Lucky Leprechaun — C.J. Hawk

Light hearty funny mystery with quirky characters and laughable discretions. Chick Lit General Audience meets Funny Mystery.
Lucky leprechaun charm my bootie patootie. This year had been a bomb and not in the sense that someone farted in the room. I am talking nuclear destruction to my life. Last year, about this time a man at a bar gave me this metal lucky charm of a leprechaun and told me it would bring me luck.
Well if luck is wrecking your uninsured car, losing your job, not a single date all year and canceled credit cards then I am one lucky lady.
My first clue should have been a strange man in a bar giving me a lucky charm. My second clue was that he was drunker than a skunk and I was two sheets with him.
It was almost Saint Patrick's Day and I would be alone again on my favorite Irish holiday. Alone, unless you counted the second of the 'two for one' beers in front of me. I had already downed the first, long ago. The holiday wasn't too far off but I was just alone now as I had been all year.
It had been almost one year since last Saint Patrick's Day and my luck was no closer to being lucky now, as it was then. In fact, it was worse. I am sitting at that very same bar, alone. I had just worked a long and lonely day in the backroom of the human resources department of our local government. I was the well-employed government personnel that found creative ways to say 'you're fired'. Allowing the government to get out of giving the employee severance and future benefits, which would save them boo-coo money. They stated almost proudly budget cuts and all, my ass. Money was still leaking out the portholes of their sinking ship. My upper management's income was ten times that of mine and I was getting paid a measly portions. Those folks I was finding creative ways to fire, got paid measly portions as well.
It was the new, bad economic, government way of eliminating high paying jobs without severance, health care benefits and saving them major bucks. Then the government would only rehire someone in the same position for less pay as a contract employee. Yes, I was also in charge of coming up with creative job titles and job descriptions to those new contract positions. It was double duty I suppose, but I was gainfully employed and that was something, wasn't it?
I worked alone in a dark backroom that looked like a storage closet. My job title was unidentified and my co-workers nonexistent. My boss, I had only met once electronically, he would only communicate with me through the e-mail or phone messages. All paperwork from my end was nonexistent, unless you account for the electronic paperwork created on my laptop that never left my office. There were no USB ports or a disk drive on my government issued computer so that I couldn't copy anything from it. To top it all off, I tried to electronically send files to myself. When I tried to email a file I was working on, to my home laptop computer, I got an error message and then went home to find out my laptop had been stolen.
The government had done a great job of hiding who I was and what I did. I rather liked that it made me feel like a secret agent. In my eyes, if no one knew who was behind all this, I was not to blame. I could not feel guilty for something that did not really exist... right?
That was until some other higher up, unknown secret agent shmuck fired me. He even copied several reasons out of my personal handbook of excuses. My passwords were revoked, my information on what I had done in the past and all my great excuses, locked from my existence.
Somehow, at one thirty this afternoon the words, 'Katie McAllister, you are fired', bounced around in my head over and over as some strange man with an official government badge stood in my doorway of my office. Standing next to him were two security guards. They fired me on the basis that my job was no longer of service to the government. Read to see how the luck of the Irish changes it all.