This is the story of Frank, an IT salary slave who reconnects with his high school crush while on assignment. Subsequently, he finds a lot of things, including love, himself, and a way out of the cubicle farm that involves multiple satisfying felonies.

Chapter One

For the third time this week, the notification message beats my alarm clock to the punch. I am already awake when my phone starts its little vibrating dance on the nightstand, buzzing and hopping like an alien insect.

I roll over to the nightstand, which is on the other side of my king-sized bed. I scoop up the phone and squint at the too-bright display. All the essential servers in the company are hooked up to an alert system, which can send a message straight to the poor soul who’s on call when something blows up. This time, the Internet mail server is summoning human intervention.

I toss the pager aside and plop back into the pillows. It’s still dark outside, a peaceful and quiet spring morning. The fountain in the pond outside my bedroom window is splashing its soothing cacophony. I briefly consider ignoring the message and going back to sleep, but then my sense of duty wins out over my laziness. They pay me a nice chunk of change every month for doing almost nothing, and I feel obligated to respond promptly to actual emergencies.

I stumble into the bathroom, start the hot water for my shower, and grab some work clothes out of my closet. The dress code at work is rudimentary, the only rules being a no-sneaker policy and a requirement for a collared shirt of sorts. I have a bunch of generic polo shirts for use as work uniforms, all in fashionable non-colours, like Japanese cars: beige, mauve, taupe, sand.

The morning maintenance ritual is efficiently automated. I mostly run on autopilot in the morning, showering, brushing my teeth, getting dressed and letting the critters in for their own morning rituals. I open the bedroom door after I get dressed, and the two cats stream past me, making a beeline to the litter box. They are banished from the bedroom during sleeping hours. One has a tendency to start noisy cleaning orgies next to my ear in the middle of the night, and the other is a hyperactive kitten with above-average destructive tendencies. When I first instituted a no-cat rule for the bedroom during night hours, I had to clean up the occasional mess in on the living room carpet for a few weeks, but now everything runs like clockwork.

I make my way into the kitchen. Breakfast is served in three minutes and thirty seconds. Yesterday evening I went to the store and brought home a stack of microwave meals, including some breakfast bowls featuring apple cinnamon pancakes. (“Bachelor Chow, Now With Flavour!”) If you disregard the “stir after two minutes” rule, the mushy pancakes and syrupy apples congeal into a delightfully chewy mess. I have a stove, but I haven’t cooked anything on it in over a year. Everything gets nuked, even the hot water for my very occasional cup of tea. The oven, on the other hand, gets a regular workout with frozen supermarket pizza, staple of the bachelor geek diet.

I distract the cats with some Meow Mix before I sit down for my five-minute breakfast.

Technically speaking, I don’t even have to leave the house to do my job. The computer in the living room is more than capable, and I can connect to the servers at work at any time securely. I wonder what the CEO would say if he knew I can read his morning email before he even gets into the office. His correspondence is terrifically dull, and he can’t spell his way out of a wet paper bag.

The coffee table in the living room is too low for comfortable eating, so my computer desk doubles as a dining room table. I check my email while eating, pulling thirty new messages from the three accounts I check on a regular basis. Most of it is spam, as usual: offers for breast enhancement cream, get-rich-quick letters, and advice on how to increase my penis size by a guaranteed three inches.

Calling in sick is a thing of the past; we use convenient and impersonal email for that purpose. It makes things too tempting on occasion, when all you have to do for a day off is to open the laptop on the nightstand and compose a one-line email. Everybody in our group abuses the system once or twice a month, but the Network team gets things done, so we’re left on a very long leash. Besides, every one of us puts in enough overtime every week to justify the occasional “well day”.

I finish my breakfast and reply to a few emails from Upstairs. The replies could wait until I get into work, but I want my emails to show a 4:50am timestamp. It never hurts to let the execs know their email monkey is diligently slaving away in his office at this hour. Having satisfied my electronic social obligations, I grab my car keys off the kitchen counter and get ready to face another day in meatspace.

It’s a pleasant day already, a sixty-odd degree morning without a single cloud in the sky. I amuse myself with the remote control lock of the BMW as I cross the parking lot. A few months ago, I finally saved up the funds to purchase a decent car, and I still enjoy having all buttons and controls working for once. The summers here are hot and humid enough to turn a car without air conditioning into a rolling sauna.

As I stroll through the breezeway, someone emerges quietly from the apartment next to mine. It is occupied by four college kids, three guys and a girl, who sit out on the porch smoking pot whenever they’re not in class or out on a road trip. This apartment complex is popular with affluent parents who want to make sure their offspring is safely tucked away in a gated community close to the university campus. My college neighbours all drive SUVs with roof racks for surfboards, and bike racks holding expensive mountain bikes.

The early riser is the sole female occupant, a girl in her early Twenties sporting glasses and a black-dyed shaggy bob. She closes the door quietly behind her and steps into the breezeway on the toes of her sneakers.

“Hi,” I offer, and she flinches a little as she notices me.

“Hi,” she says, and moves her hand in a casual wave.

“What are you doing up so early?”

She smirks and pushes her glasses up on her nose with the index finger of her left hand. Her right hand holds a pack of Marlboros and a Zippo.

“Going out for a smoke. Can you believe they won’t let me smoke inside the apartment?”

“Bit early for a smoke, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, I’m an insomniac. Geek disease, it gets worse when you get to make your own schedule in college.”

“Doesn’t get much better after you graduate,” I nod.

We walk towards the parking lot.

“Where did you go to college?” she asks, as she shakes a Marlboro out of the pack.

“University of Maine, ages ago.”

“Really? You don’t look that old.”

I laugh. “Thanks. I still get carded. How old do you think I look?”

She peers at me through the thick, black rims of her glasses. They look like something worn by the old ladies in the Far Side cartoons, but somehow they match her face well. She has a round face-a little pudgy, but cute.

“I’d say about twenty-five, twenty-six.”

I smile at her. “Thanks, I guess. I just turned thirty last year.”

“Be thankful”, she says around her Marlboro 100 as she flicks open her Zippo. “I’m twenty, and it sucks ass. If I could skip right through to thirty, I probably would.”

She lights her cigarette, holding the Zippo with two fingers, and then flicks it shut, with a sudden wrist movement that betrays years of practice.

“That shit will kill you,” I say, nodding at the pack of Marlboros.

“I know, I know, it shaves twenty years off my life. But hey, they’re the sucky years, right?”

