Murder, and other bad habits

It was not getting any better.

Beyond Rotten, the group responsible for the musical fiasco, felt it was exactly the sound they wanted.

Bob thought otherwise.

His striped shirt was rumpled, and his deep maroon tie had long ago been tugged off; it hung over the back of his chair like a dead snake, and, if its owner had had his way, a few young singers would have been hanging with it.

Scratching his head, the man cursed the bad timing that had found him free, and able to take on this project. How could even a group calling itself ‘Beyond Rotten’ be this bad? Good God Almighty, they were beyond rotten!

He smirked at the spontaneous play on words that had formed in his mind, knowing he was too disgusted to have made it purposely.

Absently thinking that a case could be made that the band members had, in fact, screamed themselves blue until many midnights, Bob turned to the young engineer seated beside him, and said, “I didn’t know the bar on good taste had dropped so low, Barn.”

At nearly 29, Barnaby Moss--standing all of five feet tall, and weighing in at a whopping 108 pounds--looked to be about 12 years old. The last engineer in, so to speak, he was the low man on the seniority totem pole at Legend Studios.

Although highly regarded by the studio that employed him, Barn seldom got the caliber of artists he deserved--even returning acts with which he had been successful, were crap assignments at one point.

Legend was notorious for never putting ability above seniority; it was a system that smacked of impartiality and idiocy at the same time, and was one that might very well bite them on the corporate ass one day.

A conviction long held by Legend’s youngest, but arguably best, rider of the dials was that, in lieu of decent retirement benefits, the studio gave its engineers a Right of Refusal, which granted them the option to kick crap assignments down the line.