Volume 3: My days in a college fraternity Chapter 107 I am excited now
In the garage at No. 9 on Liberty Avenue, on Tommy's desk, there lay quietly the complaint sent from Lotus to Actor.
It said that they had formally filed a lawsuit against Actor for computer software infringement in the Massachusetts State Court, and the court had accepted the case and issued a subpoena.
Receiving this indictment with a subpoena attached means that Actor Company must respond within the thirty-day reply period. If the court and L do not receive any response within thirty days, they have the right to make a default judgment.
"When Lotus sent the lawyer's letter for the first time, you didn't take it so seriously." Holly came over with two cups of coffee, put one in front of Tommy and said.
Tommy picked up the phone and dialed a number. "Charles, this is Tommy. I received the belated complaint. I need the help of the headquarters. Thank you very much. If you stand in front of me, you can feel my sincerity. Very good. California. In the early stage, it will mainly be the various branches in California. OK."
After hanging up the phone, Tommy took a sip of coffee, his eyes still quietly looking at the complaint, and said, "If I had taken it seriously the first time and responded seriously, how could the other party sue? If lawyer's letters can scare people, the United States would not need such an exaggerated system as the three-tier court system. I am not ignorant of the law. When I was in high school, I thought countless times whether I should go to law school in college and become a lawyer in the future, but in the end, computers were obviously more attractive, so I gave up the dream of becoming a lawyer."
"It's a pity that I can't see you become a gentleman in a suit and tie. I have imagined what you would look like as a lawyer. To be honest, you are still quite handsome. At least you will be more pleasing to women than your unkempt appearance now." Holly didn't sense any tension in Tommy's tone and voice at all, and she felt a little relieved.
Her words just now were meant to test whether Tommy, who was so confident before, would be frightened and at a loss when the other party really took action. Obviously, Tommy Hawke's performance was very good at this moment, at least better than her, Holly Keener, because when she got the news, she sat in the bathroom nervously for about half an hour, her mind full of thoughts, if Actor Company eventually lost the case, would she be affected.
Susan Curtis walked in from outside with a women's suit from the dry cleaners in her hand. She pulled down most of the garage shutters to cover herself, took off her T-shirt and jeans, and began to change her clothes in her underwear.
"Didn't I prepare two sets of OL women's clothing for you?" Tommy raised his head and leaned back in his chair, admiring Susan's process of changing clothes. He asked, "I remember you brought one set home yesterday. Why did you go to the laundry to get this one?"
Susan put on her white shirt and buttoned it up one by one, as if she was talking about something very ordinary: "I met two high-strung policemen last night, and was forced to help them with free services in the back alley . Those two bastards stained my clothes."
"Oh my God..." Holly looked at Susan in shock, then turned to look at Tommy who had no reaction: "Tommy, did you hear what Holly said? We have to do something, she...she was threatened by the police."
Tommy turned his gaze to Holly. "What we can do is to help her rent a place nearby so that Susan doesn't have to live in the slums of San Jose again. This will help her avoid all the trouble."
There is a reason why California is called a paradise today. The rich call it a vacation paradise, and another title is drug paradise. Although even a small Cuban cigar cannot be imported into the United States due to the ban, tons of cocaine are continuously sent from Mexico to California every day, and then pour into every corner of the United States like coffee, meeting the needs of the American masses.
It's not just students from Stanford and other universities who start businesses in California. Countless kids from slums aged twelve or thirteen have also started their own businesses. As long as you have two hundred dollars in capital and a broken car that can drive to the US-Mexico border, then congratulations, you can open a small cocaine street convenience store and become an entrepreneur.
As long as you don't get killed by gangsters, your business will grow like a snowball, from making a dozen yuan a day to a few hundred yuan, and then to thousands of yuan a day.
People from Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and other places even made special trips to California to purchase the drugs. Their methods of purchasing the drugs were varied. The most outrageous one was that someone drove a school bus with a bunch of poor children pretending to be on a long-distance school trip. They drove all the way to California, filled the children's backpacks with drugs, and then drove back to their state to sell them at high prices.