“Only from this side of the equation. My dad died of lung cancer when he was 52, and I bet you he would have mortgaged his soul for another ten years.”

“Well.” She takes a look at her cigarette and then proceeds to puff away. “You’re a cheerful guy.”

“Sorry,” I say. “Didn’t mean to lecture.”

“Don’t sweat it. I go through it every week when my parents call to check up on their prodigy. They always ask whether I quit smoking already, right after asking whether I’ve found Jesus already.”

“Oy.” I give her a sympathetic smile. “Hard to hang out with the folks when they try to save you from eternal damnation every time you talk to them.”

“Shit,” she groans as she flicks some ash off the end of her cigarette with a practiced motion. “Thanksgiving and Christmas is all I can take without starting to take lives. My older sister’s a dentist, and she’s married and going to the right church. Put an eggnog or two into mom, and it’s ‘Why can’t you be a little more like Johnna?’ It’s the same story every fucking year.”

“That sounds like it would get annoying after a while,” I agree. “This coming Thanksgiving, I’ll let you join in my annual ritual of getting drunk and staying the fuck at home. No turkey, either.”

Her frown turns into a small smile.

“That sounds awesome. I’ll be there with bells on.”

I hold out my hand. “I’m Frank.”

“Christie,” she replies. Her handshake is surprisingly firm for such a little thing.

“Christie,” I repeat. “I have to run off to work, but it was nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you too,” she replies. “But you had better not be shitting about that Thanksgiving date.”

---

It’s a forty-five minute drive to work, and I usually listen to audiobooks while I’m driving. This week, it’s the first of the Harry Potter books. I finished reading the last one two weeks ago, and now I’m re-listening to all of them in turn.

The corporate office sits on a small hill off Interstate 93. The architecture is typical Corporate Pompousness. It’s a big red brick bunker, neat shrubbery arranged all around it, and an actual duck pond on the far side of the parking lot. They used to have ducks in there, but they were blocking traffic and leaving duck crap everywhere. Apparently the cleanup crews were too much of an expense, so management replaced the real ducks with plastic waterfowl. They hang suspended from wires in the cafeteria, and they don’t make a lot of noise or dirt.

The lot is never completely empty, not even at six o’clock on a dreary Massachusetts winter morning. The programmers in the Development department have no lives at all. Their pre-deadline coding marathons are the stuff of legend around here.

I pull the car into one of the coveted spots close to the door, near the handicapped spaces. I didn’t even forget my entry badge this morning, which is very out of character for me. The security desk is not staffed until seven, so I would have been stuck outside until then. There is a box with about thirty loaner access cards under the security desk for people who forget their keycards, and the loaners are usually all signed out by nine in the morning. Geeks can be forgetful when it comes to dealing with the details of real life.

My cubicle is on the third floor. I am the senior email administrator for the entire company, but I still don’t rate an actual walled office with a door. Most of the folks on this floor are internal company tech support, only half-jokingly dubbed the “Hell Desk”. Everybody needs multiple computers for their work, and all the cubes and offices on Floor Three look like starship bridges. In my office, five monitors are fighting for desk real estate. I have three test servers running different versions of a bunch of software, and my work machine is a behemoth workstation. There is also a laptop, which I use to test remote setups for our salesdroids in the field. The message light on my phone is blinking a hostile red, even though I cleaned out my voice mail before I left last night. I dump my jacket on a chair and take a stroll over to the server room to check on the wounded mail server.

I check the server console, and it seems to be running just fine. This machine is also the company mail gateway to the Internet, and the mail agent is the only thing aside from the mail server itself that is hooked up to the notification system. I check the SMTP process next. Sure enough, the Internet mail handler is out to lunch. The work queue is filled up with two thousand unprocessed messages that patiently await conversion. Something is clogging up the mail queue, and after a minute of detective work, I find the bad apple near the top of the queue.

The name of the person sending the bad message looks very familiar. It is one of the Human Resources Nazis, an avid fan of pirated software. He summons Desktop Support at least twice a week to clean up his virus-infested machine. You can contract all kinds of nasty virus infections when you download pirated copies of software from the Internet. The message is addressed to someone at AOL, and it has a file attachment which is several hundred megabytes in size. The file name of the attachment is “WindowsXP.zip”, and it dawns on me that the genius tried to email the entire contents of the Windows XP installation CD to his AOL buddy. I shake my head in amazement as I cut the stalled message out of the work queue and deposit it in a blank database for evidence. The gateway has to convert a few thousand messages from our network users into Internet mail format every hour, and it does not like big and numerous file attachments. The bad message has a size of six hundred megabytes, which is about five hundred more than the gateway can handle without puking up its innards. I briefly consider writing the dope a bill for server maintenance, to include punitive damages for off-hour support. As I bring the conversion process back online, I leave a voicemail for him, explaining the malaise and asking for a return call. I also mention the corporate policy on email use, emphasizing the part about the department stance on pirated and unlicensed software. All our managers are deathly afraid of a software audit. The company policy states that people with unlicensed software on their company computers will be terminated without prior notice. Some customers respond to cordial requests, others require an occasional whack with the clue bat.

This is not glamorous work. Computer professionals are the digital equivalents of plumbers and garbage haulers, cleaning up after user communities day after day. In this business, knowledge is concentrated in the lower ranks. Many IT managers don’t know squat about technology. They read PC magazines and buy software based on biased reviews by guys whose wealth depends on sucking up to advertisers like Microsoft. Last month, one of our Vice Presidents got a demo of Microsoft Outlook from his cousin, and I promptly had to convince him and the rest of the Boys’ Club that switching our mail system from Notes to Outlook within a week just wasn’t a feasible idea. The VP was thoroughly disappointed, because he ‘likes the look of Outlook much better’. You know you’re in trouble when management buys software by aesthetics instead of functionality. There is a way to make Outlook read Notes mail, but I wasn’t about to clue him in on that. If I had given him the option, it would have taken three nanoseconds for all the other VPs to call me and ask for the same thing. I’d never hear the end of it, and of course I would have to do all the support on the software. The help desk will not touch unsupported configurations, and I was not about to create more work for myself just to appease an ungrateful target group.

