Chapter 20

Finally back to some semblance of normal!

I lost myself in my work like a madman for the rest the week and into the next. I had all of the bugs I wanted knocked out done and was deep diving into more places to tweak the database calls to use the indexes for even better performance. I probably wouldn't have even stopped to eat if it hadn't been for Mabel. She insisted she was not going to let all that work her girls did to get me detoxified from that junk food I normally ate to go to waste. I always found breakfast in the oven when I got up. Most of the times it was still piping hot because they would set the oven to use the keep warm cycle for two hours. Wilbur or Wilbur Jr. would come by with lunch if they came to the house to eat, otherwise Mabel would bring it over and have lunch with me. I wasn't ever permitted to eat dinner and work. The one time I wouldn't break away from work to clean up to go eat, Mable sent over Juniper and Bobby Joe to tell me I do it myself or they were going to throw me in the decontamination shower.

Probably could rack Bobby Joe up or rub Juniper off through her clothes to get loose if it was just one of them. No way to get free from both. Damn sure didn't want to find out what they would do to me once they did finally catch me.

At the start of the week all three interns, Calvin, Linda and Roberta, all said they were in for the Philadelphia trip. They were pretty good for interns. All of them worked really hard since they seemed to have a drive to prove something to someone. I wasn't sure they would ever refine their college skills for working at the company, but they were better than the kid showing up in his new BMW. They provided all the needed information to the accounting department for making the travel arrangements. I told accounting that I had the flight reservations already under control.

Everything was settling in even better when I finally got cleared to drive back to the office.

Man I love this GT-R. How could I ever think about wanting a Subaru WRX when I wasn't paying for it in the end? Poor bus driver.

At about eleven I saw the QA team sneaking out back to go have a long lunch and then knock for golf the rest of the day. Not assuming anything, I went into the ticketing system and checked to see what had been completed for Paul's enhancements and the status on the bug reports. While it really didn't factor into any holiday mad money I gave out as incentives, I had always hinted that I took a big bucket of money and removed handfuls for each bug still sitting in the queue. It was looking good for my team since all of the work was assigned or off to QA. The bugs Robert Stephens found had all been tracked down, re-coded, tested, validated, re-tested, peer reviewed and then sent to QA.

The more I looked, the more I started to get a bit pissed, I took a deep breath and just printed off each ticket waiting in the QA team's queue. The first two in the pile were from the day after I came back from Philly. The ticket system tracks when and who views each ticket. Not a single one had been viewed by anyone in QA. I decided to save the boss some time reading and highlighted the boxes where it was assigned to them, and then no action by anyone to view or open it since it was submitted until I checked it today. I then checked their work logs. The QA director thought only he and his team had access to their logs of the work they had checked off. Well that makes sense. They have never really had a clue.

Lazy, fucking, worthless shits. They are pencil whipping the logs! Those modules were quickies. Nothing more than punctuation, capitalization and spelling fixes in GUI text. They logged three weeks of time to check them out, including hours for today when they are definitely not in the office.

Popping into the boss's office I asked, "Mind if I see who from QA is on the VPN before I shutdown all their machines and pull their access from their office?"

He took a second to process my very calm, almost joking tone. When he looked up I dropped their ticket queue printouts on his desk, the reports of the bullshit work they had done and then their timesheets. Every single one of them had put down nine+ hours daily, including today.

"Anyone just dialed into the VPN to appear to be online will just have to login again. Everyone else is screwing off, like usual. We know they came back after lunch to work instead of eating at whatever course they are playing this afternoon," I explained. "They are showing twenty percent over committed on time and yet the code they validated since I returned from Philly are display text checks. No programming changes at all. All of our critical bug fixes are still sitting there waiting for them to get off their butts to do some work. I doubt they are even doing any testing. I already know they are just running a hacked test rig that signs off on everything even if it fails. I bet if we throw in all of QA's hardware replacements from last year, that we just upgraded completely again this year, we could get the primary school to work out blocks of time to have the Kindergarteners bang on the keys when running our software products. Hell with the power of the gear we provided them last year I could throw up a VM cluster so that every kid in the primary, elementary and middle schools could try to break our software. Some of those kids are pretty good little hackers already. I bet we could even throw in some prizes in each grade for the kid that finds the most bugs. I figure with fifty thin clients for each school, VM licenses and trinkets it would still cost less than what you are paying just the QA director. Heck an Intel NUC with a Celeron and a few gigs of RAM are going for about two hundred dollars all day long. VESA mount them to a cheap TVs via HDMI and boot them off the network. Probably about five hundred a pop with a keyboard and mouse if sourced individually. Less in bulk. I say about fifty grand for that setup plus say twenty-five grand more for VM software would probably do it. I can even fund the whole thing and you can contract that portion of QA through my LLC. You go hire an admin assistant to look at the output of the automated test case scripts. No technical skill is required. For that matter we can have one of the teachers at the school go through the results. It is really no different than grading papers."

