Author's note: the following story is pure fiction, based solely on the author's imagination. Any semblance to real or imagined persons or world events is purely coincidental. The author wishes to express his gratitude to rozezwild for her editing to make this a better story.
I'd had the glimmer of an idea for making a better computer for a few years before I finally got up the guts to do something about it. The idea first came to me one night when I was frustrated trying to write a paper for my high school physics class, the one I took in my junior year. It sat back in a corner of my mind and germinated through my senior year, through my freshman year in college while I took the basics for a CompSci degree. Then early in my sophomore year, the frustration reared its ugly head again while I was working on research for a history paper.
I'd had enough. I picked up my credit card, which didn't have much over a thousand dollars in credit left until it was maxed out, and headed for a wholesale electronics supply store. I knew all the parts I wanted, things that you just couldn't get all in one computer at a reasonable price and, since I couldn't afford the top-of-the-line stuff from the name brand guys, I decided to build my own.
To make a long story short, I managed to purchase all of the parts I required for just under my thousand dollars credit, took it all back to the apartment building I shared with fourteen other people and built my own computer over the next couple of afternoons. By the time I was finished, I had a state-of-the-art computer with plenty of memory, lots of storage, and power galore. It had enough ports to add all of the peripherals that I could think of and then some.
I loaded up the operating system and software that I wanted and zoom! It took off. I loved it and my frustrations went out the window. Well, okay, I found a few bugs here and there but nothing I couldn't fix in a short time. By early the next week, I had that baby humming. My history research zipped along, I captured information I was having trouble getting on my old 'puter and put together an A+ paper.
Along the way, my house-mates took notice. Every one of them were students at the same university and every one of them made extensive use of a computer in their studies. Four of them also used computers in the jobs they worked to put themselves through school. By the end of the second week I had been using my new machine, one of my house-mates asked me to build him one like mine. He agreed to pay $2,000 for it because a similar machine on the market was costing four to five thousand.
By the time I finished assembling his machine, I had requests for two more. Then I began to get requests from people outside the house, mostly students but generally people who were only casual acquaintances. By the end of the semester, I was inundated by requests.
I decided to drop out of school for a semester and open my own computer shop. I had worked out an arrangement with three wholesale supply stores to provide me with the parts I needed and then hired three students to work part-time in the assembly area and another to work the front handling sales. I took out some ads in local papers and soon had a booming business. I expanded my line to include laptops as well as desktops and both in several configurations. I figured I'd never be as popular as Dell or IBM or the other major manufacturers but at least I had found a niche market for my products. Hopefully it would not play out.
The whole venture succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. I plowed most of my profits back into the business, keeping a limited amount for my own expenses, but still the money flowed in. Many people came back to talk about how they loved their new computers and swore that they had twice the computing power at less than half the price. My advertisements began to grow when I was convinced to take out space in a national magazine. Up to then, word-of-mouth advertising and the small local ads had been quite successful but the national ads opened up the floodgates. Orders came pouring in.
I had already expanded my production facilities twice, leasing the shop next door to my original and hiring more part-time assemblers. The students were glad to get the work and I did pay them well for their knowledge and skill. Now I leased the last shop in the little strip where my shop was located, replacing a shoe repair shop that was almost dormant anyway. The landlord was only too glad to beef up the air conditioner to provide a cleaner environment in lieu of having the place sit vacant bringing in no income.
By the end of that spring semester when all of the students were scattering to the winds, I decided to look for another place to live. I wanted to stay close to the university but hoped for something with a little more room and fewer problems than the old house we were living in - our landlord didn't put much time or effort into maintaining the property.
On the other side of the school property itself, about a mile away, there was a row of nice large houses, most of them older multi-story homes that had been renovated for use a frat and sorority houses. I spotted a for sale sign on the lawn of one of them and, on a whim, decided to stop and take a look.
It turned out to be a great house in relatively good shape. The main floor had a large living room, an old fashioned kitchen and a roomy dining room on one side with two bedrooms on the other side and a large bath in between. I could use the back bedroom as my own and turn the front bedroom into a home office where I could handle the stuff for my computer business that I didn't take care of at the shop.
The second and third floors were divided into four bedrooms and two bathrooms on each floor. The basement was drywalled but otherwise wide open except for a half-bath in one corner. It could be put to almost any use.
