He'd finished the wallpapering and reinstated the "Study" by noon next day, and after lunch he decided to call the Centre. No doubt, they'd come looking for him if anything urgent came up, but he'd just about run out of alternative activities anyway. He was ready in his own mind to get back to the job, to start clearing whatever had arisen.
His extra two days of absence had several outcomes, he'd found. The place was a flurry of activity: the disk failure had pulled the veil off the supplier's embarrassing lack of local spares holdings. Somebody had to be the first customer, of course, but it turned out the sales rep had made some rash promises about support, and his District Manager hadn't actually corrected them, so they were both caught napping in positive thinking territory.
The supplier did a quick, rather public, evaluation of the blow to their reputation, and the rush was in earnest to salvage the situation, on a hastily-revised and almost impossible timetable. The local engineer had been there most of the weekend, trying to find the fault without any documentation. He'd been joined yesterday by his Sydney counterpart and an imported spare sub-unit plus manuals. The tech pair had the disk going (didn’t matter which one), just as a complete replacement arrived from the U.S. - just in case - and were starting into the hardware setup procedure.
By tomorrow morning, Fred Hart promised, one disk or the other would certainly be ready for him to start operational tests. Lester noted the deferential tone as Fred went on to ask his opinion on whether they ought to lengthen the off-line test sequence, just to be sure.
"No, I don't see why, Fred" he soothed. "The thing fell over and the Sto Tech people hadn't learnt to fix it yet. Their System Manual is a damned good one, though. I'm very confident there'll be no software problems when the hardware's reliable. We've had a lot of experience (at least I have, he thought) with their smaller units, and it should be clean.
"I got Ray Agnew's work two weeks ago: he'd mostly written the driver, and it only needed finishing off. I didn't have to change anything. It'll probably be OK - unless there's reliability problems left in the disk. A few threats about that wouldn't do any harm, before those engineers disappear."
"You're coming in tomorrow, aren't you?" Fred probed gently. "The engineers are going to stay for tomorrow's tests whatever they achieve on their own today. I'll see to that. We can put it on the line tomorrow night if you're happy, but I've told Operations it should be up for the weekend."
He'd wangled us another couple of days of slack, in case of trouble! Nice job; perhaps the man wasn't a cream puff after all. It ought to go on line-tomorrow night alright, but it was a real novelty to have allowed a couple of spare days after that. Now, wait a minute; I bet Fred's forgotten the other work.
"After we've got on line, who’s doing the file setup?" Lester asked.
There was silence from the phone. Then, a few seconds later, “Why?”
"I mean, it's going to be a big, new empty storage area. The system will suddenly know it's there, but it won't have any reason to use the space. It'll be struggling for room still in the Database area, until we shift some of the DB files onto it. Is anybody scheduled to do that?"
"Oh! Yes, that's out of our hands,” Fred assured him, now a recollection of the DB group's offer was coming back to him. "Soon as we've finished the system component, Jack Arnold's people will take over. They've got a man studying the work you've done, and they're finished a review of what files to shift. The man will be on standby tomorrow night, and you just walk away when you've finished. You just hand over to him and you go home. How does the recovery look?"
Friday's tantrum had certainly had an effect. There were standby people of every colour on tap now. He was confident, though. He'd as good as finished the software driver testing last Friday, when the "Bang" came from inside the disk pedestal. The little wisp of smoke looked so inconsequential, but it certainly ruled out any operations. It was the Database people's job, anyway, to relocate the Database files to the new area. They'd been too busy on Friday to agree, but once the problem arose he'd got around to mentioning them, too, in his report. He'd mentioned their supervisors, mothers, fathers and general competence in that dispatch and it had obviously been quoted about a bit.
"What else is going on, Fred?" He ought to know how the rest of the team were loaded, and be aware of any waiting tasks that he might help with at the moment.
“Paul's going to need some help, understanding some patch or other of yours that you did a year or so ago, but there'll be time for that tomorrow."
There'll be time for lots of things, Lester hoped as he dropped the phone. He had every reason to believe he would be finished the testing in an hour or two tomorrow, and then have to wait ten or so hours - until all users were off the system - before he could get the disk assembly connected in place on the national network.
"Stand back, standbys," fondly he pictured himself barking. They'd watch in awe as he studiously ignored the engineers, operators, supervisors and programmers.
