Pick'N'Mix Mods for The Sims 2

3 - Financial Wrongs

The alarm went off. Analise extracted herself from the hug of the duvet, stood and stretched the kinks out of her body. After putting coffee on in the kitchen,

she picked her way carefully through the carnage in the hallway and stood in her bedroom doorway. She groaned. Melissa had been violently sick in the night and was now sleeping in a congealed puddle of vomit. But, on the plus side, Mel's complexion was returning and Analise could see her breathing was regular. Stepping gingerly to the bed she checked her sister's pulse, it had slowed and her eyelids were no longer fluttering - she'd live. She didn't have time to deal with the mess, it would just have to wait. Carefully gathering up all she needed, Analise returned to the living room and dressed.

Analise was peeved, no, she was more than peeved, she was miffed. She'd been all ready to leave for her momentous day - newly purchased suit and shoes, new hairstyle, newly purchased document wallet containing copies of the executive summary of her report that was about to send shock-waves through the banking district - and then her email had 'pinged'.

It was a terse message from her supervisor's boss's boss's boss - her presence was not required. He thanked her for her efforts and informed her to take the day off. No, she was beyond miffed. What was it John had used to say, she was what? Yes, that was it, she was 'pissed' - and she'd just used up her swear word for the year.

John was a small footnote in Analise's life story. She'd met him after Christmas Break in her junior year, he was a senior. She'd literally fallen into his arms - while reaching for a book on the top shelf in the campus library - and broke his glasses.

Feeling somewhat guilty, she'd accepted his offer of coffee. Over the next few weeks, they went to movies, had their first kiss, cuddled on the sofa, and 'did it' ... twice.

Analise didn't understand what all the fuss was about - a lot of grunting for very little satisfaction. They didn't 'break up' as that would imply they'd 'been together' - they just stopped seeing each other. Their relationship had lasted a little under six weeks.

Analise worked in 'financial forensics'. It sounded much more interesting than it was, unless you were in love with numbers and the kind of introverted masochist that unpicked knots in cotton-thread for the pure fun of it. Analise adored it. And she was very, very good at it.

The large team she was a small, lowly part of were investigating a suspected international banking fraud. The team had been working the case for five years and had got precisely nowhere. Every lead came up blank, or could be legally explained away. Analise had been assigned to the team 16 months ago, as a maternity cover, just after finishing her six-month probation with the firm - that had consisted entirely of making coffee,

photocopying documents, making coffee, filing documents, making more coffee, and, if she was really lucky, running out to pick up 'something nice' for one of the senior's wives/mistresses - flowers were for the wives, jewellery for the mistresses.

Things didn't improve as the newest, temporary team member. She got to do everything she'd done as a probationary as well as the 'responsibility' of checking other people's work -

that is, they didn't trust her with anything new -

and she worked longer hours for pretty much the same pay. But the work fascinated her. She loved the preciseness of numbers, and, even knowing that it led to a dead-end, the thrill of chasing discrepancies through the columns and sheets of figures. Then, three months, two weeks and three days ago, she'd spotted a tiny error on one of the sheets she was checking. An interest payment was out by two simcents. She'd shown it to her supervisor, who'd taken it to his boss.

It had come back with a terse memo for her not to waste people's time with inconsequential computer errors. But computers didn't make errors, people did. A computer may round a number up or down, that would only ever be a single simcent either way, but it would be corrected eventually when all the fractions of a simcent eventually added up to make the missing one. Never two simcents. And this error hadn't corrected itself. Analise was convinced that a human had made the mistake.

That evening she broke the first rule of the company, the one she could be instantly fired for, and took a copy of the statement home. It was the first time in her life she'd ever knowingly broken a rule. The next few days she tracked down related statements for checking and broke the rule with those as well. By the end of the week, the two simcents had become twenty-three and a small folder of illicit photocopies sat accusingly on her bedside cabinet. The following week she started to ask her supervisor for additional paperwork. He was a pen-pusher, and, always after the easy life, rather than doing the work, showed Analise how to operate the archive request system.

To Analise it was as if someone had given her the keys to heaven. By the end of the month her two simcents had grown into whole simoleans, and a month later into several hundred. Then, late Friday evening two weeks ago, after everyone else had left to attend a retirement party,

she picked at a particularly stubborn knot of figures and the whole thing unravelled before her eyes. She'd never seen that much money - it ran to billions!

She'd spent the weekend writing-up her findings and most of Monday covering her work-at-home tracks. As she was leaving, she dropped her report and supporting documents into the supervisor's in-tray. He looked at it as if to say 'what are you bothering me with now?'

Next morning, the office was in turmoil; senior's running around, shouting, waving their arms, hurrying people up and doing real work. People would stop and point at her, a few shook her by the hand, some even smiled.

Her life turned into endless meetings, briefings and report writing - she was rarely home before 11pm. 'Promotion' was uttered under breaths in corridors; there was even a rumour about the mythical bonus beast. She didn't care for that, she just wanted her name at the top of the report and to sit in on the meeting with the Board of Directors.

And now that had been taken from her; she felt bereft. Someone else was going to bask in her glory and reap the rewards. In hindsight, titling the report 'The significance of an inconsequential computer error' had not been one of her better ideas. And not finding out who had initially checked the statement was going to be up there on her top three list of 'biggest mistakes of my career' - he now sat on the Board.

She had nothing but the day off for her troubles, and it was a long weekend - four days to do nothing but baby-sit and clean up after Mel. She couldn't face her bedroom, she'd start in the hall.

2 - Rude Awakening 4 - Ticket to Where?