Brent Hanley's Promotion

Learn from your mistakes, and profit from those of others. -Bill

Words by Bill Arundell
Illustration by Dylan Burnett

I get myself into messes quite often. Most of the time I hardly get myself out of one before I’m thrown into another. It’s like a cycle of problematic nuisances that I have to accept and overcome in hopes that I've moved on before the next one comes around. But, if we’re being fair, I asked for it.  No, it’s not like they’re major concerns. You don’t have to feel sorry for me, or anything. That doesn’t stop me from feeling sorry for myself, but I guess that’s my own battle. I’m Brent Hanley and I’m a product tester for Calvin TekCorp. No, don’t roll your eyes; I’m not some whiney guy complaining about his job. At least I have a job. Those aren’t just falling out of the trees anymore. I’ll tell you what, I am grateful for what I have, but that doesn’t mean I have to smile about it all the time. My job isn’t normal. I don’t have a desk, I don’t wear a suit, and I don’t have to stick around until closing to mop the floors. My hours are often irregular, but that doesn’t mean I’m getting called in on weekends or evenings. But what I gain in the convenience department I lack in the safety department.

            Most of the time I’m riding motorized transportation devices, swallowing consumables full of flushable nanotech or checking out virtual reality software for new and improved simulations. On that last one, if I don’t puke all over the thousands of dollars worth of tech then it’s a success. And I say that on behalf of Calvin TekCorp and myself. One time I didn't throw up for fifty-one days straight, which I think is a tester record. But how did I land this job? Most of these positions would go to highly trained military personnel with the capacity to operate and endure the tests, but here at Calvin TekCorp we like to appeal to the little guy. We don't deliver military-grade technology to any united government agencies. Calvin TekCorp is working to bring that next-level gear to you and your family. 

            Good one, right? I know. I used to be a copywriter for Calvin. They were sorry to see me go. Well, no, I was the first one that was asked to leave the department for the tester position, and I like to the think that was because I was the most average looking, slightly overweight, balding thirty-four-year-old white male in the office. I was the guy that tried to get CalTek through the door, but my boss said it was taken in some variation. The reality is that I was entirely interchangeable with a number of other copywriters who were a more consistent with their work than I was. I got the opportunity to join the testing team when I asked my boss for an advance on my bi-weekly pay. I was just short on rent because I had been paying for my mother’s hospital bills. She passed shortly afterward, so the costs went up and I needed the cash. I was trying to support my family and pay for what insurance wasn’t covering but it was just cutting it too close on my own bills. It was a real struggle for a while.

            Shit. 
            I’m sorry. That was a lie. Yeah, all of it. I shouldn’t lie to you. My mom’s not dead, she lives with my step-dad in Grand Rapids, Michigan and she doesn’t call me much anymore. She wasn’t in the hospital, and she wasn’t even sick, not that I’d find out. Relax, it’s not like I spent all my money on drugs and other illegal things. It was perfectly legal. I spent it on online game micro-transactions and self-publishing the crime novel I wrote when I was twenty-three. Less illegal, more stupidly irresponsible. And I was short on rent, but at the time I was really asking for an advance because one of my subs was about to expire. I was using it on one of the work computers. Oh, get over it. It’s not like you never procrastinated before.

            I was denied the advance, but at the end of the week I got a call to head a few floors up to meet with a couple executives about a new opportunity. My boss had filed me as a potentially eager employee looking to make more money, which was true. They saw me as vulnerable and weak, scratching at the bottom of the barrel to make ends meet. I saw me as desperate to buy a cool new sword so I wouldn’t have to spend seventy more hours grinding for an hour-long raid. But I digress. They offered me a job as a product tester, which was one of those hush-hush high risk, high reward positions that stayed off a lot of insurance reports. Some of the testing they did was totally illegal because they ducked under entire rolls of red tape to fast-track the manufacturing and distribution of items that their competitors were painstakingly refining in their labs and testing facilities to provide the best possible gadgets for their customers. Calvin TekCorp didn’t have the time or the money to run everything through the legal ringer. I only heard about the surface layer of legal implications, after signing the non-disclosure agreement of course. Basically, I would test normal, legal products as a front and the rest was justified with under-the-table bonuses for my trouble. The way the short, stout guy in the grey suit that I started calling Danny DeVito in my head put it was that it would be cheaper to pay me to test products than it was to actually use their internal certification system. They also paid some of the third-party agents responsible for turning a blind eye to the products on their way out. And I gotta tell you, if paying me four and a half million a year to shut up and do my job was cheaper than, well, wait, yeah I can understand it. Four and a half mill isn’t that steep for a tech company of that size, especially in a legal certification process. 
            I should have held out for more money.