I figured the price would be outrageous but was pleasantly surprised when I contacted the Realtor. I made a counter-offer which was a little lower than the asking price but not too much. The Realtor contacted me a few days later with the news that the owner had accepted and since I made a down payment of half the agreed price, I had no problem getting financing on the remainder. By mid-summer, I was ensconced in new quarters ... and enjoying it. I figured that, when the new semester started, I would advertise rooms for rent and let that income pay for the mortgage.
With the growth of my business, I had hired several of my part-timers to work full time through the summer months putting together machines for incoming orders and to begin to build a stockpile for future sales. I was amazed at how much work was involved in running a small business like this: keeping track of changing suppliers, setting up a shipping department to pack and ship orders that began to roll in from all across the country.
In addition to the assemblers, I had to hire a full time tester to test the products before they went out the door and two full-time shipping and receiving people to handle incoming parts and outgoing systems. To cover the sales room, I had five people who were full or part time, all sort of rotating to fill in the time slots as needed. By then I was spending about half my time at the shop filling in on various roles and the other half in my home office trying to stay on top of things financially.
Early in August I put a small unobtrusive on the lawn, advertising "Rooms for rent." I didn't know whether I'd get any bites or not but that was not really a big worry. By the end of the second full week, I'd had three people come in to look at the rooms but none had actually signed a lease.
On that Saturday morning, I got up late, luxuriating in being able to sleep late for once. After a leisurely breakfast, I worked in my office for a few hours and was beginning to think about lunch when the doorbell rang.
When I opened the door, I was greeted by three lovely young women. The one standing just slightly in front asked, "Are you the owner of this house?"
"Yes. What can I do for you?"
"We'd like to inquire about the rooms for rent."
"Fine. Please come in." I held the door open as they all came strolling past me. They waited and I indicated the living room and followed them in. They all sat on the couch, with the speaker in the middle. I pulled up the easy chair across the coffee table and sat facing them.
"What would you like to know?"
"First, how many rooms do you have to rent?'
"There are a total of eight bedrooms with four bathrooms between them. Something can be worked out for kitchen and dining privileges, of course."
"What is the rental price?"
"Four hundred per month, with a month's security deposit payable up front. Rent is due on the first of every month."
"If we took occupancy next week, would this month's rent be prorated?"
"Of course."
"Is multiple occupancy allowed?"
"Well ... I hadn't thought of it but I suppose it would be okay. I will ask that, because I spend quite a bit of time working in my office, you keep the sound volume down to a reasonable level."
They murmured among themselves for a few seconds, then the speaker asked, "Can we see the rooms?"
"Sure," I said, jumping to my feet. The girls followed me to the stairway and up. At the first landing, I showed them the rooms on the south side and watched them explore every nook and cranny. They seemed to be impressed by the size of the rooms and the arrangement of the bathroom and the walk-in closets. They checked the rooms on the other side of the hall and then I followed them up the stairs to the third floor ... and got a hard-on watching three shapely, wiggling bottoms moving ahead of me. All three of the girls wore short skirts that showed lots of leg and even a flash of panties every few steps.
Since the top floor was almost a mirror image of the second floor, except for the dormer-style windows, they didn't take a lot of time looking around. The speaker introduced herself as Janet Sorenson, the tall blonde said that she was Vonda Elkins, and the shorter brunette said that her name was Candy Simon.
Janet said that they would like to talk about renting the entire two floors so I showed them back into the living room and we resumed the same identical sitting positions ... except that it seemed to me as if the girls' skirts were a little higher on their bare legs.
Janet said, "We are an advance party of the Delta Pi Epsilon sorority. I'm the current President, Vonda is the Secretary/Treasurer, and Candy is the Sargent-at-arms. We have been leasing a house near the northern end of Greek row but the house has fallen into such a state of disrepair that the city inspectors have forced the landlord to shut it down until it was repaired and, at the rate he is going, that would take months, maybe years."
Candy picked up with, "We are a relatively small group which will have a membership of 20 to 26 girls, depending on whether any upperclassmen dropped out of school and how many pledges actually are inducted into the organization at pledge week. Usually we're pretty stable at about 24 girls. We're pretty serious students but ... well, we do like a good party every once in a while."
I nodded my understanding...I was still in the age bracket myself, even though I wasn't enrolled for classes at the present time. Actually I didn't even have plans to go back to school if the business keep prospering.
Vonda asked, "Do you have plans to furnish the rooms?"
"Hm ...," I thought out loud. "I really hadn't thought about it. But I'm sure it would be reasonable in this environment for the landlord to furnish them. Would you all like to have input on how their are furnished?"
