Ensurance

Remote Vacation

Pete has an adventure

Busy Work

 

Walking the entire length of every aisle in the warehouse added up to 14.2 miles. Ted measured it twice. It took him a week. His boss approved and promised to send the information up to the big boys.

 Ted was doubtful of Jack’s conduit to the big boys. The third shift warehouse manager was not on the fast track to the executive suite. Ted, Jack’s only underling, wasn’t even convinced there were big boys.

 The work was easy, but as boring as boring gets. The third shift only existed to handle immediate rush jobs from huge companies that needed their electronic parts NOW! On a good night that meant three, maybe four orders. A big order might take fifteen minutes to complete. Many nights, no orders at all.

 You’d think that would be tolerable, but Jack insisted that Ted look busy in case any of the big boys should happen by. Even if the big boys did exist, the odds of them wandering into the warehouse at 3AM AM were pretty low.

 Then, one night, Ted had to get an old part for a VAX computer from “The Annex.” This was an old bomb shelter under the parking lot. The tunnel to it wasn’t wide enough to walk. You had to shimmy sideways.

 The annex was a junkyard of old mainframes. Many of them had tape drives and tubes. The VAX was fairly modern in comparison, but there were only two left here. Ted pulled the back cover off one machine, but the part in question was already missing. Fortunately, the second machine had the part.

 Ted was about to leave when he realized that something in the room was turned on. None of this stuff was built with shielding, so the radiation was perceptible. Along the far wall he found an old terminal that was warm to the touch. He hit the space bar on the keyboard, and the screen came to life.

 On the screen was a command prompt. Sitting next to the terminal was a user manual. Ted left the terminal alone. He had to get the VAX part to shipping. Some company was paying more than Ted’s annual salary for it.

 Starting the next night, when the night’s orders were done, Ted returned to the annex terminal. At first he had little luck, but then found if he typed help, it would help him. After a few days he figured out how to navigate the folder structure. He also began to suspect that he was playing with more than just a dummy terminal.

 He found a folder with a bunch of subfolders, each one the name of an employee of the company. The folder with his own name was empty except for a record of the orders he’d processed. Jack’s was much the same. Ted was hoping for some he could use against his boss.

 The big boys’ folders were a little more interesting. Emails and letters, written in a techspeak jargon that Ted could barely follow. It took a month or so for Ted to learn enough of the code words to learn of the company’s internal struggles.

 The company, at least the old parts branch, wasn’t doing well. They were making a profit, but not enough. Half the big boys wanted to dump the business; the other half wanted to expand. Hanging in the balance was Ted and Jack’s jobs. Plus, the day shift, but Ted didn’t know any of them, so he didn’t much care.

 It took another week for Ted to get up the courage to mention to Jack what he found out. Jack admitted that he already knew of the problems but was concerned about how Ted knew. Ted told him of the terminal, and Jack told him not to use it again.

 Two nights later, Jack wasn’t at his desk. After picking and shipping the few orders, he went to the annex. The terminal was gone.

 The next night, at the front door, there were dozens of police, guys in suits with name tags, and even most of the big boys. Seems that Jack somehow got into the computer network and moved several hundred thousand dollars to a bank in the Cayman Islands.

 Ted’s interviews with the authorities reminded him of Sgt. Schultz from Hogan’s Heroes. He just kept saying, “I know nothing.”

It's A Gas

Checkers

 

David’s life was a yo-yo journey between the heights of madness and the depths of depression. He had pills that evened him out, but he said that they mushed his brain so much that he couldn’t beat a chimp at checkers. Though he never had the chance to prove it.

First of all, checker-playing chimps were not easy to come by. Amazon doesn’t sell them, and the medical animal supply company requires much more paperwork than David could supply. He tried a few other animals with simpler permit requirements, but their checker skills were subpar.

He devised a series of experiments using human opponents but kept running into roadblocks. First, the control state, to prove he was a genius when it came to checkers, could only be accomplished if he went off his meds. So he often wound up incarcerated before he could find a worthy opponent.

He tried playing people in the various wards, but he found no players the theoretical chimp couldn’t beat anyway. He tried playing computer opponents, but they were too predictable. The doctors weren’t any help. They tried to convince him that since nobody could beat him at checkers, he wasn’t as impaired as he imagined.

Then he met Fred.

Fred was winning dollar bills, the maximum bet allowed by the attendants, from the other patients by beating them at tic-tac-toe. Eventually, Fred challenged David, and they drew. They grinned at each other for a while, then discussed the morons who think the center square is the secret. They knew better.

Of course, they moved to checkers. Fred won the first game. David won the next two. Then Fred won three in a row, taking the best of five. Fred stared at David for a long time. He agreed that David was a better player, but he made mistakes every third or so move.

David slept well that night. His theory was proven correct. In the morning he found Fred and asked him to go with him to the doctor to explain what happened with the checkers games. Fred frowned, saying that he didn’t think he could help David with his problem.

David asked, “Why not?”

Fred replied, “Because...I...kill...children.”

Suddenly David’s checkers difficulties seemed trivial.

The Audition

Lights Out