Day Thirteen
Beth ran her hands through her hair, wiped sweat from her forehead. Raj went back to fanning her with the magazine.
“I don’t know where it put everything,” she said, tabbing through windows over and over again. He just held her fingers down and let it cycle through like a strobe light. “There’s no way we can move it. I mean, even if we did a full copy, who knows how the dependencies are structured… I don’t have time to go through this whole thing and re-link everything that breaks.”
Raj just nodded. There was nothing he could say that wasn’t going to get him in trouble.
Beth slammed her hands on the table next to the keyboard and got up, pacing back to the kitchen. She leaned over the sink, stuck her head out the window, and took long, slow breaths.
“Listen,” Raj said, grabbing a beer out of the fridge. “How about this: I’ll go see Reggie’s boss, explain the situation to him, and maybe he’ll be a little less psycho about the whole thing.”
Beth glared at him sideways.
“You don’t get it, do you? You can’t go telling everyone you meet that you’ve been using my work computer like this. I don’t work for a web firm, Raj, I work for a real company. Hell, just leaving this thing without a thirty second password lock could get me fired. If anyone knew I was letting play on my box unattended, I wouldn’t just be out of a job, they’d be suing me.”
“I guess,” Raj nodded.
“You guess?” Beth yelled, turning back inside. “You used me as a shield, Raj! Me and my job and my company. You had no leg to stand on so you borrowed mine! It’s sad, Raj. Just sad. You… you know, the next time someone comes in and says ‘gee, is that your computer?’… here’s a hint… say no!”
“I’m sorry,” Raj muttered pitifully. “I was caught off guard. I wasn’t thinking and I—”
“No, listen. Listen. Not only is Reggie not wiping this computer, but he’s also not checking it over. He doesn’t trust you? I don’t trust him.”
“I know… we’ll—”
“Not we, Raj. You. You are going to figure out how to stop this without dragging me into it.”
Raj just nodded.
Beth checked her watch, grunted, and put her hair back in a ponytail. She stormed past him, spilling beer on his shirt, and grabbed her bag from the table by the door.
“Where are you—”
“The office,” she snapped. “I want to get some work done, and I can’t think in this heat. It wouldn’t be so bad if you’d bought the air conditioner like you said you would last summer.”
Raj knew better than to say anything.
“Later,” Beth said, and closed the door something just short of a slam. Raj just stood there, beer warming in his hand, and listened to the MacBook’s fan rattle maniacally.
He half-wrote four emails before dinner. Three to Reggie, trying to defuse the situation with subtle grace; one email was for Beth, asking for her help. He deleted them all unsent.
He fell asleep before midnight, trying to decide if grovelling to Reggie was the right way to go, or if he should just stab him in the throat with a screwdriver and be done with it.
Both ideas had their appeals, but neither seemed right.