Chapter 26

My work trio is complete, my mainframe arrives, and I finally see Momma’s house.

The next morning, I arrived at my office at 7:50, and Carmen was waiting for me.

Before sending her to HR to sign a few documents, I went midway between Marty-World and the Real-World to disclose the power of Marty’s brain to Carmen. “Are you ready for my list?”

“Okay.” That sounded like an overconfident, okay. I’ll awe her by revealing all of Marty’s powers.

“Off my personal phone, I need all my contact names with phone numbers on a Rolodex for my desk and loaded into my work smartphone, which Uncle Bob’s Marsha received yesterday. Ask HR Marcia for Amara Bell’s folder and after you get her folder, contact and interview her ASAP. No pressure from me, but I know you’ll like her, and I want to hire her as our secretary. Then stop by procurement and see what desks and chairs they have in the warehouse, we need three of each, and I trust your judgment. If they don’t have any, grab one of their office supply catalogs, pick out what we need, and tell them we need them in place by noon next Tuesday. We’ll eventually need a slew of file cabinets, but they are a low priority for now. Do you prefer blackboards and chalk or whiteboards with magic markers? It makes no difference to me, but we need three ten-footers. I need a 40 x 30 drafting table because sometimes I need to draw, and I’m sure they don’t have one in the warehouse, so order one. I’ve already ordered five desktop units from the CIA through my fifteen-year-old cousin Larry. And the last task, order two more smartphones from Bob’s Marsha. Convince her that I need both by Monday afternoon. Oh, and the final last thing, we need a combo, copier-scanner- printer, ooh, ooh, and we all need security badges and retinal scans to get through locked doors.”

I took a deep breath and noticed something Carmen didn’t do.

“You didn’t write anything down. Did you get all that, Carmen? I recorded it on my phone if you need me to repeat it.”

“Not a problem, Marty. I forgot to tell you that I have a photographic memory.”

“Crap! I thought I had you.” Curses foiled again.

Carmen walked out of our office, speaking with laughter in her voice, “Better luck next time.”

I made a phone call, and after getting transferred six times, I finally reached Peter Wang on the phone and asked about the PCs I had already ordered for myself, Dad, Uncle Bob, Amara, and Carmen.

Just before 3 o’clock, as I walked out of my front office, I ran into Carmen and Amara. Carmen started speaking before I did, so I yielded the floor to her.

“Marty, You were ‘spot on’ about Amara; we will make a great team.”

“Well, I probably will never reach space, but we will make travel in our solar system much easier for our children and grandchildren. The CIA-approved desktops, each coming with two flat screens, are on the way and will be delivered Wednesday morning.”

Amara’s turn to speak, “Bad news, good news, and better news. They have no spare Rolodex in the office-supply area of the warehouse. They did have three desks and two chairs that will be here tomorrow morning at 9:30. The third chair will be delivered tomorrow afternoon from Chambers Office-Supply, and they will deliver three whiteboards with markers next Friday by 10 o’clock. They had to order them. And I have a Rolodex at home that I’ve never used, so I’ll bring it in tomorrow and fill it up for you.”

Back to Carmen, “Marsha said we should have two more smartphones here Monday morning, and she gave me yours. Tomorrow at 10 AM, we can go by the security office for our name tags and retinal scans.”

And Amara finished up with, “Marsha also said she’ll get back with me tomorrow on a combo printer unit, and Mickey at Chambers thinks he has a drafting table that was an open box return; he just has to remember where he put it.”

“Well, team Marty, not too bad for the first day. Tomorrow I have some thoughts I want to pursue in the machine shop. We can’t have thought of everything, so brainstorm together and come up with what we missed. Amara, it’d be your chore to babysit my schedule because sometimes I speak before checking, which leads to major problems. So every morning, my schedule for that day and the upcoming five days needs to go to me, Carmen, Marsha, and Lorraine.”

“Tomorrow at noon, we’ll pick up my fiancée at home and have lunch together. She is very jealous and hotheaded, so I want to make this as transparent as possible.”

“One of the girls in the secretarial pool told me that you’re getting married in three weeks. Congratulations, Marty.”

“I’m not sure whether congratulations or condolences will be in order. Stay tuned until the honeymoon’s over.”

Friday, desks and chairs were delivered, and the WWII leftovers were whisked away to a museum, I believe. I now had a desk to set my Rolodex and phone on.

Friday’s lunch with Liz and my two beautiful assistants, Carmen and Amara, was tense until Liz finished her interrogation. From the rude questions asked, she found out Amara was ten years older than me, married to a man she adores and has three beautiful children, and Carmen is a single parent with an eleven-year-old son and was sixteen years older than me.

We ate after the inquisition, and I became invisible while the three women chatted among themselves like old friends. I didn’t try to leave because I knew they expected me to pay for lunch, so I went to Marty-World, where there were trees and flowers and chirping birds. That evening, the miracle of all miracles happened; Liz apologized for being rude. I had to reward her that evening for being gracious toward my team.

