A Fluffy Tale 2: Warm & Fuzzy (2 page)

So, not a kid. Spen shook Daniel’s hand, but still couldn’t wrap his mind around
the idea that this was a man in his twenties, or so he assumed. Girlish
features, large green eyes and a shy expression all contributed to the disconnect. “Hi, I’m Spen.”

“Nice to meet you.” Daniel’s grip with a
callused hand was firm enough, and his voice was definitely a man’s. Not girly
at all. His eyes did travel up and down Spen’s body before he remembered his
manners, but Spen was used to that. After all, when you were six and a half
feet tall, you had to get used to it.

Spen forced himself to stop staring. Myko,
who’d been rather tense until now, suddenly chirped in enquiry, his tail
flicking towards the little grey kem on the back of Daniel’s chair. “And this
is Myko.”

“Oh, hello, Myko. Kani, say hello.” The
grey kem jumped onto Daniel’s arm and ran up to his shoulder, where he chirped
excitedly at Myko above him on Spen’s shoulder. Spen felt Myko’s
need to join the other kem, but he stroked Myko’s tail and sent a silent wish
for him to behave, a wish Myko granted.

Noble cleared his throat somewhat
impatiently. “Take a seat, Spencer.”

Spen obeyed. Myko hopped down to the floor,
where Kani joined him for a discreet cuddle and licking session. Daniel shot
his kem a tiny smile, then looked down as if worried
that he’d offended someone by doing so. New employee nerves, Spen diagnosed.

“Daniel, Spencer is our IT manager, and in
charge of implementing the Cross-Channel project in this location under my
supervision. You and he will be working closely together to ensure that the
software is installed and activated smoothly, and handle the feedback from our
people. If it goes well, we’ll be presenting a report at the national
conference in two months’ time. It’s very important to me that this project is
a success, so I’ll be depending on you two to work together to make it happen.
Spencer, I thought you could introduce Daniel to your people and give him a
more technical overview. I have, of course, given him the broad outline of the
goals and features of Cross-Channel, but I thought I’d leave the nuts and bolts
to the technicians.”

Spen made himself
smile, and stopped himself rolling his eyes. Managers tended to notice when he
made it clear, silently or otherwise, that he thought they were manifestly
unqualified on a particular subject. Most of the managers in the company
weren’t that tech literate, but since Spen had heard from a reliable source
that when Noble joined the company, he’d asked his PA at the time how his trackpad worked, it had been a surprise to learn he’d been
selected to oversee the rolling out of a large and complicated IT project.
Still, he’d apparently recognized his own limitations and knew when to leave
Spen to get on with it. Spen only hoped this kid he’d hired had some basic
computer knowledge, otherwise he’d be wasting a lot of time bringing two
non-techs up to speed.

“Shall we do that now, Tony?” Daniel asked.

“Yes, yes. Take however long you need. Be
back here at two though, as I want to prepare for that meeting tomorrow.”

“Yes, I will. Kani, come on.” Daniel’s kem
ran over and up to his shoulder—his favourite perch, obviously. Myko did
the same with Spen.

“We’re in the basement,” Spen said as they
walked out together.

“Yes, I know. I read it in the manual.”
Daniel flushed. “Um, I didn’t mean to be rude.”

“You weren’t. You read the manual? Tony
gave you time to do that already?”

“I, um, took it home. I wanted to make sure
I knew all the office procedures and key personnel.”

O...kay
. Actual technical manuals, Spen could understand. But the
office
manual?
He’d been in the company two years and he’d never actually read the thing,
though he’d written the section on the IT department. But then he’d been
headhunted so he felt secure in his new job. PAs were easier to
replace—fortunately for Tony Noble, since Daniel was his third in six
months.

He waved his ID card at the sensor. “You’ll
need access too, I guess. I prefer IM and emails but I guess face-to-face is
unavoidable in this kind of thing.” Daniel smiled hesitantly, but didn’t
comment. Spen would have thought after a week he’d have lost some of his new
boy nerves, but apparently not. “Come on in, we don’t bite. Much.” Daniel’s
eyes widened as if he believed Spen was serious. Good grief.

“Guys? Meet Daniel, Tony Noble’s new
assistant. He’s going to work with us implementing Cross-Channel.”

