Chapter 4

Moving the plot on, slightly ... And shifting the POV to Naz's perspective ... normal service resumes asap...

Well, we got the money, what with Dave's friend doing her weird shit with the Chinese woman from the States, and we were in business. And, yeah, we were in business ... Dave had obviously given Debs the job of running the place day to day - she was so clearly better at it than him, had really been doing it right from the beginning, that he'd have been nuts to do anything else. But he also offered me the job of taking over the IT side full time, and offered me some sort of joke salary ... about three times what I'd been on before and with the promise that I'd never have to reset some prat's network password ever again.

So Deb and I wasted no time at all in e-mailing PCW with our resignations. Natch, she got invited out to lunch and had a fairly hard time, apparently, convincing them she actually wanted to go. Even then, they told her she had to work out three months notice ... though she stayed seconded to Hertford Square, so none of us really understood what that was about. I, meanwhile, had to spend a few hours trying to track down anyone who remembered that I still technically worked for them ... and then just got told that they'd send my tax stuff over to the new office and not to bother returning my pass as it had been cancelled. I left the personal stuff I had in the helpdesk office where it was, intending to get my mate Seffi or someone else vaguely human there to pick it up at some point: No way was I going to deal with all the shit they'd pull if I tried to actually get back into the building...

Next few days, the office got weirder, in some ways ... Dave - with a lot of help from Deb - finished the stuff 'we' were doing for CareSpan (who were so pleased that they offered to throw a party for us) and the two of them put together a business plan which equally pleased both the shits at PCW and the people in the States. I was busy with the code conversion - no worries but, surprise, surprise, a much bigger job than Dave had thought it would be - and wasn't taking too much notice. Apparently, however, this involved us keeping the code free but selling specific analytical models (and the know-how to use it), directly at first and then via external consultants - who would apparently pay us for the privilege. Sounded bollocks to me, but apparently the suits felt it could make shed loads of money and Deb - oh, and Dave - were happy that it could all be done "ethically". Like I said, I was busy with the code. Didn't think much of it.

Nor did I take any particular interest in all of the discussions about new recruits. Well, Dave asked me to work out what I'd need in the short term to get the "product" up and running and to talk to Deb about longer term structures, but they were talking about getting in finance people - currently all the payroll stuff was being done by the accountants downstairs, with PCW doing the rest - and someone to deal with contracts and all that good stuff. I, however, was wondering why Dave had used the toolkits he had when wrote the original version of CastList ... a much more interesting topic, naturally.

We started getting a lot more visitors and you could see Debs getting a bit flustered about keeping the place together and - almost her favourite word, these days - "appropriate". You had to admit she had a point - even I would admit to being chaotically untidy, and Dave - well, I was never sure what Dave actually did but ... he was clearly used to doing it from home. I think it was his habit of writing notes to himself on post-its and sticking them all over the walls ... and sometimes the floor ... that annoyed her most. Not that it ever got fraught - I'd wondered more than once when they were finally going to get it together - but immovable objects and irresistible forces were coming together. Albeit, politely, amicably and with a lot of jokes.

So it was still a pretty relaxed place to work, albeit a temporary one: One thing that had been agreed was that we'd be moving out of London - none of us had ties to the place and might as well shift the operation somewhere prettier (or more economical as Debs always put it to the suits) while we had the chance. I favoured somewhere up North and Dave was keen on anywhere involving mountains but it was Deb who got delegated to research the topic, which meant talking to the EntRel people at PCW. I thought this was surprisingly cutting, for her, but it turned out she meant not entrail people but Enterprise Relocation ... a department presumably better at moving businesses around than thinking up good abbreviations. Or probably just lacking a sense of humour: Deb was always a picture of corporate responsibility when she went to see them.

And while Deb was spending most of her time back at PCW, Dave started doing the rounds of The City, "bigging up the product" - and he got the suit out, too. This meant I was in the office on my own a lot, which was great - at least until the guys downstairs pointed out that if I wanted to get paid it would be better if they could hear themselves think. Oh, and the architects upstairs complained about the effect that the vibrations were having on their plotters ... so I bought a pair of decent headphones, brought in a decent CD and amp, got sorted, really. Except that I hit a complete block on one bit of the code ... didn't look at all like Dave's stuff - it was compact and efficient, for one thing - and it was helpfully annotated in German. So probably not his at all.

Finally tracked the boss man down one afternoon and as expected he was no use at all - well, not directly: Promised to get me an e-mail address for the people who'd written it, but not before the next morning. Well, OK, I thought ... get on with other stuff. Except that I kept coming back to the conundrum. Despite myself, I needed to know how it worked, what I was missing. And I needed to know soon.

I thought it was about time for a break, anyway, so I wandered over to the gardens in the square for a quick smoke ... and remembered Seffi, possibly the only person in PCW IT who I'd got on with ... and who was German. Not a programmer, unfortunately - she was the IT support services manager - but she should be able to translate the comments nonetheless. I called her as soon as I got back into the office. No, she couldn't give me five minutes at the moment, nor could she get away from work for a bit - I'd forgotten the culture at PCW was a little different from the one I'd got used to recently - but if I wanted help I could buy her a drink about 6pm in a bar she named. I agreed, of course, and hung up, went back to work. Or tried to. I kept wondering whether that had been a note of reproach in her voice. After all, I hadn't talked to her at all since I'd been hoisted out of her world and deposited in here, and now I'd only called her because I wanted something from her.

I didn't get any work done, rest of the day. I kept thinking about Seff, how she'd kept us all sane with her odd jokes and appalling puns, how she'd always been ready with a kind word and a smile when the clients were giving us even more shit than normal. I ended up feeling really guilty, and finally chucked in the office at about four, wandering around for a while before getting to the bar an hour or so early. And bought a soft drink, possibly to chastise myself. Perversely, I hadn't brought a print of the code I was obsessing on: I could always e-mail her it, if she was willing to help. For now, I thought I'd have a go at rebuilding the bridges that I'd forgotten had been there.

Seff was actually about half an hour late - been having the hide torn off her by some senior exec whose laptop had not been instantly repairable, she said. Which was par for the course, I knew, but didn't mean she was in the best of moods. In fact, she was seething and didn't really say much until half way through the large vodka and something she'd asked for. She looked tired, too - short black hair spiked aggressively, a new stud in her nose, I noticed - and the suit she was wearing somehow made her look very small as she slumped on the bar stool beside me. I waited in what I hoped was sympathetic silence.

"So then, Naz," she said, eventually, "How's life in the big time? Word has it back in the real world that you're now earning stupid amounts of money and shacking up with that nice Ms Jensen from Corporate Development - Christ, didn't someone tell me that she'd left the firm to be with you?"

I sort of laughed at this, unsure as to how to take it, explained that I was indeed working with Ms Jensen - it was a long time since I'd thought of her as anything but Debbie, I realised - and that, yes, I was being paid OK for my time. As far as I could see, though, said Ms Jensen's body language and stuff suggested an interest in only one person in the office and it wasn't me. And anyway, I said, tall, neat, respectable blondes weren't my type.