Chapter 5

I hope I can keep hidden out in my room until Christmas was over. Can I even stand that much religion packed like sardines in such a tiny space?

I was dreading it during the whole walk over to Paul’s office building. Inside I hoped to at least have a friendly face at the coffee shop and get some good service.

Nope. Karma was back with a vengeance!

“What can I get you pal,” a grumpy, barely alive looking man asked from the counter.

I ordered a large coffee and blueberry muffin.

How the hell can you turn a steaming cup of coffee into a lukewarm sludge in the ten seconds it took you to walk from the coffee pot to the counter? Must be a skill taught at the crappy barista training center.

“Nine-fifty,” he told me after he coughed and hacked right over my muffin.

I handed him a ten and headed to an open table. I would have been completely disgusted by the wad of phlegm on my muffin if it had not been so hard I wondered if it was a plastic display one. Just a normal crap day for me.

I sat there brooding as the interns enjoyed piping hot coffee I knew came out the same pot as the sludge he poured me.

“God damned pervert,” the old man grumbled as he crept around behind the counter.

I went back to see if maybe I could get something that actually resembled coffee now that no one else was here.

“Can I get a refill,” I asked him after pouring the sludge out in the trashcan.

He just grumbled as he went to pour me a cup from what I hoped was a fresh pot.

Making conversation I asked, “So what happened to those two girls that had been working here for a while?”

As he handed me a real cup of something hot that actually looked like a strong cup of coffee he said, “Damn teen raping manager here. That’s what. Wasn’t able to just leave it at having them drop down on their knees and suck his dong to keep their jobs. Nope, he had to start forcing them to service him like whores. Dumb ass not only knocked them both up, he had them both in the back on top of each other as he took turns slipping out of one to slip into the other. Someone called the cops when no one came to the counter. They caught him right there in the back telling them how they better be ready for him to take their tight asses tomorrow just as the cops came walking in. Girls managed to run off with everything in the safe while the police were interrogating him. I am too damn old to be pouring cups of coffee, especially to people the likes of you.”

Asshole had it coming, but damn I was starting to like this place.

Cutting it short, we headed on up to find that Kumar had been here since five. One of the servers had failed the smoke test, or passed, depending on the way you looked at it. They lost six of the SSD drives as well. Fortunately, they were spread over the raid groups, so only one had lost both parity disks, but was still running fine. I showed him how to log into the web interface on the array, pull back a parity disk from one of other groups that had no failed disks and then swap things out. It happened enough against the prod database disks that it was something he would need to know to keep his job.

At least his luck was not near as bad as mine most days.

Turns out that the vendor had shipped in two complete server’s worth of spare parts and six spare SSD disks to have for onsite replacement versus getting them couriered in and wait for them to arrive to be replaced. We still had to wait three hours for their subcontracted tech from IBM to arrive, but we were busy with the other boxes anyway. Our luck did not hold. Two more of the boxes smoked out around lunch time. One had a broken connector on the mother board to the fan bank at the front, so it overheated when we started another code compile cycle. The second scared the shit out of the girls when it started popping caps in one of the power supplies. As it melted down, some of the solder ran off the board onto the power bus and that was all she wrote for that server. It was such a melted mess by the time we got it cooled down enough to touch it that the tech that arrived told the vendor to ship an entire new server, that one was too far gone to even replace parts in.

We were down to one app and one database box when we stopped to get some lunch. I suggested the place from yesterday.

“No can do Joe,” Kumar told me. “Rumor is that they did not pay off someone and the health inspector closed them down yesterday right before they opened for dinner. I never heard of them having less than a ninety-five since I started eating there years ago. I would have believed that it was a fluke if not for the place being completely trashed overnight. With all of the office Christmas parties going on today, I doubt anyplace around will be doing much takeout except the places you don’t want to have bring you food. There is a Subway a few blocks over.”

Subway it is!

Famous last words. The traveling holy rollers had descended on every restaurant in the city like ants to a dropped piece of slobber saturated sugary candy. Sure the sub makers were used to big rushes, they were just not stocked up to have them come two days before Christmas. All they had left when we finally go to the counter was some dried out cheese, scorched marinara, what may have once been chicken and a few olives. The rest of their stock was depleted. Deliveries weren’t going to be there until after Christmas.

We weren’t even lucky enough for this religious group to believe that alcohol was the devil’s blood, or whatever the Baptists around my great aunts home in Mississippi called it to make it sound like pure evil incarnate.

To the vending machines we go!

Nope. Someone had raided those already too. No one was coming to fill them until next week.

Joe it’s not like you don’t have a few extra pounds to live off of until dinner.

Back in the office we found that not only were the two other servers now dead, the ones the tech had been working hard to breathe life back into had died too. We just couldn’t get a win here. I called the boss while Kumar went up to tell Paul we were back to square one now.

