We were acquired last week. The Boss was put out to pasture with a severance package that will cover about 10 milliseconds of his wife's credit card sprees. He actually cried as Security oversaw the loading of the pitifully small cardboard box they gave him for his personal belongings. I think a psycho in H.R. special-orders those boxes. I rather admire the touch, myself.
The Boss doesn't know how lucky he really is, though. It seems that the new fire extinguishing system, the one that's going to be tested next week, has all its routing valves set to dump the entire output of environmentally-friendly-but-people-unfriendly chemical brew directly into his office, which is, conveniently, inside the computer room perimeter. Since the test is to be in the form of a surprise drill, my only challenge was how to ensure that he would be in his office and not at lunch or a meeting somewhere.Apart from inside info on when to expect the drill, my secret weapon was to be a seemingly mis-routed e-mail with especially large, especially steamy embedded graphics, about 200 of them in all. Since the poor blighter doesn't get out much and his wife resembles rather closely those Bog People they unearthed some years back, I figured the e-mail package would fix him to the CRT at least as well as Krazy Glue would. Now, though, everything has changed.
Incredible as it may seem, the company that bought us is run by people even more witless than our own beloved management. Everyone they've sent in here to spy things out and figure out whom to cashier and whom to retain for a few more weeks seems to be about 15 and have the mentality of a skateboard. I have to keep reminding myself that shooting fish in a barrel is not sporting. But then I keep remembering how much fun it is.
My first fish moved right into The Boss' office, seating himself in the still-warm chair while his predecessor was still being escorted, weeping, from the building. Very soon after, he came out to take possession of the computer room.
"Hello. I'm Gerald Pinkfisch. I'll be Acting Boss until we decide what to do with the position."
"Congratulations," I said absent-mindedly. "Would you mind terribly not standing on that disk cable? We just got you loaded into the Payroll system and your next paycheck is going through that cable at this very moment." After a half-second of cogitation, he virtually leapt to another, clear spot. Gotcha! Now to keep him off balance.
Peering intently at the fake payroll record I had already pulled up onto my screen from the test environment, I asked, "You spell that, 'T-i-n-k-f-i-s-h...?"
Panicking slightly now, he scurried around to my side of the Grand Operator's Console, stammering, "No! I... it's... Is that me?..." Then, just as he was about to tell me how to spell his name, he noticed the rather severe pay cut he appeared to have taken and let out a kind of squeak, simultaneously going a bit pale. Thinking of the bother of car repo and eviction from his apartment caused by delayed and undersized paychecks, no doubt. They're so predictable!
"There's um, some kind of, um, mistake or something..." he mumbled, then suddenly ran from the computer room, apparently forgetting that he had entered with the Security people who packed up dear old Old Boss and hadn't yet gotten his own computer room entry code from... you guess it... me. Just to help him keep his edge I sent his elevator to hover for a while between the eighth and ninth floors, one of many fun things I've been able to do since discovering that inside the proprietary-looking elevator controller cabinet is a quite standard PC motherboard with a serial port for the occasional maintenance connection. The elevators are on line now. I figured twenty minutes in an elevator with its ventilators shut down should give him that hunted look that will go over very well with whomever it is he is going to see about his pay rate. Particularly when the real payroll record shows nothing awry. Paranoia is such a common problem these days.
He returned just as I was finishing up his rambling e-mail to another of the pimply new contingent about the opportunities to meet other young men in "these fresh new hunting grounds." Blind cc to the new CEO, of course, who would in fact be the only person to see the message. It's so nice to have total control over the e-mail system.
After a full ten minutes of ignoring the door buzzer I thumbed the intercom again. "Operations. May I help you?" As I spoke the last few words I held down the "static" button, an original innovation of mine, so he'd be prepared for the next few minutes of strained near-communication before I walked over to open the door for him. "You need a computer room code," I said as I flung the door open and turned away, leaving him to scramble to catch it before it shut again.
After several forms and a trip to his manager for an authorizing signature (rules, you know), I gave him his code. I didn't point out that what I give, I can take away. He hadn't been back in his office more than five minutes before he was pestering me again, this time to get building maintenance to see about making his office less frigid. "Sure, I told him, I'll get right on it."
"Oh," I said absently, "Someone named Joan called (personnel records are handy) and said you're needed urgently at home."
"My wife!" he exclaimed, not ready for yet another abrupt hairpin turn on my Ride of Unending Surprises. "I wonder what could be wrong?"
"I don't know," I said, shuffling papers, "But she did sound a bit keyed up." Off he dashed to his refrigerator of an office, his call home routed, of course, to the old phone we keep on a direct line in the basement storeroom for just such occasions. Predictably, he dashed out the door without a word, bound for the parking garage at a run.
Actually, Joan had sounded a bit keyed up when her call was forwarded to me, a result, no doubt, of the call she got from my ladyfriend up in Accounts. Married? No, I had no idea he was married... that sort of thing.
No cake is complete without icing, so I sent off the e-mail from Gerald to the CEO, the one I wrote early this morning, in which Gerald compliments the CEO on how attractive his wife is and says he understands they have an open marriage. I buzzed the CEO himself in a few minutes later. He was somewhat red in the face, asking tersely about Gerald's whereabouts.
"He left rather abruptly when a young man from Payroll came down and buzzed for him. I didn't really catch what he said on his way out... something about hunting... it didn't make any sense to me."
Needless to say, we never saw Gerald again. The very next day, another seeming 15-year-old showed up to take his place to take Old Boss' place. This one had just the right combination of attitude and offensiveness to warrant keeping him around for the fire extinguisher test.
©1999 by Thomas Junker, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED