Just ten minutes after Nick left his apartment, he arrived at Jack's QuickStop convenience store.
Nick entered through the main door of the convenience store, and waved at Mr. Singh behind the counter.
"Good day, Mr. Singh," he greeted.
Mr. Singh, the chubby, full-bearded, brown-skinned middle-aged manager raised an eyebrow, glancing at the clock hanging on one of the walls of the convenience store.
"You're here early today. What a miracle," he casually said. His voice was a bit deep and possessed a notable Indian accent.
Nick laughed and headed for the door to the back, joking, "I'm trying to change. Just like you advised me to, sir."
"Mm." Mr. Singh gave Nick the side-eye, before focusing on the customer that just dropped their items on the counter before him.
Nick went to the restroom to put on his work uniform—the sleeveless red jacket—and coming out, he looked at the door beside the storage room and attempted to open it, but it was locked.
Nick thought for a few seconds, glancing at the storage room door. He checked to see if it was open, and it was.
He had an idea and went back to the main store.
He tapped Mr. Singh's shoulder and quickly retrieved a recording book from under the counter table.
"What are you doing?" Mr. Singh asked suspiciously.
Nick furrowed his eyebrows in slight confusion and smiled lightly. He said in the most natural tone, "Helping out… like you pay me to do, Mr. Singh."
Mr. Singh just shrugged and put his focus back on the desk monitor, on which he was idly playing some old, classic computer game.
Nick went about the store, checking and recording, while casually commenting, "You know, Mr. Singh, how come you play the same old game? Isn't that from, like, the early 2000s? There are newer and more engaging ones coming out every other week, you know."
Mr. Singh shook his head dismissively and just muttered, "You won't understand."
Standing at an angle Mr. Singh's gaze couldn't really inspect what he was doing, Nick took note of a particular perishable food and muttered audibly, "We're out of it."
However, there were still quite a few on the shelf, although only about five packs where ten should be.
He raised his head and asked, "Mr. Singh, are we out of McGillies Cookies? Didn't the restock come in last week?"
"There's more in the storage," Mr. Singh simply replied.
Nick nodded and returned to the counter, dropping the book and heading for the back.
In just over five seconds, he returned, peering through the slightly opened door, and said casually, "It's locked."
Mr. Singh glanced at him, sighed, and wanted to stand up but Nick held his shoulder, "No, no, no, sir. Let me do it. Heh…"
Mr. Singh looked at Nick awkwardly for a few seconds, making Nick a bit nervous, but then the chubby man took out a key bunch from his pocket and handed it to Nick.
Nodding, Nick grabbed it and, just as casually, closed the door.
Nick froze, holding the bunch of keys. He mouthed, "Wow." And then, immediately got to work.
He slowly unlocked the door of the small surveillance room and looked inside. The recording book was just a temporary resource; the real bookkeeping and technical operations of the store happened in this room. Even the monitor at the counter was only used to purview what the cameras showed at the current moment, but never kept the files there, and neither could that monitor access them.
Nick had been working here for over eight months now, so he knew just how the store ran.
He entered and closed the door behind him. Quickly, he got down to business. He switched on the monitor, as the main CPU had already been running.
Prior to this afternoon, he had been researching how surveillance cameras stored their data. Using what he learned, or at least the preliminary understanding he grasped, he navigated through the hard drives and their stored files.
Four hard drives were running concurrently at every moment, briefly storing the footage on the hard drives before transferring them to the main cloud storage server. Then, Mr. Singh came occasionally to wipe the older files on the hard drives.
Nick accessed the running cloud server and quickly found the surveillance video from last night and clicked on it. He watched it and navigated to where Johan and his friends arrived at the store.
'I can cut the scene out and delete it, but that would take a while, and Mr. Singh might wonder why I'm taking so much time and come to check himself,' Nick thought, opting to delete the entire saved footage of his shift last night. Then, he found the file on the local hard drives and deleted it there too.
Just as speedily, he cleared the digital recycle bin, switched off the monitor, and cautiously came out of the maintenance room.
Nick slowly locked it and entered the storage room.
Not long after, he came out from the back with new packs of the product and replaced them on the shelf. Then, instead of simply handing the key bunch to Mr. Singh, he held on to it, waiting for the latter to naturally ask him for it.
Nick finished the routine check and returned the book to the counter, then said to Mr. Singh, "Sir, why don't you go home and just have me start now? There's only like… fifteen minutes left before the start of my shift anyway."
Mr. Singh stared at Nick thoughtfully and sighed. "Nick, I have something I want to talk to you about."
Nick casually sat at the edge of the counter table. Mr. Singh hated it when he did that, and he knew.
Of course, Mr. Singh's brows twitched a bit, but he ignored it and said, "You have to start looking for a new job soon."
Nick's mind went blank; his amicable expression disappeared, replaced simply by deep confusion. He stood up from where he sat and voiced, "I don't… I don't understand. Why?"
Mr. Singh just rested back on his seat, sighing. "Take a look around, Nick. The store has been dying, ever since last year when ShopMart opened just down the street. You know this. I don't want to take too much of a loss before I finally quit."
Nick remained silent, unable to find any words to convince Mr. Singh otherwise. He could probably tell him they could run a promo and also some marketing, but he wasn't sure such an effort would bear fruit. He wasn't confident.
It was true; the store was dying, but he needed the little stability that having this job brought into his life. So he couldn't help but ask, "Isn't there anything we can do?"
Mr. Singh shook his head.
"I am selling the store. And in fact, I have already found a buyer."
Not long after that, Mr. Singh told Nick he could close earlier if he wanted and closed the door leading to the back behind him, letting Nick begin his eight-hour night shift.
Nick slumped down on the chair behind the counter and stared blankly ahead.
The store was empty, as usual.