One of the many advantages of having a crazy homeless lady as a boss was that you could show up any time of the day and she was available for a meeting. She didn’t even have a phone so there was no need to call ahead.
Scott noticed Crazy Carl wasn’t there today. His box was still there so hopefully the guy was all right. Scott walked in and greeted Tara who was sitting behind the lunch counter as usual. Seriously, she was there every time he had visited. Did she live here too?
“Hello Tara, is Melinda here today?”
“Sure she is. Are you related or is this some kind of school project?” Tara asked, then yelled up the stairs for Ms. White.
“Yeah, it’s kind of a project. I’m hoping I can help her communicate better so she can move out of here.”
Tara laughed. “Oh yeah, you could teach her sign language like a chimp”.
That was rude! “That’s not very nice. Umm do you work here or live here?”
“Both! I get to eat as much as I want if I help serve the food. So, I’m like the boss here when Mr. Gill isn’t around.”
He had yet to meet Mr. Gill. Apparently, he was collecting a paycheck to “manage” this place, but he never showed up and just let the inmates run it however they wanted. It was kind of surprising the shelter was mostly clean and there weren’t any corpses lying around. Probably Melinda kept things going. Hrmm… now that he was stealing her, would this place collapse into anarchy?
Melinda came downstairs and sat at the table across from him. She looked like she was waiting for him to start recording.
“Hi Ms. White! I had an idea that I could split up your conversation streams easier if I recorded you on video too.”
Melinda nodded. Scott pulled out his phone and started recording.
“So, we agreed to your terms although we don’t yet know how to come up with the money. Hopefully we can find an investor willing to let us spend some of the startup capital on living expenses. We have enough savings to pay for your first month so if you are willing to take a risk we can start now. Hopefully we can get funding in place before your second month’s rent is due. I’m going to try some facial recognition software that can capture the angle your head is looking at while you talk. I think this will give a clue as to which personality is speaking.”
Scott continued, “Matt had an idea for including a ship with diesel generators and long cables for power as an option. We could actually fund Barry’s research on a small fusion reactor and if it worked, the ship generator would not be needed. It’s kind of a big risk, but if we pull it off it will make everything else so much easier. Barry says he wants to start another company for energy research where we would keep more equity. He needs some advice on how to structure it. We don’t want to completely exclude our mining investor, but it doesn’t seem fair that his initial investment should automatically give equity in every other idea we come up with. So, I will let you talk and then we can go shopping for clothes. I think we probably need to wait on finding a place for you to live until I translate your responses more quickly.”
Melinda talked quickly for a few minutes while Scott recorded.
Later they went to the mall. Melinda picked out some business attire and a new set of pajamas along with various underwear. Fortunately, Scott was able to avoid terminal embarrassment by just waiting near the checkout counter until she was ready. He paid up on a credit card. Scott did not actually have the money for this, so he was kind of freaking out. His parents had made a big deal about always paying credit card bills on time and it looked like he was going to be short this month. He had spent less by not going out with his friends much, but he was going to be about five hundred dollars short - not even counting what they would have to come up with to get Ms. White a down payment for her apartment, food and a phone.
After dropping Melinda off at the shelter, Scott went back to the dorm to eat. He skipped another class and got to work on the facial recognition code to include the head angle data. He spent a frustrating six hours trying to get the code working. After dinner, he got back to work and trained a neural net to what he labeled as five different facial angles. Syncing it to the voice to text program took another 5 hours. He was very tired, and the program still wasn’t working so he finally gave up and went to bed.
The next morning, he slept through his Data Structures class. Dragging himself out of bed he decided to work on his crazy lady translator for no more than one hour. It was a couple hours until his Computer Science Logic class. He thought he had a test for that class - it probably wasn’t going to go well, but maybe he could speed read the course work for an hour before the test.
Fortunately, there were only about ten bugs left in his code which he fixed easily. He was working faster after getting a bit of sleep. He shouldn’t have worked on this so late - half the bugs were things he broke trying to work on this after 3AM. Anyway, success!
He listened to what Melinda had to say and sent a copy to his friends. Then he speed-read about 50 pages for his Logic class and actually made it on time. He felt like he knew a little over half the material but thought he could guess the rest. The class was about logic so it kind of made sense once you had learned the terminology.
After class he met up with Barry and Matt to discuss what Melinda had said. He had labeled her personalities “Shark”, “Professor”, “Tyrant”, “Doctor”, “Socialite”
Shark: “I’m glad we have a deal. Hopefully next time you show up we can have a proper conversation. Also, you will need to take me to a computer lab so we can type up our initial business plan and do a little market research. Hopefully your friends will deliver their part of the proposal. Matt’s idea for powering his robots with current technology in the business plan is good. We don’t want to promise anything outside the plan. Matt needs to come up with itemized costs of his initial plan - we will leave some contingency money in place to handle overruns or to test lower cost alternatives. We will include salary as part of the initial costs - you can use your salary as startup money for the Genysis Energy company, but if we need to get money from the mining company, we’ll need to be transparent with our investors.”
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Professor: “I will file patents on your robot designs on behalf of the Genysis Mining as soon as you provide some details and I get computer access. I would also like to start a third company specializing in underwater facilities and vehicles and apply for a patent on your corrosion resistant materials under this entity - let’s call it Genysis Construction. We need to start adding a lot more junior level employees. See if any more of your friends are interested, but don’t be afraid to find low-cost talent in other countries. There is a large talent pool of people willing to be part of something exciting without getting paid much to start. The trick is finding them. You seem to have a big advantage here. We should recruit almost anyone who has a computer and is willing to work part time for a year at low pay. “
Tyrant: Scott, the next thing you need to do is get an IT security expert to make sure your Human Resources software asset is protected. Right now, this is your primary strategic resource and I’m guessing you have left it on a computer sitting in your dorm room. You are probably using the college Wi-Fi network where about 1000 people have the password. You better get this done as soon as possible.
