The Spanner - 4

Something had changed on the office floor, he could feel it. There was an almost tangible tension holding everyone in place at their desks, heads down and working hard. Even Troy was typing something instead of just surfing the web. It was these two monkeys from Group, their mere presence had been enough to get everyone on edge.

If Ramble was honest with himself, he was a little unsettled by them too. Once Group got involved, it was a lot harder to confuse and deflect; they had a tendency to remove anyone found guilty of that behaviour, and to hell with the consequences because they didn’t have to live with them. Ramble was going to have to pull together some information on DDNPLFRR to satisfy the little hyenas. Not enough for them to do anything with, but enough to get them off his case.

He hunched forward over his laptop like he was trying to hide some awful secret; which he supposed he was. He’d got into the office earlier than his usual 10.30 to search through his archives. He was trying to find a document which he hadn’t seen in over five years, a document no-one knew existed: the DDNPLFRR manual.

Yes, it existed. Or it had done, at one time. If those two wetbacks Ryan and Kong had the slightest idea there ever was a manual they’d probably wee a little in their shorts. When Ramble came into the bank to take ownership of DDNPLFRR, he saw the opportunity he was being handed. He’d been in the industry long enough to know how these things went: get the contractor in to figure out the system, get it into shape, document it, then ship the whole lot off to a cheap offshore location. It was a cycle he was very tired of, and one he had no desire to repeat.

So he broke the cycle.

Ramble memorised the manual, learnt the system, then destroyed everything. Files were deleted, booby traps placed in the code, and he and he alone managed the relationship with the developers in Bangalore. He’d even gone out there to hire them.

But now, as he tried to recall the details, any of it, all he got back from his useless head was the rubbish he made up on a daily basis to explain away the shortcomings and complexities of the system. Had he been so thorough in destroying the documentation that he’d corrupted his own memory? Did he have any real knowledge of the system left? He used to, he was sure of it.

He didn't want any of his colleagues to see what he was doing, so he’s removed his laptop from the docking station, which meant his triple monitor setup wasn’t showing his desperate key-word searches of his own directories.

‘Morning Stan.’

‘Bloody shitting hell!’ he said, jumping in his seat and slamming shut the lid of his laptop in one exaggerated motion.

Ryan and Kong were standing behind him, fake smiles on their faces.

He turned back to his laptop and raised the lid, switching the display to his email. He started typing in a two-fingered fury.

‘Stan, can we grab you for five minutes?’ Ryan said.

Ramble held up his right index finger, leaving only his left to type with. He soon needed the use of the shift key, so he had to reclaim the finger.

‘One minute?’ Ryan said. ‘Sure, we can wait a minute.’

The two Groupers sat at the unoccupied desks either side of him — he almost always found himself flanked by empty desks, any neighbour he collected over the course of a year often needing to urgently relocate after only a week or two — while he churned out a brain-dump to the developers. Issues, new requirements, musings, fancies, developments, wishes and worries, it all went into the daily email. He doubted the daft buggers could comprehend much of it, as Ramble had a tendency to wax lyrical in his communiques, but he needed to get everything in there so when they messed something up he could point at random to any one of those emails and say, look, it’s all in there, I told you about it.

One minute turned into two, then three. Kong cleared his throat, and Ramble’s right index finger flew up once more.

He bashed away at the keyboard and willed, wished, urged his cloak of invisibility to surround him to conceal him from these dopes. Ramble’s cloak of invisibility was a powerful mental tool, a state of mind which put out a signal strong enough to influence those around him. If he believed in the cloak, so would everyone else. It worked on Troy and Sevak almost every time, and it would work on these two, if he believed in it.

Surround me, cover me, turn me into air and light.

‘Have you finished then? There’s a free room just over there.’

Hide me, conceal me, shield me …

‘Stan? Hello? We’re not going away Stan.’

Bugger. His thoughts were too tangled to get the cloak to function properly. These two clowns were quite literally messing with his head.

‘Fine!’ he said, and slammed the laptop shut. ‘Fine, I suppose the world can stop turning for five minutes then. The developers can wait for instructions, perhaps they can go and drink some chai on the company pound, that’s what I’ll tell Gillette they were doing instead of resolving his urgent production issues.’

‘Really?’ Ryan said. ‘We just spoke to Gillette, he didn’t mention anything about production issues.’

‘That’s because there are constantly production issues with DDNPLFRR, and if we don’t stay on top of them the whole business comes crashing down.’ He kept his voice calm and full of condescension, but his blood was screaming. They’d spoken to Gillette? About what?

‘Well, we shouldn’t keep you more than a couple of minutes,’ Kong said.

‘What is it? A couple of minutes or five minutes? See, it’s this kind of inconsistency which causes us so many problems. Three minutes might not seem like much to you, but to the developers it can mean missing a production release deadline.’

They had no comeback to that, naturally. Ramble had years of counter-punches stored in his head.

He followed them into one of the smaller meeting rooms, a windowless box furnished with a cheap round melamine-topped table and three chairs, one of which was an orange plastic tub of the kind found in school cafeterias. Ryan and Kong took the good chairs.

‘What’s this about then?’ Ramble said, folding his arms and leaning back in the chair. It creaked loudly and he felt the backrest buckle in.

‘We need access to the developers,’ Ryan said. ‘We’ve only got three weeks to complete the impact assessment, and we haven’t been able to make any progress with the London resources.’

Rude little oik. Ramble was the London resources.

‘You can’t,’ Ramble said. ‘They’ll only speak with me, it’s in their contract.’

‘Convenient,’ Kong muttered, and Ryan shot him a look.

‘Then we’d like you to facilitate the discussions.’

‘Look, I really don’t have time for this,’ Ramble said, throwing his hands into aerial tumbles over the small table. ‘I’ve got more than enough on my plate with my own job without having to do yours too! I don’t see why you need to go into such a ridiculous level of detail, I’ve told you everything you need to know about DDNPLFRR.’

‘You’ve told us nothing!’ Kong said.

Ramble just stared at him, silently saying: My. Point. Exactly.

Ryan sighed. It was a stage sigh, Ramble knew them when he heard them. ‘We’re going to have to escalate this then, no other option.’

‘You go right ahead. Escalate away. While you’re off escalating to mummy and daddy, I’ll be here getting on with business.’

Kong looked like he was fit to burst, but Ryan just smiled and shook his head. ‘Thanks for your time Stan. See you later.’

They both left the room, Ryan leading the away. Neither of them looked back.

Ramble felt something straining in his chest, and he realised it was his heart. Calm down Stan, he told himself. This isn’t the first time someone’s tried to escalate something to Troy. Nothing to worry about, you can handle Troy. Something about Ryan’s demeanour unsettled Ramble, his quiet smirk and sure tone. They’d already spoken to Gillette. Is that where they’d be escalating? Best not think about it. What will be will be.

He went back to his laptop and finished typing out his morning missive, then fired it off to the developers.

There, he thought. That’ll keep them busy for the rest of the day. He checked the clock, and decided it was close enough to ten for his morning smoke. He tucked a Hamlet behind his ear and shuffled to the lifts.