I shuffle over to the communal kitchen to look for a caffeine boost. The cappuccino maker in the kitchen has all three flavours available, which constitutes a minor miracle. The French Vanilla powder usually goes first, but the gopher in charge of the machine does not refill it until all the less popular flavours are also gone. English Toffee is the least popular flavour, and it’s usually the only thing left by the middle of the week. Today is Friday, and all three powder chutes in the machine are full. I fill up a twenty-ounce cup with the French Vanilla variety. It is loaded with sugar and caffeine, which makes it immensely popular with everybody on the floor. If you leave a cup of it sitting on your desk overnight, it turns into a brown sludge that bears a slight resemblance to toxic waste. Along with all the questionable ingredients, it does contain a lot of caffeine. Everybody on this floor is hopelessly dependent on caffeine. The Seven-Eleven down the street is the only place in town that still sells Jolt Cola, mainly because we petitioned the owner when he tried to phase it out of his inventory.

It is seven o’clock, and I have an hour of peace and quiet before the crew gets in. I retreat to my cubicle to check e-mail and screw around online.

---

I am deeply engrossed in the latest edition of our favorite web satirical, when Phil sticks his head into my cubicle.

“Morning, brother.”

Phil is six feet tall, and he weighs about three hundred pounds. He’s in his late Thirties, which makes him the oldest member of our group. An aging hippie, he makes liberal use of the loose dress policy.

“Hey.” I look up and notice that Phil is wearing Dockers today, a strange thing to see on a guy who wears faded Jeans and computer vendor t-shirts to work most of the time.

“Wow. You’re overdressed today,” I comment. “Job interview or something?”

“Nope. The wife’s out of town at a real estate seminar, and I forgot to do laundry over the weekend. What are you doing here already?”

“The mail server croaked. Some moron tried to use the mail router as his personal software distribution service again.”

Phil shakes his head.

“Screw the users, brother. I hear they’re doing eggs benedict in the cafeteria now. Wanna come and grab a bite? I’m buying.”

I look at the voicemail light on my phone console. The blinking doesn’t look too urgent.

“Yeah, why the hell not?”

I rise from my comfortable chair, a nice executive leather model with lumbar support and gas cylinder. I liberated it from one of the new HR offices a few weeks ago. The Human Resources folks moved into a new wing, and their offices were furnished ahead of the move date. A bunch of the Technology folks mounted a late evening raid the night before the move, and rolled file cabinets and chairs by the dozen out of the lavishly furnished offices. Some of the HR people noticed the miraculous substitution of standard Office Depot junk for the ergonomic gold-plated chairs they ordered, but they decided not to press the issue. The mention of Internet usage logs can pacify combative beancounters in a hurry.

We stroll down to the cafeteria on the first floor, fill our trays, and claim a table. The eggs benedict are drenched in hollandaise sauce, fatty enough to grease a tank tread. We sip our coffees as some of the guys from the Corporate Help Desk crew trundle in, each of them carrying a plate with pastries or doughnuts. They take up a table at the far end of the cafeteria, as far away from us as possible without being completely obvious about it. Phil catches one of them looking over at us, and he puts on his cheery grin and waves over to them.

“Morning, boys!”

They smile back, and the guy who looked over raises his hand, before they hunker back down over their coffees, pretending to be occupied with something else. Phil turns around, and the grin instantly drops from his face.

“Back-stabbing bastards.”

We don’t socialize with the Corporate Service Desk, and they don’t get chummy with us. They think we have “elitist attitudes”. They’re responsible for the low-level tech support stuff in the company, while our group handles all the network operations. They’re the ones who have to go to user desks fixing stuff like broken Excel installs or lost printer mappings. They resent us because we get a lot more money for doing a lot less stressful work. Technical knowledge apparently constitutes “elitism” these days.

Phil is the company web master. He can make an hour of actual work look like eight, and he spends the majority of the work week designing web pages for other companies. Management has not caught on to the fact that Phil makes more money with freelance work than he does with his regular job. He’s been with the company for almost two years, and everybody around here loves him because of his amicable nature. His job is absolutely secure, since he handles all the stuff that would have to be outsourced to a professional graphics house without him. The resulting monthly bill would cause coronaries in the Accounting department; Phil’s paycheque is a real bargain in comparison. As a result, he can get away with loud music in his cubicle and blatant defiance of the rudimentary dress code.

Our little group of senior administrators holds the key positions in the Technology division. I have all the e-mail under my command, and it is frightening just how much blackmail material goes through the mail server every day. Messaging engineers are like plumbers, plugging away at nasty stuff nobody else wants to handle. E-mail is the second most important thing in the company after Payroll, and like plumbing, the value of the system is only fully appreciated after it breaks down.

Then there’s Jessica. She handles the Unix servers which run all the HR and Payroll databases. She also controls the NNTP server that lets the corporate employees access Internet newsgroups, and the daily newsfeed from our service provider constitutes several gigabytes worth of network traffic. On any given day, three quarters of the newsfeed consist of binaries, most of which are porn images in the alt.binaries.erotica newsgroups. Jessica doesn’t curb the binary groups and their associated porn attachments, because nobody has asked her to limit the newsfeed. (“They wanted a full feed, and that’s what they’ll get.”)

Jessica is twenty-six and hyper-cynical. The idealism that carried her through Master’s degrees in Computer Science and Business Administration has disappeared since the corporate culture started absorbing her. In typical geek fashion, she has no social life. Jessica is attractive enough to be the target for socialization attempts by every nerdy programmer in the department. The male-to-female ratio in the IT sector is grossly disparate, with one female for every ten thousand males. This would be a great incentive for females to join the industry if it wasn’t for the fact that a lot of the males are hopeless nerds. Jessica has nerdy tendencies herself; she likes Star Trek, but she took the starship model of the Enterprise-D off her monitor after every nerdy programmer passing by her cube tried to engage her in a lengthy conversation on the Star Trek universe.

Next, there’s Little Joe. He is responsible for all the tape backup systems. He is twenty-four, young for a LAN administration senior. Most techies his age still sit in phone support purgatory, the entry-level position of choice for all networking jobs. Little Joe is like a three-quarter scale facsimile of a GQ model, a very handsome guy with a square jaw and carefully maintained build, all on a frame that stands a hair over five feet and four inches tall. He actually spent three years as a police officer before going into computers, and he carefully maintains the rock-hard physique he acquired beating up drunks and arresting rednecks.

Lastly, there’s Adam. He’s the wide-area network guy, master of all wiring closets in the building, and lord over all LAN and fibre-optic cables. He’s a complete loon, easily the least stable member of our group, and he is funny as hell. His taste in clothing runs a bit eccentric, which means that on occasion he will come into the office in leather pants and frill shirts, or bell-bottomed orange slacks straight from the 1970s. Adam sports a scruffy goatee and an amazing variety of tattoos and body piercings. He looks more like the proprietor of a biker bar than a network engineer. The more conservative office drones usually give him a wide berth and only look at him out of the corner of their eyes.

