Chapter 2

This meeting looks like a deviation from the standard. I walk into my supervisor's office with my third cup of Cappuccino, and it is indeed a three-person meeting. Luckily, the third guy is not the HR enforcer they usually send out when they fire someone. Benton, my boss, is his usual chipper self.

"Frank, how are you this morning?" he chirps. He is a tall, lanky guy sporting a short bowl-type haircut that makes him look like a Roman soldier. He still looks like he just picked up his computer science degree from MIT yesterday.

"Not too bad, Benton. What's the occasion? Did our bonus checks get in?"

Benton grins and shakes his head. "I told you, I am embezzling all the bonus checks for your group this year. I really want that pontoon boat, you know?"

The third guy stands up from his chair to shake my hand. I remember his face from out on the floor, but I can't recall his name.

"Have you two met?" Benton asks.

"Frank, this is Mike Albrecht. Mike, this is Frank Jasper, our Notes guy. I told you about him the other day."

"Hi, Frank."

Mike grins like the Cheshire cat as he shakes my hand. Benton is even more jovial than usual. Benton takes the helm as I take the last free chair in the office.

"Mike here has a problem, and we were wondering whether you can help us out with that. Mike is the VP for Sales and Marketing in the Pacific Division, and he wanted to ask you for assistance on something."

Mike takes his cue and turns to face me.

"Uhm, yes, we have a site in California that is still running some of their operation on cc:mail. They belong to Focus, and somehow they slipped through the cracks when we upgraded their sites to Notes a couple of months ago."

Focus is a software developer that was bought out by our company a year ago. They were a small West coast outfit with a bunch of local sales offices, and our company uses their existing infrastructure to serve their old customer base. From what I know from the Networking team, it was a bear and a half to interface their junk with our existing systems, and they literally had a keg party when they got all the systems talking to each other.

"We need to get them migrated to Notes, because it turns out that our cc:mail license and support contract expires in less than a month. I don't feel comfortable letting them run unsupported software, and you're probably aware of the corporate policy on software licenses."

"Yeah, I wrote the revision last year. Renewing the cc:mail license is not an option?"

Benton shakes his head. "We're talking fifty grand for an additional year, and the budget doesn't allow for that kind of expense. "

"We just plain forgot to budget for the upgrade back in the spring," Mike says. "Now we can't shake that kind of money loose until next spring at the earliest."

"How are we doing on Notes licenses?" Benton asks me. License management for Lotus software is one of my responsibilities.

"We have a site license for the clients, and we have enough room for a dozen more servers this year. What kind of user base are we talking about, here?"

"It's just one server and fifty-odd mail users," Benton says.

"Piece of cake," I say. "I can do that conversion in six hours, providing we have spare hardware I can use for pre-staging. You want me to take a trip out to California and do the install for you?"

"That's what I was about to ask you. If you have nothing planned this weekend, I'd like for you to go out there and be done by Monday. I'll have Adam delta-dash one of our spare Compaq Proliants out overnight. You'll just have to pick it up at San Francisco International. All you'd have to do is replace the hardware and migrate the data over."

"San Francisco? No kidding? I used to live there when I was a kid. Haven't been back in years."

"See?" Benton smiles. "There's your bonus check right there. Free trip on the company. Stay for the whole weekend and make it worth the flight, if you want. I'll sign off on the expense report for the weekend. Just don't do lobster for dinner every night—we have a meal cap of thirty bucks per day now."

"I can handle that," I say.

The travel office has a flight booked and a rental reserved for me before lunch. When it comes to depriving people of their weekend, they work with ruthless efficiency, always booking the flights that get back to Boston at eleven o'clock at night on a Sunday. They will route you from Boston to Seattle via Miami and Dallas if it saves the company a hundred dollars in plane tickets. On the other hand, the company owns a Learjet and a Peregrine that sit in a hangar at Logan, continuously on call for upper management. Earlier this year, a bunch of the directors decided to move a meeting to our office in Miami, just so they could take the Lear down on "official business". Coincidentally, the Super Bowl was played just twenty miles away on that very day. The peons, on the other hand, always fly coach.

My flight goes out of Logan at six o'clock tomorrow morning. Because of the time difference, I'll get to San Francisco at ten in the morning—surprisingly enough, I got booked on a direct flight. Jessica's secondary job function is that of a backup administrator for Lotus Notes., so she'll have to mind the stable while I am out.

