Oriole Greene came to work at my company as a secretary, but she had ambitions to be a lot more than that. The young woman was taking a night course in programming fundamentals, but she wanted to learn more and faster than the school would let her.
She asked me if I would be willing to help her learn Fortran; she had a textbook and a compiler, but she wanted somebody who could help her understand what went wrong when it did. I had weekday evenings free, and I was quite willing. If I had known how it was going to be, I would have been eager for it instead of just willing.
Oriole (she had an older sister named Robin, if that helps explain the name) lived with her parents still, in a two-story house. She was about 22, fairly tall, fairly slender. She wore a little more makeup than I liked on women, but she had a nice smile.
I went over to her house a little after dinner on a Tuesday, where I met her parents. Her father was around fifty, balding and tubby; her mother was a little younger, and of mixed race to judge by how she looked. That explained why Oriole's coloring was a little exotic, and it was clear that was where she got her looks from otherwise as well.
They seemed very nice, though her father was visibly nervous about the fact that Oriole's computer was in her bedroom, and that she was going to spend the next couple of hours in that bedroom with a man. Her mother took it more in stride.
Once we were in the bedroom, she sat down in front of the computer screen and called up the program she had been working on, and which had gone wrong somewhere. I stood behind her to look over her shoulder and comment. I put one hand on her shoulder, partly to see better, partly because I liked the idea of a good excuse to touch her. We had had no physical contact at the office to speak of, but I had found her attractive.
I started to talk to her, to help her relax, and as I talked to her I gently massaged her shoulder. Then I put my other hand on her other one and started to massage it as well. This was actually sort of innocent -- I wasn't trying to make a pass at her, at least a serious one -- since you can think through problems more easily when your body is relaxed. I would hate to tell you how many solutions I have gotten on the toilet.