He kicked back in his chair, looked at the ceiling and contemplated what I was saying.

Best boss ever for communicating! Always know when he actually listened and is really thinking it over versus giving lip service. Not that I didn't get my share of lip service over the years I have worked here.

After about ten minutes of him tossing his stress brain up in the air he told me, "Kick them all off the VPN, remote into their PCs and see if anything critical is running on them. If not, shut them down too. Disable all of their badges with my code so no one but us can reactivate them. I will shoot Katie and HR a note about our ongoing investigation. You keep your fucking mouth shut and play stupid Joe, you got me? This is going to get nasty and I don't need you back in the sights of any more crazies."

"You got it boss! I am all for no more craziness around me anytime soon. I have had more than my share as of late," I told him.

I went back to my desk to kick them off the network, shutdown their PCs and lock them out of the building.

I doubt the boss is going to can them like he should, but it will wake their lazy asses up for sure.

I grabbed the interns going on the trip and took them to a working lunch so that we could get to know each other better. I had worked with them some, but not really gotten a feel for their personalities. Turns out that only Roberta was the only one of the three to have any sort of personality and that wasn't all that great. She was a great fit for the geek coding community and lifestyles, I just didn't find anything else very interesting about her. We went over the things we were going to be doing. Once we were setup and going, I planned for them to be left to do their thing. I hoped that we would actually get some time to not be stuck in a data center for the whole two weeks. They were told to work out who would do what shifts, what overlap they wanted, how long they wanted their shifts, etc.

Man I hope they are not three worthless sheep! Time to see if they can work in the real world autonomously. Better to find out now than if we bring them on as full time staff.

Lunch did go a lot better than I thought. I could tell all three had some sort of histories together. There was something just under the surface that looked like it might be interesting to watch play out. I didn't sense anything overly hostile, maybe just uncomfortable with the thoughts of being around each other without their own homes to go hide out if things went a little strange.

Once we got back to the office we found some very interesting things had happened during our absence. Out in the vestibule where we had a token security guard / receptionist, there were clear flip top crates like they use at drug stores to ship in inventory. They still had product labels on them from both the blue and orange home supply stores.

Looks like they are not a high stock item way out here in the boondocks.

Each pile had a name on them. There was one for everyone in QA except for two. Since the director had his own stack, it was not some special treatment for him. Each crate had a lock on it as well, but no keys. I also didn't see any paperwork on top other than a notice to call a number to communicate with HR. It wasn't any of our normal phone numbers or extensions.

I shook my head and went on past the security doors. When I passed QA I found there were two people in there working like little demons. Both were relatively new and I doubted they had been here quite long enough to get into the inner circle of the QA team.

One I knew just had a set of triplets over the summer because we all chipped in to get them a cloth diaper service for two years, cribs, clothes and over two grand in gift cards to the various baby superstores and a few baby outlet stores. They wanted to start a family after they got married and were not completely unprepared for a baby to come along anytime. The thing was the wife had missed all of the signs and only her husband saying she was getting pretty round around the belly made her go to her doctor. She was twenty-eight weeks along at that point. Finding that they were having triplets really knocked them for a loop. The babies coming at thirty-three weeks hit even harder. It was all they could do to not be nervous wrecks as they tried to work and still be at the NICU as frequently as possible. Now that the babies were home, they were down to the one wage earner and he needed his job in QA to barely keep his head above water.

I bet someone in HR or Legal called to tell him to get his ass back to work, or else. I didn't know him all that well, but he was always really polite to me and listened when I had some critique or suggestion.

What is the deal with the other one though? She has always been ready to drop to her knees to blow or lick off the rest of the QA clowns just to prove she is willing to do whatever they wanted to get their favor.

Leave it along Joe.

I don't listen to myself like I should...

I headed over to where the woman was looking completely out of her element at a keyboard and trying everything she could think to make something work.

"Seems all the seasoned QA team members are still out at lunch. Did they dump something on you without bothering to give you the step by step instructions of what to type and how it was supposed to look," I asked her.

