“Hi David. It’s Mike. Listen, I have to rush to Madison. I just got a message from my mom that my father had a heart attack. I’m flying home. I’m sorry I won’t be there. After our discussion last night, I’m sure things will go fine. I’ll call you when I know more.”
David numbly put his phone down, as much distressed by the content of the message as well as the way Mike’s voice sounded: shaky and stressed. The contrast with Mike’s usual easy-going and joking manner was enough to make his throat tight.
David couldn’t remember Mike talking about his dad much, other than a few comments after his usual trips home, but David assumed he was healthy.
He was glad that Mike could fly out to be home with his parents. He felt lingering guilt, because he had seen Mike’s incoming call on his mobile phone this morning as he was rushing out of the house, and he didn’t answer. Only later when he was in the office did he listen to the voicemail, and now he regretted not answering the call. After a moment’s thought, he tried to call Mike back, but now it went directly to voicemail without even ringing. Likely, Mike was in the air, en route to Wisconsin.
Still shaken, he sat behind his desk, wondering what to do. He called Christine to let her know the bad news. She seemed equally shocked, hardly saying anything, beyond “I’m sorry,” and “I’m so sorry.”
He sat quietly behind his desk for a while, doing nothing at all. When had he and Mike gotten so old that they had parents with health issues? He did the math, surprised to realize that his own parents were going on sixty.
A knock on the door startled David.
Melanie stuck her head in. “Team standup. Mike’s not here. You want to lead it, or should I?”
He slowly nodded his head, and said softly, “I’m coming.”
By the time the team meeting was done, David had inherited a fiasco with the Test department. When that was taken care of, he had sixty emails to deal with. It wasn’t until midmorning that he had time to get another cup of coffee. He felt lonely getting coffee by himself, a ritual he always shared with Mike, who would frequently drag him on a trip halfway across town chasing down an elusive coffee bean. He realized suddenly that Mike had always been there with him. He couldn’t remember one occasion over the last two years when he had gone on vacation or taken a sick day.
Then it hit him that, with Mike gone, he couldn’t rely on his help to remove the ELOPe changes. Trembling nervously, he rushed back to his office, and pounded the carpet pacing back and forth in front of the window, pondering his options. He was so sure he was going to have Mike’s help, and now he was on his own. The coffee sat forgotten, fear-generated adrenaline giving him all the stimulation he could handle.
He wasn’t sure if he could live-patch the email servers to remove the ELOPe override module by himself. Under ideal conditions, server changes were rolled out during specified maintenance times or through a rolling downtime. In a rolling downtime they might take five percent of the servers offline at a time, patch and test them, then do the next five percent until all the servers were done. He had been lucky that rolling downtime had been scheduled the night he released the override module.
However, maintenance windows and rolling downtime were both processes that needed to be scheduled ahead of time. David sat down at his desk, and pulled up his calendar. The next planned maintenance window wasn’t until after the New Year. He slammed his fist down on the table. Tux the penguin wobbled with the sudden movement.
He stood back up. He could get a special exception to get a one-off maintenance window scheduled, but that would require paperwork, and submitting the changes ahead of time, and altogether far too much attention. He sat back down. He looked toward the door to see if anyone was observing his nervous antics, but the door was firmly closed.
That brought him back to the live patch, if he didn’t wait for a maintenance window. During a live-patch, the server stayed up, the code change would be made silently, and the entire operation should only take a few seconds. It was usually done for minor changes that wouldn’t affect the way applications run. For example, if they just want to change the logo or styling of a page, then they could do a live-patch. A live-patch that was more complicated than just changing images or styling could be risky, and was usually reserved for the most critical updates. More than one outage was due to a live-patch code change gone wrong. Changing the ELOPe code, which was now tightly integrated into the mail servers, one of the companies primary products, was definitely not a small change. A botched live-patch would attract even more attention, and an investigation into the code being deployed.
David considered whether he should attempt the live-patch on his own, or watch for the next maintenance window. Mike not only had far more experience with live-patches than David, he also had the legitimate authorization to perform a live-patch. He thought that the safer, lower risk option would be to just wait. He took a cautious sip of his coffee, and carefully leaned back in his chair. After all, whatever it was that ELOPe was doing didn’t seem to be causing any problems.
John Anderson was working his way through the queue of procurement requests when he came upon yet another request from Gary Mitchell’s department. He was happy to see that Gary Mitchell was now using the online procurement app for submitting procurement requests rather than sending him emails, but now he was shocked to see the volume of requests coming from Gary’s communication products group. There had been three reallocation requests that took servers out of the normal pipeline of delivery and directed them to the ELOPe program, whatever that was. There were several additional requests from Gary’s group to purchase the latest, highest performance servers Avogadro could procure, in unusually large quantities. John thought Gary’s division must be expecting massive increases in load.
