It was those heady days of IT when people knew they needed computers and computer services, but regarded them more as Ouija boards – things of unexplained mystery – rather than tools like everything else. It was a wild west of rip-off merchants and promises and good profits, before the big companies moved in and exported everything to the lowest salaries possible to maximise their profits and minimise their service.

I worked in the town of Borcum; I’d moved there to go to the neighbouring town university (Borcum being cheaper for accommodation). Then, when I had done my useless degree, I had stayed. The one thing the university had done was introduce me to computers. I was (and am) a natural, I was programming in paper tape, computer cards, and then directly on terminals. By the end of the second year, when the DPD2000 went down (as it frequently did) in the department, I frequently found myself helping the technicians from the computer department (who really only knew about mainframes). Once I put the non-functioning hard drive into the freezer and they thought I was mad; until it actually made it work, then I was a genius (the cold just lifted the magnetic heads an extra micrometer from the disc).

So when I left with my moderate degree in a pointless subject from a moderate university I could have found myself unemployed. Actually I set up in business. In my third year, Professor Newcom beckoned me over “I hear you are a wizz kid with computers.” I smiled. “I wonder if you could take a look at my sister’s office computer. It’s on the blink.” I said I’d happily pop over to Sandford on my motorbike that evening. “Oh thank you. Perhaps it can’t be fixed like the engineer said, but...”

So I looked. The engineer who said it was a dead piece of metal was one of the rip off merchants. I took out the small battery in the back that maintained the clock when the machine was down, went off ‘for parts’, and came back the next day with a new battery. Mrs Lydia Beynon (nee Newcom) had no more idea about small batteries (picture a very large watch battery) than the man in the moon. So she was charged perhaps a 1000% markup, I spent time and needless effort (resetting the clock: 5 minutes; needless fannying around to check the disc, reset the memory, reconfiguring the keyboard, any other made up things: 1.5 hours). But she was happy, I had only ripped her off a little, not a lot. The office was back up and running. After that, my third year was spent doing odd jobs for her and her friends, and her other business acquaintances. I was a recommended goto person who could be trusted (within reason). I read the computer mags, I got the computer papers. It was more interesting than my degree (hence the only moderate degree, not a good one – but then even Jill Waters, who got a First, ended up in a management training program rather than using her degree).

So I set up in business with my existing contacts and started the work I was destined for. Borcum Computers – strapline “For all your IT needs.” I could source printers and paper, I could advise on which new computer to buy, I could fix your old one, I could transfer everything to the new computer you had paid over the odds for from someone else. And I could do it over a weekend so as not to disrupt your business. People were pleased, people were grateful. I found myself making a surprising amount of money. It couldn’t last, it wouldn’t last, but in the meantime, life was good.

At that time, in those halcyon days, computer experts were regarded as something between Sir Lancelot – riding in to kill the dragons of computer malfunctions, the three wise men – magi from who knows where who knew the secrets of the universe, and Merlin – able to perform magical feats that no-one understood. I was happy to exist in this world and take on that persona. We weren’t geeks, we were rocket scientists, I was surprised at how many attractive young women were willing to go for a drink with me; and in the new freedoms of the period, how many were willing to have sex even on the second (or once on the first!) date. Being seen with an IT expert was a feather in the girl’s cap. I made it plain I wasn’t serious, that was rarely a problem. Their standing went up for having dated me – an IT genius; mine went up over time as I learned to be a surprisingly good lover. No, not surprising that I should become good at it, just surprising that I – a male – was willing to take the time and effort to become good. Then and now men can be selfish and thoughtless as lovers. That was the same trait as my computer knowledge. It wasn’t enough to know there was a language called Fortran (Algol, Lisp, Pascal, Basic, APL, Assembler etc etc), I had to know how to program it. It wasn’t enough to know there was a clitoris and a G spot, I had to know how to program them too. So I wasn’t a bad choice of partner and a lot of girls found they had their first orgasm with me; rather than just being a grateful mattress after a good night out.