Phil has seniority in our group, followed by Adam, Jessica, Little Joe and me. We all suffer from techie burnout in more or less advanced stages. Programmers have a half-life of seven years; technology folks fizzle out after merely three. After thirty-six months in the same position, or with the same set of responsibilities, the average tech support guy or systems administrator needs to quit or expand his horizon in order to keep any kind of enthusiasm about their career field.

Phil and I shuffle back upstairs after a slow twenty minutes of chat over caffeine and cholesterol. Not surprising, the Corporate Service Desk folks are still chatting away and munching on their donuts when we leave. They keep complaining about their insane workload, yet they always seem to manage extended breaks.

Back on the third floor, Phil disappears in his cubicle and barricades himself behind his gigantic monitor. The monitor is fitted with rear view mirrors, wide angle stick-ons taped to the upper corners. The walls of his cubbyhole are adorned with Phil paraphernalia. A sign taped to his filing closet proclaims Rule #1, “If it ain’t fun, Phil don’t play.” His cube is filled with trade show souvenirs, software boxes, computer manuals, and a platoon of action figures ranging from Spider-Man to Thrall, the Orcish war chief. It is by far the most cluttered cubicle in the building.

Phil reaches into his desk drawer and throws a CD in my direction.

“Here’s the copy of Call of Duty 2. I managed to burn it last night, shame you were already gone. We could have slugged one out. Copy protection on it was a bitch, though.”

We play games over the network all the time. It sucks up network bandwidth and productivity, and everybody loves it. I stick the CD into my back pocket.

“Key code?” I ask.

“It’s on the inside of the jewel case.”

“Most excellent. Thank you muchly.”

“You’re welcome. Stick around tonight, and we’ll give it a go.”

“See if you can recruit Little Joe or Adam, too,” I suggest, before I leave him to his own private universe for now and make my way over to my office.

Passing by Jessica’s cubicle, I hear the clicka-clicka sounds of her mechanical keyboard, so I peek around the divider to find her working with the keyboard on her lap. Her Keds are comfortably propped on the desk.

“Hey, stranger. Keepin’ busy?”

Jessica looks up from the screen and gives me her little lopsided smile. She is wearing jeans and a burgundy wool sweater. Her long hair is tied up in a pony tail, and the colour of the week is black. Jessica’s original hair colour is a nice, rich auburn red, but her head is like her personal Mood Ring. She wears black-rimmed glasses that look like the ones worn by the old ladies in the Far Side cartoons.

“Who, me?” she asks. “I’m just trying to find out how much web surfing a person can do before their brain melts.”

“Oh, they put you on that project, too? I thought that was just the Marketing department.”

“You’re supposed to use the server logs only for good, not for evil,” she says. We share a good conspiratory chuckle. Few of our users know that the software logs every site visited and tags it with the name of the user. The software running on the firewall can spit out amazingly detailed reports on every workstation on the network. It tracks average Internet use per day, week or month, as well as surfing habits and the peak times for access. Everybody starts to fire up Netscape after lunch, and the most connections are logged on Friday afternoons, when everybody is trying to slide into the weekend without wearing themselves out.

If you want to know everything about your users, check the logs on the proxy server. The proxy tracks every visit to every web site, every hour of the day, and most users are unaware that they are leaving footprints in the digital sand with every mouse click in their browser. Every time I pull the logs, it’s like seeing people through and through, like I am wearing X-ray glasses. I know the company CFO is into incest fantasies (incesttaboos.com). Van Horn in HR apparently has a depression problem (prozac.com), and he is also contemplating an illegal medication stockpiling run to Mexico (mexicopharmacy.com). Betsy Kerrigan in Accounts Payable likes Vin Diesel (vindieselfanclub.com), and David at the Corporate Service Desk spends six of his eight work hours every day trading stocks (ameritrade.com).

With all this blackmail material in the log files, I could be practically untouchable if I was a ruthless bastard. I am entrusted with material that can end careers, terminate marriages and ruin lives. If the bigwigs had the faintest idea how sophisticated modern monitoring software has become, they’d have me erase the logs at the end of every business day under their supervision. The irony is that we wouldn’t even monitor Internet access if it wasn’t pushed onto us from upstairs. This is done almost everywhere these days, and it’s always for the same reason: a corporate insurance against sexual harassment lawsuits. The users on the upper floors are frequently featured in the Top Ten of biggest Internet abusers. The written company policy on the subject is clear: surf for porn on company computers, and you’ll get fired. The unwritten policy is equally firm: if you are one of the boys, you can do whatever you want. The tight inner circle around the CEO and CFO is called the “Untouchables”. They would be hard pressed to find somebody stupid enough to deliver a reprimand upstairs.

Nobody really gets any work done in the dead hour between eight and nine in the morning. The American Office Drone needs to top off its caffeine level and take care of breakfast. The second dead phase of the day is the time between four and five in the afternoon, when everybody is wrapping up for the day. It’s a law of nature, and it costs the industry billions in lost productivity every year. Some folks are notorious cubicle nomads, on their feet and in other people’s cubes all day. I have yet to work in an office that wasn’t a spin-off on the Dilbert world in one way or another.

---

I slog back to my cubicle, where my collection of friendly machines waits patiently for input. Computers are patient and stoic, which is why geeks are drawn to them. The universe within their computers is infinitely more controllable than the one outside their windows. Now that geeks drive the industry, we have interfaces to the real world that let an anti-social person do just about everything online. We can pay our bills, get our laundry picked up, order pizza and buy groceries-all without setting foot outside. With telecommuting on the rise, some people find no reason to leave the confines of their computerized condos. Even social interaction tends to be more rewarding for geeks when it takes place online. It is much easier to find people with common interests, and the absence of physical interaction makes it easier for nerds to make contact with the opposite sex. Nerds feel secure behind their keyboards, where they can act in a familiar and controlled environment. They get to be themselves when they talk to someone online, since the intellect is the only factor in online chats.

Sadly, some people have no social life whatsoever other than the people they meet in their chats. I know a handful of fellow computer jockeys whose entire circle of friends consists of people they have never met, known to them only as a brain behind a screen name.

