Rolling Rocks Downhill - Chapter ONE

(table of contents, chapter 2)

Thursday, August 3rd

I love the smell of jet lag first thing in the morning. It smells of bacon and eggs and comes with the best-tasting coffee in the world. The bacon comes from across the water in Belfast. The eggs, though, are grown locally in Watt's Bridge, and they're cooked by Luca, whose Dad moved to Scotland from Italy after the Second World War, opening first a fish and chip shop and then later the deli and cafe where I sat, my brain craving Luca's espresso. Step one in my three-step jet lag recovery program. 

Luca slid up to my table, leaned over and gently placed a glass of cold water and an espresso cup in front of me. "Steve, my friend, where are you back from *this time*?"

"Singapore," I said. "Another technology conference."

He tut-tutted, as if he disapproved of all my air miles, or my work-life balance. Or, more likely, both. I was a regular early-morning customer. "You want your usual?" he asked.

I said, "Yes, please," and he slipped away.

I looked around the room as I sipped coffee. Three of the dozen tables were occupied by nightshift staff from nearby Watt's Bridge Hospital. Two police officers sat at another, their radios chattering in the background, and a half dozen cab drivers crowded two tables near the windows, watching over their cars in the rank outside. The walls were covered in black-and-white framed pictures of the "old country."

And then my mobile rang.

I glanced at its screen. Phil McDermott, my chief programmer and best friend since I was thirteen. It was 5:26 a.m. Phil had never been a morning person. Very strange.

I answered. "You okay?"

"You're back from Singapore today, right? I got the date right didn't I?"

"Yeah, what's wrong?"

"You're in Luca's, for breakfast?"

"Yep. What's up?"

"I'll be there in about two minutes. I've got bad news, Steve. Can you order me breakfast? Please. And coffee. Lots of coffee."

He hung up.

I turned and spied Luca standing behind the large, stainless steel and glass counter. He was writing the lunch specials on a chalkboard. He saw me looking, rushed over and said my breakfast was less than a minute away.

"Can you cook me up another breakfast, same order? Phil's joining me. And I'll need a couple more double espressos."

He paused, glanced across at the table of taxi drivers, and then smiled to himself. "I'll have both plates ready in one minute."

A moment later, the cafe door's bell jingled and Phil shuffled in, dressed in jeans and a green T-shirt. Phil is tall and thin, and has—for as long as I could recall—looked like a bald, malnourished version of Paul McCartney. He's just a year older than me, but he looks much older. I still have some hair. He spotted me, nodded, and started walking to my table. He walked awkwardly, as if he was auditioning to be an extra in a zombie movie, and I wondered if maybe he'd hurt himself.

He sat, and I smelled the stink of stale cigarettes and alcohol.

"Whoa," I said. "Late night. Have you been home yet?"

"I grabbed a couple of hours sleep, but I needed to talk to you. I knew you'd be here."

Before he could tell me what was so urgent, Luca arrived with two fully-loaded plates, two small cups of his special black tar and two glasses of cold water. He told Phil he didn't look so good. Phil nodded—there was no denying it. I picked up a slice of crispy bacon, folded it into my mouth and savored its salty, fatty goodness. Bacon was step two of my jet lag recovery program.

"It's perfect. Thank you."

Luca grinned and tilted his head towards the cabbies. "Thank them. Your need seemed greater." Then he left us alone with our food.

Phil splashed a little water into his espresso to cool it and then drank it in one gulp. He looked at mine, asked, "Are you drinking that?" then grabbed my cup and chugged it down too.

He shook his face like a dog shaking water from itself after a swim. "I learned something last night in the pub that you're not going to like. It's bad."

Bad? Phil looked at life the way a cat looks at spilled milk. He talked me into my three-step jet lag tradition, reasoning that jet lag was unavoidable for a guy with my ambition. If I'm going to be awake at 4 a.m., with no chance of sleep, why not be eating bacon?

If Phil said something was bad, it probably was.

"Go on."

"We were out for a few pre-wedding drinks," he said. Two of our mainframe operators were getting married later that week, and a lot of my colleagues had taken vacation time to help celebrate. "Pauline and Kevin Jones traveled up from Birmingham."

Pauline had worked with us for years, but then, just over a year earlier, she and her husband moved south to look after his aging mother.

