Friday morning and Lester was looking forward to an easy wind-down for the week. He'd mess about with the details of Plan A for a while, maybe make some casual enquiries about procedures if the opportunity arose, then collect a job or two from Tom on the Problem desk. With such a relaxed workload at present, there was no point getting to the office early.
Annette had the same kind of lethargy this morning. They cleared up and spent an hour on the weekend plans before they left in opposite directions. Neither of them would have a busy day, so it was reasonable to plan a busy weekend.
The phone message invited him to call back - someone he didn't recognise at the City office wanted to talk to him. Perhaps Margery Whatsit had thought of something.
More likely she had passed his enquiry on, and somebody else (no, it wouldn't be Margery) had come up with a creative suggestion. Well, stuff 'em, he wasn't going anywhere. He might get around to returning the call later, maybe, perhaps delay someone's departure for the weekend with a last-minute contact. He couldn't for the life of him imagine dear little snotty-nosed Margery had generated any world-shattering solutions overnight. It could sit quite happily behind Plan A for the moment.
The survey work was going to take longer than he thought. Payment histories were easy to find, but there wasn't much monthly regularity in the big amounts. He searched over three or four months of records for amounts over $500,000 paid in the end-of-month run. Regularly, there were more than ten, with some of them over $2 Million, but no party turned up predictably, or even twice in the four months he scanned. He'd just have to look in the current file before the run went ahead. The "donor" would need to be selected on the spur of the moment.
That had its advantages. If there weren't any predictable patterns, there would be less chance for an altered cheque payee to cause queries.
He found those files that were sometimes used, and established how they could be changed. It would have been easy, but the idea of trapping the print instructions was a better one. That way, he'd get an extra week or so of escape time if there were delays in the plan.
Making headway on the procedure was more difficult though. He dreamt up reasons to ask about the usage of the cheque-printer, and why we didn't use window envelopes. There weren't many facts to show for this probing, though, by the time he felt he couldn't safely go any further. More questions might get him referred to the Shift Supervisor, and that might be remembered.
They'd probably run the Payables cheque batch next week. It would be about time for the September close. He'd stop work on it for the present, and make a point of being around for the printing. That was a much safer way to collect the planning information he needed.
He didn't make it to the Problem Desk, not really.
Fred Hart overheard his subordinate's arrival, and asked him in to the office for a few minutes.
Fred had had a call from Head Office, too, and the subject was recreation leave.
"The Storage Tech disk is safely in service, you don't have anything else right now that's pressing, and we're not pressed anywhere. You've pulled off a couple of rough ones lately, and you ought to be tired. It seems like a great chance for you to take a couple of weeks’ leave. What do you think?
Lester wasn't much in favour of taking holidays on the spur of the moment.
"I'd rather like a week or so to plan something, Fred," he asked. "There's not a lot you can do in September. And summer would be much better".
"The Personnel people think that too, but you've not taken any leave for two years, now." Ah, so that was it!
"How much leave have I got up my sleeve?" Lester asked.
"More than fourteen weeks." Fred had the bit between his teeth. "It's a bit much, you know. Ten weeks will be overdue, and you run the risk of having that canceled if you don't take it soon. Certainly helps to explain why you might be bored!"
They wouldn't dare cancel his leave, Lester speculated. Still, there were laws about it, and he would have to make some sort of concession. This Christmas, he and Annette had speculated they might duck across to New Zealand for a fortnight, and visit her parents. That was three months away, though. Still, Annette didn't have much to do either, and split-second plans often turned out to be fun.
"I don't think next week would do," Lester said slowly, “there won't be time to get something organised. Tell you what, I'll talk to my girlfriend, and see if we can't do something the week after."
"We'd like to make some impact on the overdue leave, and now'd be a hell of a good time. Make an effort, will you? And don't get yourself committed to anything big around here while you think about it. Let's talk about it again at the review meeting. You're not the only one with too much leave, you're only the worst. We might need to co-ordinate the whole thing."
Idiot, Lester thought. You can't horse-trade over leave schedules in a review meeting. They have to be negotiated, one by one. Sometimes he wondered if he wouldn't run this section a lot better than Fred.
Never mind, he had a remarkable opportunity for a couple of days. What did they think he was supposed to do for the next day or two? He was supposed to be thinking about leave. He wasn't to take on anything significant. He didn't really have anything to do.
That's not a problem, there's Plan A, and for recreation he'd become the resident consultant, a sort of Minister-Without-Portfolio, on call for any overloads or difficulties - as long as they weren't big!
He didn't bother with the Head office phone call. They'd find him if they still wanted him.