“Ouch!” Scott said. “Yeah, I’ll look into getting a security guy. Then I’ll just try to recruit 100 other people around the world who will work for nearly free.”
Doctor: I don’t have much to add to this. When you find someone who is interested in medical sciences, I have a long list of ideas for products and services. You should also ask any of your new employees that don’t have useful skills if they are willing to be medical test subjects. Most people are not willing to do that without getting paid, but I bet you can find a few weirdos.
“Nope! We are not doing that!” Matt exclaimed.
Socialite: I can’t wait to buy some new clothes! I’m so excited to try and sell this concept to some investors. I’m also looking forward to meeting Matt and Barry. I really hope you are able to get your program finished so I can talk to other employees. I know you can do it because you are such a genius! I’m so excited to start working with all of you! Also, you should hire some more women because it will be so fun if there is some workplace romantic drama to gossip about. Can’t wait to meet you all!
“Hah, you should report her for some kind of HR violation. I can’t believe she told us to hire girls so we can have romantic drama!” Barry chortled.
“Looks like we have a lot to do. Let’s meet back up Thursday evening”, Scott said and headed back to his room.
Scott pulled up Glitch_HR and searched for “Head of IT Security”, filtering by people willing to work for free. The list was much smaller than what he found for the CEO position. Apparently, people expected to get paid for a high level IT job.
Top of the list of English speakers was Solomon Rhodes. Willing to work for no salary. Skill potential was high – he was rated in the top 100,000 candidates. There was a phone number and notes indicated he lived in the Big Spring prison in West Texas.
Scott sighed - he wasn’t even that surprised.
----------------------------------------
Matt was pretty excited about his mining robot design. He had loaded the program mods that helped substitute custom parts for off-the-shelf. He had a bill of materials, but wasn’t too eager to get prices on everything. A quick check of skills training did not have any magical solutions for this problem although there were a few articles that he bookmarked for reading later.
He decided to call Scott.
“Hey Scott, I have an initial design and a list of parts but I'm not sure how to get prices without looking them up. I don't want to call all the suppliers and try to negotiate bulk pricing. Do you think you could find someone to purchase the parts?”
“Sure. You won’t believe who this program recommended for IT security - some hacker guy in prison.”
“You get what you pay for! Maybe he knows a robber or a fence we can recruit for purchasing parts at a steep discount.” Matt laughed.
“Not funny. OK, I’ll look. I’d love an excuse to work on something other than talking to the prison system about getting computer access for a convicted hacker.” Scott replied with a groan.
“Huh… There are apparently a lot of people willing to work as a purchasing agent on commission with no salary.”
“Let’s send the top five people my list of parts x20. Tell them they are competing with four others. They can request their commission rate and come back with prices including delivery. They need to include the total cost and expected delivery date for the final part if we order next week. Give them until Thursday morning and we can just go with whoever is best.” Matt said. He thought it would be great to hand this off to someone else, and it sounded like it would be fun to see if anyone was willing to compete for the job.
“I don’t think that will work. We can’t actually order anything with no money.”
“True, but we can go to a potential investor and show him our pricing expectation - we can give him one of the middle bids. Then when we have money, we can ask the winner to execute the contract and give them the difference between their price and the middle bid as extra commission, so they aren’t mad at us.”
“Not bad.”
“We still need some custom fabrication. Barry is working on that, but I’ll pass on your idea of finding competitive buyers to get pricing for us. We can use a different set of people to compete on his list.”
“Sounds good.”
“What else do we need to finish this business plan?”
“Well, I don’t know much about finding or processing minerals. I just designed robots that dig through rock and dump it in a collection bin.”
“This is so much more work than I can handle. We need Melinda to come up with some of this stuff.”
“Yeah, hurry up and finish her translator program.” Matt demanded.
“The program works great. The problem is it really needs an app to work on a phone, or some kind of meeting software to let people talk to one of her personalities remotely. I can’t easily create either of those.” Scott complained.
“OK, first things first. Find someone who goes to school here at Mango who is good at writing phone apps.”
“Sure. That is about 60 people. Filtering those willing to be an unpaid part time intern… List is down to three. I know that guy – he has major body odor… Nope! That guy is in Chu’s class, and he hates me for getting a 100. Ok this girl Adriana Foster - do you know her?” Scott asked.
“No, it says she’s a freshman. Great, now you have to cold call a girl and see if she will meet up with you about a programming project. That is super creepy!” Matt laughed.
“Ugh no fair! Maybe I could just send her my source code and a video of Melinda. I’ll tell Melinda we are trying to recruit someone to finish her app. She can give a sob story about how she is homeless because no one will help her. Hopefully, she doesn’t scare Adriana off by asking if she can use her as a medical test subject or promising her romantic drama!” Scott said.
“Not a terrible idea, but I don’t think this girl will open a program sent in an email from some rando. All right, tell you what… You get the program ready and the video from Melinda. I’ll find a way to meet this girl and tell her about our sob story trying to help out a poor crazy homeless lady.” Matt said.
“Deal! Hey, can I borrow your laptop so I can have a conversation with Melinda while I’m there?” Scott asked.
“Sounds good. Take Barry with you. You need to see if you can get Melinda to pick some more key people. Maybe Barry can help you talk to them if they are female.” Matt laughed.
“Oh! Maybe Barry will talk to the prisoner guy. He’s totally going to end up in prison someday, so he’d probably get along great with that guy.” Scott said hopefully.
“Worth a try. I can’t believe a social cripple like you is our Human Resources person!” Matt teased.