"Hey, Tad. What's up. You loose your printer again? I should charge a premium for reinstalling printer drivers. Half of my work is just keeping the printers going."
"No," I said, lightly chuckling. "The Association is meeting on Thursday and I just wanted to remind you."
"I haven't forgotten. This week has been really crazy. A couple of stouts and a few politically incorrect jokes is just what I need to take the edge off of it."
The Association was short for The Association for Social Responsibility. It was a tongue in cheek name for a boys club that Frank, Paul and I had formed to have a few beers and blow off steam. Every two or three weeks we would get together at The Brewer's Pub, down a few of the Brewer's finest, and act in ways that might be considered undignified in other venues. We would poke fun at people in the news or pontificate on how world events should really be handled. One evening we thought up politically incorrect names for all the football teams in the NFL. That along with a steady stream of scotch ales followed by barleywines made for a memorable evening.
"There's another thing, Frank" I said, getting to the really purpose of the visit. "Angel says that those missing web pages are gone forever. The backups got screwed up somehow."
"Yeah, I'm afraid so. Even the best backup systems have some holes in them. It looks like we found one in ours."
"Angel says that you blamed her for the screw up. I find that hard to believe."
"What's hard to believe? That Anjali screwed up or that I blamed her?"
"Both, actually. This is a fairly significant screw up and I can't see you dumping the blame on a TA unless you have pretty solid evidence that she is at fault. Further, I know Angel pretty well and I am having a very hard time believing that she would make a mistake like this."
"Well, you know how students are." He said with a dismissive wave of his hand.
"I do know how students are," I pressed. "And I also know how Angel is. And I just cannot believe that she would make a mistake like this."
The next thing that happened was so strange that I wondered for weeks if it had really happened. I glance back up at Frank and an expression flickered across his face. It was an expression that I did not recognize. It was hard and cold and calculating. It was not the Frank I knew. Then, in a split second, the old Frank was back smiling broadly.
"Well, maybe I was a little hasty. I'll look into it a little further."
"Thanks, Frank. I appreciate it. See you Thursday."
I left with a feeling of impending doom that I could not shake. It had happened so quickly that my mind had barely registered. But it left me with a residual feeling that chilled me to the bone. It was a hundred degrees outside and I felt like I needed a blanket to wrap up in. I tried to put it out of my mind, but it would continue to fester and eat at me until I finally got to the bottom of what was going on.
I went back to my office. Sherry was visiting the web sites that we were trying to hack. In order to get cookies from the sites we had to order something. So I gave Sherry a list of URL's and told her to go to each site and order something. I had never seen her happier. She had ordered a cashmere sweater from Land's End, a Coach handbag straight from the factory, ginseng extract from an online drug store, some theatre tickets from TicketMaster and a book about Mars and Venus from Barnes and Nobel. I didn't know she was into astronomy, but you never know. She was pleased with her purchases and wanted to show them to me, but something I couldn't put my finger on was nagging me and I couldn't pay attention.
Patience was grumbling at her workstation and wrestling to get a cassette tape into the tape drive.
"What's the problem, Patience?" I asked, figuring that computer problems were more up my alley than shopping.
"This cassette got bent somehow. It was probably on the floor and somebody stepped on it. I tried to straighten it out, but the tape drive just doesn't want to accept it."
"So use another tape." I said, offering what I thought was an obvious solution.
Patience just looked at me with a - Don't you think I thought of that look.
"These are backup tapes and they all have sequence numbers. This is the next tape in sequence. If I try to put in another tape the sequencer will kick it out. So I have to get this one to work."
"Well there must be someway around that." I offered. "Tapes do go bad sometimes."
"Of course there's a way around it. But I'd have to reprogram the sequence numbers from scratch. I'd have to enter each sequence number and the tape id. It's real pain to do that so I was hoping I could get this tape to work."
Once again something started brewing in the back of my mind, but I was feeling too overloaded to figure it out. So I decided to brave the heat and go out for a walk to sort things out. I might even stop at the ice cream store and treat myself to double Heath Bar Crunch.