I have always wanted to do short stories so am doing this in addition to the sext stories.
Here we go, my first ever short story (episodic). Will be 3-4 parts at least.
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“What was he doing up there?” Laura wondered as her upstairs neighbor bashed and crashed around.
She assumed it was Freddie from 4A making the noise as she had never seen anyone else around his place in the 3 years she had lived there. In fact, she had never really seen any of her neighbors really.
The complex was aimed at ‘working professionals’ which she thought would mean it would attract a better class of city dweller. In reality, it attracted two types of people, office workers like Laura and reclusive computer geeks. Freddie was definitely the latter. He was around 30 with thick black hair, piercing green eyes and a pallor that screamed “why go outside when inside has computers?! “
Yet another bang from the ceiling, it’s like he is moving a piano, or maybe he got rid of his goldfish and replaced it with a fucking elephant. Not that the level of noise was all his fault, the apartments were built in an old cotton factory and so lent themselves to exposed floors and brick walls. Looks flashy (and expensive) but could be a tad noisy.
All of a sudden, a wave of panic washed over Laura. What if he was moving out? She was not close to Freddie but the new tenants could be even noisier, or worse still…friendly. Laura physically shivered at the thought of having to be civil and friendly. It wasn’t that she was rude, in fact everyone at work loved her but at the end of the day, he apartment was her place of peace, her fortress of solitude and one of the things she loved about living there was that everyone kept themselves to themselves.
Laura pushed the thought of dinner parties with the neighbours out of her mind, placed her noise cancelling headphones over her shoulder length red hair and focused back on the PowerPoint presentation she had been avoiding for 3 weeks and was now due tomorrow. PowerPoint! What is this, 2010??
As she clicked through the menus and adjusted fonts, she noticed her computer screen beginning to flicker and flash in the corners. Laura minimised PowerPoint and opened her web browser, the same thing happened.
This was not good, the presentation absolutely had to be ready for 9am tomorrow or her ass was in a world of hurt, and not in the good way. Laura had been selected to pitch the new campaign to the client and although she had done all the leg work she, as always, left the actual presentation to the last minute like an idiot.
The young Miss Jenkins had a brainwave and connected her external screen. Her rationale being it might just be the laptop screen on the Fritz. Sadly, it was doing the same. Not good!
Before she called the Tech Support at her company, she thought she should just reboot as they would ask her to do that first anyway. While the computer did it’s reboot thing, she went to make a coffee. As she stood looking out the floor to ceiling windows, she remember why she loved the city, the lights of the tower blocks and skyscrapers piercing the black of the night, the hue of the light pollution was as beautiful as it was depressing.
Wait, darkness, what time is it? She looked at the clock on the oven to see it was 20:14. She ran back to the laptop to check it was rebooting as she now not only had less time to finish the presentation but also no IT help as they knocked off at 7pm. Shit!!
As she turned the corner into her office, she knew instantly that her evening was about to get much much longer, not to mention more stressful.
The monitor screen was blue with an unhappy face, Laura remembered someone calling it the blue screen of doom or something. The laptop screen itself was every colour known to humanity, a million little boxes of colours, all of them signalling how fucked Laura was. She shut it down, waited 10 seconds and then turned it back on…and wait…and prayed.
60 long seconds later, the computer announced with a fanfare of beeps and flashes that is was still unhappy. Definitely not good!
As Laura sat staring at the blue screen, contemplating how she would pay the rent on this apartment after she got fired and wondering how she cooks have been so stupid as to leave the bloody presentation to the last minutes AGAIN! She was snapped out of her trance by another bang upstairs.
“Fucking IT nerd” Laura spat out. “I need to think!!”
It took longer than she would care to admit to for her to realise that the answer to her problem may lie upstairs. She was 99% sure that Freddie did something with computers. She signed for packages for him a few times and although one was a fish-tank, one was something like an ‘rbg computer case’.
Let’s be honest, she was desperate so was worth a try. The only issue was that she didn’t really know him, she liked to keep herself to herself and it was also getting quite late. She decided that she liked having a job more than looking like a crazy neighbour so up the stairs she went, laptop under her arm and hope in her heart that Freddie was willing and able to fix it.