With that, Joseph’s life went back to normal…for a short while. One day he was contacted by a woman who wondered if she could hire him. Joseph was confused, he was just a normal office worker so it didn’t make sense that she wanted to hire him. The woman explained that it wasn’t for his skill and work experience, such offers rarely are, but because of the cloud. She explained that she was planning to go to the beach with some friends but she had very sensitive skin and was afraid of getting sunburn. She wanted to hire Joseph to go with her to the beach so that the cloud could provide her with some shadow when she needed it. Joseph was intrigued by the idea and agreed to take the job.
When the weekend came he drove out to the beach where he met the woman who had hired him. She had long flowing red hair, green eyes and exceptionally fair skin, it was so pale it was almost translucent; he could understand she would easily get sunburnt. He had agreed to be there as a kind of servant – sort of like a waiter – and was only supposed to talk as part of the job. So Joseph spent several hours sitting in the shadow of the cloud, which he had started to think of as his cloud, reading a book or just listening to the sound of the waves, only moving occasionally when the pale skin woman required him to be closer or further away. By the mid afternoon however, the pale woman’s friends had become curious about Joseph’s cloud and started asking him questions. He happily told them all he could about his cloud but as soon as he ended his story they lost interest and went back to their own conversation. When the sun started to set they all went back to the parking lot, the pale woman thanked him for his service, paid the agreed upon amount in cash then said goodbye and Joseph got in his car and drove home.
The very next day Joseph awoke to a bunch of notifications on his phone. Apparently the pale skin woman had posted about her experience on Instagram which had given his video a new surge of views. Among the notifications were even a few job offers. Apparently many women in China are so desperate to keep their skin pale that they cover themselves up from head to toe whenever they venture outside during the summer. To them the idea of having a small personal cloud was very appealing because it would allow them to dress however they wanted without having to worry about getting sun tanned. Due to the Chinese economy, a fair share of Chinese women were willing to pay for such a service. Joseph decided to take a few days to think about it, because that’s what you’re supposed to do when you suddenly get a job offer on the other side of the world, but he had in fact already made up his mind.
Joseph patiently waited out the three days he had given himself to mull things over – he thought about talking to someone, Conrad perhaps but in the end decided against it – , and when he hadn’t changed his mind at the end of the third day he directly booked a ticket to Shanghai. The very next morning he handed in his resignation. His boss was quite surprised by this because he had always thought of Joseph as one of those people who will stay at a boring office job for decades, simply because they don’t have anything better to do. When he questioned Joseph about the decision, he simply answered that he did it for personal reasons and that was the end of the conversation. Two weeks later Joseph said goodbye to his friends and set off to China.
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