Chapter Text
Leonard scoffed as he marched over to the trash to throw away his Chinese takeout on Vintage Game Night. Sheldon meanwhile was continuing to list ways that Leonard’s field of physics was derivative and how he has stalled his own career because as Howard explains to Penny in layman’s terms, basically Leonard sucks at his job.
“Right, like you’re any better,” Leonard retorts returning to his seat.
“I am better. Infinitely better. I have more degrees than you, I have a better position title than you, I have a bigger office than you do, I have my own parking space—although I don’t use it—I have a grad student requirement, I am published, and not to put too fine of a point on things but I get paid more than you.” Sheldon lists off.
“Ooh Leonard, I think you’re gonna need some aloe vera because you just got burned! By Sheldon!” Howard laughs.
Leonard shakes his head, “No, you don’t get paid more than me. If that was the case why did you list the extra room looking for a roommate?” He asks smugly as if he had checkmated the tall Texan.
“I did so out of a need for companionship, not money. If I want, I can easily afford the rent and utilities on my own or outright purchase a house. But seeing how I don’t have a need for the excess space provided by the latter, I put up the room for sublease.”
Leonard huffed and crossed his arms defensively, he hated when Sheldon always got the upper hand in arguments—which was most of the time which is why he often acquiesced to his roommate rather than fight him—but this was going too far. “All right wise guy, prove it.”
“And how would you like me to do that?” Sheldon asks.
Leonard walks over to his computer desk uses a key to unlock a keyed drawer and pulls out a folder containing his check stubs. “This is a record of my direct deposits from the last year, so either put up or shut up.”
Sheldon shrugged. “Very well.” As Sheldon left toward his bedroom, Leonard got nervous. He was sure Sheldon would have backed down, after all sharing one’s salary was akin to a dick-waving contest and he knew that everything Sheldon said prior was true, he didn’t want to be the one with the, ahem… financially small dick, and have it be public knowledge.
Raj whispered something to Howard and Howard nodded, “Yeah, I agree,” he turned to Leonard, “Man, Leonard, you are in for a massive dressing down. You might as well go and start borrowing Penny’s skirts after this because there is no way you’ll be able to put on pants after this.”
“Hey!” Penny glared at the engineer. Leonard was silent as Sheldon came back with a large meticulously put-together binder that on the front stated simply ‘Financials’.
He set the binder down on his own computer desk and the group crowded around to look. “After you.”
“Ladies first,” Howard joked.
Leonard glared at his friend but opened the folder anyway. The group saw that his annual salary was $76,233 before taxes.
“You make way more than me,” Penny quips.
Sheldon then opens to the first section of the binder and simply points. It was a spreadsheet of his quarterly income for not just the last year but the last nine years, including his titles, start dates, promotion dates, salary increases, and necessary notes concerning each entry.
Leonard was disheartened to learn that Sheldon Cooper made way more money than him, even when he was first starting out. But the last entry from the last fiscal year made him shrink deeper into his own hole of despair. Sheldon last year pulled in $300,322 or his entire salary plus an extra $224,089. No wonder his roommate was able to do outlandish things like run off to Montana or Texas or lend Penny money without caring if it gets repaid.
Raj made a low whistle when he saw the figure.
“That’s a strike,” Sheldon admonished.
“Holy frak!” Howard exclaimed.
Penny was silent, she was nowhere near her friends' income bracket.
Leonard cleared his throat, determined to regain the high ground, “This proves nothing.”
“Was it not you who challenged me to this financial show and tell?” Sheldon asked.
“Y-y-yeah, but it still doesn’t prove anything,” Leonard stuttered, “You still couldn’t do my job, while yours is easy as pie. All you do is sit in your office doodling on whiteboards.”
“And yet I still get paid more than you,” Sheldon retorted.
“Score another one for Sheldon. Dude, I don’t know if they added hot sauce to your order of Chinese but you’re en fuego.” Howard comments with a grin. Penny and Raj had to agree.
“All right, let’s settle this, I currently have five pending experiments that Stanford, MIT, and Harvard are all concurrently conducting. On Monday, we go to Gablehauser and ask him to allow a temporary switch. If you can replicate any of the experiments and publish the results, I’ll concede you are better than me.”
Sheldon shook his head, and Leonard smiled smugly, he knew Sheldon would eventually back down.
“I already proved I’m better than you. No, if we are to conduct a proper contest, for the duration that I am doing your job you have to do mine, however, we will have an independent adjudicator verify our results, I suggest two of the senior faculty. If you can do my job, not only will I publicly acknowledge your derivative field of physics that even a C-average grad student can do is a legitimate field of physics, but I will move out and you’ll never hear from or have to deal with me ever again. However, if I can do your job, but you can’t do mine then you must write and sign a legally-binding Statement of Facts detailing why the university hasn’t had any federal contracts since the rocket fuel project and submit it to the administration since I believe given your lack of anything notable since your onboarding, the university has been paying for dead weight.”
“What are you nuts, that’ll ruin me. Not to mention will probably get me thrown into federal prison!” Leonard screeched.
“As my Meemaw used to say when she couldn’t hit certain spares in bowling, ‘Them’s the breaks.’ Or you could just concede that I’m the superior academic and I have free rein to mock your field of physics as I see fit.”
“Ooh, Sheldon Cooper from the top rope!” Howard continues to commentate.
Leonard scowled, “Fine!” Extending his hand for Sheldon to shake. He rolled his eyes when Sheldon first put hand sanitiser onto his hands before they shook hands.
“I look forward to what you can accomplish in the realm of theoretical physics. Now if you’ll all excuse me, it’s past my bedtime.” He grabbed his binder and left down the hallway and into his room.
