THE LITTLE TOWN OF French Meadow was a fun place in which to grow up. It was a prosperous town because of Aardvark Widget. AW was a successful company, selling a patented product with little competition. AW was the only real employer in French Meadow, but AW always made a lot of money and the company paid the people who worked there well.
While my high school class was growing up, we all knew that we in French Meadow were special. Our families had no money worries, because of AW. We kids laughed and played, secure in the knowledge that our parents had the money to finance our fun lifestyle. Once we graduated and went to work for AW, we also would have good jobs, that would let us earn enough money to continue to live the fun life we were accustomed to.
For whatever reason, the people in French Meadow seemed to be more attractive than usual. Okay, the people were well to do, without money worries and self confident. However, I can recall looking at the high school yearbook the year before my class graduated. Hell, many of the kids who were graduating then looked like damn movie stars. I mentioned the matter to my friends and they just laughed. The typical reply was, "They may look good, but next year we're gonna show 'em what a good looking class really looks like!"
Hell, I laughed right along with the rest of them. I was the President of the student body my senior year and ol' Gary was considered to be the handsomest guy in the senior class (he said, modestly.) Well, if I wasn't the handsomest guy in the senior class, then explain how I dated Donna, who was the prettiest girl in school. Actually, not only was Donna the prettiest girl in school, she also had a really great set of round tits that became very important as time went on. Donna's round tits were not all that important back in high school, since even a slight, accidental brush of her tits would create a situation much like I had attempted to rip her clothes off and rape her.
The crowd that Donna and I ran with was the top of the senior class. We were the trend setters for that year and we thought we were pretty damn special. We were gonna trot through our final year of high school, graduate, get good jobs at AW and just live the good life.
About six months before we were due to graduate, AW runs into a bit of a problem. The patented product that AW was selling with little competition suddenly found itself competing with a really good rival product. AW had let product development slip a bit and now had to catch up and once again outshine the competition.
Unfortunately, the competition has reduced profit margins and AW had to ask its employees to take pay cuts. The pay cuts were pretty severe. Worse, the jobs that the graduating high school seniors expected were cut way back. Some of us did get jobs at AW, some didn't. Even those who did get jobs got them at considerably lower salary than had been the case the year before.
I manage to get a job at AW, mainly because I have been actually preparing to go to work there since I got into high school. I have taken all the right courses and gotten pretty good grades. I have also kept in contact with the AW personnel people and made sure that they know who I am and how I'm doing. I also managed to snag summer jobs at AW all through high school.
Many of my classmates haven't taken the right classes, haven't gotten the good grades and haven't worked summers at AW.
Donna is one of the graduates who don't get one at AW. Instead, Donna has to work as a waitress at a small café in town. Donna isn't at all happy about the situation.
Okay, Donna and I do get married, as we had planned for the last couple of years of high school. However, instead of both of us having good paying AW jobs, I have a low paying AW job and Donna makes peanuts working as a waitress. We live a lot less well than we had planned when we were back in high school.
Many of the rest of the graduates in our high school class are working at menial jobs. Some of the girls even have to take jobs that they never would have considered before the problems at AW.