This last request was a bid for software contractors to work over the holiday break. It was hard for John to understand — wasn’t he surrounded by thousands of software developers? And it was damn short notice for a bid of this complexity. John wouldn’t even have time to submit it to multiple contractors the way he normally would. John made a quick decision: he’d just send it out to Nonstop InfoSystems, since they were one of the better subcontractors they used.
From: John Anderson (Procurement)
To: Beth Richards (Nonstop InfoSystems)
Subject: Software contractors needed over holiday
Body:
Hi Beth
We have a a critical project that needs additional engineering resources over the holiday shutdown here. As you know, we take a two week vacation break. We need to hire engineers to fix some server performance issues. We’re looking for the following skill sets:
- server administration (6 headcount)
- database administration and performance tuning (6 headcount)
- software performance tuning (12 headcount)
- general software engineering (12 headcount)
We need experts in high performance, high scalability systems, who can put in 12 hour days over the holiday. Cost is not a factor, as we have leftover budget dollars. We need six people onsite, and the remainder can work remotely. Can you please put together a bid, and email it back to me?
On acceptance of the bid, I will email you with the details of the work to be done.
If Gary’s recent department purchases were a bit unusual, they were nothing compared to the iRobot procurement requests from the Offshore Data Center department that had come in that morning. The requests were labelled at the highest level of company confidentiality, but he was still so puzzled that he called Bill Larry, an old college buddy, to get the inside scoop. When Bill learned that he was reviewing the procurement request, he confirmed that Avogadro was indeed going to be arming the ODCs! Imagine, automated robotic defenses on an Avogadro data center. Even after the phone call, he could hardly believe that they were buying armed robots. He shook his head in disbelief.
Shortly after he finished the call with Bill, he stopped working through the queue of requests in alarm at the specter of an empty coffee cup. Had he already had his allotted four cups? Could he have another? He had just decided against one when Maggie Reynolds knocked on the open door of his office. “You busy?”
Maggie Reynolds was technically in the Finance department, not Procurement, but they worked together so often that John felt closer to Maggie than most of the people on his own team. She had just started at Avogadro six months earlier. John thought she was fun, and wished he could think of an excuse to ask her out, but the timing never seemed right. “Sure, come in.”
“I’m concerned about the way some of this last batch of purchases are being funded out of Gary Mitchell’s group,” she said, getting right to the point as she sat down.
John watched the way her earrings dangled as she spoke. Her hair looked different. Had she gotten a haircut? Would it be inappropriate to comment on her hair?
“Gary submitted a purchase order over his budget limit, and I kicked it back to him saying he couldn’t do that. Then he sent me this email. He divided up the purchase order among a bunch of individual project budgets. Shouldn’t it all have to come from one budget? It seems suspicious.” She wedged a tablet in front of his face to show him the email.
From: Bryce Cooper (Gary Mitchell’s Executive Assistant)
To: Maggie Reynolds (Procurement Finance)
Subject: re: updated billing code for reallocation exception
Body:
Maggie,
Gary has asked me to split this across the following billing codes:
9004-2345-01: $999,999.99
9002-3200-16: $999,999.99
9009-5387-60: $999,999.99
9009-6102-11: $999,999.99
9015-2387-19: $999,999.99
9036-1181-43: $109,022.23
John waved his hand dismissively at the tablet. “Normally, I’d agree with you. I’m up to my armpits in requests from Gary’s department. But you’ve got to consider the effect of the end of the fiscal year. Departments often have leftover money, and anything they don’t spend before the end of the year just evaporates. So at the end of the year, they start ordering servers they might need for the next year, new monitors for the employees, sudden urgent contracts with vendors, anything really, just to make use of the money before it disappears. And if they need to make big purchases, like Gary buying these servers, then he’d have to pool leftover money from many different budgets. We’re just two weeks away from the end of the year, and most everyone will be gone during the Christmas holiday. So you’re going to see a lot of purchases in these last few days.”
“That rewards gross financial mismanagement!” Maggie exclaimed in frustration.
She arched her neck as she said this, looking a little like Chewbacca from Star Wars. John wasn’t sure what it said about him, but he found it both endearing and sexy.
“If the money rolled over from one year to the next, it would reward saving money,” Maggie went on, growing more strident. “This just causes irresponsible spending.”
“I know, I know,” he said hurriedly, trying to placate her. “It’s contrary to every shred of common sense, but it’s just business as usual. Everyone plays the budget game to some degree.” He had to change the subject somehow before she grew any more angry. He looked down at his coffee cup, thumped his fingers on the table and gulped. “Do you want to get a cup of coffee sometime?”