            I was a tester for nine months. I saw just short of three and a half million for my work, plus a few bonuses. I didn’t have to worry about taxes on the cash bonuses, so I got all that money straight up. Calvin TekCorps continued to pay me my copywriter salary, plus the tester wage which were taxed, and the millions that remained of the difference was delivered to me in cash every week. It was the greatest job I ever had. And I worked at a pet store once. I hung out with a lot of cats. My life had never been better. I had all that money and I barely knew what to do with it. And that is also a lie, because I spent it as irresponsibly as I had spent before I even had money. I sent some to my mom as a boastful spoil of war since she always told me I’d never go anywhere with that job at Calvin TekCorp. I bought a new house, new discounted Calvin TekCorp gear to outfit the joint and I got four cats. Luke, Leia, Han and Burrito. I know, I may have missed out on not calling the fourth one Chewie, but he just didn’t look like a Wookiee. And I was eating Mexican food at the time.  

            Nine months testing products of middling quality, nine months living the life I had always dreamed of. They told me that I could hurt myself doing some of these tests, but I agreed that the dollar bills would muffle the screams and mop up the tears just fine if it ever came to that. I only had to take three days off because one of Calvin’s consumables gave me some wicked diarrhea. That concerned me a bit, thinking I had been damaged permanently but it went away for the most part. Except for the periodic ulcers, but the in-house doctor that observed my health said it was a preexisting issue. So, we’re all good, except I can’t have Mexican food as much. I’d have gotten that sitting at my desk writing about the product anyway: “The new Calvin TekCorp NanoTrek powder lets you endure the harsh conditions of a mountain expedition without the concern for the lack of oxygen, the threat of frostbite or nutritional deficiencies. Mix it with your favourite energy drink and it will begin to produce oxygen in your blood if the atmosphere is too thin, keep your skin warm so your nose stays on your face and feed you bursts of protein and carbohydrates to let you keep on trekking! Don’t worry; your stomach probably won’t bleed. That was just an anomaly.”

            I would be lying if I hadn’t gotten a little worried with the increasingly risky products they were tossing my way. These products were the equivalent of some of the worst things created by man with little market testing, like New Coke, the Nintendo Virtual Boy or most things coming out of SpaceX in the early twenty-first century. I mean, they were death traps. I don’t know how Calvin TekCorp thought they could put some of these things on the shelves without someone throwing out a flag on the play and investigating the entire certification system that I was sitting at the middle of wearing sweatpants and a two-day old t-shirt with ketchup stains. I was testing magnetic levitation personal transports, which you plebes call hoverboards and it tore my pants off by the belt buckle. Good thing I had removed most of my jewelry, I don’t know, eleven years prior following a regrettable unemployed post-college phase. I’d have been splayed out all over that lab. But, guess what? That thing went back for some tweaks and they said they fixed it. So, this is a heads up to any of you trying to ride to school McFly-style. It won’t end well for you.

