“I’ll go through them again,” I said, grabbing the no pile once more.
“Oh, and we need to set up the model casting as well.” That was another thing I wasn’t fond of. If I could hire a bunch of robots to walk down the runway wearing my stuff, I’d do it.
“Right, right,” I said, flipping through the applications. I added another one to the “hell no” pile.
“If you want, I can set up the casting, call the agents, and all you’ll have to do is show up,” Inari said.
“God bless you. Do you have time to do that?”
“Absolutely. I will make time.”
“Can I clone you?” I asked.
“Um, you can try? I think it’s pretty expensive and not very reliable. That sheep they cloned didn’t live that long. Soooo.” We both laughed. Inari always knew how to make me smile.
“Well, I’ll go and start setting that up, and you come back to me with at least four more applicants.”
“Sounds good,” I said, giving her a big fake smile and a thumbs up.
She just rolled her eyes at me. “I’ll bring you some more coffee if you do it,” she said in a singsong voice.
“You’re evil!”
Inari shut the door in response.
~*~*~
“So, what are your ultimate goals?” I asked the girl sitting in front of me. She was dressed in a pink skirt, white cardigan, and had perky blonde hair. I almost asked her if her name was Elle Woods, but stopped myself. Inari was right beside me to keep me in check.
“Um, well, I’d really like to make it to fashion week, and be like, an icon. I mean, I think I should have my own reality show.” She beamed at me as I fought the urge to punch her in the face.
Inari nudged my foot and I reeled it in.
“Well, that’s lovely.” I shut her resume and lookbook (which had massive amounts of pink in it and several pictures of the Kardashians and Paris Hilton), and smiled across the desk at her. It wasn’t easy. My face was getting quite the workout today.
“Thank you so much for this. You’re, like, so cool.” I couldn’t hire this girl. Even if she had been qualified, I would strangle her in five seconds of her being here. And something told me she wouldn’t know shit about a sewing machine.
“Well, we’ll let you know, Gabby.” I cringed at the nickname. What was wrong with being Gabrielle?
“Great!” We shook hands, and she barely touched mine before she bounced out the door. I pretended to bang my head on my desk.
“Okay, so even I will admit we can’t hire her. I’m an upbeat person, but that would just drive all of us crazy. And did you see her shoes?” Inari shuddered and tossed the resume and lookbook in the trash. Good riddance.
“Okay, so that leaves us with the girl with the double nose piercing, the one who had the kickass handbag, the guy with the mohawk, and the girl with the blue hair,” Inari said, thumbing through the candidates we’d already interviewed. Luckily, the Paris Hilton wannabe was our last interview for the day. I didn’t think I could do any more.
“Then that’s four,” I said, scanning through the resumes again. They weren’t the best, but they seemed malleable. I could train them.
“Perfect. Do you want me to call them all tomorrow, or would you like me to bring them in for another test?” Back when I first started out and had been hiring interns, I’d made them do a sewing test. Most of them had failed, so I got rid of it or else I wouldn’t have hired anyone.
“Oh, and I found you an accountant. He’s a CPA and he comes highly recommended. He’s coming over tomorrow to chat with you.” Sometimes Inari did things I didn’t want to do and then threw them on me so I had no choice but to get them done. This was one of those things.
“Great. So we’re good.” I checked off everything I’d planned to do that day. Wow. That almost never happened.
“We’re good. Tomorrow we need to choose the pieces for the show and the music, and start set designing.” It was a lot, but I didn’t care. I loved it. “I was thinking,” Inari continued, “that we might ask for ideas from the rest of the staff. They can be morons sometimes, but every now and then they have good ideas.” Okay, that was true. “What do you think?”
“Well, normally I would say that’s a terrible idea and I don’t want to do it, but I want to do this show differently. I have a few ideas, but nothing is jumping out at me.” I’d played with a few themes, but everything I’d thought of so far felt cliché. I needed new. I needed fresh. I needed innovative. Let’s see what my minions could come up with.
“Okay, so I’ll let them all know to get their minds percolating.” She hopped up and left me alone with the rejected resumes. I used my arm to slide them off the desk and into the trash.