Little Joe is slumming in my office when the mail gopher delivers the e-tickets for the flight. He picks them up and nods his approval.

"San Francisco, eh? I heard it's pretty nice out there."

"You've never been to California?" I ask.

Little Joe grins. "Hey, I've never been outside of New England. Nothing wrong with that, you know. I suppose some day I'll have to cross the Rockies and go to Looneyland."

"Want me to bring you anything back while I am out there?"

"Don't worry about it. They have nothing that I can't get in Boston. But, hey, if you find a nice fridge magnet..."

I file the tickets away in my wallet.

"Gotcha. Maybe I'll get you a souvenir from Alcatraz, too."

He shakes his head.

"I don't need any prison junk. Got an uncle and a cousin with the Middlesex County Sheriff's Department. They can get me authentic stuff from the county klink."

"Like what?"

"Oh, like homemade knives, and booze. They make it out of rotting fruit and floor cleaner. It's not exactly officially endorsed, though."

Back in my office, I fast-forward through my accumulated voice mail. Like email, most voice mail messages are general announcements and other assorted junk, like the front desk letting the whole company know that there's a blue jeep in the lot that still has its lights on. My voice mail cull rate is almost as high as the one for email. With all this convenient technology at their fingertips, people have lost the ability for concise communication. Nothing is more tedious than having to listen to a voice mail that rambles on for five minutes without ever getting to a point. It's a surprising trend, considering the fact that our generation gets its news in ten-second factoids, and most kids have developed attention spans that are shorter than those of fruit flies on meth. Most office workers don't really like to write, so they keep their email messages to a bare minimum. Voice mail messages tend to be rambling, since VM is easy to use and doesn't require grammar skills.

I finally reach the end of the queue, and the message light on my phone ceases to flash. Some of the Help Desk people have been known to tape pieces of cardboard over the message indicator because it is too annoying. The server console window on my screen shows that the mail server is humming along just fine since its reboot this morning. One of the messages in my voice mail queue is a bullshit message from the HR idiot who caused today's outage. He is disavowing all knowledge of the incident, blaming hackers or inattentive administrators. Just for good measure, I call up his user profile and limit his outgoing mail attachments to two megabytes, a mere four percent of what he tried to squeeze through the system this morning. Our company policy relies on the user's common sense when it comes to attachment size, and Benton won't let me set a global limit on outgoing file sizes. I can, however, mess with the individual user quotas. The next time our customer tries to email out the Encyclopedia Britannica on CD, the message will bounce back to him, and he will have to call the email administrator if he wants to justify an exception to his new hard quota.

I've decided to wait until after lunch to bail out, so I send off a quick email to the other four, checking whether they want to hook up for lunch. Within five minutes, I get four affirmatives back. With the lunch issue settled, I fire up my web browser to check for things to do in San Francisco this weekend.

We all decide to take an early lunch to beat the crowds, sneaking out of the building at eleven thirty. Jessica volunteers to drive, so we all pile into her new vehicle, a Toyota Echo. Phil gets to ride shotgun by default, since his girth does not fit into the rear seat. The Echo leans precariously to one side as Phil squeezes himself into the passenger seat. The car itself looks like a marshmallow on wheels, but it is a Toyota. Before I bought my used-but-new-to-me BMW, I owned a Dodge Avenger that fell apart faster than I thought possible, passing deterioration records that were previously held by Yugos. When my Dodge dealer sent me an invitation for a test drive in the "new, improved Avenger", just after the air conditioning compressor in mine dropped out of the car, I laughed heartily and looked up the number of the nearest BMW dealer in town.

We occupy our usual booth at the #1 China Buffet. The place used to be a country dance club, but its first incarnation went belly-up after just a year of line-dancing bliss. There were a few too many fights on the weekends, and the city revoked their beer license. This is a practical death warrant for an establishment that has its bottom line riding on Miller Lite sales. After the old owners folded, a Chinese family moved in and set up shop in record time. They painted the roof turquoise and simply covered the old boot-shaped pole sign in front of the building with a large sheet proclaiming "Coming soon: No .1 China Buffet". The gas station across the street promptly changed their marquee to read, "Coming sooner: No .10 China Buffet".

