Chương 18: The Big Day

On the day of the launch Dawn excitedly floated over to Stephan's house early that morning eager to start the day. Stephan, nervously being ready already and repeatedly going through his mental checklist of things to make sure he had done before starting the engine up today, worried about not getting done something on his list or forgetting to add something essential to his already lengthily list was glad for Dawn's arrival enabling him to briefly focus on something other than his list. After making sure that he had set up his security system to protect Jessica and scheduling food deliveries for her to eat while he was gone, and then going over it all once more to ease his worried mind, him and Dawn got into his car and he drove to pick up Holly and Rachel from their place before heading to the office so that they wouldn't have to leave their car unattended while they were gone.

Upon arriving at the office, the girls made sure to go through their lab area shutting down most of the machinery and securing the smaller engine and any other projects that were dangerous or that competing companies are always trying to bribe the other employees for reports on or samples of. After using his ability to direct his robots in space to pressurize and then turn on the rocket's oxygen tanks after checking for leaks, Stephan went to his office and called his assistant Ranita in to meet with him.

When she arrived they quickly went over all of the financial reports and the current status of patent applications for all of the newest items they had designed and submitted for approval before marketing. Once they were done Ranita started to get up and go back to her own office when Stephan stopped her with, "Wait Ranita. Wait. Due to the risks of what we will be engaging in later today, we have one last thing to go over today before I go on this test flight."

"Ah. Yes. The lovely power of attorney and inheritance stuff should the worse case scenario show up." Ranita said with resignation.

Stephan gave a small smile and exclaimed in an unenthusiastic voice as well, "Yes. Yay! I just love doing this soooooo much as well."

He then passed her copies of the paperwork that had been in front of him and informed her, "Ordinarily I would have kept things as they have been and torture you guys by turning the company over to my mother. But with the recent arrival of my sister, I had to actually sit down and give it a little bit of thought this time and I've made some major changes."

"You giving it to the girl scouts this year to make up for all those times you promised to buy cookies but forgot to pay for them?", she asked as she started skimming the paperwork. She then and asked for clarification, "I see where you're giving it to your sister, but why do you have two sets of paperwork here?"

Stephan grinned and surprised Ranita by explaining, "Well, the top set is for her in a limited role due to her not yet being legally able to take full control. The other set is partly because I am granting Power of Attorney while she is still not old enough to the one person that knows this company better than me and already runs it in practice if not in name. And, should Jessica not want the responsibility after achieving legal age or, Lord forbid, anything happens to her, the second set it for that key person to take full control of the company and keep it as successful as it has become."

Curious, Ranita pulled the other set to the front and was surprised to see her own name. Shocked, she shakily responded, "T-thank you. I feel honored that you would trust the company to me. I don't know about being able to keep it successful since I'm nowhere near your ability to think of all these new inventions that pop out of your head every day but I do greatly appreciate you seeing how much I do here."

He smiled and told her, "Coming up with ideas for new stuff is actually quite easy. Just use your imagination. Then you just have to do your research to see if it is possible and then the hard part is working on making it possible. Then, once you get done with that part, you already know how to do the marketing and business stuff."

"Yeah. But my ideas are harder to find markets for than yours." Ranita grumbled.

"Hey now! Chin up girl! The marketability part grows with time." Stephan chided, "Don't forget about how we couldn't find anyone that wanted what I was coming up with when I first started this company. I know you knew about them because I was so desperate to find folks as interested in the stuff as I was that I had to hire this up and coming marketing exec by giving her twice as much as her last job as well as a corner office with the best view in this new research tower she talked me into building because she didn't like working out of my living room while me, H, and R were coming up with stuff in the garage."

Laughing at the memories he brought up, Ranita responded, "Sorry, but your mismatched furniture was clashing so bad that it was making me feel OCD-ish and I couldn't concentrate. Plus, I knew that we would have to have a business office at the least to get folks to even think of taking us serious. So, for me, it was a win-win."

With a playful grimace Stephan jokingly complained, "If you had just said something about the furniture I could have bought matching stuff instead of building this tower. Oh. Wait. I forgot, Miss Marketing couldn't resist using her marketing abilities on me to get what she wanted and to show me how good she could be at marketing."

They both laughed but then Stephan got serious again and told Ranita, "Sorry but back to business for one more thing before I forget about it. With H&R going with me on this flight I included in there what they want done if something should happen to them as well."

With a humorous groan, Ranita asked, "Oh Lord. Knowing those two. Let me guess, they want me to start some strip club in their name or even a store selling some of those freaky sex toys they've come up with that they want to use on me when I refuse to market them."

Sighing Stephan shook his head, "I'm sorry they subject you to their pervertedness. I've told them I don't know how many times that one day somebody is gonna throw sexual harassment charges and it's gonna cost us millions of dollars and they're gonna have to work for free to pay it back."

Ranita patted his hand as she consoled him, "If it helps any, one of my friends is a lawyer and, when I asked her about some of the stuff the girls were saying to me, she explained that with the girls always phrasing it as suggestions or asking if it's something the person wants and not pressing with anything more than a plaintive 'are you sure?' it only qualifies as offensive speech. But the language I have gotten from clients throughout my career where they make sexual comments phrased as the only way to get them to close the deal and especially when they keep trying to press the issue is full blown sexual harassment."

"What?!" Stephan exclaimed, "Why haven't you told me?! If I had known we would have dropped those guys in a heartbeat!"

"I know." She replied, 'But don't worry, we always ended up with a better deal. They would all be letting the hormones do the thinking for them and so I would play it up and get them to keep adding to the deal and then, when I had pushed the deal as far as I could without their big brain taking back control from the little brain, I would get them to sign the deal while I went to the bathroom making them think I was getting ready. Then, after a couple of minutes, I would come back from the bathroom, pick up the deal and make sure it had their signature on it, then thank them and leave knowing that they couldn't complain about it because they knew if they did then they would be the ones getting fired or sued, not me."

"Durn," he said with admiration, "I almost feel for them guys but they deserved it for treating you like that. And I must say I'm glad I've always stuck to the rule of work stays at work and home stays at home cause, hearing that, if I had ever even thought about even asking you out on a date you would have milked me out of a million dollar raise and ownership of half the company cause you're just as beautiful as you are smart." he finished with a blush.

When Ranita then smiled, he then shook himself and, in a strict managerial tone, said, "Anyways, back to business. H&R had an interesting way to attract good engineers after we leave that I think we might want to go ahead and start even if things go good today being as the three of us and the robots are the entire engineering department."

Looking at the indicated paperwork, Ranita read, "Let's see here, They want me to take what stocks they have that account for 25% of the company's stock and give employees, at the end of every year of employment, one share for every week they were employed that year. Then, if they quit or get fired, we basically buy back the stocks at market prices."

She thought about it for a minute and told Stephan, "I think we should go ahead with that part too. Especially if we do it across the board to all departments. Doing this would really get folks to buy in to the company because then the better the company does the bigger a bonus they get every quarter when we release our business reports. And, should there be any issues come up, they would also have a direct voice in the decision making process by being able to choose options at our stockholder's meeting. But I think we should up it to 33% of the stock."

Stephan did the math in his head real quick and agreed, "Yeah, 33% would work better if we went across all departments. But I think the remaining 12% that I don't own should go to those of you that have been with me from the start of things. Because y'all have been through rough times right along with me. And some of you even had to go a couple weeks without checks a couple of times when I couldn't even afford to keep the lights on at the house until those projects finished and we started getting paid."

They then moved on to a couple of other things that needed his decision before he was free for the day and able to complete the last few things needing to be done before they left.