An hour later Paul called down to have me come up to his office.

“Well Joe, it looks like your supplier sold us a load of crap. If I was my father, I would be ripping you a new asshole, but I’m not him. Someone is getting a new asshole and I thought you would enjoy listening in,” he told me.

As I sat back to enjoy a well needed stiff brandy, he put in a call to the supplier. Never losing his temper, he explained to the person on the other end that their CEO was going to call him in the next ten minutes or they would be speaking with the law firm his business used. When he mentioned Penny’s dad’s firm out of Atlanta, I was sure I heard the person on the other end go pale as they shit in their pants.

Damn good thing I was not taking a sip or I would have choked. Too bad he and those around him don’t rate enough to ever get Penny herself to represent them. By the way, where are his two shadows? Shouldn’t they be dealing with this mess?

Right on cue they showed up and asked how things were going. I knew then that they didn’t even have enough sense to go ask their staff first. Why Paul would even suffer these washed up high school jocks was beyond me. They must have something on him. Not that it mattered since Paul’s phone rang to interrupt my contemplations of how they managed to keep their jobs.

“Mr. Stephens, what can I do for you today? My secretary told me it was very urgent I speak with you immediately,” the older, powerful sounding man asked over the phone.

After a way too long pause, Paul said, “Recently we made a sizable purchase and less than twenty-four hours after turning the gear on, all of our servers have failed.”

“I wasn’t informed that you were having problems to this degree. As you know, computer systems can have some initial startup issues and that is why we provided replacement parts for those that turn out to be defective. My system shows you have a tech onsite repairing the failures reported earlier today,” he said confidently. “We are already sourcing replacement components to refill your onsite spare parts.”

“Normally I would agree with your boilerplate legal ass covering, but I did some checking of my own. It turns out that in addition to sitting on millions in unsold SSD drives, you have a large warehouse full of servers that failed QA testing by Dell, HP and Lenovo. I don’t know what you think you are trying to pull over on us, but if they are not replaced with your highest speed configuration, maxed out on RAM and sporting at least six one-terabyte enterprise class SSD drives by Friday...”

The man interrupted with, “Mr. Stephens, you have not even permitted us to repair the hardware. I don’t know where you obtained your information, but the only warehouse we have with the gear you mention is our bone yards. We purchase large quantities of other manufacturer’s failed servers, strip the components out, have each recertified by an outside third party and then sell those parts, at a hefty profit, to third-party hardware support companies. None of those servers would ever be shipped to any of our customers. I understand your frustration at this temporary issue. My staff has already put a note on your account that we are re-shipping your entire server order to arrive by four p.m. per the support contract.”

“For the continued health of our business relationship, I hope you have ensured that they are not the same products that have already shown to be faulty. Should any single component fail before EOB tomorrow, you will be having an after Christmas chat with my company’s law firm,” Paul told the man on the phone. “I am sure they would not mind swinging out to your home in Peachtree Corners to save you the trip into your offices in Norcross.”

When he explained who the company retained in Atlanta, I think the CEO for the vendor wished he had worn his brown pants that day.

Ever remaining bold and confident the CEO said, “It makes no difference how powerful of a law firm you have retained Mr. Stephens. Our contract clearly states the required remediation steps for server failures on equipment under support. We are following our side of the agreement to the letter. Threatening us will not change the fact that you are bound by that agreement.”

Paul just stayed quiet and let the CEO wait for someone to talk. No one did, so the CEO confirmed that the servers had left by courier to be put on a Delta Dash flight to Philadelphia for a four p.m. arrival. Paul just told him they had better arrive on time and not have any problems.

“Joe it seems we are facing some logistical issues. You have no idea how grateful we are that your company held firm on the required burn in stress testing period before beginning deployment,” Paul said as he topped off my brandy. “It shows me that we made the correct choice in partnering up with your company as a software vendor. I see no need for you and your team to remain here today. You are free to stay as you see fit.”

When he had dismissed his underlings he said, “My family always gathers for Christmas dinner at the home of the current CEO of the family business. At one time you were part of our family as you cared for my niece Ariel. It would be my honor if you would be willing to join us. While my sister and I will never be able to mend the rift between us, I am trying to correct the ambitious mistakes of my youth. I have invited Ariel and her daughter as well. She has always meant so much to my mother and they are not getting any younger. Maybe you and Ariel will have some more time to reconnect.”

Ah. The plot thickens. He let it slip that he knew Ariel had come to my house that one time.

“Sure. Hopefully all the people that came in from all over to celebrate together as a huge church won’t be taking up all the taxis or Uber drives,” I told him. “It would be my pleasure to share Christmas dinner with your family. What time should I arrive?”