I have just settled back into my cubicle, coffee and donut in hand, when the phone rings. I briefly consider letting it go to voicemail, but then I set down my coffee, park the donut on top of the cup, and reach for the phone.

“Email support, this is Frank.”

“Hey, it’s Dana.”

Dana works in the Marketing department. We have been dating on and off for the last month or two, and I occasionally spend the night over at her place.

“Oh, hey, Dana. What’s up? Are we still on for lunch?”

“Absolutely,” Dana says. “But I think I have a little technical problem here that requires your immediate assistance.” Her voice is not the clipped business voice she usually adopts when she’s at work; this sounds like Playful Dana, and my curiosity is piqued.

“Oh, really?” I say, drawing out the last word. “Immediate assistance, huh? Can it be handled over the phone, or does it require hands-on intervention?”

“Oh, definitely hands-on,” Dana says.

I take a look around to make sure nobody is listening. Phil is gone, probably for his after-coffee break in the Sanctuary Bathroom on the H.R. Floor. Adam is listening to music via headphones while hammering away at his keyboard. Little Joe and Mitch are also gone, probably doing maintenance over in the server room. The coast seems clear.

“Well, I need to come over to the main office anyway to... uh... check on some laptops. I’ll swing by your desk in a few minutes.”

“Don’t take your time,” says Dana, and the slightly husky tone in her voice convinces me that her technical problem does not involve computers.

I grab my car keys and signal Adam across the cubicle walls. He lifts one ear phone cup away from his ear and looks at me quizzically.

“I’m heading over to the main office to baby-sit a user,” I say, and he gives me a thumbs-up and returns to his task. Now that Adam is informed, the boss won’t be looking for me if the fat bastard gets back from his hour-long coffee break and for some reason decides to come and mingle with the troops.

I leave the building and jog over to the car. The temperature is a perfect sixty degrees; unseasonably cool for a late spring. The drive to the main office takes five minutes, and most of it is spent at red lights. With the price of gas escalating, there has been talk of putting the network support group in the same building as their main user base to cut down on the driving. I don’t mind the driving at all, as it gives me a frequent excuse to leave the building and get some fresh air. I’ve even thought about bringing the bike to work just so I can use it to shuttle between buildings, but the local drivers are notorious for overlooking anything smaller than a full-sized pickup truck, and I have no aspirations to end up as the hood ornament on some Medicare granny’s Lincoln Town Car.

I pull into the parking garage across the street from the main office, and walk into the main door, giving the receptionist a friendly nod. Dana’s cubicle is on the first floor, part of a massive cubicle farm that takes up almost the entire west wing of the first floor.

Dana flashes me a conspiratorial smile as I enter her cube.

“My, you’re looking lovely today,” I say. She’s wearing a light blue summer dress that showcases her tanned legs nicely, and her long blond hair is tied back in a ponytail.

“Thanks,” she says as she rewards me with another smile. Her teeth are very white and even. I like the shape of her mouth; when she cracks her room-illuminating smile, she bears a more than passing resemblance to Michelle Pfeiffer.

“So, what seems to be the problem with your hardware here?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Dana bats her eyelashes in a completely exaggerated gesture of helpless confusion. “I can’t get to anything all of a sudden. Email, printers, the Internet...” Her eyes sparkle with a healthy dose of mischief.

I know I am being set up, but it’s fun to play along. She rolls her chair aside for me as I bend over her keyboard and check her PC. Everything seems to be in order, except for the fact that she has no connection to our network. I check the network cord at the back of the PC, and it’s firmly attached, but there is no link light.

“Hmm, that’s odd,” I say. “Let me check on something here.”

I bend down and kneel underneath her desk, and find the other end of the network cord unplugged from the wall jack and dangling freely down the back of Dana’s desk.

“It looks like someone unplugged your network cord.”

I turn my head and find that she has scooted her chair back into its position in front of the desk, blocking me from being seen from the aisle. She has spread her legs slightly, and I do a mental double take as I realize that she is not wearing any underwear underneath that light and airy summer dress. This is so completely out of character for Dana that it takes me a few moments to absorb the sight. I notice that she has shaved her pubic hair since our last date, leaving a neat little strip of blond hair. It suddenly strikes me that this is the first time I have seen her labia in daylight.

This is Dana, the woman who only has sex with the lights off? It boggles the mind.

“Do you think you can fix it?” she asks with a sugary innocence in her voice as she rolls her chair away from me again. Under normal circumstances, our exchange of innuendo would be cheesy to the extreme, but it is so unusual for Dana that I find myself more and more aroused by it. Where is she going with this?

“Yeah, I can fix it... just have to plug it back in. Here we go.” I insert the network plug into the jack without taking my eyes off the intersection between her smooth legs.

“Good,” she says, smoothing her dress over her thighs and crossing her legs demurely again. I unfurl myself from underneath the desk and check her computer again.

“You’re good to go,” I say.

“Not quite,” she replies. “I have some stuff to print out, and that printer has been giving me trouble lately. I was wondering whether you might be able to come back and take a look at it while I get my printouts?”

“Sure,” I say. “Which printer is it?”

“It’s the old laser printer by the mailboxes in the back. You know, the one right next to the Handicapped bathroom?”

Dana gets up from the chair, winks at me and sashays out of the cubicle, leaving me with a suddenly blooming erection in my khakis.

I feel the urge to shake my head to clear it. Who the hell is this woman, and what has she done with Dana?

Common sense drives me to go and investigate, of course. I sit down on her chair and take a few deep breaths as I check her network connectivity once again to look busy, and after a few moments, my developing boner subsides again. I straighten my khakis and leave her cubicle, following Dana down the hall to the back of the building.

The mail trays are in the back of the cubicle farm, lined up on the back side of a wall that separates the mail and print room from the rest of the wing. There are two doorways into the mailroom, one on each side of the building. On the right side of the room, there is a handicapped bathroom that is spacious enough to hold a minivan. The laser printer in question is located right outside the bathroom, and Dana is putting fresh paper into the feed tray. She glances at me and smiles briefly as I turn the corner, then directs her attention to the printer again. Someone else is in the mail room as well, one of the office drones from the second floor, and I pretend to be busy with my phone while waiting for my turn at the printer. Dana and I share a few furtive glances as the office girl is sorting handbills of some kind into a few mailboxes. She finally finishes her task, smiles at Dana and leaves the mailroom.

