Chapter 5

When I open my eyes in the morning, it takes me a few moments to recognize my surroundings. The geometry of the room is unfamiliar, and for a few seconds I have no recollection of my whereabouts. Then the memory of last night comes back, and I blink a few times and take a look around through squinted eyes.

The radio clock on the night stand shows 7:33am, and there is nobody in bed next to me, only ruffled sheets and a crumpled pillow where Nicole fell asleep last night after our wine-fueled adventures. I sit up in bed, and it simultaneously occurs to me that the door is open, and that I am stark naked under the covers. Thankfully, this floor contains nothing but Nicole's bedroom and the tiny bathroom across the hall. I lean over the edge of the bed to look for my underwear, and the sudden change in attitude makes my head hurt as if someone has given it a whack with the San Francisco Yellow Pages. I groan as I snatch my boxer briefs and t-shirt out of the pile of clothing by the side of the bed.

"Good morning, stud. Want an aspirin?"

Nicole comes out of the small bathroom, brushing her teeth and holding a glass of water, and I let me head drop back onto the pillow with a groan.

"Please. Two or three, if you have 'em. My head is killing me."

"Lightweight," she smiles, and goes to the bathroom, where I can hear her opening drawers and rummaging for a moment.

"Here we go."

She returns to the bedroom with a small pill bottle and places it on the night stand along with the water glass. Then she walks back to the bathroom, brushing her teeth along the way, and I admire her tight little butt as she walks away. She's clad in very rudimentary panties and a tank top.

"Thank you," I croak as I pick up the pills and untwist the child safety cap. I shake out three aspirin, throw them into my cotton-dry mouth and wash them down with the contents of the water glass.

In the bathroom, Nicole taps the toothbrush against the sink, and I can hear her spit and rinse over the running water of the faucet.

"So what's on your plate today?" she asks.

"Oh... lay here for a while until the room comes to a stop, and then take it from there. I have about six hours of work to do at the company office, and no motivation to do it."

"Poor baby," Nicole replies with fake empathy. "I'd offer to come along and help out, maybe let you jump me when you get bored, but I told mom I'd go shopping with her today. I need some new clothes."

"Pity," I say. "I would have taken you up on that offer, too."

"Maybe we can get together tonight after you're done. Have dinner, look at old yearbooks some more, that sort of thing."

"It's a date," I say. "Find us a decent seafood place while you're out with your mom, and I'll buy dinner tonight."

"That's easy. We can do Neptune's Palace on Pier 39. It's a bit touristy, but the view is absolutely awesome."

"What time do you want me to pick you up?"

"Hmm... we should be back by early afternoon. Think you can be done early enough to get here by four or four thirty? If we leave any later, there'll be no parking spot left between the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate."

"I can do that," I reply. "Piece of cake."

I give myself a quick cat wash in the sink of Nicole's bathroom and get dressed in my clothes from last night. My change of clothes is still neatly packed in the travel bag resting on the back seat of the rental Blazer in front of the house. The house is quiet, and when we come downstairs, a pair of empty teacups and breakfast plates on the kitchen counter tell me that Nicole's parents have started their day already.

"Damn, how early do they get up? It's only, what, eight o'clock? The sun is barely up."

"Unnatural, aren't they?" Nicole says with a grin. "They go walking after breakfast, up and down the neighborhood."

"Good for them. I'd do more of that walking and running business myself back home, if it wasn't for our local grannies running over everything that is not painted Day-Glo orange. People get run over riding bikes all the time, and they have reflectors and flashing lights on their helmets and everything."

"Yeah, that's why I do my running indoors," Nicole replies.

She opens a cupboard and reaches for a fresh coffee mug.

"Are you going to stick around for breakfast?"

"Uh, I think I'll make tracks before your folks get back from their walk. I gotta check into the hotel and take a shower before I head over to the office."

Nicole shakes her head slightly.

"Don't want to embarrass yourself in front of the folks, huh? I told you they won't care. We're not kids anymore."

"Yeah, but they're still your parents, and you're still their little girl."

"Well observed," she says. "I guess I'll see you at four-ish, then?"

"Count on it."

I leave the house, pausing for a moment to enjoy the sunlight and the clear air of the morning. There is a clean breeze coming in from the bay, and the temperature is perfect once again, right in my comfort zone of around sixty degrees. The fresh air takes the edge off my hangover, and I roll all the windows down as I start up the Blazer. The rental spent the night underneath a row of trees, and now it is liberally sprinkled with bird droppings.

I drive back over to the Marina and check in at the front desk of the Radisson. My room is still available, since the company booked it with a credit card, and I sign in and haul my luggage up to the room. It's a business suite with a little office and a kitchenette. Strangely enough, it sports a handicapped-accessible bathroom, complete with a shower bench and enough handrails to equip a subway car.

I toss my bag on the bed, take out a fresh change of clothes, and take a lengthy shower. The dress of the day is unceremonial techie wear—old jeans, a black t-shirt, and an untucked green cotton shirt. Replacing old hardware usually involves crawling around underneath desks and wrestling with hardware caked in a decade's worth of dust.

My toolkit has made the trip without getting confiscated by the TSA, although I can tell that the case has been opened by the yellow "You've Been Frisked" tag that's wedged between my screwdrivers and the soldering iron. I gather my toolkit, the cable crimp tool, and a bag of assorted connectors. The job calls for a simple replacement of a server, but these kinds of assignment have a way of generating their own issues, and I hate being caught on a site without all my tools when some unforeseen problem manifests itself.

I ask the concierge at the front desk for directions to the corporate office, and he takes the time to sketch a rough map on the back of a restaurant menu. The office is in the financial district, which means that I have to go all the way across the bay into downtown San Francisco again. Thankfully, Sunday traffic is light, and it takes me only twenty minutes to make it back across the Bay Bridge.

