Stephanie came to the office the next day. Prattle's office was just half a floor of The Pixel, one of the endless towers standing in the remaining CBD in downtown South Jakarta. With the remainder of the Immune workforce hustling in essential fields that sometimes forwent the air-conditioned rooms, tongue-in-cheek comments often sounded rude to those who still enjoyed working indoors. Old news, that was. Jobs without exertion risked becoming the public enemy.
Coupled with the general misconception—the classic problem of the Maslow pyramid: whether a psychological need was an actual need in the pandemic, Stephanie didn't have any luxury of firefighting. She fought the fire by doing real work with people. Well, go figures, Stephanie sighed. Just because nobody did their research on the current depression rate or even suicidal thinking, it didn't mean they were not present as silent killers. They lurked in the darkness, ready to consume any meat hurled at them like hungry tigers. Masked by the apocalyptic-scale drop in population, these murderers hid behind false peace.
It just didn't sit right with her when a job was measured by the amount of physical exertion required, because that simply meant jobs that required vast variations of thinking and sitting were not counted as meaningful.
But that wasn't the reason Stephanie started this business. She recalled the talk with her ex that night.
"Your communication sucked." He, her ex, of all people, dropped the guillotine of judgement on her personality, much more than just communication skills.
"I believe you won't have a good relationship with other people because of your miserable problems that annoy me so much. Why didn't you greet my friends when they were here? And no call to my mum, either. Such an ungrateful person you are."
"You threw that pot of bone broth to the sink. What were you thinking?" Stephanie scolded back.
The fights were getting pettier. The more unsubstantial the matter was, the more eager each party was willing to be catty.
Until it was always her turn to say something like, "I'm never good enough for you, am I?"
"Look at my mum and her wide connections with people. She's loved, unlike you. She's a good role model for you, so try to be her." Ah, yes, that was the bottom line. There was always the other woman she couldn't compete with. Only the woman was ultimately irreplaceable, his mum was.
She was never good enough for anyone. Even for her parents.
"Ambitions and dreams could only bring you so far in life. But the familial love, the marriage that you'll have few months from now, is something to cherish forever."
Why was it easy for her inner circle to ask her to drop her future and tag along with the plans her fiance had made and hard to understand that she wasn't going to shed her identity just to become a trophy wife?
Before getting engaged, she was a thriving finance associate on her way to becoming a manager. Ah, funny how one sour memory opened the floodgate for more to come, wasn't it?
Only at work, she had felt accomplished and respected. People saw them as Stephanie with her stellar performance and not second-guessed by whether she had a man to come home to.
She walked with immediately lighter steps to the Seroja meeting room. The leftover name sticker was still glued to each meeting room of its previous company, a distributor in a massive FMCG chain. They named the meeting rooms after the tropical cyclones in Indonesia. It was known that the cyclones were named after vegetations instead of female names, a thoughtful movement that was considered progressive as compared to the other places in the world.
Stephanie wondered what might have become of the employees of that old company. She had heard about massive layoffs and furloughs happening around the same time she was given the pink slip.
When the situation worsened for everybody, many of the companies couldn't recover anymore for simply not having enough manpower to carry on the BAU, business-as-usual.
"Our economy is built upon cracks of bones and bazillion tears." She recalled Val ever said this. His ochre polo shirt and black jeans were visible from the glass wall separating the Seroja from the open floor plan. Stephanie instantly smiled, noticing that single person standing inside Seroja meeting room who was now facing the medium-sized whiteboard, wiping a small part of it with a piece of a rag because no one made whiteboard erasers anymore after three years in a vacuum.
Valentino Dartanto, her co-founder, was somehow turned up on her path when she started a discussion in an online forum to flesh out the prototype of Prattle. Stephanie was the first person to take him into the business venture when both of them had limited career choices, and together they rolled out Prattle for the first time.
It was his idea, too, to name this app when they were stuck at choosing between the synonyms of companions and the variegated nouns embodying the spirit of social beings. The creative motor of the team, Val was one of the three main PICs of Prattle. The concept of C-level like CEO, COO, and such had been dropped in the new era since it didn't make sense when all of the companies were short-staffed like Prattle, which had only ten employees including the founders. Everyone did anything they had to do to keep the business running, and titles were just the breadcrumbs left by history.
A tall and muscular guy in his mid-30, Val was an easy heartthrob with his intelligent and clean-shaven face. He got deep in the secondhand spectacles frame trade since contact lenses that he frequently used turned rare in the market and many optical shops ran out of business.
He turned bodily around when he heard the soft creak of the door hinge. No one had the time to oil it when three-quarters of the population was wiped out. Perspective.