Dana shoots me a look and nods toward the doorway through which I just entered, and I step back and peek around the corner quickly. Nobody else is approaching the mailroom from this aisle, and I turn back and give Dana a quick thumbs-up. She drops the stack of paper she was holding, and swiftly disappears into the bathroom.

The bathroom door is visible from the other aisle of the cubicle farm through the second doorway. I peek around the doorway to make sure nobody has seen Dana enter. The aisle is clear on this side as well, so I open the door and step into the bathroom before swiftly closing the door behind me.

Before I can even turn the lock on the doorknob, Dana is on me, mashing her lips onto mine and thrusting her tongue into my mouth. I manage to turn the lock blindly with one hand while pulling her towards me with the other. The bathroom is still dark, so I feel for the light switch and hit it, all the while engaging in a furious game of tonsil hockey with Dana. The bathroom light turns on, and the blissfully noisy ventilation fan kicks in with it. I reach between her legs and push her skirt up with my hand, and she moans softly into my mouth as I run my middle finger through her cleft. She is as wet as if I had been busy with my tongue on her for twenty minutes. I keep my palm on her neatly trimmed mound as I keep sliding my finger between her labia, and her soft moans turn into more insistent little groans. Her hand finds the bulge at the front of my khakis, and she unzips my pants and frees my cock with two fingers. I am about as hard as a piece of marble now, and as she wraps her hand around my erection and gives it a few urgent strokes, my mind dissolves into complete horniness. Nothing short of a nuclear explosion nearby will stop me from taking her now, and she is very clear in expressing her desire to be taken. For this instant, we have ceased to be intellectual beings, professionals adhering to a code of behavior at work-we are just two lusty animals, about to mate with urgency.

I wrap my arms around her hips and grab her firm butt with both hands and she willingly parts her legs and allows her crotch to grind into mine. She is fairly tall, and we could do it standing up without contortions, but I want her in a different way right now. There is a sink nearby, with a big mirror on the wall behind it, and I lift her up and carry her over to it. She squirms slightly as the cool porcelain of the sink touches her bare butt, but then she spreads her legs wider and tries to guide me into her with her hand. I pull away just a little bit, and gesture her to turn around. Without hesitation, she slides off the sink and turns to face the mirror, legs spread slightly, and I pull up her dress and drape it inside out over her back.

Her ass is a revelation, toned and firm, easily her best feature. I enjoy the sight of her well-shaped roundness as I reach down between us and guide the head of my cock into her wetness. She accepts me with ease, and I slide into her in one smooth stroke. We both sigh at the exquisiteness of the sensation, and the sight of her face in the mirror, contorted with lust, almost puts me over the edge. I pause deep inside her for a moment, and she grasps the sides of the sink with her hands and grinds her rear into me in wordless insistence. My hands find her hips without thought, and I begin pumping into her with equal urgency.

We mate at a furious pace. The only sounds in the bathroom aside from the hum of the ventilation are the slapping of my hips against her butt and the wet sound produced by our sexes exchanging slickness. I reach underneath the front of her dress and cup her breasts in my hands while continuing my pace of furious strokes, and her hard nipples rub into my palms. Her breasts are not overly large, but well shaped, and they fit my hands just about perfectly. We can see each other’s faces in the mirror, and gazing into her eyes while mounting her from behind is one of the most intensely erotic things I have ever experienced.

Before long, we are both panting with the exertion of the act. Dana’s gaze is firmly locked with mine in the mirror, and we read each other’s cues from our reflected images. When I feel myself getting close to climax, I slow my thrusts, and she moves herself backwards against me, impaling herself with fast and shallow strokes to keep up the pace. I take my cue and continue my strokes, faster and harder than before, until I almost drive her face into the mirror with every thrust. She closes her eyes and groans her pleasure into the porcelain sink, and I release all restraint at the sight of her face lost in the pleasure of her own climax. My orgasm comes fast and hard, and the intensity of it makes my knees buckle. I bend over her back and bury my face in her long blond hair to muffle the sound of my own moan. My cock twitches as I ejaculate with force, and my hips grind into her in an entirely instinctual fashion, Mother Nature making sure I spill myself as deep into her as possible.

For a few moments, we remain joined in this fashion, Dana holding on to the sink with quivering arms, and me clasping her from behind, bent over her smooth back with both arms wrapped around her. Slowly, we catch our breath again. I run a hand down her flat stomach, then lower, following the trace of her neatly trimmed pubic hair down to the spot where we are still joined together messily. I withdraw my still erect cock a little and then slide back into her all the way, savouring the warmth and silky slickness of her.

“That,” says Dana, “was awesome.”

“Oh, yes, it was,” I concur, and we laugh one of those lovers’ chuckles together, two mates that have just shared a private amusement. I don’t want to withdraw from her just yet, but my cock is starting to deflate now, and in a few moments there will be a glob of evidence on the floor. I reach past Dana to reach the Kleenex box perched in front of the mirror, and I give her lightly freckled shoulder a kiss as I withdraw a handful of tissues. Dana wriggles under me and moves her butt playfully from side to side.

We clean up quickly, and Dana smoothes her skirt over her legs again.

“Yuck,” she says. “I’ll be drippy all day. Good thing I brought some panties and a liner in my purse.”

I smile at her as I button my khakis again. Dana’s attentions at the beginning of our encounter have left a bit of a stain on the crotch in a compromising spot, so I pull my black polo shirt out of the pants and leave it untucked. Thankfully, the front of the shirt comes down just far enough to cover up my indiscretion.

“Why, it almost seems like you planned the whole thing,” I say, and now it’s my turn to put a sugary innocent tone into my voice.

Dana smiles in what seems to be a brief return of her usual coyness.

“I woke up this morning and wanted you, but you weren’t there, so I figured I’d get you at the office. I really wish you’d spend more nights over at my place, you know.”

In light of the last ten minutes, I wonder why I don’t, indeed.

Dana checks the mailroom before we make our exit, and we manage to make it out of the bathroom unseen. I give her a head start back to her cubicle, pretend to mess around with the printer in front of the bathroom, and then make my way back to the front of the building via the other cubicle aisle, well away from Dana’s cube. This path takes me past the cubicles of the desktop support group, the junior woodchuck geeks, and it figures that all four of them are sitting around in their big multi-desk cubicle and chatting away. The most agreeable sight among them is Carrie, the point-of-contact phone girl for the desktop guys. She receives all the incoming help desk calls and routes the tickets to whoever is available at the time. Carrie is short, cute, bubbly, and freshly married.

