Literratica was busier than I'd seen it in a week.
I'd taken a two-hour nap after my day-long fuckfest with Carrie. It was after eight and I was hungry. I called Tom to see if he wanted to join me at Lit, but it went straight to voicemail.
"It's starting, thank god," said Lisa as she arrived to take my order. "I hate it when nobody's around. 'Course I can get a lot of writing done, but no income. Got some ideas I want to show you about the drunk pictures. We could do an exhibition."
"I'm game. Tomorrow? Breakfast?"
"Maybe. Let me see how pounded I am after tonight. What'll it be?"
"I need energy food, protein. Got a steak?"
"Prime rib. How d'ya want it? Beer?"
"Medium rare. No, Sprite, thanks."
My cell rattled. It was Tom.
"Sorry I missed you, I was obsessing about a job. What's up? Any problems with the installation?"
"Nope, everything's great, approved, ready to roll. I just wanted to see if you were free for dinner. I'm at Lit. Wanna join me?"
"Yeah, sure." He arrived fifteen minutes later, sweating.
"They must have built the whole fucking campus with idiot non-union labor. The electrical system is a complete mess! There are no as-builts, I can't find out where some feeds come from, and I swear one of the junction boxes was made out of papier-mâché."
"Tell me what you really think," I teased.
"I'm serious. One of my side jobs is working on the server that's supposed to handle the merger of the bursary cards and ID cards. You heard about that?"
"Yeah, Lisa told me. Sounds good."
"Good idea, rough execution. Bursary and ID are different programs, commercial software written in different languages and designed for different operating systems, that's the way they've always been.
"Some bureaucratic genius decided to kludge them together, it was cheaper that way. Of course it didn't work. They were way behind schedule when they finally decided to find someone, somewhere, who had already written code for combining the two programs.
"Turns out one of the California state university campuses has a combined system, so they bought a license and had them do some customizing. We got the source code as a backup.
"But the same bureaucratic genius that got us way behind schedule is paranoid about the system being hacked, since it's not gonna be on the mainframe, just a small unix box, and it's gonna be in a very secure place, all its own.
"The room where they want to keep it has all sorts of non-critical stuff in it. It's big enough, and the air conditioning will handle it, but the electrical system is crap, and up until now nobody seemed to care. Now they want the electrical system to be rock solid, never a chance of outages — they even bought a battery backup that will last twelve hours.
"I've spent at least twenty hours trying to trace down where the juice comes from, since this machine's gonna be going 24-7. God I hate bureaucrats!
"They're so far behind schedule that they've eliminated all the beta-test sites except Lit. The new ID cards being issued to the summer students have the capacity, but nobody's using it. They want to install the terminals here next week and get it running as fast as they can. Stupid bastards!"
It was a little too engineer-y for me, so I changed the subject.
"You've been in summer before, right? Pretty much all the girls I was friendly with are gone. How do you handle, uh, meeting new girls when you're working?"
"This is the third summer I've stayed here. I've got a good room in the dorm, so I'm staying put. I've had this AV job for two years now, before that I stayed to make up two courses I'd failed freshman year.
"The problem isn't the girls, but they're so
young
. The problem," he deadpanned, "is that they don't want to go out with geezers like you and me."
"I'm not old! I won't be twenty till July!"
"Thing is, you gotta be visible after class, in the afternoon. If you're working, that's a real handicap. I work hard, pull as much overtime as I can get. I'm not done till at least six, sometimes later, like tonight, and I'm not much for concerts or the bars.
"This place is party central all summer. I mean, they do teach college-level courses, there's real work being done, but there's so much more socializing, outdoors, than during the regular semester.
"And they have all these 'special' programs, where they bring in kids for things like 'Ecology and World Religion,' where they run a debate and two classes weekly for four weeks. Virtually no reading or writing papers, just show up, pass the exam, get credit.
"It's not fluff, they get good faculty. It's just that they doesn't want to make it too tough, otherwise the special programs won't come back, and that would kill enrollment, which means they lose money.
"So they do entertainment, lots of it. SOL, for example, has a big problem with that, because the concerts and stuff the university does are either free or cheap. Outdoor concerts, Ultimate Frisbee tournaments, lots and lots of participatory things. It's fun, but if you're not there, it's tough to catch anybody's attention."
"So how do you, uh, cope?"
"I'm a techy, a geek. I know it, it's my lot in life. Last two summers I've been sorta lucky, met a geek girl. Y'know, just like Karen. I mean, you meet girls all the time, it's just tough finding the time, what with working all day."
"They don't have any problems with being in each others' rooms?"
"Regular students, no, of course not. The special programs, though, they usually have chaperones, and they're usually housed in the suites. I mean, some of these kids are fourteen or fifteen, so their parents want them under some sort of supervision. You see 'em all over, they move like gazelle herds, always together. Couldn't pick one off if you wanted to."
"Then I'm dead! The interviews are going to give me, max, five minutes' exposure with six or seven people per day, six days a week. I'm stuck in a fourth-floor lab with no windows. And I'm no more interested in the bar scene than you are.
"And if the concert I ran into at SOL the other night is any indication, I'm not going to like the music."
I slipped into self-pity.
"You live in the dorms?" said Tom. "That's how I met my girlfriend last Summer, she was reading a technical manual in the lounge."
"No. I thought I was being smart, so I got an off campus apartment."
"Well," he said, slapping the table, "looks like we'll have to look out for each other. What kind of girls do you like?"
*
You really are a horney bastard!
