And thus the applicant went off on her long and meandering road, patched together from platitudes, euphemisms, and business jargon. Jules was glad suddenly, actively glad, that by striking a vein of sheer good luck, he had managed to avoid occupying the same room as this regurgitator of other, smarter people's half-digested ideas.

She knew exactly what Ona and her team of brain-dead business-casuals wanted to hear. With wanton glee she wielded accusations of "being unable to pursue" her "passion" in that environment, although everyone knew damn well that Transcomm offered her nothing which Convergys couldn't. (A fifty-fifth story office, maybe; admittedly their headquarters was bigger and nicer, built with money which its employees' health plans and life insurance policies doubtlessly did not deserve.) She followed that parry with a pirouette, like how being surrounded by "nontrepreneurs" frustrated her over there. By the time she'd begun to speak about "alignment issues" in her team's list of priorities, Jules realized he had begun to feel sorry for Ona, being chained down in a chair next to that reservoir of verbiage. Would taking an axe to the bulletproof glass between the two rooms save her from drowning in it, or would Ms. Nalluen just flood both compartments in equity, like the iceberg which brought low the mighty Titanic?

"[color=8d97bf]I don't need to tell you how this bullshit grates on me,[/color]" he mumbled into the mic, finger pressed firmly to the talk feed. He made sure to say it when the applicant was speaking, so he could be sure Ona would not miss anything important. But realizing that, of course, literary creativity was not one of Transcomm's hiring criteria, Jules took a lazy glance down at the woman's papers. He suspected everything was in order so far, but with such thick layers of sugar and frosting smeared over her messages, they served to confuse and obfuscate more often than to communicate and clarify.

No, not sugar. Not frosting. Jules realized she would have tried to eat them if that was the case. Looking up from the papers he tried to count the number of chins wiggling between jaw and collar bones.

"[color=8d97bf]Everything checks out so far,[/color]" he felt confident enough to say after a moment's attempt at translation—confident despite the con-artist cant on her tongue, designed to hide how very vacuous the whole process was. "[color=8d97bf]Ona, let's ask about her personal life. Find out more about her family and her hobbies, and all that fairytale stuff.[/color]" [i]That[/i], he knew, is where her real motivations would lie: wanting to spend more time with the kids? Needing more money for her drug habit? No one cared about "synergy" when they slipped out of their ties and dress-slacks at the end of the work-day. It was time to cut through the gristle and get straight to the meat underneath.