Finally: "You can have it now," he'd snap as he headed for the door, the task satisfactorily completed.
It wouldn't be like that, though. They'd all have other things to do. Hopefully, he wouldn't need any help with the disk, but it was an opportunity to raise the subject of promotion, or some other duties just as a source of variety, with Fred.
With all the time spent on it so far, it wasn't surprising he was right about the disk instal. After two hours’ work, it was still singing happily, after it had sung for him every song he could think of that was pertinent. The supplier engineers had even brought along a new diagnostic; he'd had a look at its driver routine, and reckoned his/Ray's was simpler in several places.
His supervisor was delighted with progress when he emerged from his weekly Software Manager's meeting at eleven o'clock that morning. Fred was quite happy to push anything else aside for a few minutes to discuss job prospects for a while.
"I'm trying to look ahead a few years, Fred," Lester led off, squirming in the tightly padded office armchair. "It's not very exciting to look forward to another 20 years doing the same thing. There ought to be room for some variety. I thought you ought to have some idea of the options, so I wondered if you'd give it some thought."
"What sort of variety are you looking for, Lester? Do you want to get out of this area?"
"No," Lester assured him, "at least I don't think so. Actually I'm just feeling a bit bored, with one series of tasks, and I think I'd like to break the pattern."
"But you're a specialist - probably the best we've got in your own field."
"So I'm wondering if that means I can't do anything else." The conversation had reached the core of the matter a lot faster than he had expected.
With a thud, Hart recognised that he too had a minefield. The specialist wanted variety, and the company needed efficiency. He might have a No-Win situation here. He could have his best contributor promoted out of the group, and it would take years to replace those skills fully.
Bayliss was his own age – 38 - but he'd probably be able to take Hart's job over quite well. The odd blast of temper like last Friday's might stop him progressing far, but it certainly got things done once in a while. Nevertheless, Hart wasn't offering his own job, and Lester was one of the main tools he used to keep that job. It wasn't easy to be a System Programming Supervisor. Without Lester, it would be a damn sight harder to look competent.
The third way to lose this round was to discard Bayliss' dreams outright. The man would pick up a job in days at any one of ten mainframe sites around town. He was good, and gradually the industry came to know it. Competitor staff saw his name as contributor often enough to programs in published libraries. Bayliss was a personage: he was pretty close to free. He could walk out if he chose, and he'd double his salary if he chose to work on contract.
Hart just had to find a compromise, and that would take time.
"Well, give me some idea of the sort of work you'd consider, Lester. How about Sales Support, or Supervisor in the Operations area? It's not going to be easy to get satisfaction elsewhere, when you're so good at one job."
The flattery didn't get him anywhere. Lester had opened the subject, and he knew it wouldn't be easy. They spoke in circles, each waiting for the other to fasten on some concrete possibility, but neither did. Lester wanted the Company to devise a solution, and Fred hoped that if he juggled this problem delicately for a few weeks, it would go away.
Later that day, Fred's subconscious dredged up a better way to handle the risks. The Personnel people were paid to handle career problems.
Initially, the Personnel Director couldn't see the relevance of his Careers Officer to Lester’s problem. She was only 25, and a big help with the younger clerical staff, apprentices and operations. He doubted she could help much with an overpaid technologist, but conceded it might be worth trying. An appointment was set up for Lester in the city office next day, and Fred outlined his earlier conversation with Lester to her on the phone.
Then he phoned Lester.
"I didn't get very far with our earlier discussion, I'm afraid. I think my mind's stuck on the present, and it gets in the way of looking at alternatives. So I want to call us in some outside help. There's a Careers Officer on the corporate staff in the City. She makes a living at working out people's strengths and preferences. She ought to able to narrow the field. How about talking with her?” Fred was pleased with the way he had put that. "We" have a problem, and we’re getting the best help the Company can offer. This was positive action, and it didn't really matter that the woman and her boss didn't much fancy the idea. It just wasn't their normal challenge, but they had much better qualifications than he had.
Another thing; if Lester Bayliss got sufficiently pissed off to resign, it just mustn't look like Fred's fault.
That visit sounded like a good idea to Lester. There wasn't any hurry with the subject, and a specialist with a current knowledge inside and outside the company would be a breath of fresh air. Back at his desk, he jotted down details of tomorrow's appointment, and made contact with the Database man; the one whose evening's work would start when this was finished. He'd never had someone in the position before. For years and years, he always got the wrong end of the duty roster stick. No wonder the bastards were obliging about time off.