Maggie looked down at the tablet with a sigh, and turned it off. “Sure, how about now?” she answered.
It wasn’t quite what John had in mind, but it was better than nothing. He happily picked up his mug, and they made their way together to the cafeteria.
Mike boarded his flight at 5:30 in the morning, and found himself in his seat, not quite sure of how he had gotten there. When had he last seen his father? It had been a year ago, over the Christmas break. No, he realized with a pang of guilt. He’d been dating someone, and went to Mexico with her for the holidays. Was it two years then?
He pictured his dad’s face as it was the last time he saw him. He was healthy then. Why, his mother had posted photos on Flickr of an all day hike that she and Mike’s dad had done that summer. He was still active.
Six hours later, after anguishing over his father’s health the entire time and feeling increasingly guilty for not visiting sooner, he arrived at Madison Airport terminal. It was just before lunch, local time, and snow flurries were starting to come down while the plane taxied to the gate. Mike tried his mom again by mobile phone while the plane was taxiing in, but the call went right to voicemail. He tried not to get frustrated as he craned his head over the crowd on the plane. Why couldn’t his mother keep her mobile phone on?
He absentmindedly thought that there should be a mobile phone app for monitoring the condition of someone checked into a hospital. He gritted his teeth in yet more frustration with himself. Even at a critical time, he still couldn’t stop his brain from coming up with more ideas. He glanced again at the email from his mother.
From: JoAnn Williams
To: Mike Williams
Subject: your father
Body:
Mike, your father had a heart attack this morning. He is in the critical care ward at Meriter Hospital. I’m at the hospital with him. Sorry to send this email, but cell phones don’t work here, and there’s a computer in the room here. I know you check your email constantly.
Please fly out on the next plane you can get and meet us at the hospital. Hurry!
Meriter was one of the larger hospitals in Madison. Mike picked up a rental car at the airport, and swore at himself as he heavy-footed the throttle and sent the wheels spinning. The snowfall was getting heavier, and by the time he parked at the hospital, there was a two inch accumulation on the ground.
Turning his coat collar up, Mike made his way to the visitor’s entrance. He gave his father’s name at the reception desk as he briskly rubbed his hands together. He hadn’t been thinking clearly. He was dressed for the above-freezing temperatures of Portland, not the twenty degree temperatures of Madison. The white-haired receptionist slowly shook her head and asked Mike again for the name. Mike told her again, spelling it out carefully. Mike waited, bouncing on his heels with anxiety as she searched again.
“Sorry, son. There’s no record that your father is here.”
“That’s impossible. My mother said he was here. He had a heart attack yesterday.”
“I’m sorry, but there’s no record of him being here.”
“Could he have been here, but checked out? Could they be here under my mother’s name?”
The receptionist checked again, and checked for his mother’s name, but sadly shook her head both times. “I’m real sorry. Could they be at another hospital?”
Mike looked again at the email from his mother, which clearly stated Meriter Hospital. He supposed his mother could have made a mistake, being worried herself. He jumped as the phone buzzed in his hand.
A new email from his mother. Cryptically it told him to come to his parent’s home in Boscobel, a two hour drive. Mike looked back out through the lobby doors. A two hour drive in good weather, and a three or four hour drive in what was now looking like a serious snowstorm.
Mike thanked the receptionist, and walked away to a corner of the lobby. Sitting on a bench next to a towering potted plant, Mike called his parent’s house phone, only to hear the buzzing tone he knew indicated the landlines were down. He cursed the phone company. It was a frequent occurrence for his parent’s rural town during heavy snows, which was the only reason he had even gotten his mother to get mobile phones for herself and his father. He tried their mobile phones again, but was bounced to voicemail.
He replied to his mother’s email, and sat on the bench. The receptionist smiled at him, and he wanly smiled back, and then avoided looking at the counter again. He waited ten minutes for a response, phone in a sweaty death grip. His mother never answered him. The odds were good that Internet access was out if the phone lines were out too. He was confused. How had she sent the latest email to him?
At last Mike trudged reluctantly back to the car, and settled in for the drive to Boscobel. He couldn’t imagine what the hell had inspired his mother to tell him to fly into Madison if there was no record of them at the hospital. He played out different options in his mind. He had wondered again if his mother had gotten the hospital wrong. If they had been at a different hospital, and that other hospital had released his father, it was conceivable that they could be home already. But why would his parents have gone all the way to Madison unless the heart attack was quite serious? He turned on his blinker and merged onto the highway.