“I wouldn’t be there before ten in the morning if you don’t want to deal with all of my daughters, nieces and granddaughters wearing their most risqué sleepwear to torment all of the males. I have no idea where it was started, only that my cousins and sisters were tormenting me with views of their bare breasts and their lack of panties under their gowns from the time I was old enough to realize that boys and girls were different. It was just made known that the males in the house had to bear it until all gifts had been opened, the associated trash cleaned up and the matriarch of the family dismissed us. We all hoped that she was happy with the male’s cleanup for the Christmas morning mess or the girls would be allowed to continue their antics until time to dress for dinner.”

I wonder if that is really why he worked so hard to screw over Ariel’s mother and less to do with his agenda.

He seemed genuinely interested in how my family spent Christmas. We were still going back and forth with crazy stories from Christmas past when Kumar said all of the new servers had arrived ahead of schedule. They were racked, cabled and the interns were re-installing the OS.

Right off the bat I could tell these were a much higher class of server chassis just from seeing English on the back of the power supplies. Inside was a whole different layout with names I recognized. One thing that really stood out was that the 10Gig and Fiber Channel adapters were HBAs and not daughter boards like the first batch of servers that came in. As I was working to get the databases built, mapped and starting to import the data again, another crate came in that was filled with a dozed of the crap servers at three forty-five. At four the Delta Dash pallets came in right on schedule.

Have fun with that Paul. I’m going to look closer at the Delta Dash servers that did arrive.

I will always love the little grunt on the line whose only job is to stick on a “QA passed sticker and a build date.” These servers were made at around the same time as the first batch that all died. Based on what I had seen from this vendor in the past, I was happy to see that these were definitely in-line with the gear we always specified. On the waybill I found the first round of the better servers had been shipped from Atlanta back when Paul called us to say the gear had been purchased and was on the way. The ones that came in at three forty-five were bearing the Delta Dash tape and stickers, which matched exactly the ones we had just racked, plus a crate with a new disk array with the same 400 GB SSD drives that also arrived with what looked to be the correct gear from the original purchase.

Very curious. Something funny is going on here.

“Paul, I think someone is playing games here. The servers we just racked appear to be what you ordered, not the junk that arrived. The shipping documents match up with the ship dates you gave for your gear to my company. I checked and the waybill numbers matched as well. All the servers that arrived as replacements for the smoked gear were all sourced locally. We got a palette in from Atlanta at three forty-five with the expected Delta Dash tape and tracking. Before we even cracked the crate, we got another locally sourced pallet of the junk gear at exactly four,” I told him. “Someone is trying to line their pockets somewhere between the vendor and your company.”

I saw the anger in his eyes while his voice sounded very calm and relaxed.

Someone came up with a good scam, but was too stupid to make it work. I know the vendor who provided the crap servers couldn’t have paid more than pennies on the dollar for the junk servers. Most of what they paid I expected was transportation costs and transfer paperwork so the manufacturer could write them off. Serial number stickers were trivial to print and most third-party techs had to print out new ones to put on systems where the chassis was changed out.

I bet that his CIO and CTO have their hands all over this little debacle. It would be so easy to blame our company’s software. Say that we told them the vendor to use to buy hardware to cover their own butts. If they could get a crooked enough judge, we would have to pay back the entire hardware purchase price and probably a few million more in some form of penalties. It sure smelled like the scams Gordo had been pulling.

When we got the shrink wrap off the crap server delivery the crates were beat to hell.

Idiots! They couldn’t even glue on the fake storage vendor stickers correctly. Was the idiot looking down over top of the disk array trying to stick them on?

All of the servers were the same exact crap that had smoked out.

Teach him to imply us or our preferred vendors were anything other than top notch.

“Paul. The disk array crate was beat to hell and most of the vendor name plates are upside down or on crooked. Not surprisingly the servers were literally just servers stacked on top of each other in another beat up crate. No boxes, no packing materials, not even power cords. They were just shrink wrapped before being dropped into the crate. We didn’t even try to unwrap them. We counted twelve on the pallet,” I told him. “I would bet you money that you have someone in your company that is behind it. Obviously, they never knew the original order would arrive today as promised. Only you, the CIO, CTO and I were in the room when the vendor promised a four PM delivery time for the servers coming in via Delta Dash, which actually arrived earlier than promised.”

I let the veiled acquisition hang out there as I headed back down to see what progress we were making. Fortunately, the interns had already gotten the OS images reinstalled, network setups sorted out and servers re-cabled to the SAN array. Since only the OS was on the internal disks, we were able to do a quick reconfiguration on the app and database hosts to update the few places required on the OS disks.

