Monday started rainy and miserable. The trip into the city in peak hour was a nerve-wracking experience for Lester, over an hour of bumper-to-bumper, cars crawling on treacherous roads. For the rest of that week, he decided, he'd have to have a closer look at public transport.
It seemed to him the four EDP audit staff had become befouled by the weather, too. Presentations were interrupted all morning by the weather mood as one or other of the attendees questioned the relevance of the material. They'd used a small part of the Company's security software for over twelve months, had studied that with distaste, and jointly decided the system was unsatisfactory. As the session began that morning he felt the hostility of his audience, and plodded on with his teeth gritted. He had to cover the whole system in context; it would be futile to just point out to these people what was wrong - they knew that. You couldn't tell them what was right, either! It wouldn't necessarily still be correct for them in six months. They had to see all the choices, including some of the crummy ones that they used at the moment.
Fred had offered his opinion last week that the Audit Manager (who didn't understand computers, and would probably not attend) was the motivator behind the course. In fact he dropped in during lunch, a tray of sandwiches and fruit brought in to their Conference Room.
The EDP people had told the boss pretty clearly that they felt the morning had been wasted. Then he made a point of drawing Lester into the "gripe session."
"From what I hear, young man," he said jovially, "you're doing a splendid job. Sounds like everybody has stayed awake so far. Keep up the good work." But then he was gone, as quickly and quietly as he arrived.
It took a while for the conversation to pick up again. Yes, Lester concluded, this was the Boss's idea, and not a very popular one. So they're stuck here. So they might decide to make the best of it from here on.
By the end of the day, though, he could see the turnaround starting. A little after five - he pretended not to notice the shuffling and watch-consulting that had started, and was gradually gaining momentum - the overhead projector switched off.
"Let's sum up briefly," he concluded. "Today we've seen all the things the system can do, all the ways it can work, and all the choices we've got to make it report on operations. Outside is a copy for each of you on the material we've covered today; you might get the chance to glance over them tonight." Might as well work the buggers overtime while he was the designated master. "Tomorrow we'll look at how the system can be built up different ways, to do different jobs - the kind of jobs I think should be valuable for you people."
Murmurs of approval as they packed up. He'd gotten far enough now for them to see the specks of gold. The rest of the week stood to be a lot more cordial.
The room emptied quickly, and Lester was able to head for the University. His Investment course started tonight: Heaven help him if that lecturer had homework plans as well!
The evening was heavy with poetic justice for him. You had to get the basics of investment straight before you could get into comparing all the practical methods, the lecturer claimed. The group was dragged for three solid hours Price theory, Interest, theory of Risk-Return, correlation, inflation and Discounted Cash Flow. Would he ever cope with all that?
Then came the homework.
"I don't know when or whether you people will get an opportunity to study these notes,” the lecturer commented cordially, "but they'll certainly help to consolidate our evening's work. Tomorrow we'll start to use this stuff, on Fixed Interest Securities - that's Bonds, Debentures and the like. Off to bed, now, ladies and gentlemen."
They'd broken the class up a trifle early; it wasn't quite 9 p.m. when he reached the car and settled down to the trip home. Annette wouldn't be there tonight. She was giving a training course for a customer in Geelong. It would have meant a two-hour drive twice daily if she wanted to commute, so she'd chosen to stay at a motel there. She expected to be gone three, perhaps four days, and given their respective timetables, they expected not to see or hear from each other for the whole week.
Wanting nothing but a soft, warm bed in a quiet house, he flogged the car home in a little over thirty minutes. He was in bed five minutes from the front door, couldn't remember how long later he shut his eyes.
The last thing he remembered was the challenge he saw shaping over the next three days. This was going to be a damned heavy week: what could he do to lower the time pressures, to lengthen the days, fit study in between two training courses: one by him, the other for him? Perhaps not a lot; brace yourself, Lester.
Sleep.