It was time to give thought to an implementation timetable for Plan A. It would only be tentative, of course, he would know a lot more when he's seen the handling of the Payables cheque run. Even so, it looked rather daunting, and the scribbled draft showed up some work still to do.
Watch the September Payables run.
Develop the addressing intervention programs.
Work up some tests to prove out the program.
Final test on October run.
Milk the November run.
Presentation of cheque in early December.
That was ten weeks, almost three months to the first constructive step!
There had to be another way, a faster way to take that positive step. What could be dispensed with, he wondered, or perhaps done in tandem, instead of as a stepped series of operations?
He could assume he’d be stuck with the worst of his options in simplifying this procedure draft: plan, and just have to deal with having the cheque mailed to him anyway. Assuming that meant he could plan and write the intervention program now.
Should he dispense with the trial run? Very risky - if he did that, and something went wrong, he would be back under suspicion of a real crime. Nothing would save him; unless he threw suspicion on somebody else. Perhaps he could use one of the other team-members' passwords to put the program in place.
No, that wouldn't last five minutes. They'd find the name and address on the payment documents, and he was the exclusive, logical, only culprit. He'd need another name and address before a "borrowed” password would be any value. But another name and address might be better anyway.
So the trial was important. Well, could he pull it forward? He needed to know when the next routine Payables run was on; perhaps he needn't wait until late October. If he finished all the research next week, maybe he could jump the whole timetable forward a month.!
He picked up the phone, and scanned the internal directory.
"Max Hanlon there, please?" he asked, concentrating to study the girl's voice over the background buzz and clatter of the Operations area.
"No, he's not," she said. "I'll see if I can find him."
"Look, I probably don't need him. I'm from Purchasing," he kept his voice low and shrouded the mouthpiece," and we're checking supplies of some of our stationery. All I need to know is when you run Accounts Payable. When's the monthly printout of payments?"
"You'll have to talk to Max, I think," the girl started dubiously. "I'll have a look around."
Damn! He knew Max, only casually, but Max knew he wasn't from Purchasing. Why did he lie?
"Not now," he pulled her up, "I've got to go out, I'll give him a ring later."
"Ok. 'Bye now."
What a stupid thing to do! Now, if she told Max, he might just ring the Purchasing people to try to help. Nice guys could be a blasted nuisance. So, he consoled himself, possibly they'd never find some nameless person who wanted to know about some un-named piece of stationery. Nothing serious, just a timely warning.
So much for spur-of-the-moment decisions. Now he still wanted to know the time-table, but he needed to manufacture a good reason. He suspected most of the senior operators would know, but they weren't so accessible.
He'd go and ask somebody. He'd be planning an investigation of some important problem, and want to leave it till after the monthly job.
"What's the problem," Max was interested. "I just got a message from Purchasing about this, but it doesn't make a lot of sense."
"Forget that bloke, he's off on a tangent,” Lester assured him. “I'll tell him I got the answer I want if you can just tell me when the next run finishes. The log told us it's been running a bit slow, and I'd like to have a look at it, once it's out of use for a while."
"That's easy," Max said. It sounded to him like a reasonable request, and there might be some benefit for him. He pulled a book down from the shelf.
"Wednesday before the last day of the month, second shift," he read. "It's scheduled to run twenty minutes. How bad's it been?"
"Dunno," Lester brushed it aside. "I haven't done any work till I've got a clear go. That's next Wednesday, isn't it?"
"Yep. Wednesday night."
"Do you use it between month ends? No, don't bother, I'll find that out from the Data Dictionary. And I'll refocus the dummy in Purchasing, too. Many thanks, Max."
"Any time. Who was it?" Max was probably only asking from idle curiosity, but the question left another loose end.
"In purchasing, you mean? Don't know his name. I'll have to go down there and find his face again. See you later."
So it was done, and he'd probably smoothed over the earlier indiscretion. It was Friday afternoon, and the question was:
Can I be ready to run a test
on the cheque print program
by next Wednesday night?
He checked mentally through the work involved.
1. Find a supplier who's due for a large payment at month end.
2. Program A will scan the cheque-printing instructions for his name, and make a change.
3. Program B will do a similar job on the envelope printing sequence.
4. Program C does that again on the covering letter.
(His analysis on the files showed there was a standard letter.)
5. There ought to be a Program D, that destroyed the other three an hour or two later. It wasn't vital right now though, because he'd probably hang around for the test, and remove them himself.
There's about 20 hours of work there, he estimated. He had the whole weekend, and three days that should be lightly loaded. That was even allowing for normal interruptions.
My God, he could do it! He could pull the whole damned caper off in six weeks, and be standing there demanding attention.
He jotted down a few notes for his thinking process, questions on how the printer queues were set up and handled. Nothing was supposed to fool about with the string of characters waiting to be printed out. He'd have to build a small intervention routine, and that might look a bit strange. It mustn't stay in place long. It might be noticed.
On that delicious note to be solved, he packed up the manuals for the week, and left the office. It was about 5.30, a really early night for him; so he dropped in at the local hotel on the way home.
As usual on Friday afternoon, a group of people from the software group were gathered in the Saloon Bar, putting the week's irritations to bed. He stayed chatting about the Computer Society's latest drive for more professional members for an hour or so. The subject of work came up several times from odd corners, and the temptation was there, constantly, to do a little probing.
How do we handle cheque blanks? Who seals up outgoing cheques, and how are they checked? Would anybody notice if the Security software were disabled for twenty minutes?
No, it was quite impossible to get into those subjects in public. He had to find out all that stuff by stealth. This crowd of simpletons would be aghast if they had the faintest idea. They wouldn't believe you could do it, let alone have the gall to run a test first.
However, the more he turned it over in his mind that weekend, the more certain he was that it would work, and that it wouldn't be traced.
* * * *
The weekend flew past: a long list of routine odd jobs, and the weekly cleanup of accumulated debris didn't damp Lester's soaring spirits for a moment.
Not even the torrid series of “what-if” discussions with Annette about holidays could take the edge off the feeling that he was taking control of his destiny. She just wasn't ready to join him for a week's holiday in two or three weeks, much less right away.
"I know it's short notice," he reasoned, "but it's off-season; we won't have any trouble booking."
"Do you know why it's off season? There's no place worth going in winter, that's why. We planned after Christmas."
"We can still go to New Zealand after Christmas," he persisted. "What about a snow trip? I've never been skiing."
"Neither have I, and I don't fancy a broken leg out of the learning process. What's the big rush?"
He explained about overdue leave, and she still wasn't very sympathetic.
They returned to the subject a couple of times, and belatedly he recognised it was going to be his problem. Annette didn't have to take holidays, and for some reason she wasn't feeling like giving herself a pleasant surprise this weekend. No matter, he might be getting himself too far into a comfortable domestic rut; he'd just have to work something out on his own - it would be a change. He did get one concession, thought, on Sunday evening. If he only took a week now, that didn't help his overall leave balance much. They'd have three weeks, not two, in January. That would give them all the time they needed to do a really good Tourist trek over the North and South Islands.
Come Monday, he was bubbling with enthusiasm. Strolling jauntily into the security foyer a little after nine, he even turned the Guard's head. Mr. Bayliss must have fallen out of bed to be in at this hour.
Hart was as good as his word, too, with workloads. Lester fished through the tasks on the Problem Desk, noting that his name had been crossed off on a couple of job sheets. They were his kind of query, and they had been allocated to him, and then somebody had changed that.
Why?
"Fred said you've got enough on your plate, now," the programmer answered. "You got something big coming up, Lester? Resigning or something?"
"Not voluntarily," he laughed, as he walked away.
His head was close to bursting with all the scraps of progress he'd been mentally assembling in most of the free moments over the weekend. Personnel must have delivered a pretty determined blast over leave, the way Fred was rebuilding the work flow around him.
It couldn't have suited him better, however. In six hours, he had the three programs stored tidily away, ripped up his worksheets and started into the details of putting them in place. He reckoned another three hours would see the job finished, mentally congratulating himself on his productive burst that had gone so far over the weekend.
Tuesday was only half a day, by the time Fred Hart's review meeting was finished. Lester starts leave next week, - "aren't you, Lester?"
"Yep." No point going into detail; they'd have to bargain about duration of that leave another time. Two of the other systems programmers had lesser leave "problems" and a tentative schedule of heavy absences was worked out. That'll crash pretty soon, thought Lester. The very next time something goes wrong, we'll throw all those plans out the window.
Fred knew that, too. "We'll have to be flexible about the whole subject," he conceded. “We're quiet now, and it won't stay that way. On the other hand, if we don't plan definitely to get the leave out the way, you guys won't take any. So for now, that's definite, and it's going to happen."
"Mean we'll get reimbursed for cancellations if changed workloads screw up our bookings?" one hopeful queried.
"WHEN they get screwed up, and occasionally they will. No, it doesn't work like that, and you know it. There are exceptional situations, and we have to cope the best way we can. You've been here long enough to know we can make allowances later on for disappointments."
There was another phone message from Head Office on Lester's desk after lunch.
This time he probably better call back and find out what was up.
Sure enough. "Thank you for calling back-at last. I'm from Personnel, and I'm calling up the staff with a lot of overdue recreation leave. You might be aware you've got a rather spectacular record."
Cheeky bastard!
"That's supposed to be my Supervisor's job," Lester shot back. “Anyway, he's on to it, and we've fixed it up."
"For ten weeks? When do you start?'
"No, of course not. He's happy with a week now and another three in the new year. Aren't you happy too?" Lester was getting just a little bit annoyed: Fred had been so easy.
"No." He was certainly was persistent. “You'll have to do better than that. Next Year's too far away."
"My supervisor's happy. Why don't you take it up with him. He has to cover the workload, you know."
"He doesn't have to take the leave. There've been a few canceled leaves on your record, and that could easily happen again to next year's."
Well for crying out loud! "That wasn't my fault. I'm on call for serious problems, and if my personal plans get in the road, they have to wait."
"We've all got that problem," the faceless bureaucrat finished. "You just need some more plans. We wouldn't like to have to cancel some of that leave, but it's getting to be a real risk."
By Tuesday evening, he'd got it all in place. The programs were ready, they were installed, and he's used them to print a few characters on the empty platens of each of the three printers.
Now, how could he use them?
He needed a nice, innocuous test that would look harmless if it was noticed, but shouldn't actually be noticed. It had to be definite; certain enough to prove that he'd made a change.
He needed an excuse if he was caught on the way in, too. Suppose he was bothered about how efficiently the special printers were operating? That ought to do.
Next day, he made the office in time for lunch, playing the role of the unwilling workaholic gradually winding down.
"Got anything going, Lester?" Hart asked, on the way past his desk.
"No, not really," he said slowly. "I was going to have a look at an old print routine, see if we've learnt anything since we wrote it. Anything you want?"
"No, not at all. Glad to see you've not tied yourself up too tight on anything. You'll have to drop it soon and go take a holiday, you know," Fred finished as he walked away.
There was a general embargo on systems staff working in the Operations area: supposed to be kept out, for Security reasons. That meant he better have an excuse if he was challenged, but most supervisors turned a blind eye to the presence of trusted colleagues. Peace, glorious peace, and an alibi established to fiddle, he gloated. He'd need that.
After an hour, he found a way to call his programs up, and destroy them, without a Security record. All he had to do, he found, was to make the program calls from a "privileged" area of the System. He could have destroyed the Security log, but this was only a test, after all. When the Security log was corrupted twice, there'd be a reason, and there'd be a lot of close inspection. Although he'd become very confident, he didn't need to prod the investigations.
He set everything up at 4.30, and moved into a corner of the Operations area near the cheque printer, with a stack of manuals, to watch developments.
On the way back from his second cup of coffee, around 8'o'clock, he found a couple of extra people in the Ops area, obviously packing up. The elderly gentleman was packing a wad of cheque blanks, along with all the traces of their brief visit, into his open attaché case.
Damn! Not twenty minutes had he been away, and it was all over. Now how could he tell whether he had been successful?
Did they use that printer?" he asked the Shift supervisor, casually.
"Yes. It's their printer - is something wrong? The man knew him, vaguely, well enough not to question his right to stick his nose in, but obviously wondering what he was doing there.
"Nothing operational. I was looking at the printer driver routine, and it would have been a good chance to do some timing checks, that's all. Some of those old programs aren't all that efficient."
"Mmm," the supervisor murmured, still thinking in straight lines. "You'll probably get a lot of run-time data off the journal file. We don't use it anymore, I don't think, but all those oddball printers used to be pretty closely monitored. Relic of some ancient efficiency drive, I suppose."
Lester cussed a bit for the man's benefit, noting that if he'd known about the journal this afternoon, he'd have saved himself a lot of work.
"Thought you blokes knew everything," the supervisor commented, and went off to help an operator at one of the tape drives. The man had lost interest, and that was fine with Lester.
He logged back on from his desk terminal, and searched through the sequence of events. Dead end: the programs had all been removed. Well, that's standard operating procedure with money-handling programs.
Within five minutes, though, he'd found a copy of a program manual that told him the names of the journal files. He looked them up.
In the cheque printer listing, it read:
"J. MARLAND & SONS.. Two periods!
The letter address showed
"J. MARLAND & SONS. Double space.
The envelope printer showed it as:
"J. MARLAND AND SONS. AND, not &!
That second period after the name was so small, and yet it proved so much. He'd managed to modify all three "copies".
Total victory : time to go home