Chapter 2 - Official Interest

The response surprised him.

He really hadn’t expected all that much when he placed the advertisement.  Perhaps a dozen, or maybe a couple of dozen, people would respond, slowly, and over the 10 day life of the classified posting, but that was all he was expecting.  He had been wrong, very wrong.

The first he knew how wrong he had been was when he had woken up at his usual time, and gone downstairs to make a cup of coffee.  The mobile phone, with the Signal app, which had been on the kitchen counter, had vibrated itself off the counter and was lying, somewhat unhappily he thought, on the carpeted floor, pinging constantly with new messages coming in.  When he picked it up, he almost dropped it again in surprise with close to 200 messages waiting to be answered.

By the time he had made coffee, and sat down to drink it, the number had grown to 250, and still they kept coming in.  He shook his head in disbelief as he stared at the display. “It’s too many,” he thought to himself.  “How can there be that many people of retirement age in such desperate straits?”

Grabbing a notebook, he started to tally the responses to see how many men and women had responded.  It was mostly men, as he had expected, but the percentage of women was considerably higher than he had guessed it would be. Once he had done that, he went through all of them again; blocking any that were over 70, and then deleting those numbers.

New responses would arrive constantly for the next 9 days.  In total just over 1000 people responded to the ad; of those he eliminated 373 immediately as they were over the maximum age of 70 that he had set in his mind.  That left around 630, a number that staggered him every time he looked at his notebook.  He needed to whittle the number down to about half of that, and even that was too many since he was only looking for 10 people; 10 very special people.

After two days of thinking, he came up with a plan, and sent out a reply to each person asking for their occupation, and a recent photograph.  The occupation would give him a good idea of their likely intelligence level, and the photograph; well that was as good a way as any to eliminate a lot of people; admittedly, it was very unscientific because you can’t always judge a book by its cover, but he had to do something.

The answers, and photographs, came in slowly which he was grateful for as it gave him time to enter those people into a FileMaker database that he had created for the project.  It also allowed him to eliminate another 229 people due to their occupation, and 54 that he simply didn’t like the look of.

After all the weeding out was finished, he had just under 300 people left; 32 of them were women.

Now for stage 2.