The next day dawned bright and clear. The rain had blown away overnight, and he cut ten minutes off the trip into town on dry roads. His "pupils" from EDP Audit had largely forgiven him, it seemed, for the unavoidable boredom of the previous day, and new technical material flowed smoothly through the Overhead projector beam. By late morning, it was time to consolidate the new information. They set up three hypothetical Divisions with different mixes of operational activities, two different typical management groups, and proceeded to apply the various options of Security software to the needs of the separate combinations.
He found he could split the group into pairs, and by keeping rotating the pairing he kept the game of discovery alive. He remembered, too, the previous run of this course he'd done, where this method lightened his own load considerably.
The big boss dropped in again at lunch, listened quietly to an argument over the comparative merits of four separate solutions to the third combination they had tackled, and left without a word. He was smiling broadly as he winked at Lester on his way out: he'd won; everyone knew it, and he had more street sense than to rub it in.
They finished the sixth combination a little before 4.30, and agreed readily that the day should be over. It had been a good experience for Lester, this business of watching a glitter of achievement dawn in four pairs of eyes.
"Tomorrow, we'll re-plan this dumb old computer system we've got, and discuss some of the project options you might want to use; I've got material to cover still, but some of it will be obsolete now after the work you’ve done. So the day will be less structured. You'd better be on your toes," and a couple of the people thanked him on the way out: what a turn up!
He settled down in the conference room as soon as it was quiet, and skimmed through the course notes of the previous evening's finance lecture. An hour later, he decided he might just as well not have bothered. Unless you were a Public Servant with zero responsibility and four or five spare hours of work-time a day, there was far too much information to absorb. Perhaps he would need to buy one of the textbooks the lecturer had listed as standby references.
To his surprise, then, he found the evening's material highly pertinent. He could operate quite simply through a bank or stockbroker, and it was quite normal to transfer ownership of government securities with values of millions. The banks did represent an unsettling audit trail, though.
By the end of the evening, he had almost changed his mind about the need for a reference textbook. If the presentation stayed highly practical, like this evening, he wouldn't need to be so hot on the theory in the beginning. After all, he was planning to have lots of financial choices, and it mightn't altogether matter if a few of them were unwise. Perhaps call them tax losses - which thought appealed to him for a cost reduction as he drove home.
He hadn't needed to fear the Consolidated workload, either, he found from the third day onwards. The EDP Audit group had reached the practical application level and it was very easy for him to start an argument, and then walk away for twenty minutes. He'd fumed for over a year about dumb Audit practices. He could see many of the problems and felt he knew most of the answers. However, his "pupils" had to come to the same realisation now, the hard way. Otherwise they wouldn't remember.
There was the whole crazy area of Password control, for instance.
"There is one advantage in having too many records," he commented to the group one time. "You can go look backwards at the history of a lately-discovered question. We know it’s wrong to overlook potential problems, but of course it happens with busy staff. Now, what was I doing a month ago today?"
The four turned their screens, and began to hunt back through usage record in the computer's massive files.
"You were working on the Operating System," one offered.
"The Word Processing package, too," another had found.
"Wrong!" he had them right onto the issue he wanted. "I had Rod on that job. I watched him check his work out, too. I didn't have to touch the keyboard on that task.
"Now, perhaps you'd like to work out why Rod - that's Rodney McAllister, the new starter in Systems Programming who's working under me - didn't use his own password."
"You just finished telling us," the girl objected, "that using someone else's password is a cardinal sin."
"And it is, "Lester answered, "and I want you to see some of the ways you force people into cardinal sins."
"He's got a Special-level password," one of the men had been busy during the interchange.
"Yes, he does now," Lester said. "Why wasn't he using it a month ago?"
"That was a user-level password he had then," another discovered. They all descended on Less.
"He shouldn't have been working on the system."
"You gave him yours, against the rules."
"Why did you break the rules - cardinal rules?"
"That could have been serious."
They waited.
"Yes, but your boss wouldn't give me the authority level I wanted for him. So he couldn't do the job he was paid for. So I couldn’t train him and he'd have to sit on his little pink bot for a month or so - fully paid - until somebody was confident he was trustworthy. During which time," he added, "he wouldn't have carried any trust or learnt anything. So that’s why I broke the rules, but I supervised his every move to compensate for the risk."
