A Day in the Life of Cupid
When we last left our intrepid hero, he’d been comforting his girlfriend at the hospital on Valentine’s night after buying her drugstore candy with nuts in it to which she was allergic. But now it’s back to work for Cupid. He’s Project Manager at Love, Inc. and his days are hectic. Today is no exception.
Cupid arrived at his office early at 8am, hoping to get a bunch of work done before the crew came in. He’d bought an egg and cheese muffin and a large coffee to fuel himself up for the tasks ahead.
First, he remembered to text his girlfriend and ask her how she was feeling after the candy ordeal last night. She didn’t respond right away, but that was probably because she was busy at work too. They’d only had two dates so far, plus the funny hospital mishap, but Cupid had a good feeling about their potential. Chantal was a really sweet, understanding person.
Just as Cupid started to plow through his pile of unread emails, the head arrower stopped by his desk.
“Sorry to bother you, boss,” the HA said. “But I thought you should know that the new batch of arrows are at least twenty percent defective. The rest of the crew is experiencing the same.”
“Darn it!” Cupid said. “I recommended we stay with Universal Arrow, but was overruled because they wanted to cut costs.”
The HA nodded. “These are definitely inferior.”
“Thanks for letting me know. I’ll make a report.” Great, thought Cupid. Another task for the to-do list. But this one was high priority.
Cupid shot off a report about the defective arrows to his Operations Director and then returned to his other tasks. But he was soon interrupted again.
“Excuse me,” one of the new arrowers said. “But I ran into a problem on Valentine’s Day. My target was hit again an hour later because she hadn’t disappeared from the list. The same thing happened three more times with different targets as I discovered just now when I compared notes with a coworker.”
Cupid’s naturally calm and cheerful demeanor faded into anger. He realized immediately this was due to yet another boneheaded cost-cutting measure some of the Directors had insisted upon. His Director was a good guy, but had voted in favor of the measures regardless in hopes of getting concessions from the other Directors in return. “Politics,” he had said to Cupid at the time.
Now Cupid said to the arrower, “I’m sorry that happened. It’s the new software. We’ll alert them to the problem and hopefully it can be a simple fix.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I’ll tell the others. It’s really sad when we set up a promising situation and it all falls apart because of some technical glitch.”
Cupid agreed with her. He called Hearts Aflame, the new software company, and put in a help ticket with Quality Control. They promised to give his issue their fullest attention just as soon as his number came up in the queue. It was 37.
Next, he attended a luncheon seminar slash sexual harassment program that all Project Managers were required to attend quarterly. It lasted two hours and they received free chicken pesto sandwiches, sodas, and handbooks on how not to be jerks, and then they watched a movie on how to deal with any jerks on their crews. Now it was 3pm and Cupid still had at least a full day’s work left.
At 7 he decided enough was enough and went to the gym. He felt like skipping it, going home, and flopping on the sofa, but thinking about his hot new girlfriend motivated him to go. He did a quick workout, showered, and headed back to his pad. It was after 9 and he was wiped out. As he nuked a frozen burrito, his phone dinged with a new text. Chantal!
Hi, sorry to do this over text, but I’ve met someone else. Thought you should know. It just happened all of a sudden like a bolt out of the sky. Take care. C
💔💔💔💔💔
I didn’t choose this wretched path:
