After all Miles’ efforts the only item that appeared in the paper was a tiny story on page three to the effect that the police had raided the Koala Bay Bugle’s offices in search of, an “associate” of a member of staff. The police were hoping that associate could “assist them in their enquiries concerning a sum of money missing from a Koala Bay business”. It sounded like one of Angela’s police reports, but it was all the lawyers would allow him to say. He argued that it was ridiculous not to even mention the member of staff, but the lawyers were adamant. His one consolation in this sorry business was that Angela seemed to have gone for good with her departure – as he later realised - occurring shortly after the office email stopped working.
The Monday following Angela’s departure, still feeling sorry for himself because his story had been blocked, Miles did his former colleague’s job of walking two blocks to the police station to get that week’s news. The station was a large, cream brick building within sound of the surf, separated from the street by a tiny hedge and a short stretch of lawn. The reception area was covered in bright, white and green linoleum and the sort of light brown veneer endemic to police stations. Behind the reception desk were no less than four young constables.
“Miles Black from the Bugle, doing the police rounds,” he said by way of introduction, when he stepped up to the front desk.
“Angela’s not coming?” asked one on the far left, the shortest and youngest of the four. Miles recognised him as the constable who had told Angela about the service station in his first week.
“’Fraid not. It’s just me this time – but haven’t you guys heard? Two of your fraud squad guys came and took her computer away. They wanted this friend of her’s Steve. Haven’t seen her since.
“Steve?” said the youngest constable, blankly.
“As far as we know she’s run off with this Steve..” Miles stopped when he caught the expression on the young constable’s face - he looked as if he was going to cry – and hastily changed tack, “but we don’t know anything for sure. We just haven’t seen her for several days.”
The young constable abruptly left. One of his colleagues hesitated and then went after him. The third shrugged and wandered away, leaving Miles with a young constable who seemed amused by the turn of events.
“Used to invite Angela back to the lunch room for coffee,” he said. “Highlight of our Monday. Boys are a bit disappointed.”
“Don’t doubt it. ‘Fraid you’ll just have to settle for me. At least I’m taller. Anything much happening this week?”
“I’ll get the senior sergeant.”
That senior police officer proved to be a balding, affable man in his late 30s. It seemed to be a happy station.
“So you’re the new guy,” he said. “Bit of a change from Angela.”
“Your guys are disappointed.”
“Eh! They’ll survive. Anyway the head of detectives is a women - you go up the stairs to her once you’ve finished with me. She didn’t like Angela much; didn’t think she was much of a reporter.” Miles shrugged and half smiled but did not commit himself. While there was any chance Angela might come back, he was not going to say anything to an outsider that might get repeated. “So what sort of reporter are you?” the sergeant asked.
“Me? I’m just like any other reporter.”
The sergeant, who had dealt with journalists before, thought about that for a moment.
“Crawl over cut glass for a story but otherwise alright?”
“You’ve got it.”
One minor penalty for the loss of Angela was that Miles had to do the community notices. These were mostly the notices of various clubs and organisations in the area about meetings, events, changes in office holders and so on sent in by email. Miles cut and pasted these into a larger file without doing anything more than glance at them. The subs could read them if they wanted. As with the other email addresses many of these were forwarded on automatically from the company issued email to the free email box, but increasingly he and the others were giving the non-official email to others as a contact, and that seemed to cause problems with the people in administration.
By that time Miles had done all he reasonably could to restore the proper email address. At his request Eve had asked a passing technician whether his section had heard anything about calls from the Koala Bay Bugle office, with the only response being a puzzled look and a shake of the man’s head. He had even tried to explain the problem to Justin, when he went down for the disastrous meeting with the lawyers, in a few quiet moments before the lawyers turned up, but the editor in chief was not going to trouble himself with such trivia.
“Are you still farting around with that stuff? Just ring IT for chrissake,” he had snapped.
“I’ve melted down IT’s answering machine with calls and they just don’t return them,” Miles snapped back. “So whaddam I supposed to do? Tell me that? Where is the guy who takes the messages anyway?”
“Ohh this is just such bullshit. He’s off site somewhere. It’s outsourced.”
“Okay, where?”
“I – I don’t know. Some service. They handle a lot of people besides us.”
“Well can someone find out? Tell me where I can find this guy so I can work out what the problem is?”
“Miles I’ll get someone to look at it, okay. Just don’t hassle me over this total fucking trivia. This is an IT thing.”
Then the lawyers arrived. Later, Justin told Bronwyn that Koala Bay was having some sort of problem with their IT system and they needed help, but gave her no other explanation. Her sole action was to ring the same number Miles and everyone else at Koala Bay had been ringing and leave a message telling the service to ring the Koala Bay Office. There you are, problem solved! Why did she have to do everyone else’s work as well as her own? The message was, of course, ignored. No one else had any luck, including trying to prompt Ros into any sort of action.
Miles wanted to forget about the problem after that. They had tried, and the jury rigged service worked after a fashion. He should have known better. The next week he came in to find the normally cheerful Kelly sobbing quietly at her desk.
“Kelly, what’s wrong?”
Kate was out on calls and Ros’s door was closed which probably meant their office manager was on the phone to her mother, as that seemed to be all she ever did in there.
“One of the people in administration rang,” said Kelly, between sobs, “and really yelled at me for allowing unofficial email addresses.”
“What! What’s it gotta do with you?”
“That’s what I told her,” said Kelly recovering a little. “But she didn’t listen. She was just yelling about having unofficial email addresses and how it was causing problems, and how Ros had told me to work it out and how I hadn’t done anything. She even called me lazy, and said she would tell people in South Forest.
“Oh for heaven sake. I asked you to set up those email accounts because we had no choice.”
“Yes, that’s right. But Ros told me to get IT to fix it and now this women says it’s my fault.”
“Aren’t they just a useless pack of bastards. Next time, just tell her to ring me. Yell back. Say I’ve grabbed all the responsibility.” This chivalrous gesture on Miles’ part was prompted just as much by total disgust at South Forest, as by a desire to help Kelly. Unlike the vast bulk of journalists in Australia Miles lent to the political right rather than to the left, but after spending a comparatively short time with the Bugle Group he thought he could understand the revolutionary urge.
“She really yelled at me.”
“She should try the editorial side, we’re always yelling at each other.”
Back at his desk, Miles rang the IT help service again, but this time pretended to be a sub at South Forest with a problem, even putting on a slightly different voice for the occasion. Half an hour later a tech called Carl rang back.
“Listen Carl, I’m not at South Forest I’m at the Bugle in Koala Bay. We’ve just about melted down that answering machine of yours with calls, but no-one there ever returns the calls. Why is this?”
“Oh right!” said Carl. He sounded reasonable enough. “Someone at South Forest was asking me about this. I’ve never heard of you guys, are you part of the group?”
“We’re a branch office up in Koala Bay itself, and our email doesn’t work. We were told if there’s trouble to ring your service, but the calls are never returned. I’m trying to work out why you don’t want to talk to us.”
“’Erm well its Liam that takes the messages from the answering machine, and the Bugle calls he gives to me or Rachael. I never hear any of the messages on the machine, I just do the jobs.”
“Okay then, is this Liam person in?”
“Um no, I can’t see him at his desk. I can take a message, if you want.”
“No thanks. Does he have a mobile number, or any other number I can get him on?”
“Sorry, it’s more than our job is worth to give out any other number here to clients but the answering machine.”
Miles had feared as much. “Okay, then, can you do me a very small favour. All I want is just some idea of why we’re being ignored, so then I can tell our own administration. Just ask Liam what the problem about the Koala Bay Bugle is – no, come to think of it, just mention that someone at South Forest was hassling you about the Bugle and you’d never heard of it, so what’s the deal? I just need to know why we’re being ignored. Can you then send me an email?”
“Well, I guess I can do that.”
Miles gave the man his free service email address and then went back to his reporting work. A little later the tech kept his promise and sent him an email.
“Sorry Miles,” it read, “told not to deal with you guys. Not in service deal with the Bugle Group. Your machines don’t have a maintenance contract. Liam is really angry about some woman there. Had a real fight with her a few months back.”
There was no need to ask what ‘woman’ Liam had his fight with – Ros had messed things up again. Armed with this information, Miles rang the woman who had yelled at Kelly. She was called Mrs. Turner and turned out to be an aristocrat of the old regime, horrified that a mere journalist should dare to speak back to administration.
“I will consult with Ms. Rosalind Charles, the office manager there, and see if there is a problem,” she said stiffly, after Miles had pointed out, as tactlessly as possible, the true cause of their IT problems. “We have heard nothing of this. South Forest Networks handle the PC and network calls. They have always proved most reliable.”
“Glad to hear it. So you’ll get right on to them, shall you?”
“I shall consult with Ms. Charles.” There was an edge to her voice.
“She’s already given you the wrong story once. My guess is that she bought the PCs from somewhere ‘n tried to cut maintenance costs, ‘n probably still doesn’t realise what she’s done.” Until very recently, Miles did not realise that PC networks needed help desks or maintenance contracts, but the Bugle Group was a learning experience in many ways.
The response to this piece of impertinence was a few seconds of spluttering and then, “well.. I will go straight down to Mr. Brock..”
“Complain to whoever you like,” said Miles, raising his voice. “The fact is you were told the wrong story by Ros and rang up and abused Kelly here for no good reason. You want this problem fixed then get busy and fix it. Do you want us to take the problem direct to Mr. Charles and say why we’re having problems with email?”
“I think this conversation has gone on long enough,” said Mrs. Turner.
“Too right. And we’re agreed that it’s an administration issue.”
She hung up.