A chorus of “Hi, Daniels” broke out and the
kid went red again, although he waved back and said “Hi” in a reasonably
confident tone. His kem squeaked and jumped down to the floor, having spotted a
bunch of new playmates, and all the office kems, including Myko, rushed over to
begin the traditional love-in. Daniel started to move towards them, but
stopped.

“Sorry—do you mind Kani doing that?”

“Can hardly stop him, can we? Don’t worry
about the kems. Come meet everyone. This is Jyoti, my deputy. That’s Devi,
Luke, Amanda, Wendy, and Joshua. I have a couple of people off sick so I want
to wrap this up pretty quickly this morning. I can give you all the
documentation to read and you can come back with any questions. Is that okay?”

Daniel nodded and took a seat where Spen
indicated. “Right. Not sure what Tony told you?”

“Um, he said Cross-Channel would make it
easier to keep track of training projects, and trainees to get feedback and
access training materials online. The trainers would build up a dataset of
documents, which any of them could edit and refine, and become a resource for
the entire company. It sounded like a great idea.”

“It is, but we’re working with a
notoriously IT-illiterate group, not to mention trainees with their own
problems. Did Tony mention our target clients?”

“A bit. You’re working with the long-term
unemployed?”

“And people with drug problems,
disabilities, language difficulties—anything and everything. So one,”
Spen checked the points off on his fingers, “we have to get our people trained.
Two, we have to make sure access and security are as we want them. Three, we
have to get the software installed and configured. Four, we have to train the
people training the trainees. And five, we must keep Tony’s ego stroked.”

That forced a laugh out of Daniel, though
he looked down quickly, long pale eyelashes brushing reddening cheeks. “He did
mention a few times how important this was to him.”

“Yeah, I bet. But anyway, let me show you a
demo. It’s all accessed in a normal browser. Which one do you prefer?”

“I don’t really have a preference.”

Spen frowned. “Okay. Which one do you use
at home on your computer?”

“Uh.”

Jyoti caught Spen’s eye and raised her
eyebrows. “You do use the internet at home, don’t you? Which operating system
do you run?”

“Redbird.”

“
Redbird?
”
Spen leaned back in his chair. “Are you sure? That’s not something you find on
most home computers.”

“No, I know. I was using it in my course at
Uni, and I like it. It’s easy to program in.”

Spen’s brain did a one-eighty. He’d been
thinking this kid was too dumb to even operate a simple web browser, and now he
found he was comfortable programming in a high-level, highly specialised OS
with its own rarefied language and uses. “So the browser...?”

“Wrote it myself,” Daniel admitted. “I
don’t really use the commercial ones, but I know how to,” he added earnestly.

“I bet. What did you study at Uni?” Spen
asked, mentally revising his estimate of Daniel’s age again.

“Electrical engineering, but I dropped out
last year.”

Something in the set of his jaw as he said
that, warned Spen not to ask why. “Uh, right. Okay, then, you might find some
of what I’m saying a bit simplistic—”

“No, no...I mean,
you’re writing web applications and interfaces for general users in an open
environment and I haven’t done much of that at all. Just treat me like I’m an
idiot.” He gave a deprecating smile as he said that.

“I will if I have to,” Spen agreed, but
smiling too. “Okay. Demo.”

For the next hour and a half, Daniel
watched intently, played with the demonstration site under Spen’s supervision,
and asked a few but pertinent questions. Maybe he didn’t know much about
writing user interfaces, or the database language they were using, but he knew
data, and he understood the issues of security and access Spen had to address.
Spen gave him the manual, apologising in advance for the simple-minded writing which he’d pitched at the level of their IT-phobic
employees.

“That’s fine. It’ll be a quick read then.”
Daniel’s smile had become much more open and ready as the morning had worn on.
“I’ll bring it back tomorrow.”

“Don’t read the damn thing at home. Life’s
too short.”

Daniel clutched the folder to his chest,
and his smile disappeared. “Yes. Yes, it is. But I can read it on the bus.
Thanks for taking the time. I know you’re busy.”

“Not a problem. I’ll arrange your ID to
have access for this section, and send you an email confirming. There’s a
meeting on Thursday at eleven.”