            But there’s a reason I’m sharing this with you now. It’s because I’m done with this secret, glamorous life as a product tester for Calvin TekCorp. I want to get out of this before one of two inevitable things happens. Either I die in the lab or I get blamed for approving any of the products that don’t kill me outright. Because I just learned that everything that leaves the lab and goes into production has my signature stamped on it. Mine. Not Some lab tech’s, not Danny DeVito’s, mine. I’m done with it. I only tested products that could be used by humans or required a human to use. They could have used robotics like every other company, but any investigator could check records for what the devices did during the testing phases because those things are computers. Instead, they simulated the tests, manually input the results and were free of any issues. You can’t check my records. I’m just a dude, no computer inside. Not yet at least. Those are coming soon. So, when I was shoved into the newest device brought to you by Calvin TekCorp, I figured it would be as safe as they promised.

            Which I should have understood was not safe at all. I slipped on these boots and they locked to the floor. There was a dial on the inside ankle of each piece of footwear that increased the intensity of the hold. You guessed it: gravity boots. If I wanted to be able to walk with a bit of cling I could turn the dial to its lowest setting. If I wanted to make it a little more difficult to lift the boots, I could put it somewhere in the middle, which made it feel like I was walking on Velcro. If I wanted to be stuck to the ground, the highest setting would ensure that I wasn’t going anywhere. I could walk on walls for a bit, but I wasn't strong enough to support myself. I went to the ceiling and hung there, feeling myself slip away every time I lifted a foot. But these idiots were testing gravity boots in Earth gravity, not the zero-G. So, when they automatically locked my boots at full blast and put me through a course of throttling, jostling crash simulators with the floor bouncing around like a car with bricks for wheels, I couldn’t stand up straight. I was knocked left, right and backwards, trying my best to absorb the movement with my knees as my feet held firmly to the floor. My body was responding to the movement in an environment that increased the realistic conditions of the gravity that the boots were intended for. The final rodeo buck from the raging floor threw my body forward, but my feet stayed still. I folded over my knees, breaking my tibia and fibula away from the patella and tearing the posterior cruciate ligament in both legs because the boots remained fix to the floor. Somewhere in their criteria for “Stupid Enough to Sign The Contract” candidates, they neglected to include “Must have genu recurvatum.” They snapped my legs in half. Backwards, for Christ's sake! 
            Okay. Now you can feel sorry for me.

            I left the company that day and began to compile all the information I had in order to hand it over to the certification agency and the police. I was going to spill the beans on all the products I could remember. The thing about having a cool new job, but still the health benefits of a copywriter is I could pay for it with cash but it drew attention to my medical condition. Calvin TekCorp tried to have me treated by the in-house doctor, the same guy that told me the NanoTrek bots didn’t chew holes in my stomach lining, but I passed. I wheeled my way to the hospital after helping myself to their newest model of painkillers and got all the attention I needed. I couldn't sue for everything they did because I signed a contract that qualified my compliance with the work conditions. But I could leak their bullshit anonymously and wait out the hellstorm that would follow. When Calvin TekCorp got word that I might take all their shady dealings to the certification agency, they offered me a settlement. They were ready to give me five year’s pay up front with a healthy severance package and benefits for life. I would be set. So, I took it. They transferred me the funds and I was free from their treacherous ways. We had a deal. They put a guy on me for a while to make sure I didn’t try to go to the certification folks.

            I went to the press instead. Calvin TekCorp went down hard. Best part? I waited for a few of their products to malfunction in the hands of customers. Yeah, maybe a little sadistic on my part, but I needed the leverage. I got myself a lawyer, we put together a great case and waited for my NDA to expire. Those guys didn't think I'd play the long game and I'm sure I would have had to re-up while on the job, but I was gone before they could do anything about it. Once things started going awry for the company I was the whistle blower that brought them to their knees. I wrote a book about it and I didn’t even have to publish it myself. Watching Calvin TekCorp executives being hauled out of their offices on television was a real highlight. It turns out Danny DeVito was some woman named Olivia Calvin, daughter of founder Reginald Calvin and the second generation CEO of the damn company. Don’t know how I didn’t catch that one, but seriously, the likeness was uncanny. My legs healed for the most part, but I don’t have to do much walking since I retired at thirty-five. I’m just a prick on the Internet now. Just living a cycle of messes.