Liz Botham was somewhere around thirty to thirty-five. Seven or ten years older than me. She was riding the same wave. She had set up an office as a bureau system for other businesses. She employed some girls by now and they entered the receipts for shops, ordered the goods and updated the books, sent letters from hand written scrawls (improving the spelling for some greengrocer to look more professional and educated), her office employed local girls on flexible contracts so even married women could get home to still make hubby the tea. This was the cusp of feminism. Women wanted to get out of the house but were still expected to keep that house nice. So some had a job for the freedom it gave, some for the company, some for the extra income that they could keep for themselves. Botham’s Bureau employed a mixture. A year before this, her computers – a mixture of Unix office machines and a couple of the new Windows style desktops – had been hit by a power surge which all but wiped several of them. As with so many companies, her backups were poor. I helped set up new machines with Uninterruptible Power Supplies to protect them; the girls worked hard to reenter the last four months work (“Four months Mrs Botham! Let me help you set up a better, more robust backup system”) that the backups didn’t have. It helped, but they nearly went under, just scraping through with an injection of cash from Freely and Johnson, who were looking to get into this IT lark and spread their risk from their Cash For Cars secondhand businesses (four sites and counting). Carl Freely was a weasel – the kind who would put sawdust in the gear box of a scrapheap to sell it off the lot and then point at the small print saying ‘Warranty is invalidated by driving this car’. Jo Johnson was an ex-boxer and was known to like to keep his hand in with people with bad debts. Both would sell their granny if the price was good.

I did other pieces of work for Mrs Botham, I always maintained a strictly respectful tone for even the smallest stallholder with a dodgy keyboard, right up to Mr Archibald Laing the owner of Laing’s Ltd – he liked to get me in as a consultant when one of the big company’s put in a quote for some work: ‘the hardware is overpriced for being a year out of date, they are trying to off load the old stuff on you’.

I networked all the computers so they used a single print server on the Unix machine to drive all the printing; it meant they only needed two printers – one for computer printouts and one for letters and accounts. The maintenance that saved would pay for itself over a year.

“Chris? Oh thank goodness I’ve caught you. We can’t print anything. No, nothing! We have to get the end of month run done. There are salaries for seven companies, eight if you include mine!”

“Nothing is printing?” I asked.

“Nothing, nobody can log in, there are some odd errors which make no sense to anybody. Oh, this is a disaster.” She went on like this for a while. When I finally got a word in, I offered to go over and have a look.

When I arrived, as is normal with panicking people (and especially females I have found), she insisted on telling me all her useless information (“Nobody can tell what has happened. You won’t understand I’m sure”), then she pulled in Sharon to tell me the whole sorry tale again with only a small snippet of extra information. Why do people do this? Why don’t they just let the expert do what they have called him in for? “I’ve asked the girls to stay late so they can sort out the printing as soon as it is sorted, if you get it sorted. If you can’t, I don’t know what I’ll do. Oh...” And so she recounted the sad story again.

Finally I took control by the simple expedient of telling her to take me to a computer terminal. “Hmm, I can’t login.”

“That’s what I’ve been saying. You see the girls have tried and tried and they can’t and...” I patiently listened again. I’m very patient, and it was her time she was paying for. But time was passing and they would be in trouble if the customers could not get their end of month runs complete. She let slip that she was most concerned that Freely and Johnson would probably see the place shut down and them all sacked. Her investment would become worthless. The last six years of her life building this up and it could evaporate.

I was piecing together the facts from the girls working there and coming up with a possible scenario. A Windows update here, a failure to print there. There had been a new release that (if I remembered what I had read correctly) sometimes had the unfortunate effect of an infinite printing loop. But most of the work was still done on Unix terminals and the printers were attached to the Unix server so they had simply ‘known’ that the update which had been loaded was not related. I got everybody off, and rebooted the Unix box with the PCs unattached. It took a long while but I finally got the printer function switched off and immediately things sped up; I knew that people would immediately think it was all fixed, so I put it back on again before anybody noticed.

