Chapter 2: A Typical Tuesday

Posted: April 23, 2011 - 05:23:06 pm

Dexter James reached over to swat the off button on the alarm clock. He missed, sending the damned instrument of torture to the floor, where it continued to blast its infernal noise. He reached down and grabbed the clock. He fumbled with it for a few seconds before finding the switch that turned off the offensive noise.

He sat up on the edge of the bed and wiped the sleep from his eyes, thinking that he could use another half-hour of sleep. Six in the morning seemed to come too early in the day. He wasn’t a morning person. The fact of the matter was that he wasn’t a night person anymore, either. He was a tired person, who just wanted a full night of sleep.

His wife of eighteen years, Janet, moved on the other side of the bed. He knew exactly what she was doing despite the fact that he didn’t turn to watch her. She rose from the bed and headed to the bathroom. Dexter ran a hand along the back of his neck and then yawned.

His wife exited the bathroom and said, “It’s all yours.”

“Thanks, honey,” Dexter replied. He looked over at the alarm clock wondering how six minutes had passed since it had gone off. He unplugged his cell phone and blackberry that had been charging on the night table. He rose from the bed and headed towards the bathroom. As had become habit forced by necessity, he carried the cell phone and blackberry with him.

Seated on the toilet, he checked the emails on his blackberry that had arrived since going to bed the night before. There were a dozen of them, but only two required his immediate attention.

The first was a notice that Glenn’s wife had gone into labor and had been taken to the hospital. Glenn wasn’t going to be in work that day. Dexter stared at the message thinking about what it meant for him. Glenn didn’t actually work directly under him, he worked for Jim. But Jim didn’t have the authority to approve days off for his people.

He sighed and said, “Fuck.”

He typed out a message that Glenn should take a personal day today, but that he should check with Jim to see if he would be needed in the office tomorrow. Dexter knew that Jim’s project was behind schedule. He copied the email to Jim to let him know that Glenn wouldn’t be in that day.

The second email informed him that one of the programmers had located a bug in the program he was supporting and had corrected it. The programmer’s direct supervisor wanted to know when he could upload the modification to the production system. Shaking his head, Dexter responded with an email that the modified software had to go through system testing before being uploaded to the production machine.

Everyone knew that code had to go through system testing before it could be put into production, but the company had two measures of performance for developers. One was the total number of defects reported in a year. The other was in terms of how long it took between identifying that a defect existed and getting a fix for it in place.

In a strange twist of corporate logic, uploading a buggy fix looked better than taking an extra day to actually fix the problem. People had learned that they could reduce the official count of defects by putting more than one problem on the same report. As a result, uploading a buggy fix didn’t increase the number of reported defects. It was impossible to hide how long it took to fix a defect. The day’s delay forced by putting the patch through system test would make the numbers look bad for everyone, particularly if the defect hadn’t been corrected.

Dexter responded that the code had to go through system test. As a result, the programmer should double check that the defects had been fixed and then send it over to system testing.

Dexter finished his physical business on the toilet. He set down his cell phone and went into the shower thinking that it was going to be a long day. He could imagine the set of emails that would be exchanged with the programmer and project lead over the course of the day. His phone rang while he was washing his hair. He let it go to voice mail, wishing that just once he would get to finish his morning shower without a phone call.

Getting out of the shower, he dried off with a towel. Once his hands were dried, he picked up the cell phone and listened to the voice mail. As he had expected, it was a call from his boss. While the message was playing, the blackberry chimed that it had another email. He continued to dry off while listening to the message from his boss. It was the typical morning ten-minute message in which his boss rambled from one topic to the next, while driving to the office for an early start to the day.

Once he was dry, Dexter picked up the blackberry and read the email that had arrived. It was from the programmer telling him that he was going to be late to the office since he had worked through the night. While reading the message, another email arrived. Dexter replied to the first email that it was okay. He read the second email discovering it was from the programmer wondering why he hadn’t responded to the first email yet.

Dexter swore and said, “Give me a fucking minute, asshole.”

The voice mail from his boss came to a distracted end with the message to call the man back as soon as possible.

Dexter muttered, “I’ll call back when I’ve finished shaving.”

Picking up the electric razor, Dexter went to work removing his stubble. His phone rang about halfway through the process of shaving. He fumbled with the phone one handed and answered/

“Hello?”

“I was expecting you to call me back,” Mark said.

“I just finished listening to your message,” Dexter replied. This was a conversation that he had almost every morning with his boss.

“I called you fifteen minutes ago,” Mark said.

“It was fifteen minutes long,” Dexter said. He heard Mark honking his horn at another driver.

Mark said, “Would you stop shaving? I can barely hear you over the razor.”

Irritated at not being able to finish his shave in peace, Dexter turned off his razor and said, “Okay, it’s off. I wish you would wait to call until after I finish my shit, shower, and shave.”

