Another Date

“You know, she doesn’t seem that happy. Not like when you two were together.” I was sharing a plate of carpaccio with Linda. Linda was one of the secretaries at my previous employer. She’s really nice. She is a single mother of a 10 year old son and lives with her mother in south San Jose. She was pretty close to Lynn when they worked together. She was referring to Lynn.

Just to keep from being alone, I have been asking out just about every woman that I know. On evenings that I’m not working I’ll take someone of the female persuasion out to dinner. I’m a bit embarrassed to say it’s like an ego thing. Seeing how many women I can take out. But it’s just dinner, and I usually dine at pretty good establishments – so you can’t really call it a great accomplishment. I’m not leading them on, it’s just a dinner. I only take a gentlemanly and polite peck of a goodnight kiss at the end of the evening. Soon, what’s left over of my severance package will be gone and I’ll need to start watching my money a bit better. Anyway, I’ve taken out the lady from payroll, and purchasing, 3 from accounting, and 1 from support, and a secretary. Just for the record, all these women are single, available, and not from my current workplace.

Linda was telling me about the party at Liz’s. Tim was there with Lynn. “Lynn was a lot more reserved than usual, and she wasn’t smiling a lot. You two were a great couple. You both had these silly grins on your faces all the time when you were together – well, after you had sex.”

“She told you when we…”

“Oh, Rich, It was so obvious.”

“I miss her.”

“I was talking with her. You know, it’s weird. Didn’t you get upset when she started sleeping with Tim?”

I almost dropped my fork. “I’ve never been more upset in my life.”

“She seemed to think that you didn’t care that much.”

“Cause I didn’t hurt her, or break anything, or throw a tantrum?”

“I don’t know. I guess she expected more of a reaction.”

“Well, Jim certainly would have given that to her. You know, she asked me if I wanted to hit her after I had found out. Isn’t that weird?”

“Maybe she was abused at some time back. Did you react? I mean in a way that she could tell?”

“Yeah, I did.” I nodded slowly “She knows I was devastated.”

“Jim really treated her badly. I don’t know why she was with him for so long. Once we were out at a concert and he reached down her dress and grabbed her breast – right there in public. It was disgusting. She should have slapped him.”

“Well, he treated her badly in public. You never know what went on in private. I certainly can’t understand it. She told me that she didn’t cheat on him – well until we got together. But by that time she had already decided to leave him.” I took a long sip of wine. “She couldn’t bring herself to cheat on him. But she could so easily cheat on me. I don’t get it. Anyway, a bunch of guys gave her plenty of opportunities to stray while she was with Jim, and she turned them all down.” (including me, although I didn’t say that out loud). I sat silent for a while. “Did you know that he hit her?”

“Who, Jim?”

“Yeah. That’s when he decided to leave him.”

“At least she had the sense to get out once it got physical.” She though about this, I don’t think she hadn’t learned that Jim had hit Lynn. “But there’s a lot more to abuse than a fist, you know.” She added.

We moved on the nicer topics. It was easy to have a good conversation with Linda. This actually turned out to be one of the better dates I had been on in a while.

Driving back to Linda’s house the conversation had turned back to Lynn. “She wanted me to share her. You know, I get her half the time and Tim gets her the other half. I was almost ready to do it. But in the end I just couldn’t.”

“Wow, I’d like to have two men.”

“Yeah I know,” I said dismissively. “But what if you loved one of them?”

She thought about this. “Nah, probably not. But if it was just sex, now that’s another story.” She grinned widely. I explained how I tried to get back at Tim, and how Lynn wouldn’t let me.

We were parked in front of her house. “Rich, you’re a really sweet guy. You know, it’s her loss – not yours.” That comment is really starting to piss me off. I’ve lost and I hurt. As best I can tell, she doesn’t. It’s like I should just stop hurting because she’s done something dumb. She has done something dumb – I am better than Tim (at least I think so). But it still hurts - a lot.

“Thanks.” I said swallowing my anger and smiling at her.

“So, Rich, did you ask me out tonight so that you could have sex with me?”

This was a question that I really didn’t want to answer. What’s the right answer? I know that a sincere and non threatening advance is always flattering. But having her think that I was after her could change our relationship. On the other hand, “no” is only good if she doesn’t want it. “Hell hath no fury,” after all. I searched her eyes for the answer and came up blank. I couldn’t read her. How bad would “maybe” sound? Pretty bad, huh?

“Linda, you are wonderful. I don’t want to say anything that might possibly offend you. Can I take the 5^th on that?”

The truth is that I did not want to have sex with her (I hope to god she never reads this.) Not that I don’t find her attractive – I do. It’s just not what I want now. I really want Lynn. While it would be fun and distracting to have a roll in the hay with Linda, it seems like the resulting complications would be more trouble than it’s worth. It would end with one of us hurt – and I can’t handle that now.

Anyway, Linda beamed at my reply. Whatever she wanted to hear, it seems like this was the right answer. “Thanks, Rich” and she kissed me on the cheek.

I walked her to her door and gave her a kiss goodnight. For the first time since high school I worried about her mother peeking through the front curtains.

Driving home I was feeling even more alone than usual.