Naturally, the Focus office is on the twenty-zillionth floor of a generic office tower. There are no parking spots available in front of the building, and I have an expensive server in the back that comes in two boxes which weigh about sixty pounds combined. I decide to try my luck and park the Blazer right in front of the main entrance of the building, despite the "NO PARKING" signs plastered on every surface in sight.

I've been wondering how to get into a corporate building on a Sunday without a key, but that concern is rendered pointless when the front door opens. A security guy in a putty-gray uniform steps out into the sunlight, giving me the evil eye as I climb out of the driver's seat.

"Can't park here, chief. Private property."

I'm pretty sure that the sidewalk in front of the building is a public one, but I don't feel like starting a philosophical argument with the rent-a-cop.

"Yeah, sorry about that. I'm with Focus, and I need to replace some computers for them today while they're out for the weekend. They didn't leave instructions for you to let me in, did they?"

For a moment, I am positive that this will be another corporate clusterfuck, and that I'll spend the next two hours on the phone trying to gain access to the building, but the rent-a-cop nods without hesitation.

"They left a note and a set of keys for the weekend shift. I just need to see some ID, make sure you're the right guy."

I hand him my corporate ID badge, and he takes it and squints at it.

"Hang on. Lemme check the name on the note. I'll be right back."

He walks back into the building, locking the door behind him, and I can see him retreat to his security desk through the glass of the front door. He rummages around on his desk briefly, picks out a sheet of paper, and studies it briefly. Then he comes back to the door and opens it again.

"Looks like you're the guy. Come on in."

I open the rear hatch of the Blazer and point at the computer boxes.

"Got these to carry upstairs, and I don't want to leave them on the sidewalk while I go and park this thing. Can I leave them in the lobby for a second?"

"Mind opening them for me?"

"Not at all," I say, and take my Swiss Army knife out of my pocket to cut through the tape holding the box flaps together. I open the boxes, and he peers inside. He looks over the computer stuff and nods.

"Okay. Just making sure you're not going to blow me up while you drive off, that's all."

If I was in a cranky mood, I could tell him that the computer case would probably hold enough Semtex to blow the contents of the foyer clean across the bay into Oakland, but I just smile and nod.

He's nice enough to help me with the computer boxes, and I place them on top of each other on the marble tiles of the foyer. He locks the door behind me as I walk out—wouldn't want any terrorists to dash in before I get back from parking the rental—and I drive off in search of a parking spot. It's Sunday, and I find one only half a block away.

When I get back to the building, the rent-a-cop opens the door for me, and I see that he brought out a dolly for me to use.

"Hey, thanks," I say as I load the boxes onto the dolly and roll off into the direction of the elevators.

"No problem," he replies before settling back behind the security desk. "Just make sure you bring that back to me. We only have the one down here, ever since the UPS guy stole the second one a few weeks back."

'Sure thing."

The Focus office is on the thirty-seventh floor, and it's totally bereft of activity. It's usually routine for a systems administrator to stick around when someone is coming in on a service call concerning the essential company hardware, but their admin has apparently decided to enjoy his weekend without watching someone else crawl around in the server room. There's a note taped to the door of the server farm, and I pull it off the door and read it. At least their computer guy was nice enough to leave a list of servers by IP address along with the admin passwords, although I have to cringe at the casual way in which he chose to convey that information. Leaving server passwords on a torn-out notebook sheet in plain view of the cleanup crew and everyone would constitute a firing offense back at the main office.

The place is tiny, a broom closet compared to the server ranch at the main office. I count twenty-odd workstations out on the floor, and a grand total of two tired-looking beige server boxes in the computer room. They have one hub, one switch, and a modem bank with four modems. I have more equipment in my living room. The servers are ancient Compaq Proliants, dual Pentium Pro boxes that were already just about obsolete when the millennium crystal ball dropped on Times Square six years ago.

I take stock of their setup, unpack the new hardware, and make sure that Adam pre-staged their shiny new mail server properly. Everything is as it should be, and I spend the next two hours unplugging their old junk and neatly stacking it in one corner of the room. The conversion from cc:mail to Notes is largely automated, but it takes another two hours, and by this time my stomach is starting to growl, reminding me that I unwisely skipped breakfast. When the conversion is complete, I grab my Notes CD and head out onto the floor to install the client on the user workstations.

Between installs, I seek out the ubiquitous vending machine, and find it in the break room after a brief search. The selection is kind of crummy, but I'm pretty hungry by now, so I spend my remaining pocket change on a Snickers bar and a bag of baked potato chips. Phil calls the vending machine the Triple Bypass Lotto, noting that there's not a single healthy choice to be made, and that you might as well hit random numbers and let the machine surprise you. I think his position has some merit, but some of the choices are more disgusting than others, and I wouldn't trust the Candy Robot to skip over the nasty bear claw or the knockoff strawberry Twinkies.

The workstation installs take another two hours, and by the time the last machine is configured, my watch shows two o'clock in the afternoon. I quickly type up instructions for their admin, complete with passwords and procedures for user logon, and leave the sheet in an obvious location in the server room. By the time I lock the Focus office again, it's past two thirty, and I have less than two hours to get back to the hotel for a change of clothes before picking up Nicole.

The rent-a-cop nods in appreciation as I park his dolly on the wall behind his desk, and he follows me to the door to unlock it and let me out.

"You have yourself a good evening now," he says.

"Planning on it," I smile. "You have a good one, too."

To read this story you need a Registration + Premier Membership
If you have an account, then please Log In or Register (Why register?)

Buy at Bookapy.com

Fringe Benefits

Michael Lindgren

$2.99