Heads turn as Carrie sees me coming and waves hello, and I step into their cubicle. They have a fresh box of Krispy Kremes open on one of the service carts, and I fish out a plain glazed one.

“Hey, stranger,” Carrie chirps. “Whatcha doin’ over here with the peons?”

“Oh, just helping some users with their Notes installs,” I offer. “You guys staying busy?”

“You know how it is over here in the trenches,” David says.

Sure I do, David, I think. You’re so swamped that the proxy log shows you surfing the Web for stock quotes and sports results five hours per day. But I am in a very good mood now, and I just enjoy my fresh donut as the crew carries on with their decidedly non-work related conversation. We chat for a while, and I admire Carrie’s shapely legs as she sits at her desk with her ankles crossed.

I’m a complete horn dog, I think. I just had sex with a coworker not five minutes ago, and now I am thinking that I probably wouldn’t decline if this newly married girl ever offered a roll in the hay. I watch Carrie’s face and notice the cute wrinkles she gets when she smiles, and I already find myself trying to imagine what her face would look like underneath me as I grind her into the mattress. Dana is tall, statuesque and beautiful. Carrie is short, a little lacking in the curves department, but cute. One is French Vanilla; the other is Cherry Garcia. I’m a big fan of variety.

I walk past Dana’s cubicle on the way out, and she shoots me a wink and a smile.

“Thanks for the help,” she says, and I tip an imaginary hat.

“Any time. See you for lunch.”

Outside, the sun is out, and it is turning out to be a beautiful spring day. I actually whistle as I walk back to my car, happily sated.

When I reach the BMW, my work cell phone rings.

“This is Frank,” I answer.

“Hey Frank, it’s Benton. Would you mind stopping by my office after you get back? I have something to discuss with you.”

Benton is my boss, the head of the entire LAN support team. He’s a nice guy, one of the rare breed of bosses who have a clue. Still, I feel a sudden twitch in my stomach at his request for an unscheduled meeting. Did somebody see me with Dana and rat us out already? Fraternization at the office is not against company policy -we have several married couples in the company who met at work- but getting it on in a company bathroom on company time probably constitutes a major offense.

“I’ll be there in ten, Benton.”

“See you then.” He hangs up, and I suddenly find myself pondering whether I have an updated resume as I start up the car and head back to the satellite office.

Chapter Two

This meeting looks like a deviation from the standard. I walk into my supervisor’s office with my third cup of Cappuccino, and it is indeed a three-person meeting. Luckily, the third guy is not the HR enforcer they usually send out when they fire someone. Benton, my boss, is his usual chipper self.

“Frank, how are you this morning?” he chirps. He is a tall, lanky guy sporting a short bowl-type haircut that makes him look like a Roman soldier. He still looks like he just picked up his computer science degree from MIT yesterday.

“Not too bad, Benton. What’s the occasion? Did our bonus checks get in?”

Benton grins and shakes his head. “I told you, I am embezzling all the bonus checks for your group this year. I really want that pontoon boat, you know?”

The third guy stands up from his chair to shake my hand. I remember his face from out on the floor, but I can’t recall his name.

“Have you two met?” Benton asks.

“Frank, this is Mike Albrecht. Mike, this is Frank Jasper, our Notes guy. I told you about him the other day.”

“Hi, Frank.”

Mike grins like the Cheshire cat as he shakes my hand. Benton is even more jovial than usual. Benton takes the helm as I take the last free chair in the office.

“Mike here has a problem, and we were wondering whether you can help us out with that. Mike is the VP for Sales and Marketing in the Pacific Division, and he wanted to ask you for assistance on something.”

Mike takes his cue and turns to face me.

“Uhm, yes, we have a site in California that is still running some of their operation on cc:mail. They belong to Focus, and somehow they slipped through the cracks when we upgraded their sites to Notes a couple of months ago.”

Focus is a software developer that was bought out by our company a year ago. They were a small West coast outfit with a bunch of local sales offices, and our company uses their existing infrastructure to serve their old customer base. From what I know from the Networking team, it was a bear and a half to interface their junk with our existing systems, and they literally had a keg party when they got all the systems talking to each other.

“We need to get them migrated to Notes, because it turns out that our cc:mail license and support contract expires in less than a month. I don’t feel comfortable letting them run unsupported software, and you’re probably aware of the corporate policy on software licenses.”

“Yeah, I wrote the revision last year. Renewing the cc:mail license is not an option?”

Benton shakes his head. “We’re talking fifty grand for an additional year, and the budget doesn’t allow for that kind of expense. “

“We just plain forgot to budget for the upgrade back in the spring,” Mike says. “Now we can’t shake that kind of money loose until next spring at the earliest.”

“How are we doing on Notes licenses?” Benton asks me. License management for Lotus software is one of my responsibilities.

“We have a site license for the clients, and we have enough room for a dozen more servers this year. What kind of user base are we talking about, here?”

“It’s just one server and fifty-odd mail users,” Benton says.

“Piece of cake,” I say. “I can do that conversion in six hours, providing we have spare hardware I can use for pre-staging. You want me to take a trip out to California and do the install for you?”

“That’s what I was about to ask you. If you have nothing planned this weekend, I’d like for you to go out there and be done by Monday. I’ll have Adam delta-dash one of our spare Compaq Proliants out overnight. You’ll just have to pick it up at San Francisco International. All you’d have to do is replace the hardware and migrate the data over.”

“San Francisco? No kidding? I used to live there when I was a kid. Haven’t been back in years.”

“See?” Benton smiles. “There’s your bonus check right there. Free trip on the company. Stay for the whole weekend and make it worth the flight, if you want. I’ll sign off on the expense report for the weekend. Just don’t do lobster for dinner every night-we have a meal cap of thirty bucks per day now.”

“I can handle that,” I say.

The travel office has a flight booked and a rental reserved for me before lunch. When it comes to depriving people of their weekend, they work with ruthless efficiency, always booking the flights that get back to Boston at eleven o’clock at night on a Sunday. They will route you from Boston to Seattle via Miami and Dallas if it saves the company a hundred dollars in plane tickets. On the other hand, the company owns a Learjet and a Peregrine that sit in a hangar at Logan, continuously on call for upper management. Earlier this year, a bunch of the directors decided to move a meeting to our office in Miami, just so they could take the Lear down on “official business”. Coincidentally, the Super Bowl was played just twenty miles away on that very day. The peons, on the other hand, always fly coach.

