Cleaning Out the Closet

Frederick paused his unpacking, reaching out to take the offered note. He skimmed over it, but didn't look at it too closely. He wasn't going to go through and scrutinize it until later, and it wasn't as if the rush was so great he needed to stop their conversation over it.

But his face lit up anyway.

"Thank you very much," he said. "This should help a good bit with the job search. There are so many companies, and so little information. I think they expect people to already be in the industry, or to know someone who is, and to use that as a leg up."

It was, after all, always about who you knew, not what you knew.

"It's a case of who you know everywhere," Frederick said with a sigh. "A fact of life. Humans are - sorry, I guess people might be a better term here?" He looked to her for confirmation, clearly unused to dealing with so many non-humans. "Either way, people are social creatures. Without making ourselves, we can't possibly judge candidates for a position without taking our biases into account. If you look for them, you can try and compensate for them, but even that doesn't clearly work out. Attractive people tend to do better, for example. People who look like they'd fit the idea the person doing the hiring has for the job. It ties into dress for success and all that."

It was probably all stuff she knew, but he considered it fun to talk about as he set the paper aside, going back to unpacking the box. Most of his cupboards were empty, so there was plenty of room.

Frederick looked up, looking genuinely surprised.

"Really? Truthfully, I'd expected the island to be more... enlightened. Back home was a boys club the same way everywhere else was, but back home didn't have vampires sitting on the council. Almost half the CEOs I've seen are women here from what I've seen."

He hadn't really thought much about it, truth be told. Honestly, sometimes he went out of his way to try not to think about CEOs.

"It's stupid," Freddie said with a sigh, loading pots and pans into his cupboards. He didn't know enough to know how good or bad the ones he had now were, but they seemed fine. At least they weren't bargain bin.

"You have the odds stacked against you, I'm afraid. Anyone in their twenties does, but for a woman? Especially one from a wealthy family? I can imagine the jokes and snide comments. I don't think it helps that CEOs tend to overwhelmingly be older men. For them, it's still an old boys club. Half of them were probably around for..."

He paused for a moment, and then glanced back at her.

"Was the second great war something they could reasonably be from?" He was having a hard time remembering his dates. Was that the 40s or the 60s?

Frederick scrutinized the grater much the way Zora was, before finally deciding that he was going to just have to look it up later. Rather than putting it away, he placed it on the counter, going back to the box.

"I have to confess I made plenty of those deals myself," he said. "Although, in my defense, a lot of those deals were while I was literally wearing a mask. Can't exactly have an above the board meeting with someone whose identity you don't know. To a certain extent, you have to be willing to play ball to get anywhere in places like that. It's unfortunate, but at least in Halcyon it felt like a fact of life. Too many old men who want to sign deals at strip clubs, as if that's an appropriate place for a professional business deal."

The box's contents were starting to wane, and he mostly ignored the clothes, pushing them to the side to deal with later.