Pink Slips, White Paper

“I’m not mad,” Cullier Joseph drank his ginger ale and orange bitters.

“You’re not in the least outraged by the fact some evil, greedy billionaire canned all seven hundred of us?” Palia Pamik asked.

“No.” He sipped some more and turned around and looked at the crowd of people at the bar.

“You’re not drinking. You’d be mad if you were drinking,” Palia said. She checked her phone for the latest opening for a position as an engineer at a rival social media company.

“I say we don’t have to see this as what you said. First of all, she would be gluttonous, not greedy. The former applies to consumption, the latter is production. Also, what makes her evil? The fact she produced a fortune, bought a company and handed us pink slips?”

“It’s something like that,” Palia sipped her bourbon.

“What we need is to not drown our sorrows. We should band together,” Cullier declared.

“Social network engineers unite?”

“Not in the sarcastic, Communist way you’re talking about, but yeah. We should draft a white paper.”

“A white paper to send to what company?” Palia asked. Her phone chimed. “Ooh, I got a bite.” It was a text from her ex-boyfriend. “Jesus, just put me out of my misery already. I can’t believe he’s actually trying to hook back up.”

“You and Darren?”

Palia nodded, “yes.”

“Goddamn shame we have to put up with this,” Cullier breathed.

“I know. I’m sure Krystal has drunk dialed your number once or twice.”

“What? No, I mean our careers. We were pulling in high six figures. With the bonus, I would have cleared a mil’ in a year after taxes.”

“Same here. I was about to be promoted, then,” she made an ax chopping motion.

“This white paper’s going to be the thing!” exclaimed Cullier.

“So what are we supporting? Just our jobs? We’re going to sit down and type up a whole proposition to our next employer telling them not to fire us?”

“No, we're going to start our own company called White Paper and submit it to ourselves.”

“Okay….” Palima rolled her eyes and shuddered. “Is it cold here to you?”

Joseph was too lost in his reverie to fully commit to what Palima just said. He continued.

“We’ll make it the only social network where you don’t network. You just talk to yourself. No wall, no reels, no scrolling other people’s pages. You get your site and you just post content for you. There’s no sharing or anything like that.”

“Seems masturbatory, but okay. What about the white paper part? How do you make that White Paper?”

“There’s a blank white paper that you type into that gets erased everyday.”

“So we’re making our own definition of it now?”

“Precisely,” he sipped some more.

Palima grinned. “I don’t know how your brain works, but I like it, sir,” she said.

“Thank you, madame.”

“Where’s the infrastructure, the C-suite, the space?”

“All in Delaware. Wilmington will be our flagship location and headquarters. We can just start collecting people that are in our position. I can think of about ten people as officers.”

“I can think of two. You and me.”

“You know we’ve got coding, we would be in the black every quarter. Nevermind the fact that we’ll be trying to pick pieces that never shattered completely. And we won’t need any investors. I’m sure you put away enough to last you.”

Joseph nodded his head yes.

“So we can do this. Yeah, I’m absolutely down with this idea.”The two former coworkers and future centibillionaires finished their drinks and exited the bar.