"Some time around midnight," he continued, "we were drinking shots and Pauline—you know her, she never could hold her drink—let it slip that her mother-in-law wasn't as sick as they'd let on when they left."

"What do you mean?"

"She was poached by Chaste Group, Steve, to go work on a no-frills version of our FPP."

FPP stood for the Future Perfect Project. It was our top-secret, software-intensive, project, or it had been, anyway. We were building a brand new financial product for richer, older people. Before Pauline moved south she had been the project's lead analyst. She'd kindly delayed her departure until just after our requirements work was complete, to minimize the hassle she'd said. And now, apparently, she was working for Chaste Group.

"Chaste? Are you sure?"

"Yup."

Chaste Group had a reputation for cherry-picking the easy money from established markets: credit cards, long-distance telephone calls, airlines, car rentals ... the list goes on. Phil and I, on the other hand, worked for Wyxcomb Financials, a.k.a. Wyx-Fin, which was part of the multi-national conglomerate, the Wyxcomb Group—or just Group, as we called them—and we built big, sturdy, grown-up products.

I smiled. "You sure she wasn't just having a little fun with you? Teasing you?"

He shook his head, then looked down glumly at his (my) empty coffee cup.

"They're copycatting a product that doesn't exist yet?"

"They're even launching on April 1st, so they can piggyback off our advertising campaign for free."

I winced. That little detail made Pauline's story sound more plausible. The press loved a good angle, and they'd no doubt run a bunch of David and Goliath stories casting us as the bad guy and giving Chaste free advertising.

"Hang on ... does Pauline still think we're delivering in April?"

He shrugged. "She must, and I didn't tell her otherwise."

I watched Phil's eyes, waiting for it to click. He was a coder. He coded at work during his days so he could pay his bills, he wrote open-source software in his evenings and weekends for fun, he even took his laptop on vacation with him ... to code. He didn't pick up immediately on the schedule implications.

His head jolted up. "She doesn't know we're running late ..." I let him process a little more. "Chaste will beat us to market."

I thought out loud. "Their product will be smaller, that's the way they do things, but it'll still appeal to sixty, maybe eighty percent of our market. A smaller product is quicker and cheaper to build."

Phil nodded. "Especially when you steal your competitor's lead analyst right after all the hard thinking has been done."

I let out my breath slowly. "Does anyone else know?"

"No. I doubt Pauline even remembers telling me. She'd had a lot to drink by then."

"Good." I thought a moment, formulating a plan. "Why don't you go home, grab some sleep, and I'll handle it from here. You should enjoy the rest of your vacation day."

"Sure thing." He smiled, though he didn't look happy. "But not until I've finished my breakfast. You're paying right? So, did you enjoy your junket?"

"The conference was good." It had been sponsored by a vendor, so they'd paid my expenses. I had given a presentation about our use of one of their products.

"Your talk?"

"My presentation," I said, enjoying the banter with my friend, "was very well-received. I won an award."

He raised an eyebrow. "For what?"

"Runner-up for best presentation."

"Runner-up? Impressive. Did you get a statue?"

I wrinkled my nose at his friendly sarcasm.

"You found time to work on your tan," he continued.

"Networking."

Phil frowned, confused. To him, networking meant routers and IP addresses. Then he got it. "Golf ..."

I smiled.

Phil stretched his arms and yawned. "You know, we will sort out FPP. No matter what our customer reps say, the specs still have fat we can trim. We can cut features, and there are a number of processes we *could* automate, but don't need to. No one will like what we deliver, but yeah, we'll find a way to do it."

"Yeah. Somehow."

He'd gained a little color in his face, but he still looked tired and hungover, and malnourished. He also, I realized, looked sad.

I said, "I'm surprised at Pauline. I didn't think she was the sort of person who would do something like that."

"She was a friend."

I grimaced. I didn't know what else to say. We finished our food in silence, then I offered to drive Phil home.

He declined, saying that he'd be fine. Which in a way was a relief, since I was eager to start the third step in my jet lag recovery routine: working, interruption-free, in my office. Normally I'd use that time to get a head start on the admin that built up while I was away, but that day I had something better to get on with: rescuing the most important project I'd ever worked on.

Phil said, "Later, then, dude," and left.

The* dude* was, in case you're wondering, ironic.

(chapter 2)