My flight goes out of Logan at six o’clock tomorrow morning. Because of the time difference, I’ll get to San Francisco at ten in the morning-surprisingly enough, I got booked on a direct flight. Jessica’s secondary job function is that of a backup administrator for Lotus Notes, so she’ll have to mind the stable while I am out.

Little Joe is slumming in my office when the mail gopher delivers the e-tickets for the flight. He picks them up and nods his approval.

“San Francisco, eh? I heard it’s pretty nice out there.”

“You’ve never been to California?” I ask.

Little Joe grins. “Hey, I’ve never been outside of New England. Nothing wrong with that, you know. I suppose some day I’ll have to cross the Rockies and go to Looneyland.”

“Want me to bring you anything back while I am out there?”

“Don’t worry about it. They have nothing that I can’t get in Boston. But, hey, if you find a nice fridge magnet...”

I file the tickets away in my wallet.

“Gotcha. Maybe I’ll get you a souvenir from Alcatraz, too.”

He shakes his head.

“I don’t need any prison junk. Got an uncle and a cousin with the Middlesex County Sheriff’s Department. They can get me authentic stuff from the county klink.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, like homemade knives, and booze. They make it out of rotting fruit and floor cleaner. It’s not exactly officially endorsed, though.”

Back in my office, I fast-forward through my accumulated voice mail. Like email, most voice mail messages are general announcements and other assorted junk, like the front desk letting the whole company know that there’s a blue jeep in the lot that still has its lights on. My voice mail cull rate is almost as high as the one for email. With all this convenient technology at their fingertips, people have lost the ability for concise communication. Nothing is more tedious than having to listen to a voice mail that rambles on for five minutes without ever getting to a point. It’s a surprising trend, considering the fact that our generation gets its news in ten-second factoids, and most kids have developed attention spans that are shorter than those of fruit flies on meth. Most office workers don’t really like to write, so they keep their email messages to a bare minimum. Voice mail messages tend to be rambling, since VM is easy to use and doesn’t require grammar skills.

I finally reach the end of the queue, and the message light on my phone ceases to flash. Some of the Help Desk people have been known to tape pieces of cardboard over the message indicator because it is too annoying. The server console window on my screen shows that the mail server is humming along just fine since its reboot this morning. One of the messages in my voice mail queue is a bullshit message from the HR idiot who caused today’s outage. He is disavowing all knowledge of the incident, blaming hackers or inattentive administrators. Just for good measure, I call up his user profile and limit his outgoing mail attachments to two megabytes, a mere four percent of what he tried to squeeze through the system this morning. Our company policy relies on the user’s common sense when it comes to attachment size, and Benton won’t let me set a global limit on outgoing file sizes. I can, however, mess with the individual user quotas. The next time our customer tries to email out the Encyclopedia Britannica on CD, the message will bounce back to him, and he will have to call the email administrator if he wants to justify an exception to his new hard quota.

I’ve decided to wait until after lunch to bail out, so I send off a quick email to the other four, checking whether they want to hook up for lunch. Within five minutes, I get four affirmatives back. With the lunch issue settled, I fire up my web browser to check for things to do in San Francisco this weekend.

We all decide to take an early lunch to beat the crowds, sneaking out of the building at eleven thirty. Jessica volunteers to drive, so we all pile into her new vehicle, a Toyota Echo. Phil gets to ride shotgun by default, since his girth does not fit into the rear seat. The Echo leans precariously to one side as Phil squeezes himself into the passenger seat. The car itself looks like a marshmallow on wheels, but it is a Toyota. Before I bought my used-but-new-to-me BMW, I owned a Dodge Avenger that fell apart faster than I thought possible, passing deterioration records that were previously held by Yugos. When my Dodge dealer sent me an invitation for a test drive in the “new, improved Avenger”, just after the air conditioning compressor in mine dropped out of the car, I laughed heartily and looked up the number of the nearest BMW dealer in town.

We occupy our usual booth at the #1 China Buffet. The place used to be a country dance club, but its first incarnation went belly-up after just a year of line-dancing bliss. There were a few too many fights on the weekends, and the city revoked their beer license. This is a practical death warrant for an establishment that has its bottom line riding on Miller Lite sales. After the old owners folded, a Chinese family moved in and set up shop in record time. They painted the roof turquoise and simply covered the old boot-shaped pole sign in front of the building with a large sheet proclaiming “Coming soon: No .1 China Buffet”. The gas station across the street promptly changed their marquee to read, “Coming sooner: No .10 China Buffet”.

We picked this place because it is the only eatery near our workplace that offers more than deep-fried items and greasy fast food. As much as we all hit the vending machine on our floor whenever we need a sugar rush, our group is somewhat particular when it comes to a balanced lunch menu. Most fast food chain burgers are fat sponges, and pizza is for coders who need to depend on delivery services for nourishment.

“Rumor has it they’re going to make Nick the Director of IT,” says Jessica, while she pokes the Orange Chicken bits on her plate. A collective groan comes from the group. Nick is the supervisor of the Development team. He’s a moderately talented developer, but his personality is abrasive. His ego is the size of the Goodyear blimp, which makes him one of the most hated supervisors in the company. He is, however, part of the CEO’s inner circle, which also makes him predestined for a Director’s office. To us peons, he’s Nick the Prick.

“Benton is going to shit a brick if they make Nick his director,” Adam says. “They hate each other’s guts. If Nick gets to hire and fire at will in IT, Benton is out on his ass.”

“Nick hates Benton, because Benton actually knows what he’s talking about,” Phil says. “Nick can write code, but he couldn’t tell the difference between a Blackberry and a Game Boy.”

“I don’t even think he can code worth a shit,” Adam snorts. “He probably knows how to use the Visual Basic package, but I’ve never seen him write anything in C++ or Assembly. Anyone can drag and drop pretty pictures around with Basic Visuals.”

Most of our lunches are great stress relief. We bitch about users, we bitch about vendors, we bitch about directors and managers. I always figured that the personal development of a systems administrator is very similar to that of a schoolteacher: both start out full of idealism and good ideas, and both are driven from the job or transformed into vicious cynics by the end of their first year. We hang on mainly because of the fat paycheques that keep coming in. None of us are wealthy by any stretch of the definition, but our hourly rates are more than decent compared with those of non-geeky professions. I make seventy and change per year, and my rate is by no means exorbitant. Jessica and Little Joe make a little less, while Phil clears close to a hundred grand.

That was a preview of Fringe Benefits. To read the rest purchase the book.

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