Mike felt emotionally wrung out from hours of concern over his dad, and physically tired from flying all morning. Then he drove almost four grueling hours with no tire chains in a snowstorm that threatened to shut down the highway. When he finally arrived at his parents’ driveway, he released his aching hands from the steering wheel and closed his eyes for a minute.
Then he opened the car door and stepped out into a foot of snow. The house was already decorated with Christmas lights, and smoke rose from the chimney. He walked up the path to the house feeling the snow leaking into his sneakers, and rang the doorbell.
His mother opened the front door a few seconds later, her face turning to an expression of total shock. What was he doing there a week early, and in a blizzard of all things, and come in of course. His mother’s words came out tumbling all over each other.
Then he suddenly found himself standing in his parent’s living room. The Christmas tree was up already, and a fire blazed in the background. His mother wore a dress, and had an apron on, just as she always did. His father came up wearing a wool sweater, giving him a rough hug. Mike was so glad to see his father feeling healthy and hale, he started crying.
“What is going on?” his mother finally asked. “You aren’t supposed to be here until next week. Why the crying?”
Mike pulled out his phone. “Mom, I got this email from you saying that Dad was in the hospital with a heart attack. It said to fly out right away. I’ve been traveling since 5 am.”
“I haven’t sent no such thing. My God son, how worried you must have been.” She rubbed his arm with one hand, and pushed him into the room with the other.
“So Dad’s fine? There was no heart attack?”
“No, of course not. If your father had a heart attack, do you think I’d send you an email? I’d call you, of course.” She frowned at him, and gave the phone Mike still held in his hand an even darker look. “I don’t know what that is, but I didn’t send it.”
Mike stood in the middle of the living room speechless.
“Come on then, don’t just stand there. Come in the kitchen with me.” She bustled toward the kitchen, somehow pushing and pulling him simultaneously until he found himself in the kitchen. “I don’t know if this is a late lunch, or an early dinner, but I just can’t welcome you home properly without a meal.”
There was bratwurst of course, and mashed potatoes, and after dinner his mother pulled out a warm kringle from somewhere. Trust his mother to make all his favorites, and with less apparent effort than Mike exerted making himself spaghetti. Not for the first time, he wondered how his mother did it.
Then they ate and then sat around the kitchen table drinking coffee, and reminiscing. Mike looked around at his parents’ dining room, the wood and glass china cabinet looking unchanged since he was a teenager. During one of his father’s stories about getting stuck on a rural dirt road with a couple of his lodge buddies, Mike started thinking about the emails again. He abruptly thought about what David had told him about turning on ELOPe.
It had been in David’s kitchen, just last night. David admitted that he had turned on ELOPe to help get support for the servers they needed. They toasted the success of the project, how persuasive ELOPe had been. But what exactly had David done?
Was there some chance that ELOPe could have sent the emails? Chills raised the hair on the back of Mike’s neck as he thought about it. The idea seemed preposterous. Was ELOPe sending spurious emails to everyone with an AvoMail account? Surely that would have been noticed. The alternative was even more shocking, that somehow ELOPe would have intentionally targeted him. Why would it send him on a wild goose chase halfway across the country to a land-locked town with downed phone lines and lousy cell phone service?
Mike had meant the question as a joke to himself, but the more he thought about it, the more he realized just how out of touch he was. He palmed his phone, which still had no signal, desperately wanting to log into Avogadro’s network so he could verify the log files, and lacking that, to talk to David to find out in detail just what he had done.
He looked up to see his parents staring at him, his mother with a little frown for him taking out his phone at the table. He apologized, and asked to borrow his parent’s house phone just to find that indeed, the lines were out. That meant no internet service, either. And there was no mobile phone signal.
Pacing back and forth in the privacy of the kitchen, Mike thought about the design of ELOPe. The intended real-world use of ELOPe would be to offer language optimization suggestions to the Avogadro’s AvoMail customers. But in fact, the suggestions could be automated — there was code in there to do just that. In fact, they had used the automated suggestions during their human factors testing to automatically modify preexisting emails. Not only had the human factors testing shown that the recipients preferred the emails modified by ELOPe substantially, they also had not been able to tell the difference between a genuine human generated email and an ELOPe modified email, even when they knew one had been modified by a computer.
In fact, it was after that experiment that one of the guys on the team had given ELOPe the ability to generate emails without any human based text. It was just for the development team to have fun with, and so it could only be triggered from a hidden module. You could put any goal into the module parameters and it would generate emails. It was surprisingly good and around April Fools Day there had been no end of practical jokes among the team.
Stranded now in a snowstorm in the middle of Wisconsin with no connection to the outside world, Mike found himself wondering if ELOPe had just social engineered him into this situation. If so, to what end?