Chapter 4: Disaster

Dexter looked over at the cell phone when it rang. He was just getting ready to get into the shower. Wishing that he would get one morning without being interrupted, he answered the phone.

“Hello, Mark.”

“Are you on the crapper?” Mark asked.

“No. I’m about to shave,” Dexter answered thinking he could put the phone on mute and shave before showering.

Mark said, “Shit ... It rains a little and every asshole forgets how to drive.”

“What do you want?” Dexter asked while picking up his electric razor.

“I want you to...”

There was a weird noise on the speaker, and then silence. Dexter continued to listen, but there was nothing coming over the speakerphone. He glanced over at it to see if there was a problem only to discover that the call had been disconnected. He shrugged his shoulders and started shaving. Mark would call back once he realized the call had been interrupted.

Dexter finished shaving without getting a call back from Mark. He glanced at the phone wondering if something was the matter and then took a shower. There wasn’t a voice mail on the phone when he finished bathing. He headed down the hall knocking on the doors of the kids to wake them. It was a little early, but he could live with their complaints.

In the kitchen his wife was talking to the group from Ireland. He poured a cup of coffee and sat down at the table. He watched Janet go through the motions of preparing breakfast. It wasn’t much work. She just tossed a couple frozen bagels into the toaster, and waited for them to pop up.

He hadn’t noticed how old she looked. She was in her late thirties, but looked more like she was fifty. Her voice had taken on a sharp edge to it. He blamed it on her job. Her hours were almost as long as his and she did the housework on top of her job. He would have helped more, but it seemed like he was always at the office or on the computer trying to get caught up on work.

He answered a couple of e-mails from people who worked for him. One of the developers claimed to have worked through the night and was going to stay at home that day. He would have to check to see if the guy’s claim was true. It was just as likely that he had worked a couple of hours that night and claimed an all nighter, just to have a day off. He had done it before. Dexter hated managing people.

Janet put a plate of bagels slathered with creamed cheese in front of him with a grunt. He picked up one and took a bite out of it. The kids showed up and poured their typical breakfast bowls of cereal. His wife sat down, and started eating a bagel. She took small bites so she could swallow if she suddenly needed to make a comment to the party at the other end of the line.

He finished his bagels. Getting up from the table, he dropped his dishes into the sink. He texted goodbye to his wife and headed out the door. He was running a little early and hoped the traffic wouldn’t be too bad. Maybe he could get into the office early and get caught up. It had rained a little the night before and traffic was running a lot slower than usual.

He managed to get into the office late. It wasn’t really late since it was only a few minutes after eight and the working day officially started at nine. That didn’t matter, since eight had become the defacto starting time. His office phone was ringing and he had a dozen e-mails waiting for him. There was a reminder to have all of his people turn in their time sheets. He forwarded the e-mail to the sixty people who worked for him knowing that a handful wouldn’t get their time sheets in and he’d have to track them down later.

He checked to see if the developer who was taking the day off had done any work the previous night. He pulled up the logs on the source code control program and noticed that the developer hadn’t checked out any code since eight the previous day. He then recalled that the guy had worked the whole weekend when one of the production machines had core dumped. That little problem had ruined everyone’s weekend. He had spent the whole weekend fielding calls from developers, production support, and management about the problem. He decided not to pursue the issue.

He went back to his e-mail and noticed that he hadn’t gotten anything from Mark. That was unusual. Mark was ‘the great communicator.’ He liked to tell people what they knew they were supposed to be doing that day four and five times in the morning, then call four or five times during the day to make sure they were doing what they were supposed to be doing, and then four or five more calls in the evening to make sure that everything was done. He should have had two e-mails reminding him to call India that night.

He got an e-mail telling him that he had exceeded his quota for e-mails. He looked down and saw that he had over sixteen thousand e-mails of which two thirds of them were unread. He sorted his inbox and eliminated all of the automatically generated e-mails from the source code control program, the time sheet program, and all of the meeting invitations and reminders. That got rid of ten thousand e-mails.

He archived the thousand e-mails from his boss that had collected over the past three months. He knew that a thousand e-mails sounded like a lot, but his boss tended to send him ten e-mails a day and copy him on another ten e-mails. That was a hundred e-mails a week from his boss.

He then deleted the hundreds of e-mails that were company junk mail. He wondered how anyone could possibly wade through those e-mails and get any work done.

He was left with a couple thousand e-mails from the people who worked for him. Sixty people generated a lot of e-mails particularly when every e-mail was addressed to two levels of management. These were the ones that he read because he had to read them. Most of them were complaints, technical issues, and requests for time off. The three firms in India and China generated nearly as many e-mails as his sixty people.

He stared at his desktop, thinking that he needed a vacation. He needed a real vacation ... one that was better than his last one to Hawaii. That had been a disaster. They hadn’t seen many of the sights. Between him and his wife, there wasn’t a day when they hadn’t been on three conference calls. The time difference had his wife on the phone at three in the morning local time. It was kind of hard to have a late evening out, sit on a conference call for two hours at three in the morning, and then go off to pursue tourist activities when the tour buses left at eight in the morning.

The kids had sat around most of the day complaining about being bored. Will was irritated about not being able to play his computer game with his friends. Sarah was upset because the time difference cut out six hours a day of texting with her friends. He wasn’t sure if any of the kid’s friends actually existed since he had never seen any of them.

About the time his wife was ready to do something, he was on a conference call. His calls to India coincided with dinner time which meant they had to eat early, missing the shows, or late, getting the bums rush when the place was ready to close. The trip had ended with a huge argument about having wasted thousands of dollars. They returned home tired and exhausted.

He remembered taking camping vacations with his parents when he was a kid. They had a pop-up tent trailer that they would hitch up behind the family station wagon. They would travel from one campground to the next, spending a couple of days at each place. His job was to set up the trailer by leveling it with the jacks. Once the trailer was level, he had to put in the aluminum supports for the sleeping platforms and the tent.

He had always complained about having to set up the trailer while his dad walked around stretching after having made the drive, but he’d give his left nut to have a simple vacation like that at the moment. His dad didn’t get any business calls while on his vacations. They didn’t have cell phones in those days.

His thoughts were interrupted by his desk phone ringing. He answered it. It was the Director’s secretary ordering him to come over to the Director’s office. There wasn’t anything he could do to get out of the meeting. When the big guy called, you went. After hanging up, he glanced at his watch and swore. “I hope this isn’t any of that Service Economy crap.”