With relief, Pete smiled and leaped up from his desk. He’d never seen the mysterious Avogadro billiard room that supposedly roved from building to building and floor to floor. “Absolutely!” he called, as he ran from his office, following the gang of geeks.
Work temporarily forgotten, Pete joined the happy hunt for the billiard room. Laughter rang out as other groups heard the rumor and joined the hunt. The billiard room would only accept the keycards of the first few dozen people to find the room’s new location. As teams ran through the halls, they told each other outright lies about the location of the billiard room, all part of the game surrounding the mystery.
While people played and laughed, thousands of servers hummed and exchanged data. A few servers allocated to Internal IT spiked in usage, but nobody was around to notice.
Gene Keyes walked back to his office with another cup of coffee, grateful that the campus had returned to a somewhat normal decorum after the insanity of the hunt for the billiard room that morning. On some deep level, he was curious about the mystery of the moving room, but he hated the way that the kids around him turned it into a superficial game, as they did with everything.
He searched the pockets of his old suit looking for a note he had written down. His rumpled suit and graying, disheveled hair was a stark contrast to the young, hip employees dressed in the latest designer jeans or fashionable retro sixties clothing. Nor did he fit in with the young, geeky employees in their plaid shirts or T shirts with obscure logos. Not to mention the young, smartly dressed marketing employees in their tailored business casual wear. Fitting in and impressing others weren’t high on his list of priorities.
As he approached his own office from the coffee station, he found a young blonde girl knocking on his office door. “Can I help you?” he asked, temporarily halting the search for the missing note.
“I’m looking for Gene Keyes,” she said in a bubbly voice. “I’m Maggie Reynolds, and I…”
“I’m Gene,” he said, cutting her off. “Come in.” Gene opened the door, and walked into his office. The girl could follow him or not.
“Uh, my boss sent me because he’s missing four…” She trailed off.
Gene put his coffee cup down, and took a seat. He looked up to see an astonished look on the girl’s face.
“Wow, I didn’t know anyone still used… Wow, look at all this paper.”
Gene looked around, despite himself. Yes, it was true his office was piled with computer printouts. Stacks of good, old fashioned 8.5x11 paper were littered everywhere. Oversized plotter printouts with huge spreadsheets and charts hung from the walls. The centerpiece of the office, the desk he currently sat behind, was a 1950s era wooden desk that nearly spanned the width of the office. It might have been the only furnishing in the entire building complex manufactured in the previous century. Incongruously, the desk was far larger in every dimension than the doorway. The people with a good brain on their heads, usually engineers, but occasionally a smart manager, those who trusted their guts, instincts, and eyes, but took little for granted, they’d come into the office, and their eyes would bounce back and forth between the desk and the door trying to puzzle it out. Sadly, she didn’t appear to be one of them.
“Wow, is this continuous feed dot matrix paper?” the young woman asked, coming round his desk. She fondled a stack of green and white striped paper on a side table. Her eyebrows went up, and her jaw went down. “I saw this in a movie once! Hey, do you have any punchcards?” she asked earnestly, turning to him.
It rankled Gene to hear the same comments from every kid that walked in the door. He sat a little straighter in his wooden office chair, the same chair he liberated from the army the day he was discharged.
“Some things are better on paper,” he explained calmly, not for the first time. “Paper is consistent. It doesn’t say one thing one day and a different thing a different day. And, no, before you ask, I don’t have punchcards. I’m not preserving the stuff for a museum. This is how I do my job.” Gene tried to work some venom into his voice, but what came out just sounded tired. Gene knew what she would say next, because he heard some variation of it from everyone who came into the office.
“You know we work for Avogadro right?” Maggie smiled as she said it.
Gene knew it. He also knew he worked in the Controls and Compliance department, what they used to properly call the Audit department. When push came to shove, paper never lied.
“Uh huh,” he grumbled, ignoring that whole line of thinking. “So, what can I help you with?”
“Well, I have this problem. See, the finance database says we’re supposed to have more than four million dollars left in our budget for the fiscal quarter, but our purchase orders keep getting denied. The finance department says we spent our money, but I know we didn’t. They said you would be able to help.”
Gene gestured with both hands at the paper around him. “See, that’s what the paper is for. Believe it or not, I have a printout of every department’s budget for each month. So we can look at your budget before and after and see what happened. Now let’s take a look….”
“David, I’m glad I found you.” Mike finally found David in his office, after looking for him all day. He’d been in and out of the office constantly, and looked for him online, but David had somehow made himself scarce. Considering that they worked in neighboring offices, this was quite a feat. Mike plopped himself down in David’s spare chair. “Where were you this morning? I couldn’t find you anywhere. I need to talk to you about some oddities in the performance of ELOPe. Not to mention that you missed the entire hunt for the billiard room.”
“What kind of oddities?” David gazed off into the distance, ignoring the question, and sounding distracted.
“I know I told you we couldn’t find any more performance gains, but I couldn’t help trying. I started by establishing a baseline against the current code, to have something to test against. Just as we usually do, I tried to correlate the bulk analysis import with server cycles consumed, and to correlate the real-time suggestions with server cycles consumed, and…” Mike stopped. He realized that David was still staring out the window, and didn’t appear to be paying any attention. Mike looked out the window. It was a pleasant sunny day. Uncommon for Portland in December, but he didn’t see anything other than the ordinary bustle of people walking about on the street.
He turned back to David. “David, are you listening? Is this, or is it not, critical that this be fixed before Gary’s deadline?”
“Well, I do have some good news there, but go on.”
“Well, I tried to establish the correlation, but I couldn’t find any. For months we had a very solid correlation between the number of emails processed and the amount of server resources required, as you remember. For the last two days though, I can’t find any correlation at all. The server resources keep going through the roof even when the logs indicate that nobody is running any tests. It’s as though the system is working on something, but I can’t find any record of it.”
David was staring out the window again. Mike felt his head start to pound. He’d been struggling with the goddamn performance issues for days. “So then David, I was sleeping with your wife, and she said it would be just fine with you.”
“Yes, it is fine. Wait, what? What did you just say?”
Mike planted himself in front of the window to block David’s view. “Look,” he said angrily, “why don’t you just tell me what’s going on, since you’re clearly not interested in the fucking performance issues.”