The fix

You know what? I quit. The words rolled around in her mind like steel knives, severing everything she believed she knew about the world. She had, just like that, changed the entire trajectory of her world with five simple words. And what was she going to do now?

“What am I going to do now” the words flew out of her mouth as she sat in her car lost and looking at the sky as if it would open up and all of the answers would pour out. They didn’t.

Alice was in a state of shock. She was done being the whipping girl for the praised men. Men that took her wins as their own while torturing her into a corner. She was done with forced mediocrity for less money. One emotional reaction in a moment of deep frustration and she was now free from the corporate wheel that rolled over her without appology over and over again.

She started the car and drove home. What she knew, was that rent was due, her credit cards were mostly maxed out, and her dog needed food. She also knew that she was out of a job, and she also knew she couldn’t go back to the world where men were rewarded for being bullies, and girls that supported them were never acknowledged or given any credit.

What she didn’t know was that this simple small act would not only change her life forever but it would set in motion a small change that would affect the whole world.

Tim was an old boss, he tried to be fair but he was part of the old regime, award your buddies and ignore the little people as much as possible. He couldn’t be blamed for his role in how many people left after Alice, he had his star salesman, he had his GM and he was bound to them with his service, he had been steady and reliable. He made smart choices and spent most of his time talking his employees through their issues. His star sales team was doing better than ever, bringing in more clients and money than the company had ever seen so certainly they were not the problem, right?

But the support team, ungrateful people who always complained, support staff that never lasted long, lacked team spirit. Didn’t they? But now Alice, for years she had powered through and suddenly just up and gone. But others were interested in getting ahead, they could fill her position without any problem. Couldn’t they?

They replaced Alice with Deirdre, she knew the ins and outs of the job more or less and could learn the details. She was sent to the corporate office for training. She trained with the top man, the guy that everyone thought knew everything. She came back with the same training Alice had been given, but she wasn’t Alice. She took over the basic duties, but so much of what Alice did, what Alice had was based on who Alice was. Not the fact that she did the job, but how she did the job. Alice was a rollover, she was someone that always found a way to make the client happy, make them feel like they could have anything they wanted without actually giving it to them. She was kind and honest and giving and caring and they liked her for that. Over time clients moved on to other companies, other adventures, other towns. They couldn’t do the same business with the company that lost Alice, without her their experience wasn’t the same.

Eventually they reduced their staff to a minimum. Their profits leveled out and raises no longer were a given. A new building across the street went in and many employees moved to offices over there. After all support staff were just that. They could support anyone, anywhere and the entire mood of this particular office had just changed too much since Alice left.

Eventually the business moved to another office in another town and that building shut down for good. The landscaping was no longer viewed as important, Alice had been the one to oversee that, and the vines she would absent-mindedly pulled out on her lunch break began to take over. The weeds that she took out on her breaks began to overgrow and in time the building became home to rodents, because Alice was no longer there to call the exterminator. A broken window pane was a place for troubled teens to make their way in and spray pain over the one beautiful murals. The tile work in the lobby a great place for skateboards at first, then as it chipped away, and was no longer fun for teens, the homeless began to sleep there leaving piles of collected trash everywhere and defecating on the street outside the building.

The building next door was a small sandwich shop. Alice used to eat lunch there twice a week as did many of the employees that works in her building. But when she left, their sales dropped, then as other left they dropped some more and soon they were also out of business and their building suffered the same fate. The effect was like a domino and a depressed economy swept down the street all the way to the Happy Factory. They too closed down. Only when the Happy Factory closed down it took down the entire town, now everyone that still lived in Happy Valley was either forced to live in extreme poverty, or move to another town.

The Happy Factory was the largest supplier of fertilizer to the entire region. But when they didn’t have enough employees to continue to operate they were forced to shut down. Without their very specific and very special brand of fertilizer the crops in the region began to suffer. Most people were too dense to see the connection and they blamed Global Warming or Government cuts to farming for the decline, which to be fair was someone part of the problem. Strangely enough the fertilizer from Happy Valley, along with the produce, which was shipped all over the worlds and contributed to the composted products for other fertilzers, had one unique ingredient in it. Something that was in no other fertilizer, something that they were not required to put on the label. The item that was in there was a bee stimulant, it produced crops that gave bees more strength and in turn those bees flew around, spread their pollens further and created more colonies, which then expanded their territories and so on throughout the entire world. This singular ingredient was only needed in tiny amounts. It improved and increased through the pollen of the fertilized foods, and fed the ecosystems of the entire world. It also contained a micronutrient that determined if a women would have children, and if those children would be male or female depending on the amount of this simple vitamin that was consumed by these women during the first few weeks of their pregnancy. More and more women were being born, but less and less babies overall.

In time the population grew to be so predominantly female that no more babies were able to be born, and even though by this time Alice had been long gone and her simple poor life not even a memory in anyone’s mind, because of the importance of her life, and the fact that she left it too soon, the world began to lose it’s human populations. And then something beautiful happened, something remarkable. The balance of nature began to return to the earth.

It was around one hundred years after Alice had quit her job, and taken her sunshine personality away from her little town, that the population of the earth was decreased by seventy percent. Factories were all crumbling into piles of rubble as no one wanted to work there anymore. Small local farms with communities of around a hundred people, ninety percent of whom were women, were now living in complete comfort and there were no more wars. No more borders, if a member of a community didn’t like their climate they could simply ride a horse as far in any direction as they wanted to go and find a different community. And because those communities were predominately female, everyone accepted newcomers wholeheartedly. Even on the rare occasion that the newcomer was a man, they were taken in and loved and accepted equally. War dissappeared, famine was no longer a problem as there was enough for everyone and everyone was accepted. Life was beautiful again.