Leonard stood there somewhat shellshocked, his hand still extended, he pulled it back before turning to his friends, “Uh, what just happened?”
“You made a deal with the devil disguised as Sheldon for your soul and when you lose he’ll definitely come and collect,” Howard deadpanned.
Leonard walked stiffly toward his big chair and sat down, looking ahead blankly, “You think I can still withdraw?”
Howard nods, “Yeah sure, nothing’s been done yet but like the tin man said then he would have free rein to mock your field of physics as he sees fit.”
“Let me get this straight,” Eric Gablehauser says sitting up in his chair, “You want to do each other’s jobs temporarily?”
“That’s the gist of it, yeah,” Leonard shrugs.
“And you want Meyers and Weiss to act as your referees.” Sheldon and Leonard nod.
“And how long will this last?”
“Until I can complete his experiments or one of us throws in the towel figuratively. Most likely him,” Sheldon thumbed toward Leonard.
“It is highly unorthodox, but perhaps it could yield some positive results.” Gablehauser steeples his hands in front of him, “Except I’m adding my own rules to this little, whatever it is between the two of you, 90 days maximum. Then you return to your corners. I will humour you because well, frankly it amuses me, but if you hurt the university’s reputation in any way during this little experiment I will not hesitate to not only terminate this little contest but also your jobs. Do we understand each other?”
Leonard and Sheldon nod.
“I assume you have your own set of ground rules for this bizarre little trial run?”
Sheldon nods, and presents it to their department chair, “Yes, we both signed it last night.”
Gablehauser looks it over, “Okay, is this my copy?”
Sheldon nods.
“All right, gentlemen. Off you go. I’ll inform President Siebert and the department of your little competition so they aren’t confused as to why the Senior Theoretical Physicist is working in the lab and the Associate Lead Experimental Physicist isn’t.”
The only thing that hadn’t changed for the bet was the offices, and it wasn’t until Raj came in that Leonard realised he should have pushed for that too.
“Have a seat, Raj.”
Raj gave him an uncomfortable smile as he squeezed in between a couple of makeshift whiteboards.
“Is your office the reason why you and Penny never had sex in it?” Raj asked.
Leonard grimaced. His breakup with Penny was still fresh, they had only been broken up three months, and he knew there was still a chance they could get back together. “Well, I never spent much time in my office so I guess they never needed to give me a bigger one,” he redirected.
Raj shook his head.
“What?”
“Dude, even Howard’s office is bigger than yours and he never uses it. Like ever. His name’s on it and there’s a desk and cabinets and stuff but he spends 95 percent of his time in the engineering labs. This,” the Indian man gestures around with his finger, “is a hole in the wall, this tells me the university doesn’t give a shit about you.”
“They’re still paying me, so they care somewhat,” Leonard shrugs.
Raj chuckles ruefully, “Not for long.”
“What do you mean?”
Raj takes a breath, “Leonard, you’re a smart guy, but even you should know not to tango with Sheldon Cooper when it comes to science. He may look down at your field of physics and call it ‘derivative’ but he has intimate knowledge of everything it takes to do your job and do it correctly. I doubt you can do what he can. When this is over, I would be worried the administration finds out that you’ve been sandbagging for seven years and hire somebody else who can do your job, as well as what that Statement of Facts will do to you.”
“So you think I bit off more than I could chew?” Leonard surmised.
Raj nodded, “I don’t know exactly what Sheldon does all day but it sure as hell isn’t just ‘doodling on whiteboards’,” he made air quotes, “Also think about it this way Leonard, Sheldon was able to go to Human Resources in 2004 and create a position out of thin air for me so I could stay at the university as his ‘assistant’. I don’t know anybody on campus who has that kind of sway with Human Resources. He made an ass out of himself during the Chancellor’s Award banquet and they still gave him the award. He received an NSF-Caltech grant to go to the Arctic by himself, and when we did what we did; he fell on his sword, resigned, and moved back to Texas. But literally the day after we got him home he was offered his old job back with the only stipulation being that his work be reviewed at every step. Unless you can replicate whatever it is Sheldon does, there is no way you are winning this. Well, I need to get back to my dark matter hypothesis, so I’ll leave you to doodle.”
“So, Dumbass, I hear you’ll be Leonard for the next few months,” Leslie taunts.
Looking up at the laser setup, Sheldon looks at the one person who can get under his skin regularly. Not because she is smarter or because she is better at her job, it’s because she can make him question his own methodology. “Hardly Leslie, Leonard hasn’t been able to prove anything in months. I am simply here to show him and the rest of the university why that is. Because Leonard Hofstadter is a subpar intellect who has ridden his mother’s coattails to a cushy job yet complains that his mother is stifling him.”
Leslie was taken aback by Sheldon Cooper’s blunt takedown of his roommate. She had a feeling that everything wasn’t all peachy keen after they all arrived back from the Arctic. She wondered after he was rehired, if Sheldon Cooper was simply playing the long revenge game and now finally executing it. “So what, you’re gonna do his job for him?”
“Exactly. He has five pending experiments, I reckon within a month I can successfully complete three of them and have results peer-reviewed and published—yet another thing Leonard has failed to accomplish. I will make him or his position at the university redundant once I’m through.” Sheldon tells her as he continues the setup.
Leslie has to admit, Sheldon Cooper with balls is pretty hot. “Need any help?”
“From you? On this? Honestly, I could do this blindfolded and still produce better results than Leonard has ever come up with in his career. But I appreciate the offer.” Sheldon continues to set the lasers.