The drug business is so prosperous. In addition to the influx of drugs and the fact that Americans from all walks of life have regarded smoking this drug as a fashion, the most important thing is the performance of the California police.
The more police officers are in charge of slums, the richer they become. They can unscrupulously collect bribes from every cocaine convenience store and bully those poor people. In order to maintain stability, drug dealers whose business is growing bigger and bigger will take the initiative to help the police suppress those who are bullied.
So what Susan said about encountering two high-strung policemen last night who forced her to provide free services is very normal in California.
In the eyes of those policemen, people in the slums are not considered human beings. Those poor guys don’t even know where to go to complain about themselves. Even if they call 911, they will have their friends in the police force to notify them in time. Then, as long as they find the local bosses in the slums, they will be happy to make them shut up completely.
"Tommy is right, Holly." After putting on her shirt, Susan walked to the side, pulled open Jason's chair, lifted her legs, took out her stockings and put them on. She smiled at Holly and said, "Don't worry, Mark is looking for a suitable house nearby. When the time comes, I will rent with him and move out of there, which will solve this problem."
"…but those two policemen…" Holly said in shock.
"They are only like that in the slums. As long as you leave those areas, they are all perfect gentlemen. As long as I don't go into the slums, the police who don't know me will be very friendly to me. So if I don't want to encounter that kind of thing again, I just need to work hard to make myself rich." After Susan put on her stockings and skirt, she walked up to Tommy, picked up a cigarette and lit it:
"Are there any plans for today? If not, I will go to the training classroom to continue teaching those people some issues that they should pay attention to in their official work, and then call various companies to inquire about the women's work performance."
"The HR department at AMD headquarters contacted me and told me that they want to arrange five more female clerks in the secretariat. The ten clerks we sent previously performed very well. At least from the documents and reports, there is no difference between them and college students. It is only revealed during conversations." Holly struggled to get rid of her previous shock and said to Susan:
"But they don't care about that. They won't go out of their way to chat with them anyway. In addition, they hope that there will be four women with the same appearance to take charge of the front desk guidance in the lobby of their headquarters, which looks like the White House."
"That makes nine in total, and four of them have to be prettier, right?" Susan asked Holly after listening.
Holly nodded. "Yes, but there is another company called EC DA that also needs five clerks, female, and pretty too. It would be best if they could tolerate the silence or nervousness of the nerdy engineers, because ECDA will send them to the engineering research and development department of their company to help those engineers make coffee and handle various trivial data entry tasks to ensure that they focus on product research and development and design."
"Compared to those customers, engineers are the easiest men to deal with. When I was interning at Symantec, I felt like I was in heaven. There were polite men around me. Even if they were interested in you, they would only walk over when you went to the tea room, chat with you while you were making coffee, and then carefully ask women out to watch a movie on the weekend." Susan skillfully blew smoke from her nose and said with a smile:
"I'm curious, is watching a movie the only option for engineers to date women?"
"You'd better let those women get used to their boredom. Maybe a man who asks her out to the movies will suddenly become a millionaire, and then she will muster up the courage to officially date her." Tommy said to Susan with a smile.
"Thank you for your thoughtful reminder, Tommy. I'm going to work." Susan put out her cigarette, put a piece of gum in her mouth, and then walked out of the garage.
After Susan left, only Holly and Tommy were left in the garage. Tommy looked at the indictment again and asked, "How is our human resources company's small business doing?"
"Currently, seventy-nine women have been sent to nine companies of various sizes to do the most basic computer clerical work. There are still forty women in training in the training classrooms. Gary Goode has asked me several times whether I should consider increasing the number of classrooms and computers." Holly sat on the desk in front of Tommy, gently took off her high heels, put one foot on Tommy's knee, and bent the other foot to gently massage his calf.
Tommy leaned back and pushed his feet against the ground, moving the seat back a little, creating some distance between him and Holly, and said, "I don't care how many prostitutes are sent to Silicon Valley. I mean how much money is in the account?"
"Counting the unpaid paper fees, and the salaries that haven't been paid to the women, it's probably around 100,000 yuan." Holly stared at Tommy with a playful look, "You were watching Susan changing her clothes just now, I thought you would be interested."
