Story Starters - Answering Machine #1

I've decided to do some short stories here to flex my long-atrophied writing muscles. I'm going to be choosing prompts from the book "Story Starters"  by Lou Willett Stanek. I'll bold the prompts (I may use more than one!), in case you want to do them yourself or just so you can see where I'm getting this all from! Some may be okay, some may be incredibly uninspired, but I plan to go in order. So, here we go!

A voicemail on my cellphone. That's how it all started. And, to be honest, I hate voicemails. Call in, put in your PIN, then the incessantly repetitive script begins: "you have one unheard message and twenty saved messages [I'm lazy]. First unheard message, received today at five, thirty-four, pm."

After that long of a wait, this message better be worth listening to. It wasn't. Just four minutes after work, my boss dropped the bombshell. "You can have the promotion, but you will have to relocate to LA." Be still my heart. The land of fake tans and fake bodies. Designer clothes and accessory dogs. Not exactly the best place for a born and bred Colorado girl who only dreams of bigger skies and even bigger mountains to ski. A girl who had unfortunately decided that skiing wasn't going to pay all her bills and sucked it up for a job in Human Resources. I traded skis for resumes and slopes for an endless stream of rejected vacation requests. Hey, it's a down economy - who has time for a break?

Years of red tape and red pens had flown by, and I finally got the nerve (and the ambition) to put myself forward for a promotion. To Human Resources manager. I know, I'm that cool. Unfortunately, that also apparently meant I'd have to bleach my hair and start wearing obscenely high heels. Oh yeah, and move to chronically sunny, snow-deprived LA.

To be continued...