn't. There's gotta be some angle I haven't looked at this from or some nuance I missed.
He checked again the support ticket queue, which had been steadily decreasing since his team's weekly Wednesday morning meeting. It had been growing smaller since yesterday, in fact, and it wasn't as though Carl was taking credit for his extremely capable team's ability to do their work—he'd hired them for being capable, of course—but it had been his belief that having a weekly face-to-face was good for morale ever since his first good manager had held a similar belief some fifteen years ago. Naturally, this being the current year, Carl was flexible and enabled working from home as-needed, so a number of his team, including Adi and Dax today, were usually calling in using the chosen company's VTC software. It had…
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Carl let out a sigh of frustration at the realization that once again his ability to focus had failed him. I gotta think about this from a different angle, and sitting here staring at these freaking charts and write-ups I've done isn't going to help. He eyed the headband on his drawer. This isn't like before. I'm being totally responsible. I stop after a responsible amount of time, and it's not impacting any other part of my life. I'm not even thinking about it or researching it when I'm not playing. I even got a little parenting advice from Ir'alith's dad last time!
He nodded to himself. Yeah. I'll just log in for a bit, see what's happening with Mina and whether she's okay, check in with Ir'alith and… Probably shouldn't mention any of that stuff… Maybe get some fishing in, though? Feels like forever since I've done that. No, what am I thinking. Just need to get a change of perspective, then I'm gonna log out like a responsible adult. Not playing a game, just using a tool to help me think differently.
Carl pulled up the account settings page on his company-issued gaming computer and set a thirty minute logout interval, which was something he'd spent just a little time checking out when he got to the office that morning. Just in case. Not that he'd been planning to log in again that day, of course, but he wanted to be prepared and responsible, which was why he'd also read further on the topic and discovered that the game had an automatic logout failsafe which would take effect after four hours of continuous play, which was the same sort of thing he'd imagined had to exist back on Friday, though that amount of time would still have led to him missing one of the most important events in his daughter's life, and his sense of time back then had been…
Nope, not gonna think about it now. Already done way more game research than I should've.
For the third time in the past week, Carl Weathers logged into New Era and touched the in-game orb to select his character, and his surroundings fuzzed.