She snubbed me like I wasn't even there.

Ok fuck you them bitch. I am sure they have your paperwork ready in Legal. Maybe since you don't have any crap of your own on your desk you didn't get your own crate.

I was turning to leave when the guy said, "Hey Joe. Got a minute?"

I headed over to his desk and he was sweating bullets. As I pulled up a chair, the bitch left in a huff after giving him a very dirty, fuck off and die, look.

"Look man, I got three little hungry poop factories to feed at home now," he told me quietly enough that even if the bitch came back in she wouldn't hear him pleading for me to do him a solid. "The others haven't done shit for months. When they found out we were pregnant, they pulled me off to the side to tell me that I was going to be doing all the testing runs while they fucked off. It was how the new people showed them we deserved to be here. Once someone retired, left or they got more headcount, they would dump all this off on the new guy. I got stuck testing that big vaporware update Marketing sold without bothering to tell anyone about it. Everything failed miserably, as you already have found. I gave them the details to take back to the developers, but was told to keep my fucking mouth shut. That tramp that just left gave me a flash drive the next day and told me I was a stupid moron. Seems I had failed to get the latest testing setup for this product and that was why everything bombed. It was made very clear to me that my wife, babies and I would be living out of a box or shelter if I brought up any more failures that were not show stoppers. I knew damn well they had hacked the test suite to make anything pass that worked fine with valid data inputs, but failed on garbage input, exactly like you reported. I didn't like it, but I was not the one signing off on anything as being correct and passing, only providing the data from the test runs. That falls on the director, managers and team leads. I will work twelve hour days testing out all of the new fixes and enhancements if that is what it takes to keep my family off the street. My wife is pissed as hell because I come home, eat and go right to bed. I have barely seen the babies since they came home."

Hey buddy, I get what you are saying, I am just not sure I believe a word of it. Show me you can deliver to get me to trust you more than anyone I trust working in Sales or Marketing, which is no one.

The tramp was there hovering outside the door when I came out and slipped through the open door like a cat after food someone just put out. I know I heard the card reader giving the rejection tone for her badge, so she must have followed this guy into the office when he came back.

Oh you are do going to have a bad day when I let HR know you are hanging out in QA and are due for a short walk off the flaming pier.

I was starting to believe maybe this was just more drug induced dreaming when I walked into HR to see the director there with a huge smile on her face. It wasn't something I ever equated as a good sign. I didn't even know she had teeth! Pictures she had of her family showed they didn't have a full set of teeth between them. She always looked like my grandmother did when she had her dentures out and had a face like a raisin. Today she was glowing!

"Joe," she told me as she pulled me into her office and closed the door, "If my old plumbing weren't as dry as the Sahara I would see if you got a hair trigger or can go the distance. You made this old woman happier than I have been since I discovered playing with myself when I was ten. No matter how much I may wish to clean house around here, the boss has to give the word. I can't tell you everything, but just know that Katie worked up two-year non-compete clauses and five-year trade secrets contracts for each of the terminated employees for them to sign. In exchange they will get getting two months of salary and benefits paid through Cobra. It is ironclad. They sign on the line or they get squat. None of them are eligible for unemployment since they were terminated for cause. Legally, I can't say anything more until the process is completed. We both know you dumped the steaming pile on the boss's desk, but can't prove it. I have an email from the boss to validate the payroll data against the card readers in the office and VPN logs for everyone. You are seeing the results of that investigation."

Thanking her I headed off to see the boss.

He told me, "Joe I know you always butted heads with them anyway, so I admit I discounted your previous complaints over the years as nothing more than a disagreement between how hard you work and their seeming lack of effort to get their queues cleared. Still, after the major cluster fuck on the data entry code passing through QA without so much as a whimper, I had already began watching them closely. I was already communicating with HR on the matter and had planned to pull the trigger at a later date. The need for the fixes to be put through QA and your reports pushed the timeline up. I waited to see who would come traipsing in to find they were locked out. I assume you know we had two come back from lunch on time. Harvey needs this job and is hungry enough to work his ass off. Arlene is another story. She rode in on his coat tails. I knew she was a crazy money-hungry bitch, but when she stormed in here about ten minutes ago, I found out how much. She dropped a pile of already prepared sexual harassment complaint forms she electronically filed with some law firm in Atlanta who claim to specialize in sexual harassment lawsuits. She said we were going to get sued into the ground because these lawyers never fail to get everything they sue for in the name of their clients."