"Hey," he greeted her, adjusting the now-oval-shaped metallic-framed specs.
"Forecasting the next quarter's clients?" Her eyebrows raised looking at the structured approaches and calculations. "Good numbers, yeah?"
Val didn't reply with banters. He stared sharply at her, "Of all people, why did it have to be a Council member's wife you visited?" His voice stern, his arms crossed in front of his chest.
Stephanie felt sweat trickling down her back. Val was always a commanding presence, exuding a domineering aura.
"How could I know beforehand? Our app doesn't have such a thing to filter out important persons!"
"We got a serious problem from this," he turned his laptop around so the screen faced Stephanie. He beckoned her to read the opened email.
Her stomach sunk.
There written in red font, it said,
!! Violation of the Law of the Unified Global Government !!
Providing service to the Council members, ministries of the Unified Global Government, and the departments across the world, and their family members is strictly prohibited.
Consequence might include but not limited to the immediate termination of the business licence. Board members are advised to appeal at Department of Commerce.
All colours drained from her face.
What should she do?
"Call Gema," she said in a trembling voice.
~*~
"Summoning me, fam?"
A leggy guy wearing a white pullover and tactical khaki pants sauntering inside. Gemarianto Husnaini, or Gema for short, was the third person in the main PIC of Prattle. Joined a little over a month after Stephanie and Val registered their brand and app proof-of-concept to the government, Gema's speciality in tech and product development helped them much.
Prattle now subcontracted their tech development to few Protected freelancers working from home, and not many changes were necessary to their front end, so Gema had less to do in his expertise. He utilised his timetable to recruit new Companions, instead.
"I had to walk, just so you know, for almost five kilos. There was no bus at the Bogor KRL station bus stop because they somehow moved the pool somewhere else. And this info was not updated anywhere. Look at my blisters," he whined, removing the band-aids covering his ankles to Val and Stephanie who raised their eyebrows.
"Ouch." Stephanie crouched to watch closer the red welts that formed horizontally over the pale veiny skin. Gema eyed her warily. When their eyes met, a flash of emotions she couldn't name showed on his supposedly cheerful pupils. But it faded as quickly as lightning.
He cleared his throat, "Makes me miss driving cars even more. But with the restricted mobility, definitely, I won't be here next time you call me if the government catches me driving personal vehicles. Heard from some birds a couple were taken down by the bloody choppers for driving out to Ancol beach. Recreation went into frenzy when the birds snooped around. With their eyes everywhe—"
"Shush," Stephanie put the lid of his bubbling disappointment back. Their record had to be kept squeaky clean. Nothing should ever be at odds with how the country was run.
After catching up with what came upon them, Gema proposed his opinions.
"Basically we have to cooperate, is that what you're saying?" Little beads of sweat dotted their foreheads and the junction between the neck and shoulders because the AC was off. With the lack of technical workers, she postponed dealing with issues like the repulsive smell coming off the central AC vents. When she caught wind of one AC service firm that was still operating, the technicians kept being called by supply offices here and there.
"As if we've got any other options," Gema snarled, wiping down his sweat with a blue handkerchief. His face was ashen and his shoulders slumped.
"But, come on. It was an honest mistake," she pushed.
"It's because our app doesn't recognise those politically exposed persons," Gema explained.
"And whose fault is that?" Val pressed on.
Both guys's eyes looked at Stephanie. It was her fault to postpone some features in their backlog because of the problematic red tape. It was a delicate situation to ask for the sensitive persons' data from the Department of Wellbeing, the one Prattle was answering to. Coupled with assumption that not even the family members of those VIPs did care about this whole Companionship business, Prattle ran without this specific feature.
Now look at this.
The three of them should work the hardest to not let their business shut down. Stephanie balled her fist in her lap. They couldn't cease being Companions. Not when they had just taken baby steps to improve the role of Companions to their clientele's life.
People who felt stuck at home, in their relationships. Elderly ladies and gentlemen living alone, without anyone regularly checking in on them. This pandemic had destroyed relationships and brought out the worst in almost everyone.
"Let's speak to legal. Is there any bargain we can take? We don't have money, so nothing to pay, yeah," Stephanie threw a glance at Val to confirm her understanding of the current financial situation. "There's always something else if we try hard enough," she proposed.
Gema and she spent the next two hours calling everyone they could reach while Val calculated the maximum allocation if they needed to pay.
Dead end. The steady rhythm of tapping fingernails against incisors, Gema's tell of nervousness, spread Stephanie's patience thin.
"No other way. An appeal is an appeal."
They followed through the email procedure until they got an appointment and the name of the PIC.
Val answered short and sharp. "You won't like him."