Cindy was one of few 'non-programmer geeks' at the company where she worked, which began as a video game company, and now had moved far afield into online role playing games, social media networking and promotions, and their most promising new market segment, online pornography. Although they certainly did not operate porn websites, or distribute porn videos, they did make massive software systems that made operating these kinds of sites so much simpler and much more profitable. They didn't want to be publicly associated with the porn market, so they used generic terms like "serving rapid turnover high bandwidth content' and gave very favorable licensing terms for sharing revenue from the web sites that their software helped to run. They even used third party value added resellers to buffer them from direct connections with the porn industry. But it was a major and growing revenue stream.
Cindy was officially a 'market and user specialist', which meant she looked at everything except the technical implementation of a product. She worked on what customers wanted to do, how they wanted it done, how they wanted the products to look and feel, and how much they were willing to pay for it. She had power and importance far above her title, which sounded almost like an entry level job for a college new hire, which was how she started.
Her nickname while growing up was 'Brainiac-180' both for her reputed IQ score and her tendency to approach things from a completely different direction than most people. She finished high school at 14, and then earned a degree in English from a small private college near her home at 16, then an MS in computer science at Carnegie Mellon, which she finished by the time she was 19. She understood all the things the programmers were doing, she just didn't do them herself. She told her sister once that she was like a race car driver who understood the workings of the car and its engine perfectly, but kept her hands clean for driving.
She actually was hired as one of the first ten employees of the company right out college, but proved to be so skilled at bonding with customers and understanding their needs that she had led the positioning and final configuration of most of their successful new products and at age 24 had more stock options than most of the VP's. She was a critical part of the stage gate approval process for funding new projects and releasing new products, and anyone who studied the 'informal organization' of the company would realize she was a key player even though the formal organization chart did not reflect that.
Most of the other employees did not realize her real status, either, and since she usually worked from home, many of them thought she was an outside contractor, not a key team member. She often worked 20 hours a day studying a market, a customer, their competition, and becoming a user of competitive products, literally immersing herself in the market she was studying. She usually only came into the office two or three days a month, for formal product review meetings or strategic planning sessions, but had a large unmarked office that most people thought was a special conference room for the CEO and his direct reports.
Her latest project grew out of a meeting in that office, where the CEO, reviewing the incredible growth in their porn related revenue, took a 100,000 foot look at the overall market and said they had too small a share and were growing it too slowly. He created a 'tiger team' composed of two proven 'super programmers', a product manager, a market research geek, and Cindy to find 'the next big thing in porn' before someone else did. He envisioned a new paradigm, a quantum leap that could get them huge market share in months, rather than just the steadily growing share of a huge market they forecast now.
So for the last several weeks, Cindy had been immersing herself in the porn business. Taking her usual offbeat but comprehensive approach, she had visited strip clubs, adult bookstores, porn theaters, bath houses, and whorehouses in Nevada. She surfed hundreds of every kind of website, marveling at the micro-targeting and specialization and mass customization of the innovators in the market. One of her professors used to use an unlikely and politically incorrect demographic example of products designed for left-handed Chinese midgets, but Cindy had found multiple website offering midgets and Asians doing just about any sex act possible, but without reference to handedness. She discovered some things about herself, too. She had never before seen 'Hentai' cartoons, but found herself totally captivated by them, especially the ones that depicted impossibly beautiful and juicy young girls forced to submit to dominant men and sometimes women. The first time she saw a well produced one, luckily while she was working at home, she ended up wet as hell with three fingers in her pussy and one in her ass driving her to one of her best orgasms ever! Whenever she masturbated now, she often found herself making those little high pitched cooing noises, which even made her more excited.
She had never dated much. All through school, she was much younger than all the boys in her classes, and had many IQ points on most of them. She lost interest before she could really even consider them sexually. She looked even younger than she was, and she was tall and thin with surprisingly big boobs. She actually looked a bit like the girls in the 'Hentai' cartons. She had taken a scientific approach to studying her sexuality in graduate school, and seduced a few guys and one girl who all thought she was another freshman undergrad. She carried on affairs with them, and learned all the mechanics of what she liked and what she didn't. Since then she was hoping to find smart guys and an occasional girl that were interesting enough to talk to and hot enough to take to bed, but was not seeing too many so far. Most of the guys at work ignored her completely, since she tended to dress in androgynous slacks and tee shirts that were comfortable to hang out in. Occasionally a guy would notice that she had a very hot body under the shapeless garb. Also occasionally a guy would be interested in how cool she was to talk to and how many things she was interested in. She was hoping for a guy that combined those two, and engendered the same reactions in her. No luck so far.
One of her pet peeves at work was people who just wanted to work nine to five and did not get as enthusiastic as she did about new products and markets. She tended to dismiss them and discount their potential contributions to the success of a project, and focus on the team members that shared her enthusiasm. On her latest tiger team, only one of the super programmers, Jason, had that kind of spark. The other team members were contributing nothing to brainstorming or idea evaluation, and just wanted a written assignment to carry out after someone else had defined the proposed product. So her 'team' turned out to be just the two of them, hanging out in her office bouncing ideas off of each other.
This situation, and the subject matter of their assignment, forced her to notice several things about Jason. First, he was really bright, most likely just as bright as she was. And although he was an 'ubercoder', he also seemed to be well versed in current events and well read in general, a clear contrast to most super programmers. He also was open and frank in his discussion about sexual topics, not showing some of the junior high school demeanor that many of his peers did when the subject came up. She proposed they have a final brainstorm and review session the rest of the afternoon, and he agreed. He volunteered to go down and get some Thai food from the restaurant down stairs, remembered that she wanted a big green tea, and though he was a total white guy from Ohio, pronounced all the Thai dishes perfectly. Somehow that piqued her interest in him! Once he came back, he proved to also be perfectly capable of eating in a mannerly way with chopsticks, and she also liked that!
They began throwing out ideas with wild abandon, without evaluating them for feasibility at all. He seemed to be very aware of most of the other development work that was going on in the company, and was able to easily extend the concepts to things that might be used in their current assignment. He also picked up quickly on the some of the ideas she tossed out. They ranked them by their estimate of how much market share they would gain if they were successful. Then they went into evaluation mode, using a weighted ranking decision model to gauge the chances that each would succeed and the resources that would be required to implement them. Only two potential new products made it through their screening process.