We picked this place because it is the only eatery near our workplace that offers more than deep-fried items and greasy fast food. As much as we all hit the vending machine on our floor whenever we need a sugar rush, our group is somewhat particular when it comes to a balanced lunch menu. Most fast food chain burgers are fat sponges, and pizza is for coders who need to depend on delivery services for nourishment.

"Rumor has it they're going to make Nick the Director of IT," says Jessica, while she pokes the Orange Chicken bits on her plate. A collective groan comes from the group. Nick is the supervisor of the Development team. He's a moderately talented developer, but his personality is abrasive. His ego is the size of the Goodyear blimp, which makes him one of the most hated supervisors in the company. He is, however, part of the CEO's inner circle, which also makes him predestined for a Director's office. To us peons, he's Nick the Prick.

"Benton is going to shit a brick if they make Nick his director," Adam says. "They hate each other's guts. If Nick gets to hire and fire at will in IT, Benton is out on his ass."

"Nick hates Benton, because Benton actually knows what he's talking about," Phil says. "Nick can write code, but he couldn't tell the difference between a Blackberry and a Game Boy."

"I don't even think he can code worth a shit," Adam snorts. "He probably knows how to use the Visual Basic package, but I've never seen him write anything in C++ or Assembly. Anyone can drag and drop pretty pictures around with Basic Visuals."

Most of our lunches are great stress relief. We bitch about users, we bitch about vendors, we bitch about directors and managers. I always figured that the personal development of a systems administrator is very similar to that of a schoolteacher: both start out full of idealism and good ideas, and both are driven from the job or transformed into vicious cynics by the end of their first year. We hang on mainly because of the fat paychecks that keep coming in. None of us are wealthy by any stretch of the definition, but our hourly rates are more than decent compared with those of non-geeky professions. I make seventy and change per year, and my rate is by no means exorbitant. Jessica and Little Joe make a little less, while Phil clears close to a hundred grand. If any of us can be called loaded, it would be Phil. His independent activities net him a fine bonus every month, and his wife is a successful real estate agent who runs her own office and staff. Nobody knows where Phil leaves all his money. He drives a four-year old Ford pickup truck, and his favorite attire consists of jeans and free t-shirts from software companies. Rumor has it that he owns a few thousand Microsoft shares, but he certainly doesn't look like an aspiring millionaire.

"So what are you guys up to this weekend?" I ask in between trips to the buffet.

They all look at each other, and I can tell they haven't thought it over until I asked the question just now.

As usual, Little Joe seems to be the only one with a social plan.

"I guess I'll be taking my brother out to the Cask and Flagon. Gotta subsidize the family's drinking habits, ya know?"

Jessica raises an eyebrow.

"What the devil are you doing at that dive? Didn't you have your fill of nubile college chicks this month?"

The Cask and Flagon is a favorite with kids from BC and Boston University. The typical audience is barely above drinking age, and most of them carry fake driver's licenses from out-of-the-way states. The Massachusetts driving license is difficult to counterfeit, so the Cask and Flagon gets a lot of young weekend customers from Nebraska and Colorado. Little Joe is as much out of place at the Cask and Flagon as a redneck with a ten-gallon hat at a hip-hop club.

"We have to alternate bars for a few weeks. I broke up with Becky last week, and that's her main dive."

We get a good chuckle out of this. Little Joe's tales from the dating front are hilarious. He's a good-looking guy with a very decent salary for someone his age, and he takes full advantage of the fact that many girls his age are lining up for guys like him.

"That's what you get for dipping your pen in the company inkwell," Adam says. "Dating a chick from the office is always a bad idea. You sleep with one, might as well sleep with all of them."

Jessica shoots me a funny look, and I try my best to be nonchalant about it.

"Speaking of," she says. "Weren't you going to do lunch with that leggy blonde from Marketing? Daria or Doris or something?"

"Oh, shit." I slap my hand to my forehead, not even bothering to correct Jessica who knows very well that the leggy blonde in question is called Dana.

"I'm a chowderhead. I totally forgot to cancel lunch with her. Now she's probably sitting over at Los Amigos by herself."

Jessica shakes her head in pity.

"You said it... chowderhead. But she'll forgive you, because she's a nice girl. Dunno why she bothers with you."

"And that's why I prefer the naughty girls," Joe says. "I never need to make up an excuse for not calling."

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