“What contract?”
I pulled it out of my file cabinet, waved it defiantly in the man’s face. He’d sucked all my positive energy away, leaving me in the negative myself. I was ready for a fight.
Instead of debating it, he turned on Nick. “You entered an employee into a contract?”
“Yes.”
“That was pretty irresponsible.”
“I don’t think so,” Nick said. He was ready to fight too. “I don’t know where you come off stepping in here and turning everything upside-down. I’m running a very successful store here, and I’m running it my way.”
“You’re running it against corporate policy.”
“Yeah, well, whatever works. My figures don’t lie. Hey, I don’t see many of the other stores turning the business like this one.”
“This store does not belong to you. You’re just an employee here.”
“Yeah, well, this employee is doing a damn good job if I say so myself. I’ll leave before I ruin my business by adopting your greedy, short-sighted policies.”
Nick was given his final check that very week. Denny himself moved in to manage the store. He tore up my contract in my presence, with Bob, Steve, and Janet watching. “If you don’t like it, sue me.”
During the next few days, Janet and I tried generating positive energy for repairs by chanting the lyrics to our favorite songs. We had a limited success, but then Janet was chewed out and banned from the tech room for “spending too much time chattering.”
After work, sometimes Bob, Steve, Janet and I – all with our collective spouses, Significant Others, and children – would meet at a little ocean-side pizza place and try to figure out a way to recapture the magic, despite Denny’s negative presence.
Angry, negative-energy plans were rejected, and all our positive energy plans failed.
Negative energy, it seems, is always stronger than positive energy. Possibly because positive energy has to be generated and exists in limited amounts, while negative energy is as vast and limitless as the universe itself. It’s easy to be negative. It takes effort to be positive. And when positive meets negative the positive drains away.
It seems the negative usually wins.
Just look at the world.
We finally figured that the only way to beat the negative is to avoid it, so as a group we all resigned from the store – and, with sadness, went our separate ways. It didn’t matter in the least to Denny, he simply hired more and continued on.
The moral? I don’t know. Just generate as much positive energy you can, share it with those you love, and never, never levitate someone’s computer unless you know them very well.