* * * *
Next day, he drove into town with the scent of victory still in his nostrils. That disk had gone in without a hitch, and already he'd dispensed with the other problem, in the best possible way. Paul Towner has copped a query in his absence, about a supervisory routine he's installed a few years ago for Internal Audit, After all this time, it seemed it might be causing trouble. Into the bargain, Towner was making very slow progress working out what the program did. The documented version was hardly worth looking for, it had been archived so long ago. Lester felt the newer security Software made the whole question obsolete. He doubted that routine was ever used any more, and so it probably wasn't worth trying to fix.
The pair decided to get some fresh air, rather than do the legwork by phone. They strolled to the Central Accountant's Offices to find the reports that were generated by that routine.
Each month, after all the supplier cheques had been raised, the machine reconciled the Payables total from two separate sources, a kind of batch check over the cheque-printing run. A clerk used the reconciliation again on the copy off the cheque printer. That way, no cheques could go missing, either a cheque that should, or a cheque that shouldn't, be there.
The girl who showed them the file of reports assured them that the system hadn't changed, at least not that she was aware. Her boss had somebody else, however, reconciling to a total from another source, unbeknown to her!
The Audit Supervisor took no more than a minute over the problem. "We don't depend on that reconciliation anymore. It's done a different way, so the officer doing the inputs can't fiddle the books either. You can scrap the report, for all we care."
Paul's eyes met Lester's with some elation as they retraced their steps. He liked the occasional job in partnership with Less. The man never hurried, hadn't been caught in a mistake that he knew of, and it was instructive to watch him turn a problem upside down. For instance, this time he's started by asking whether they really needed to solve the problem of several years back at all. They didn't, as it turned out. They could just throw the program out, and save some clerk a useless job each month.
That course of action also removed potential complications from the machine. Every handwritten piece of code carried a higher risk of malfunction than the original system, and any professional in the area felt good about simplifying things. You didn't often get the chance to remove patches and temporary solutions: it was cause for rejoicing when it happened!
On the way in the centre-city office, he got his thoughts straight. There were few jobs like his - the challenge, the prestige, the salary was good, too; it was just that you couldn't live on ice-cream as a solid diet. Now wait, it was a bit too glowing to put his dissatisfaction that way. He'd just like to broaden his activities a bit. There wasn't any need for a big, irrevocable break. Surely the Company could comprehend that, with its more than 30,000 employees.
He didn't get a lot of reassurance from the Careers Officer, though. Whatever she was capable of doing for less mature, less developed careers and people, she was far from encouraging in this case. He had to realise he had a senior position, and a lot of people depended on him. As well as that, there were few in the organisation with such a long outstanding record of productive service. There was always possibility of a promotion sometime in the future, and they talked about people-management for a while.
As they sparred, it became clear what she'd do about any perhaps-suitable vacancies that might turn up. If she had a supervisory position to fill, she'd almost certainly pick an appointee with people-management experience. In the current economic climate, there wasn't as much room for risk, he could see her thinking.
But did she have any constructive suggestions?
Well, he really ought to do a Supervisory Management course. Several of the big Management Consulting firms ran suitable two- or three-day workshop series every three months or so. She'd recommend he be reimbursed for undertaking one of those courses. It might be a while, though, before he got an opportunity to use that training. They'd just have to wait until a suitable vacancy turned up, ideally in a high-technology field.
On the whole, he was one of the fortunate people, she assured him. Sometimes it was more productive to set out to build variety into your out-of-hours life, than to look for change within. There were just so many things an employer would like to do, but couldn't afford, these days. If he had any specific ideas, though, she'd be pleased to talk about them: any time.
No chance of his getting fresh ideas out of that surly little bitch, he concluded bitterly: she actually resented his wanting a change! It looked like it was going to be his problem.
That's it, he decided on the way back to the Mulgrave office. He'd tried Fred, and he'd given the Personnel bird a chance, and he'd found that they all had their own problems to solve.
It was becoming painfully clear that they needed him exactly where he was, and it was going to be too bad if he didn't like it. They weren't about to help him. After all he'd done for them, all the late nights, double and treble shifts, the lost weekends over the years, you didn't get rewarded for dedication.