So their work went on.
"Lester," the EDP Audit supervisor called, taking charge of the rabble. "We'd like you to look at a proposal for a new procedure. Can you think through how other people will react to it too?"
After lunch, he got away with a quick trip down to St.Kilda, to do some private research. Any second identity would need some documents, and his shiny new driver’s licence wouldn’t always be enough. Money could buy anything in the seamy suburb by the sea; he wondered what a forged passport would cost?
The kind of people he wanted didn't advertise in the yellow Pages, though, and there wasn't any signpost he could think of. That had stumped him over a few days of idle musing. Money would work, but how to avoid accidentally approaching an undercover cop?
The best he could think of was a direct question to somebody in charge in an adult bookshop. It had to be risky, but he couldn't see a cop being so thick as to look for a forger that way. So that would do as a starting point. He backed straight out of the first two sex shops where there were customers, but the next seemed to suit.
"I don't want anything on display here," he glanced everywhere but at the scruffy little man behind the counter. "Do you have any idea where I could get some identification documents quickly?"
"Yair, the Post Office handles that." Predictable answer, but Lester persisted querying for alternative suppliers, praying that no customer would wander into the middle of this.
Within seconds, this lowbrow runt seemed to have labeled him stupid rather than dangerous, and wanted a way to contact him.
"I'm not ready to commit yet," Lester struggled. "Can't you just treat this as a first inquiry?"
"Yep, but if you want a price, we're going to want to check you out - very discreetly, but for sure. Do you want a price? Yes? Then I want an address or a phone number. So would anybody. Otherwise forget it." Maybe this bloke understood.
Suddenly, this business seemed dangerous. His mind raced for a few seconds: what could they get him into, if something went wrong, he wondered? He didn't know. That was the worry: he didn't know anything about these people, but they were probably crims, and he’d planned not to go this way.
"I think I'll forget it. Thanks", as he started for the door.
“Runt” waited till he was halfway out, and then played for another contact. "Gimme a ring in a couple of days. This card's got our number on it. Call yourself Fredrick; I'll see what I can do." That seemed harmless enough. He took the card and headed back to work, wondering if he'd make that call.
Back at the city office, they seemed not to have noticed his absence for the hour.
That was the way it went for the rest of the week. The EDP audit team members were self-sufficient, and mostly they knew it, but they also used him as a skilled adviser to develop a new, less obtrusive and more effective approach to their job.
The Investment course didn't get any easier than the second night. The third night they went over financial analysis of companies, shares and share portfolios. Again he felt that, given a trusted contact with a competent broker, all the details of the legwork would be taken care of, but it was your own responsibility to balance the risk.
The last night, on Options, Futures, Commodities and Assets, was by far the most enjoyable. The idea of sitting on - or paying storage costs for someone else to sit on - a few bars of gold while their value halved worried him, initially. He worked on that concern. He needed to turn his attitudes around to "easy come, easy go," but didn't seem in his own mind to be making a lot of progress.
He'd made a special effort that morning to wash up three days of dishes and make the bed. Annie should be home on Thursday evening from Geelong.
She wasn't. The house was quiet, cold and lifeless, as he plodded in at 9.30 after the last of the Investment lectures. It felt empty, not welcoming.
All those bloody dishes!
Damn, bugger, and blast! he thought. Bloody woman should be here. A nice quiet soul like his dad would have a glass of milk and go to bed at that disappointing discovery.
Lester wasn't like that. He rang around, long distance.
"Go to bed, Lester," she said when finally he found her. "I'm finished, I'll be home tomorrow, but we weren't finished here till after six, and I was just too damn tired to drive home. Go find yourself a Red Light, if you're so horny. I was asleep then, and that's where I'm going right now."
He didn't believe that. You didn't answer the phone that quickly if you were asleep. Still, she had her own life, too: that was part of their deal.
A "red light" area? St.Kilda again, twenty minutes' drive away? He'd never done that before.
And so to bed.