Work Sucks - more than ever

Dave is my boss. Dave and I don't get along. Dave is quite a character. He is an older guy, but he doesn’t have a lot of experience on the job. He used to be a truck driver and got a programming degree at a night university about 6 or 7 years ago. I can honestly say that he is not a very good programmer. He used to be one of my co-workers. We both reported to another guy who quit a few months back. The company tries to promote from within. In this case they promoted Dave to group manager.

I suspect that they promoted Dave to get him away from the code. He is a sloppy coder and didn’t test his work very well. While he was a co-worker of mine I didn’t hide my lack of respect for his abilities. And he didn’t hide his dislike for me. I also didn’t hide from him the fact that I was starting to look for a new job (something that I now realize you should never share with *anyone* you work with). And then, in a quirky twist of fate, he became my boss. Whoops.

Now I get all the assignments from the bottom of the barrel – and more work than most of the other folks. Which is OK. I do like the work – just not the company or my boss. And I can do the work faster than most of my co-workers. It helps not having much of a social life either, as I can eat dinner from the candy machine and work late into the night without missing anything other than some bad sit-coms on TV.

Dave reports to Tony (more on Tony later – Tony hired me into the company, over Dave’s objections). Liz also reports to Tony. All of Dave’s and Liz’s workers are in a block of cubicles together. Mine is in the same hallway as Lynn’s office. My office is on the corner near the main hallway, hers is at the end of the cubicle hallway, in sort of a cul-de-sac – so there aren’t too many folks walking by. I take my coffee breaks in her office. We play backgammon on her computer and discuss the problems of the day loud enough for folks in neighboring cubes to know that we are collaborating on work. I probably spend too much time there because Linda – the group secretary – knows to look for me there if I am not in my office.

On Friday, I was sitting in Lynn’s office when Linda found me. "Dave wants to see you right away," she said. I got up and followed her to Dave’s cube.

Dave had his feet on his desk and was doodling on a note pad. "Come in" he said not moving his feet. "I’ve been going over the bug reports and you have been very productive in September and October. You passed even Eric on fixes in October, even though you were out for a week and a half. – that’s impressive."

"Thanks" I replied.

"So," he continued, still looking at the pad of paper "I’d like you to start leading the India meetings"

"You mean the status meetings with Sanjay?"

"Yup" he put his feet down and looked at me. "Sanjay and his guys are doing more bug fixing and I need them to coordinate their work with the project team here. We’ve had too many problems with them making changes that interfere with work going on here, especially in the last month."

"OK" I shrugged "Tuesday nights at 7:00, right?"

"No, I changed the time. It interfered with my baseball. It’s now at 5 a.m." He paused. Dave is a big baseball fan and goes to the local games as frequently as possible.

"Can’t we change it back? I don’t go to ball games." It's not even baseball season.

"I don’t think that would be a good idea. Sanjay will have most of his engineers there so we need to schedule it during their work day."

I felt my face turning red. Dave smiled.

"The meeting is in video conference room B."

"Can’t I call in from home?"

"No, Richard, communication works better when they can see you."

"Can’t I use a webcam from home?"

Dave laughed.

"Who else will be there from Sunnyvale?" I asked.

"No one, just you." He smiled again.

"Isn’t this supposed to be your job?" I tried to ask as evenly as I could.

"Yes it was. But now I’m delegating it to you. As a manager it is my job to delegate tasks to the people that will do them the best." His phone rang, he checked the incoming number quickly. "I’ll e-mail you the agenda. Keep up the good work, Dick" with a strong emphasis on the word “Dick”. He picked up the phone and turned his back toward me.

Dave had been on my case about the fix count since he took over the job. My counts were usually close to the average for the group. Eric is the boy wonder of the group, and has had the highest monthly fix count since he joined - he also held the group record (until I took it in October). He’s actually a really good guy and a good programmer. I gave him a bad time when he first joined the company – which I feel bad about now. Before he came on board all the managers were gushing about how great he is. He came from one of our biggest customers and knows the application really pretty well – so he hit the ground running.

About a week after he started working with us I found that he left his computer unlocked and had gone home. I added a startup script to his machine that displayed a file and logged him out. The file said:

"Security section has determined that you have not followed proper logout procedures – your computer was left logged in, unlocked, and unattended. This represents a security threat to company intellectual property. Your access to company computers and networks has been suspended pending an investigation. Your management has been notified."

I meant this as a joke, but the company is sufficiently up-tight that it is plausible that we might have a security section and they might take that kind of action. This really panicked Eric. I guess it would have panicked me too. He went to both Tony and Linda when he came in the next morning and tried to figure out how much trouble he was in. No one could figure out where security section was. No one was aware of any security policies requiring logging out. No one tried to hack into his machine and remove the script either. When I got in – around 10 as usual – I fixed his machine and apologized. Eric saw the humor in it I think, although maybe he was just really relieved. Dave though it was irresponsible and childish, and he let me know it. But he wasn’t my boss back then.

Anyway, in October I put in some extra hours and got my fix count higher than Eric's record before I went on vacation. I figured that Dave couldn’t argue with my productivity. My reward for the hard work is a weekly 5 a.m. meeting.

I’m going to check monster.com now