"You contact Sophia and ask her to resolve issues such as the terms. In short, use a loan to transfer the money from the human resources company to Actor Company." Tommy ignored Holly's provocation and spoke to himself.
Holly didn't care to continue to provoke Tommy. After a moment of surprise, she asked, "Loan?"
"Of course it's a loan. This way, even if Actor loses the lawsuit, he can produce a promissory note of one hundred thousand dollars to ensure that there is a debt dispute. The end result will be that Lotus won't even get a piece of toilet paper." Tommy Hawke said to Holly.
"Didn't you always say that Actor doesn't need too much money? Besides, even if we lose, there's nothing in this company worth letting Lotus take away."
"Although the possibility of losing is not high, we still have to be fully prepared. Even if Lotus wants to forcibly take our company assets, they have to wait until the human resources company settles the debt first. The human resources company will then throw a few computers at them and ensure that they can't find any data they want." Tommy put his fingers on his forehead, lowered his eyelids, and said:
"And an actor needs at least 20,000 to 30,000 dollars to deal with the court. Sophia wrote a letter of defense and sent it to the Massachusetts court. She wrote the letter herself, but she needed to borrow the name of a law firm, but the other party charged her 400 dollars. This kind of lawsuit has multiple stages. The lawyer's letter is the first stage. If we don't respond, we don't have to pay. Now it's the second stage, filing a case. We also chose the cheapest defense because it only costs a few hundred dollars. Otherwise, we have to file motions on jurisdiction and the other party's allegations. This delays time and requires professional lawyers to fly to the Massachusetts court to deal with those judges. The fee is probably at least several thousand dollars, and we have to cover the round-trip airfare."
"You're like a lawyer now, Tommy." Holly said with a smile as she looked at Tommy's appearance.
Tommy exhaled and drank the coffee in the cup:
"And what we need to hold on to is the third stage, the disclosure of evidence, which means that the lawyers on both sides start collecting evidence and accumulating strength, preparing to kill the opponent or force the other party to completely compromise."
"I have another question. You just said that 20,000 or 30,000 would be enough, so why did you borrow 100,000? Most of that money is unsold income that needs to be settled." Holly continued to ask.
"Stop settling the blank income of those companies and lend it to Actor. Then Actor will use the money to buy a batch of the cheapest computers that can run MS-DOS to support the SSD training courses held in other universities. A symbolic donation of one or two computers to each company will be enough. Remember to ask the school TV station and school newspaper to take pictures for you." Tommy looked at Holly and said calmly.
"Aren't you afraid that those companies will cause trouble for you?" When Holly heard Tommy say that he would stop settling the expenses that should have been returned to the accounts of the human resources managers or founders of the employing companies, and that he would embezzle the money to buy computers, her beautiful eyes widened, and she subconsciously stopped the massage movement and straightened her long legs.
This bastard is really bold. He actually wants to stop settling the white paper income that should be returned to certain people in those companies and use it for other purposes!
"Be honest and tell them we're in trouble. They'll understand. We're just suspending settlement, not owing them money. Those companies enjoy the beautiful female clerks I provide them and save so much money. They should understand that everything has a price. From the day we reached the cooperation, they knew that this is the awareness that adults should have." Tommy rubbed his chin, which had been prickly for two days without being groomed.
"Besides, I'm going to wait until the training courses in California schools seem to be running, and then I'll ask you to stop paying these women who have just found stable jobs. The reason is that the company has been sued and has entered the stage of evidence disclosure investigation. In order to avoid trouble, we want to mediate. In order to survive and express our submission, a small company like us needs to hand over accounts, data, and other things, including cash flow, for the other party to review. So the salary payment will be suspended. If they are unhappy, you should know which company to tell them to say hello."
Holly sat on the desk without moving, just looking stupidly at Tommy Hawke who said these words. Seeing her expression that was more shocked than Susan's being bullied by the police, Tommy seemed to be interested. He walked towards Holly, spread her legs, put her on the desk, looked down at Holly and said:
"When Lotus sent the lawyer's letter for the first time, didn't I take it as seriously as I do now? I'm not taking it seriously, I'm just excited now, but don't worry, I'll pay for your laundry."
