Sims2: Aran Newson

(Now with better pictures!) Arabella Newson was an eccentric loner in the early days of Strangetown's history. She was rumoured to have great skill as an inventor. The SCIA (an organization so secret that no-one even knows what it stands for) contacted Arabella, sure that she would be discreet, and asked her to build several intricate machines for spying and gathering data. She obliged, and created a machine so complex it was practically simanoid (you know, like a humanoid, but Sim).

She named him Aran after a fabled long-ago place, and he performed so impressively that he became a staff member (taking Arabella's last name), then climbed up the ranks to become the head of the entire SCIA.  Now that Arabella is gone, Aran lives in her old converted industrial building.

Here he is in the days just before his promotion, calling friends and acquaintances and asking for their support.

Every promotion in the Sims requires a number of family friends; so the number of friends of the household is totalled up and displayed in the work panel, along with the number needed for the next level.  So it might say 10 (+2) or 12 (0), for example, meaning that the household has 10 friends and needs 2 more, or it has 12 and no more are needed.  It's interesting to me that the friends are for the whole household.  It's neat because someone can be short of friends, go to work, and I can have another Sim in the household spend the whole time on the phone.  Because the promotion is determined at the end of the shift, they can still earn it.  This is in contrast to the skills needed for the promotion, which the Sim has to earn personally.

Here Aran is on the phone drumming up one more friend needed for his promotion.  When you "Call..Sim...", there are six different ways to sort the people your Sim knows; alphabetically, by friend level, and by attraction level; and then for each of those, displayed by picture or by name.  Friends are denoted by a little green happy face in the corner.  It makes it simple to sort by friend level and choose the first person who doesn't have a green happy face, and talk to them until they do become friends.  Asking them to come over and interacting with them is another way, but until they are friends they don't always come, so that's a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation I usually avoid.

Be careful!  At 4pm all friend relationships are re-evaluated according to how much recent contact there has been.  Your Sim can go to work at 9am with enough friends, have one drop off at 4pm, and come home at 5pm without the promotion you worked so hard for.  You are warned with a message on the screen, but I used to ignore those until I realized the implications.