A Cursor Story

Chapter 2: Boss's Presentation

2024

Ryan's office

Ryan preserved a smile on his face for long- this was coming to him after a lot of hard work- as he saw his own name as the lead author of the research paper on a growing area of man-machine interface. Ryan always wanted to conduct research and publish his results but never did so. He had enough excuses to convince himself, why he could not. But seeing his own name as lead author alleviated his ontological guilt. After all he had been a front seater throughout his school days.

Ryan switched on the monitor, opened up the root folder on his computer, and searched inside the directory named OptimizeComputingPower.

'Tring Tring,' there was a call on his intercom. The display on the intercom was showing 6171: Mitt. Ryan picked up the call.

'Come over.'

Within seconds Ryan was standing in the chamber of Mr. Mitterson, aka Mitt, his boss. Mitt was a middle-aged man with white hair, hair as short as his temper, slightly bigger face with big brown eyes. Being a boss Mitt always dressed in formals. Mitt handled the liaisoning for and on behalf of the company for the governmental projects apart from managing the profits of the GRIID. These projects usually brought huge benefits (read revenue) to the company making him an exceptionally important asset for the company.

'Ryan do you know that you have been working in this company for the past 11 months. We have recruited you because you have shown out-of-the-box creativity in your college project. You had solid recommendations and a tempting profile enough to impress us all. You had already worked in the area of our core interest, man-machine interaction. We greatly value your contribution to GRIID. The efforts of the excellent team members like you made the GRIID a harbinger of the Fifth Industrial Revolution. GRIID has helped us in delegating work which took long working hours to Artificially Intelligent programs and devices running on it. I always appreciate your innovative zeal. But you have missed the two deadlines on the Automatic Poll Prediction project. Your SchoolNet project to predict the marks of the school kids is also off schedule. Did you understand how much we depend upon you? How much this company and this project depends on you. Consider this as the first warning and this should be the...' yelled Mitterson staring right into Ryan's eyes.

'Yes.' Replied Ryan. His mouth had dried without words.

'How much time do you need?'

'Maybe two or three weeks,' Ryan was coming to terms but slowly.

'What?'

'May be two or three days. Chris was not cooperating.'

'What?'

'No no .. I mean Christopher of the data team has not sent the data for feeding into my analytical model.'

'I would tell him to be on time. Now you can go.' Ryan had turned back by then.

'Wait for a second,' Mitt said.

'Again .. is there anything I missed,' thought Ryan applying reverse gear to his locomotion but the momentum of his body carried him forward by a few inches.

'There is another assignment for you. Make a presentation on the latest techniques for modeling human emotions in Artificial Intelligence  systems, this is our key area and I have to deliver this presentation before a group of Senators. This is crucial since our next tranche of grants for GRIID Inc depends on this presentation.' Mitt was calm and polite now.

'Sure sir.' Ryan agreed to do the new assignment without giving a second thought.

Ryan came back and sat on the chair in his cubicle and moved the mouse on the mouse pad randomly pressing right and left keys. Ryan ran his left hand through the hair and forced the group of hair demanding gel to sit down and opened a new word document. A new WordPages window opened in almost no time and a blank white page looked into the blank eyes of Ryan.