Jaffen's back ached as he rolled out of bed to go to yet another shift at the power distribution plant. He splashed some water in his face and stretched the kink in his back. Long hours of standing at the monitoring stations in the power distribution centre had aged his muscles and joints. He snorted at his self-pity. His job was one of the best in the solar system; including health benefits, excellent working schedules, competitive wages and since he was promoted, very generous living arrangements. Of course, this promotion came at the same time he lost the love of his life. Due to her crew discovering a planet-wide conspiracy, many abducted and brainwashed workers went back to their previous lives, leaving behind high paying positions at the power distribution plant. For the first time today he already had to remind himself that she had to go back to her people and there was no way for them to be together. His place was here on Quarra. In the last four years he had been repeating the same mantra to himself over and over.
"Great.." He thought, he hadn't even made it to his cooking console yet and the grey cloud of Kathryn Janeway had already descended upon his day. Some days, it held off until he walked past the tavern on the way to work. Groggily he pushed the button on his cooking console to produce a nutritional supplement for breakfast. He didn't feel like making anything fancy that stood a chance of being screwed up by his sleepy state.
As usual, he made it into his workspace right on time and began overseeing the work of the fourteen employees under his direct supervision. His control room used to be occupied by the very corrupt manager that was involved in abducting and brainwashing the entire voyager crew. He liked to think that his management, while average at best, was at least more ethical than his predecessor.
Jaffen gathered his thoughts and headed down to the workstations where his co-workers were gathering for the daily meeting. He nodded to them as he made himself to the front of the group.
"Hello everyone. Unless there is anything that is of immediate concern, you all know the drill, please provide me with your morning generator running baselines within the hour."
Jaffen paused for a moment and quickly turned to walk back up the stairs with the intention of hiding in his workstation for the rest of the shift. One by one, his employees trickled in with their morning statistics. He checked each one of them before handing their tablets back.
Symbya was the last one to come into his work station. She was a sharp new employee with an annoying ability to observe all the social happenings of the employees at the power distribution plant.
She handed him her tablet and said "We missed you at Kiviks birthday party last night."
"hmmpf" Jaffen replied without peeling his eyes off her perfect baseline statistics.
"Why didn't you come?" She kept digging.
"I don't fraternize with my co-workers" He replied handing the tablet back. She didn't reach out to grab it.
They made eye contact and he nudged the tablet closer to her raising an eyebrow indicating that he was not going to elaborate further. She swung her arm around with a dramatic sigh to grab the tablet.
"You used to" she muttered under her breath as she stalked out of his work station.
Jaffen just knew that this new employee was going to be a real thorn in his lazy side.