Chapter 33: Last Chance

HENRY SPENT much of his time on Tuesday preparing for his interview with Darrel Jones. This involved purchasing some pieces of equipment that he didn’t necessarily need right now, but they would need when setting up the new office. Isobel gritted her teeth and accepted Henry’s explanation of the expense.

She is really a money miser, he thought. If we were to give Pythia a human image, it would be Isobel, the dragon queen.

Wednesday morning, he set up the office for his interview with Darrel Jones.

“Henry, Darrel Jones is here for his interview with you,” Chastity called into the office. Lisa was at her desk and Josh was at the desk Isobel usually occupied. She and Luke were out shopping for an apartment.

“Oh, good,” Henry called from behind the array of servers he’d moved out from the wall. “Send him back.”

Darrel approached the voice of the hidden man.

“Uh ... Hi. I’m Darrel,” the much older man said when he reached Henry’s desk.

“Hey, Darrel. I’m Henry. Ah! Found it,” he said from behind the server array. “I was rushing and didn’t check all the pieces before I got the server connected. I’ve got a bad NIC card. There’s a box of them on my desk there. Open and hand me a new one, would you? I’ll get this one out.”

“Sure,” Darrel said. “Is this clipboard your serial number inventory?”

“Yeah. Chastity checks it each day and enters them in both physical and electronic inventory.”

“Okay. Here you go,” Darrel said, handing the new card between two of the servers. Henry handed him the faulty NIC. “I’ll mark the old card with blue tape so you can check it out later. Could just be a loose connection.”

“Thanks. Yes. That’s good. I’ll manually boot the new drive. You may have to switch the display to see it. You’ve got the keyboard next to the monitor.”

“Got it. It’s running diagnostics. Everything looks okay. Booting now.”

Henry stepped from behind the shelves and Darrel helped him move them back against the wall.

“It’s so dang much easier with two people than crawling in and out of that tight space,” Henry said.

“Might have been easier to install all the hardware and test it before it went on the shelf,” Darrel said.

Henry grinned at him and Darrel nodded.

“Of course. Then you wouldn’t have had a hands-on interview,” Darrel laughed. “Nicely done.”

“Let’s grab a cup of coffee downstairs and talk about what it will take to move our network to a new office in a month,” Henry said. “I appreciate your willingness to play along. You hit every one of the steps, so now it just remains to determine if you’re a good fit for our company.”

The two walked downstairs and Henry poured them both coffee.

“Cream and sugar?” Henry asked.

“Just black, thanks.” They sat at the table.

“Here you go. Why are you looking for work?” Henry asked as he sat with Darrel.

Darrel was easily older than Henry’s father, with black hair liberally sprinkled with gray to match his beard. He had sharp eyes and a pleasant demeanor.

“Boredom. I got tired of my job at Broomley because it was the same thing day after day. I told my boss a college kid with a liberal arts degree could do everything I was doing, so he replaced me.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Eighteen months. Decided to take a break before I went back into the office. Took my wife for six months in Italy. Great time.”

“Sounds like it. You know Open Cloak is a young company, both in terms of how long we’ve been in business and the age of the four of us founders. We’re all twenty years old. Why would you want to join a company like this?”

“Young. Energetic. Startup. Future. Variety. I had to assume some of those things until I found the CTO behind the shelves connecting a network server.”

They talked for over an hour and Henry showed Darrel the plans for their office that would be opening in a month. He emphasized that they needed to get the network up as quickly as possible, but they also had to get cables run for the full office in order to have stations ready for new employees.

Darrel understood the needs quickly and made a couple of notes on Henry’s flowchart.

“The thing is, we are subject to hack attacks on a regular basis,” Henry said. “We’ve repelled and countered each one, but I can’t spend all my time monitoring the system. I need someone who can not only manage the system, but take over security for our network. I think you’ll find our defense system is unique, but I don’t profess that it’s perfect. Yet.”

“Hmm. One of the things I missed in my former employment was the chance to actually do something productive as well as provide maintenance,” Darrel said. “At Broomley, they considered network security to be separate from IT management.”

“I can see a possibility in the distant future that we’d grow to a size that requires that,” Henry said. “But as a startup, consolidating things in the IT department makes more sense to me. As long as I have a person savvy enough to monitor the code as well as the usage, I’m content with that.”

“What’s the big dream?” Darrel asked. “You have some nice apps that will sell, but you don’t need much more than you and your partners to keep them going and sell them. You could probably even sell them off to a big company and retire before you hit twenty-one.”