one, so I got both.” I’d stopped at one of Seattle’s iconic bikini drive-through coffee kiosks on the way to work, where barely dressed baristas greeted me at 6:30 A.M. with giant, perky . . . smiles. “Princess” had taken my order, and as she leaned over to grab my twenty-dollar bill, I wondered if I was helping or hurting the world by supporting this local business.
Kat smiled greedily and grabbed both from my hands. “I can’t choose between hot and cold, either. That’s like asking if I like my son or daughter more.” She leaned in and whispered, “My son makes me toast every morning, though.”
I laughed and then told her about all the shit that went down at GameCon.
She whistled and leaned back in her chair. She lightly tapped her pen on her desk, to an adagio metronome beat.
She stopped tapping and frowned. “This sucks. I’m not gonna lie.”
“I know. I’m hoping you might have some ideas on how we can get this game launched with half the team. And no marketing money.”
She scrunched her brow and nose at the same time. “Well, you’re the one with the marketing background, so I’ll leave that part up to you. But the design and development stuff, I might have a thought or two.” She took a sip of the iced drink and then tried the hot one. “The hot one’s better.” Her face lit up and she clasped her hands together. “Okay, so you may hate these suggestions, but I’ll tell you what I think. We have two programmer interns, both still in college, both Chinese citizens with visas. If they do coding on the evenings and weekends, in exchange for, say, help with English assignments and essays and such, you might have a workable solution.”
“I’m not good at writing essays, though.”
She swatted her hand at me playfully. “Look, I’m just telling you where I see opportunities for mutually beneficial opportunities. Got it?”
I covered my head and winced. “Yes, ma’am, I’ll shut up. Keep going.”
“Production-wise, I actually think you’re doing great. Asher leaving will hurt us but he loaded all the remaining Jira tickets and all the projects into our shared tracking system. The receptionist Kedra isn’t too busy, she’s hyperorganized, and she’s been dying to break into game production. She’s smart, too. I think she could be a good coordinator. Your intern friend can assist her.” She nodded, like she’d just realized something. “I’ll make sure you get the design resources you need. Those guys will listen to me over Asher because they like me better. I’m glad you came to me, by the way. It’s better to rally with a team than to be a lone avenger. If you tried to do it all, you’d for sure fail. No offense. And to tell you the truth, I’m really enjoying the break from Zooful Nation.”
If Kat’s ideas panned out, I could have three new people on the team by the end of the week. With the energy and enthusiasm of fresh new teammates, and me putting in more hours, Ultimate Apocalypse could get back on track.
“Thank you, Kat. I’ll set up some meetings this week with the developers, Kedra, and Nolan and bring them up to speed on everything. You’ve been so helpful. I owe you so much.” I tapped one of the bobbleheads on her desk as I stood up from her guest chair. Its head projectile-launched off the spring, slammed the wall, and fell to the floor.
“Oh god, I am so sorry about that.”
She scratched her brow. “Don’t worry about it. It was broken and I hated that one anyway.” She pointed to her coffee cups. “If you bring in coffee again, I’d love the hot one.” She took a sip of the iced one again. “Yeah, the hot one. Oh! They just opened up a trendy coffee shop down the street, you should check it out. It’s gotten great reviews.”
DURING MY LUNCH break, I stopped by the new neighborhood coffee place Kat had raved about to get her an afternoon macchiato. What she had omitted from her narrative was that this new coffee hot spot was a kitten café. Seattle had so many coffee shops downtown, and new shop owners tried to find new ways to differentiate, such as having feline animals on the premises to cuddle and pet while drinking coffee and/or reading the morning paper. What I didn’t disclose to Kat, because she didn’t tell me about the live kitten motif, was that I