The most lavish wedding of the 21st century, in Greenville, South Carolina, would take place in twenty-one days. Whose wedding was that important? Mine, of course. Why’s it so special? Because of all the money my mother, sisters, and fiancée are spending on my behalf. You may remember Liz telling me she had no living relatives, so my mother decided to make this the most spectacular wedding any living South Carolinian has ever attended. I pretend to be upset because I’m paying for it, but it’s worth every dollar they spend if it makes Liz happy.

There are five hundred names on the guest list, and Liz, believe it or not, has talked Momma out of doing some bizarre shit, like her arriving in a carriage pulled by white horses or paying $150 a bottle for champagne. I need to invent and patent a modern-day philosopher’s stone so I don’t go broke paying for my wedding. In reality, I needed to develop and patent something quickly to sell to the U.S. government.

I spent the weekend as a gopher; Marty, go to Mabel’s and pick up the tablecloth order; Marty, go to Frans craft shop and pick up the crystal candle holders; Marty, blah, blah.

I’m not a Monday morning person, but I was out the door at 6:30 and relaxed at the Waffle House for an hour, eating breakfast before going to the office to begin a critical week.

The short version for today’s activities; Amara spent all day putting contacts in our smartphones and putting away office supplies. Carmen got the schematics I needed and spent three hours ordering software specific to our requirements. In the afternoon, I met with Larry and told him I had bought a Cray and explained it would arrive on Wednesday, with installation starting on Thursday. I gave him the phone number of the customer service manager in charge of training at Cray Inc. While the Cray was installed and tested, Larry would be getting an online crash course on maintaining my costly purchase. After that, he would take classes online at home and perform maintenance as needed on the Cray under supervision until he received certification.

The tractor-trailer carrying our Cray supercomputer arrived at 9:05 AM on Wednesday. The largest crate delivered easily fit through the double doors; however, I wasn’t given the width of the forklift they sent, and it wouldn’t fit between the doors; the tires were too fat. Nevertheless, the gods were smiling at us today because the guys in the fabrication building had an old electric forklift with enough muscle to take a handoff from their forklift at the door. The only problem was that while the motor was powerful enough for any load, the weight of the crates caused our forklift to tip over, so we added 525 pounds of ballast by having our two largest fabricators stand on the rear bumper.

There’s a statement that’s used quite often, ‘necessity is the mother of invention.’ After the truck left and we locked up the room, I ran to my office to be greeted with organized chaos. PCs were being set up by three men who looked like, um, well, Chippendale dancers, beefcakes. There, I said it, but if I were inclined to be a switch hitter, any of them would’ve got me excited. Larry was there setting up the users on one PC while Amara and Carmen were against the wall admiring the view. Behind them, HR Marcia, Uncle Bob’s Marsha, Carla, and Lorraine were observing the setup while whispering among themselves. The office supply people were assembling the whiteboards and drafting table in my office.

I greeted the ladies, “Ladies, what could possibly bring six of the hottest women in Greenville together in one small office simultaneously? Maybe I should call Liz so she won’t accuse me of having a party and not inviting her?”

“Too late, I’m here,” Liz said as she walked through the door with Dad in tow. “Oh, my. I see what you mean, Carmen.”

Too much estrogen in this room, and I need to leave.

I headed toward the door, and Carmen chirped, “Hey, Marty. They had to get under our desks to hook up the PCs.”

They were all wearing shorts, socks, and boots, but I had to ask, “I can see that, but why did they take off their shirts?”

Thursday morning, I was out the door at sunrise and pacing in front of my double steel doors at 7:50 AM when two vans sporting the Cray Inc. corporate logo pulled up next to me. I was expecting three men for a two-week install, but four men and two women exited the vans, making me question my memory of the contract signing. I recognized Harold, my installer.

“Bright and early, Harold. You’re the kind of people I like to do business with. But why are there six installers?”

“How would you feel having the beast installed and operational in eight days?”

“Ecstatic, but I only have two eyes, two kidneys, and two nuts, and I don’t want to part with any of them for a fast install.”

“How about, for no extra cost to you, an eight-day install in trade for you doing five demos in the next six weeks? Stevens A&D is the third customer we have sold this model to, and we have customers who want to see it in operation before they plunk down three-quarters of a million dollars.”

“Why Stevens? What about the first two you sold?”

“Those Alphabet companies don’t exist.”

“I understand. It’s all right with me, but I have to ask Dad and my uncle if strangers can visit? I have one condition; the demos will be restricted to this room.”

So now we were on track to get this bad boy running well before getting hitched and heading off on a fabulous honeymoon with the sex goddess.

Today is Saturday, fourteen days before Liz puts a ring through my nose and tries to make me domesticated. I woke up before the sun came up and was out the door as it peaked above the horizon so that I could escape a day of Marty, the gopher. I had my notebook with me and went to my office to evaluate my realistic ideas, not science fiction ones like warp drive, and transfer some of my thoughts to my hard drive. When I finished up, it was after three.