“I thought you were gonna call me before you tried to reconnect to the system. Hold on.” I jumped out of my chair. “Kim, are we still up?”
Kim rolled her chair around to the console. “Yeah, why?”
“James said the system is still off-line and they been up for twenty minutes,” I said, practically pulling Kim out of her chair and out of my way. I picked up the extension. “James! Everything looks good here. I don’t know why it’s still down. I’ll call you back.”
“I’ll be over there.” James slammed down the phone.
“This is the last thing I need today,” I s
aid, feverishly typing commands. “He needs to stay his ass over there. I don’t need him standing over my shoulder, breathing down my neck.”
I tried everything I knew to get the system back online to no avail. Everything still read fine. When rebooting, the system failed. I called CJ, left her a message, and continued to work. After waiting fifteen minutes for CJ to call back, I called for her at her job. “Jackie, this is Chris. How you doing? Is CJ there?”
“She’s here, but she’s not at her desk.”
“I called her, but she hasn’t called back.”
“That might have something to do with the fact that her cell phone is on her desk.”
“Great, just fuckin’ great! I’m sorry, Jackie, I didn’t mean to curse at you. When CJ comes back, have her call me, please. Tell her it’s important.”
CJ finally called back an hour later. By that time, not only was James breathing down my neck, but by then Ivan had showed up, making a pest of himself. CJ rattled off commands for me to try. None of which worked. “I need to get into the system, Chris. I’ll be over there.”
I was glad to have CJ on board. If I could ever stabilize this account, I could pursue some new business and I’d be on my way. But as happy as I was about it, I was still a little leery about working with a married woman that I am in love with.
An hour and a half later, I was in the parking lot pacing back and forth, when CJ zoomed into the parking lot and ran toward the building. “Sorry I’m late, Chris. Traffic was murder coming through downtown.”
“As long as you’re here,” I said as we entered the building. When we got to the door of the office, I noticed a bruise on CJ’s left cheek. “What happened to you?”
“I walked into a door the other night,” she answered quickly and went inside.
“Did the door have a name?”
CJ didn’t answer.
A half-hour after that, she was able to get the system back online, but it was two o’clock by then. She could offer no explanation why the system appeared to be online when it wasn’t. I spent the rest of the day trying to explain it to Ivan and generating reports; printing logs and going over them carefully, looking for the cause. Once we were done, CJ and I headed out the building. As we approached the lobby, Ivan DeVito called me into his office. “It will only take a minute,” Ivan promised.
I looked over at CJ. “Don’t leave.”
“I won’t. Remember, meals are included in my deal and I’m hungry.”
Once we were in his office, Ivan told me how pleased he and the other managers were with the way CJ handled the situation. “I just wanted to let you know that I really have a good feeling about the way things are going.”
“Thank you.”
“I made some notes and I’d like to go over them with you. That is, if you have time.”
I looked at my watch.
“It should only take a few minutes,” Ivan promised.
It was nearly an hour before Ivan stopped talking and let me out of his office. I walked out to the parking lot to find CJ waiting patiently in her car. She looked at her watch. “What happened to this ‘will only take a minute’?” she asked.
“Old Ivan had other ideas. He made some notes.”
“What, he didn’t like the way I resolved the problem?”
“No, as a matter of fact, he loved you. Said you were absolutely extraordinary.”