I gotta admit, I wish I’d had this kind of professor-pupil relationship with any of my bosses. They mostly just wanted me to do the work, make the reports, and go away. That’s not the only reason Carol’s so loyal, but it’s a factor.

At any rate, the way HR is testing her here at least gives this scene a bit of conflict to spice the exposition.

At this point, Phil and I were arguing about increasing the chapter-count from 24 to 30. “We haven’t mined the full potential,” he kept saying. The idea that we were “discovering” the story’s true shape was a reassuring one, but to a large degree, we related to HR, watching this thing spin more and more out of our control.