“Yes, Tony told me. I’ll be there. Thank
you.” He bobbed his head and rushed out of the room, stopping only to scoop up
his kem and pop him up on his shoulder.

As the door closed behind him, Luke came
over to Spen’s desk. “What the hell is someone like that doing working for a
tit like Tony Noball?”

“I have no idea, but I intend to find out.
At least we didn’t end up with a moron as our liaison.” Spen raised his arms
over his head and cracked his spine. Myko took that as an invitation to hop
into his lap for a petting and cuddle, which Spen delivered without even
needing to think about it. “Right. Who’s going to lunch?”

Daniel rubbed his forehead, trying to ease
the headache that had been sitting in his frontal lobes all day. He had redone
this presentation three times now, and hoped this time Tony wouldn’t decide to
radically rewrite it, as he had with the three previous attempts. The
presentation was for a key meeting, and Daniel didn’t begrudge the time spent,
but he worried it was his own incompetence which made
the previous versions so lacklustre. He didn’t want Tony to start questioning
the decision to hire him. Not this soon anyway.

“Got those graphics Tony wanted.” A folder
slammed down in his desk as Linda’s sulky voice penetrated his attention.

He looked up. “Uh, do you have the digital
versions?”

“You mean the
original files
?” She said it as if he was a total moron for not
using the correct office term. “Couldn’t find them. They’re lost, apparently.”
The look on her face made Daniel doubt the truth of that, but it also told him
it was a waste of time to argue.

“Okay, thanks.” He made a special effort to
smile in as polite and friendly a manner as he could, but Linda sneered and
flounced off. Effort wasted, clearly. She didn’t like him. None of the other
PAs did. In fact the only people in the entire office who treated him as
something higher in the evolutionary scale than bacteria were Spen’s team.
Daniel took a guilty pleasure in the frequent visits he had to make to the IT
section, and wondered what he would do when this rollout was finished and the
meetings with Spen and his people were no longer necessary.

The printed graphics weren’t good enough to
use in a slideshow, so Daniel resigned himself to a couple of hours trying to
recreate them using software designed for idiots. No lunch for him again. There
was a strict “no eating at the desk” rule, so apart from quick cups of plastic
coffee in the kitchen, he had to manage until he got home in the evening. He
didn’t dare tell Dee. She suspected he ate badly, and he did. Had done as a
student, and now as an office worker. He just did what he had to do, to get the
work done. That was what his job was. Bring in the income,
keep the family going. There was no one else now to do
that.

At half past two he knocked on Tony’s door.
“Finished the redo.”

His boss smiled approvingly. “Terrific. Let
me look.”

“It’s on the server. I’ll just call it
up—”

“No need. I can come and look on your
computer. Let’s see.”

So Daniel opened the file up again, and
Tony leaned over him, his hand casually on Daniel’s shoulder. Daniel didn’t
find the position comfortable in any sense of the word, but Tony was a
touchy-feely kind of boss, and since Daniel had zero experience with an
employer in this situation, he realised he would have to adjust. He did his
best not to squirm or indicate in any way that Tony’s hand bothered him, but he
wished Tony wouldn’t wear such sickly cologne.

“Good thing Legal found those graphics.”

“Uh, they only had print outs, so I remade
them. Hope they’re okay.”

Tony looked at him. “They’re wonderful, but
I didn’t realise you’d have to...I mean, those pictures were done ages ago.”

“They lost the original files, Linda said.”

“Right.” Tony frowned. “Did you have lunch
today?”

“Not yet. I wanted to finish—”

“Did you have lunch yesterday?”

Daniel flushed. “Not exactly.”

“Rest of the week?”

“No. There was so much to do.” He realised
after he said it that it sounded like a complaint. “I mean, I’m still getting
used to things so I’m slower—”

Tony held up his hand. “No, this isn’t good
enough.” Daniel’s heart sank. He’d failed already. “I don’t want my staff
burning out, and I certainly don’t want them starving. Now you go home early,
have a good, restful weekend, and I expect you to take a proper break in the
middle of the day. Employment laws and all that, you know,” he added, wagging
his finger sternly. Kani meeped and patted it with a paw. Daniel hastily picked
his kem off his shoulder and set him down on the floor. “Close this down, and
I’ll see you Monday.”