Scene III
January 2016
Luke hated his job. But he hated hating it even more as he considered himself an extremist pacifist.
It had been about a year since he had received his degree in geology that he realized he was screwed. No one would hire him. All of the universities and museums that might have were either out of funds or had the positions already filled. In desperate need of a paycheck to start paying off his massive college loans, Luke was forced to turn to his older brother for help.
Don was happy to help his little brother. He pulled some strings and got Luke a job as an assistant to the biology department head at Caveat University, a West Coast school that Don was on retainer for. At this apparent stroke of luck, Luke had thought this would have been an easy temporary position. It turned out it was in the beginning, until Luke got transferred six months into the job. It was called a "promotion" for exemplary dedication, but all of the adjuncts and professors in the department gave him tearful hugs and pitying handshakes. He even overheard an elderly ecology professor mumble something about "poor millennials" to the Calc professor.
Luke didn't know what to think. The transfer required him to move to Central Campus, and begin work as the assistant to the Dean of the liberal arts program. As Caveat University prided itself at being highly selective and extremely expensive, Luke could only guess about the rich money polluted snobs he'd have to interact with.
Also, the dean was supposedly an ass who would do anything to maintain the university's prestige. Alison, a preppy blond adjunct once told Luke during a biochemistry lab setup up that the dean apparently was involved in some sort of cover up. Apparently it involved someone disappearing. "He like totally denied anything has happened and that campus security majorly screwed up," she mentioned while handing Luke some pipette tips, "No one even knows who disappeared. Apparently the parents were paid off big time, convinced she had run off with some guy because she was knocked up or something."
Between being uprooted from his current life, and hearing this, Luke felt torn about taking the promotion. That was until he received his monthly student loan bill. Apparently someone decided somewhere that since he had held a job for a few months, he would now need to have his monthly payments doubled. Gossip be damned, he needed some financial stability.
So with that mantra being repeated over and over in his mind, Luke found himself standing in the middle of a large office with a glass wall that exposed a raging Pacific Ocean and the tallest Evergreen forest he'd ever seen. He was holding a stack of transcripts of hundreds of conversations that had taken place over a ten-year period. Transcripts that were hand-written and had to be typed up within the next two days.
Yeah, he really hated his job.