As I was getting this information, I couldn’t help noticing the girls flitting around. One stretched up for files on a top shelf, showing a distinctly attractive amount of thigh as her short skirt rose up. A little later, another bobbed down without closing her knees, giving me a very clear view of her pants. Liz Botham saw me looking but did nothing to tell the girls to be more refined in the presence of a man who was already distracted by the legs on display normally. The tight upper clothing wasn’t helping either.

“Mrs Botham, I think I can fix it. But it will take time.” This, at least was genuine. “I could come back tomorrow to start if you like.”

“No! No! It has to be today. Oh please! Can you work into the evening? How long will it take? What do you need to do?”

“Well, I won’t bore you with the details; but I will need to reboot a few times. I think: clear the Windows print queues, roll back the updates, empty the Unix print queue, clear the buffers. I may not be able to clear all these in one go you see, and each reboot takes about an hour. That’s why I was suggesting tomorrow. I would have to clear my diary. I was meant to be taking my girlfriend out tonight.” I smiled in a way that implied how the evening was intended to end.

“Wait for a moment would you?” I nodded. She walked over the girls and they had a conflab. Heads shook and then nodded. She came back over. “Look, we need this sorted urgently, but, as you say, it will take a while to fix so ... Well ... The girls have agreed that one of them will stay to attend to your physical needs.”

“You mean food and drink? That’s nice of them but I think -”

“Not just food and drink, the, umm, physical needs that your girlfriend was going to attend to. Do I have to make it clearer?”

“Perhaps it would be best.”

“When it is booting up again, you and her can use my office.”

My mouth went dry: “Well that is very generous, but hardly seems fair. I mean you get the benefit, well so do the others.”

“What have you in mind? Surely I’m a little old for you?” I smiled at her. “Oh? Okay, I’ll sleep with you as well. Is that better.”

I shook my head “Better, but ... well ‘all’ would be fair.”

She looked at me and moaned. “Wait here.” She went back to the girls. After all, they had all agreed that I could select any one of them, why not all of them? They only had to put out once. Was it really so important? Apparently it was. She came back. “Okay, all of us.”

LIZ: “You can be first, and last. That seems fair too. Once as a down payment, and lastly as a bonus if I achieve it. I mean when I achieve it of course.” She nodded. “Oh, naturally, I won’t charge you for the call out.” She smiled at me, I actually think she was grateful. “Shall we get started?” If I was going to do this, I had to take a confident tone.

We moved to her office, watched by all the others. I was already wondering if I could actually keep this up with so many of them. Could I keep going all night? I had to make sure the work lasted long enough too. In the office, she waited. “What do you want? I mean do what you want. I don’t mind, as long as you fix the problem.”

“I shall, I’m certain. May I?” I knelt and pulled her skirt up. She wore a sensible, knee length skirt; but not as stiff as the mini skirts were. It was easy to lift and see her pants and what she insisted on calling pantyhose rather than tights. She thought using the American term made her sophisticated. Black tights over white pants. Since the tights were stretched, the white pants showed clearly through.

She was good looking, not overly laying down fat as some do as they get older. Her bust was more better hidden than some of the others, her blouse was not so tight; her legs were firm and shapely, expanding to an admittedly larger bottom than some of the others but still attractive. I wanted to grab her arse and squeeze. I wanted to, and apparently I was allowed to; so I did, squeezing her squidgy rounded buttocks hard. She gave a little yelp.

I allowed my thumbs to slide in on either side and then realised: “Wait.” Sure enough, when I looked the window blinds onto the rest of the office were open. Several pairs of eyes were watching with wide looks of amazement. I shut the blinds.

“Sorry, I wasn’t thinking.” She said.

“No worries, just a minor distraction. Each girl should have some privacy, I’m sure you agree.” This time I got her to hold her skirt up. My thumbs engaged the hem at the sides and I pulled down the tights and pants to her knees. “Now, let’s get you lying down on the rug.” She struggled a little to get down and then started to continue to remove her underclothing. “No, leave them.” “But I can’t open my legs.”