While the interns had been working, IT Kumar had pulled all the disks from the replacement array. He verified that all of them were the correct serial numbers and sizes before swapping them in for the failed SSD disks that the repair tech hadn’t been able to in from the local parts depots. Once each raid set had rebuilt he started swapping out one disk per raid set, waiting until they had rebuilt and repeating until all the disks had been replaced with the ones from the replacement array.

“Hope you didn’t mind Joe, but I started swapping out disks when I saw the storage vendor and the reseller’s certification and testing results for every single drive that was in the replacement array. We didn’t get that with the array that arrived. I will keep the replacement array for spare parts if the array hardware starts smoking out while being load tested,” he explained. “After all looks good here I plan to shut this other array down to replace a chassis at a time since they are the same models, but the ones we got in the original order are actually new.”

As soon the reconfiguration steps were done, we kicked off a build cycle on the apps and data load tests on the database. When they looked to be cooking along well, I went up to tell Paul we were heading out. I would come by in the morning to take a look to check on server status.

“I will be here as well Joe,” Kumar told me. “We do not celebrate the Christian holidays. I have swapped that company holiday for a religious holiday my family celebrates. Robert ensured that Paul, or any other successors, couldn’t modify the arrangement without needing to renegotiate my employment contract.” The interns and I didn’t even think about trying to hail a cab or see if an Uber driver was available, we just walked the blocks back to the hotel.

Shit! This place is way past overloaded. Hmm. What is the number of the fire marshal? Wonder if he is somehow related to the one in Atlanta that I have heard is a complete asshat.

Once I finally got up to my floor I found it wasn’t going to be a relaxing few days after all. Not with all the people out in the hallways to get enough room to be able to move around. One look in the rooms I passed showed me why. There wasn’t a free area of open floor space anywhere. They had playpens, cots, sleeping bags and luggage anywhere it would fit. I never saw less than six children running around in any of the rooms.

Must be one of the very prolific religious sects.

I just finished my thought when I almost bumped into a group of teenaged girls barely wearing anything. It was hovering below freezing outside and here they were in thin, nearly transparent, tops and spandex. When I took another look I noticed that all of them were pregnant enough to be showing a bit.

No way can any of them be fifteen yet.

As I made it to my room, another group of teen girls came to be right outside my door and kept it open.

“Hey, look! His room is completely empty and he has a suite. It is as big as two of our rooms put together. Come on,” one girl said before I had around a dozen girls in my room.

At least they made sure the door was propped open so the cops don’t have to break it down to arrest me. Just them being in my room is going to put me under the jail for sure now. Better make sure that I stay out in the living room part of the suite to have at least some chance of defending myself.

One of the girls asked, “When is the rest of your family getting here? It is so noisy, crowded and hot everywhere else. This would be a great place for us to hang out until they got here. We promise to keep it down and not drive you too crazy.”

What the hell are they doing here? Who the heck would let their teenaged daughters go into some man’s room they don’t even know? After the coffee shop and server issues today, it is better to nip this in the bud before you get found nipping at one of their buds.

After putting down my laptop bag I told them, “Probably not a good idea. I’m here alone on business and not a member of your large church group. Before you ask, I’m not interested in joining, don’t need to be saved, never lost Jesus and have no desire to pursue any form of religion. Take a good look at me. If you hadn’t assumed I was from your group, you would have run away screaming the moment you saw me. Your parents will banish you to some convent thousands of miles away for even being near a single heathen male such as I.”

That had the desired effect and half of the girls quickly rushed from the room having the disgusted look I know so well. I expected the others were about to follow. Instead, one of them ran over to the door. After looking out both ways, she quickly closed it, locked it and threw the bolt. Another girl was trying to turn on the TV. Once she found something she wanted, she turned the volume up loud enough to be heard in the hall.

Good choice. Only a heathen like myself would have on whatever the hell that is they have on the TV now.

One of the girls turned out to be the spokeswoman and I was “herded” into the bedroom.

“Mister, you have to let us hide out in here. These people are really fucking crazy this year! Normally we would have a couple of rooms per family so we can spread out and not kill each other. The psycho in charge said God demanded everyone to come this year. No one has ever made the entire congregation all gather on such short notice,” she started saying, but was interrupted.

Another girl said, “More like he had a drunken vision while trying to get a boner so he could knock up more of the girls in church.”

“So as I was saying, the psycho made everyone come, even those that don’t have enough money to feed their kids or put clothes on them. In the name of being good shepherds every family has to host at least one of the leeching families shoved in their rooms. He has declared it as God’s will. I already had two boys bust in on me in the bathroom when I was trying to pee. Neither even asked, they just pulled my legs apart so they could pee between then. I was forced to jack one of them off because he had a boner. He said God made girls to service males and have their children,” she told me disgustedly. “Did they have to pee all over me down there? There wasn’t anyone in the shower and the sink was right there.”