Chapter 2

It wasn't his fault, not really. If George had been a normal work mate, Marty wouldn't have been reduced to writing a program to look for some kind of patterns in his speech. Well, not exactly his speech, since it was really George's help tickets that the program analyzed.

Marty had thought he was so smart. George probably just had a different way of thinking than most people. If you could dignify his way of approaching the world as thinking. Mary remembered one of his recent tickets 'Mizz Farnswerth is havening problems with her fonts being blurry, i djusted er settinz and that didnt not help'.

Aside from the obvious misspellings of "er" and "havening" and "djusted", Marty didn't even know who Ms. Fernswerth was. There were only a limited number of people in town and besides that, Wurczock Computers Incorporated only had some of them as clients. Marty had already checked the company's list of clients and even resorted to looking up Fernswerth in the phone book. No Dice.

And George, even if he was a lazy ne'er-do-well, wasn't a liar, and wouldn't make it look like he was working when he wasn't. After all, he didn't need to lie. He had gone to elementary school, and junior high, and high school with Mr. Wurczock, as he would tell anyone who would ask. "We are blood-brothers, we cut our palms and shook on our eternal friendship, mixing our blood and spit together, you know there isn't a stronger bond than that!" George had told Marty the first lunch they had eaten together.

WCI was just a small town computer company, with pretty much a monopoly on fixing computers, scanners, and any other computer equipment that you could imagine. Well, that you could imagine in a small town like this. Which means Marty shouldn't have this much trouble finding Mizz Fernswerth or why her fonts were blurry. Knowing George, the blurry fonts were blurry because of the 'djusted settinz', rather than the fonts being blurry before George had helped. And even if George's adjustment of the settings hadn't made them blurry, he had more than likely broken something else by adjusting the wrong settings.

But Marty had to have this job, and Mr. Wurczock had made it clear that he was a fair man. "I don't give you a raise based only on your work, but on your team-work!" Unfortunately, what he really meant is that any errors made by one of the help desk Bobs was used against all of them. Rumor had it that the last two guys who had Marty's job had quit because not only had they not gotten a raise, but Mr. Wurczock had actually penalized them for each complaint that made it to his office. But Marty had a plan.

It was simple really. If he looked at all the help desk tickets, maybe he could find some other mention of Mizz Fernswerth, and figure out how he would fix George's latest solution that probably had screwed up something in a weird way that was totally unbelievable if anyone other than George had been involved.