“You need to get up earlier,” Mark said. Dexter could hear his shout, “Stay in your lane, fuckhead. Where did you get your driver’s license – a Cracker Jacks box?”

“You’re going to get killed if you keep using your cell phone while driving,” Dexter said. Of course, he was on his cell phone through most of the drive to work.

“I just wanted to remind you to give Sid a call. He has a conference call with the English group at nine,” Mark said. He then proceeded to remind Dexter of all of the things that Sid needed to cover during the conference call. Of course, there was going to be a group presentation at eleven to cover what had been discussed in the conference call.

Dexter was regretting his decision to have Sid make the presentation. Sid worked for Jim who worked for Dexter. Mark objected to such a low level person giving a presentation to a customer. Dexter had argued that since Sid was the person who had designed the system that it should be Sid who presented it to the customer. Mark felt Sid shouldn’t been seen by the customer despite the fact that Sid had been working with the customer for six months. Instead, he believed Dexter should give the presentation to the customer with Jim present in case there were any questions that he couldn’t answer.

Dexter stood in the bathroom listening to a repeat of the previous call while staring in the mirror with a half shaved face. It was rapidly approaching the time when he should be calling Sid and he still hadn’t finished with his shave. He pressed the mute button on his cell phone and resumed shaving. He had to pause occasionally and respond to questions. His boss finally completed the call about the same time Dexter finished his shave.

He checked his blackberry and saw that another email had arrived. He brought up the email and saw that it was from Sid wanting him to call in order to discuss when they could go over the presentation. Mark had told Jim to have Sid call Dexter to go over the presentation.

Dexter swore, “I wish that we could just let the engineers present the engineering without having a bunch of fuckers riding on his back. What in the hell am I supposed to do? Change the fucking drawings at the last minute?”

Grabbing the blackberry and cell phone, Dexter returned to the bedroom and started getting dressed for the day. He was pulling on his pants when the cell phone started ringing. Ignoring the cell phone, he swore, “I’m already working and I haven’t even finished dressing.”

Picking up the cell phone, he listened to the voice mail from Sid. The guy was nervous about his presentation that morning and wanted to go over it. Mark, who was three levels above Sid, had told the poor guy that he was concerned about his ability to present something technical to a customer. Sid was hoping that Dexter could come into the office early. Listening to the request, Dexter said, “I go early to the office every fucking day.”

Dexter unplugged the Bluetooth earpiece from the charger and stuck it into his ear. He dialed Sid and headed to the kitchen. He discussed the presentation with Sid while watching his wife prepare breakfast. She was talking to someone on her cell phone using her Bluetooth earpiece to free up her hands so that she could work in the kitchen. He was pretty sure she was talking with her contact in Ireland who was handling the billing for the company she worked for. They had early morning conference calls three times a week.

She nodded to him and pointed down the hallway as a reminder to make sure that the two kids were awake. Nodding his head in acknowledgment, he poured a cup of coffee. It was 0635 and his day had already begun.

Still talking to Sid, Dexter walked down the hallway knocking on the kids’ bedroom doors to wake them. He rattled the doors until the kid inside yelled that he or she was awake. Once the kids were awake, he returned to the kitchen.

It was a typical breakfast with him talking on his cell phone to someone at work, his wife talking to the team in Ireland on her cell phone, his daughter, Sarah, talking to one of her friends on her cell phone, and his son, Will, playing a video game. He sent out a message on his blackberry to one of the people working for him, requesting that they double check to make sure that a conference room had been reserved for that morning’s meeting. While he had been typing the email, a new email arrived with the agenda for the late morning status meeting for one of the other projects. He forwarded that email to the members of the team.

After finishing his breakfast, he looked over at his wife. She was still engaged in her conference call. He had finished his call with Sid. Sending an air kiss to his wife, he headed out the door while composing a text message to his wife telling her to have a good day. He knew that she would see it when she finished with her call.

He fielded two more calls from his boss, one from a project lead, and one from another developer complaining about the project lead while driving to the office. The traffic was typical for a Monday morning: an eighteen-mile long metal snake, from his home to his office. In each car, people were talking to invisible listeners. At one point, he looked at the radio in the car and wondered why they bothered putting radios in cars, anymore.

The office was filling with people by the time he reached the place. With his position in the company he actually had a real office with a door that closed rather than a cubicle. His office didn’t have a window since he was still pretty low in the management chain. Of course, it didn’t feel like he was that low. He was overseeing ten software projects that encompassed nearly sixty people along with three outsourcing contracts to firms in India and China. Seven years ago, he had been overseeing five projects until downsizing (upper management had called it ‘rightsizing’) had doubled his workload without a promotion or an increase in his salary. It was a lot of responsibility, but he did not have much authority.